NSA Bombshell: US Is Selling Americans’ Personal Data to Iran, Russia [exclusive]

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

aNewDomain, Moscow, 01.04.2015 — The National Security Agency is selling Americans’ personal data to private corporations in order to raise revenues for stretched federal coffers, according to a blockbuster report to be released by Second Look Media.

It turns out that Second Look, which is 50-percent owned by billionaire eBay founder Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar, is a 25-percent spinoff of First Look Media, known for transcribing NSA documents leaked by former NSA/CIA contractor Edward Snowden.

Second Look is scheduled to publish the details on April 1.

NSA bombshellThe program began during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when congressional Republicans began “cockblocking” Obama’s every move and denying even routine budget appropriations. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is reported to have suggested to the frustrated president that the government should consider “rolling big-data style, like they do in Silicon Valley” i.e., monetizing valuable personal information that is in the hands of its agencies and federal departments.

Attention naturally turned to the NSA, which methodically intercepts, stores and indexes every digital communication on earth, including those between American citizens. The communications include, but are not limited to, email, text messages, voice phone calls, cell phone metadata, faxes, bank wire transfers, and even telegraph, which is still used by remote train stations in Nevada and Utah. “If someone figures out a way to bring back the passenger pigeon, we’ll snag the sucker, Xerox its ass, and implant a chip in his brain just in case someone wants to use him to say something,” said former NSA director Michael Hayden in 2009, prior to his resignation.

According to sources, the NSA held secret online auctions on the so-called “darknet” to offer transcriptions, recordings, bank account numbers and even the sexual habits of Americans to the highest bidder, regardless of whether its country of origin has good relations with the United States.

Most of the gigantic data files ended up in relatively benign hands, such as an affiliate of the Brazilian social network Bazoo, which ran searches on Portuguese-sounding names in order to market spam email offering 35-percent discounts on Brazilian waxes.

However, the Russian energy giant Gazprom, which is closely affiliated with President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, allegedly purchased voice recordings of every phone call in the upper Midwest between February 2012 and January 2013. Although their intent can’t be known positively, analysts believe the Russians wanted to learn more about the fracking industry, both as a form of industrial espionage, and also in order to use shell companies to acquire drilling rights under the homes of registered Republicans.”

Obama administration officials speaking under condition of anonymity confirmed the basic details of this account, but deny that they did anything wrong. “First and foremost, we ran this past the lawyers. There’s a reason that they call people who live in the United States ‘Americans.’ That’s because they live in America. Anything that is in America belongs to America. In other words, people are just like dogs, cats, wild turkeys, worms, what have you – that’s the government’s property. That’s pretty much been the case ever since the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Bob Jenkins of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern about what he called a “novel” interpretation of constitutional law that he said “seems to contradict two centuries of legal precedent and 800 years of Anglo-American common law dating back to the Magna Carta.”

But the administration official says that the data is the president’s to sell, and he will do so as long as there is a huge federal deficit to pay off to China. Says the source, ‘Anyway, section 215(b) of the USA Patriot Act authorizes the president to do anything it takes in order to defeat Al Qaeda, and we won’t be able to take on the terrorists if we are too broke to buy any weapons.’ “

Speaking under condition of anonymity based on threats of this reporter, a representative of the NSA who may or may not work there said that the government takes care to sell American data only to private companies who “we know can pretty much be trusted.”

But that seems to be belied by a $14-million sale of DNA records belonging to Millennials and Generation Xers who make $38,000 to $54,000 a year to FarsiNet. After the sale was complete, the NSA was surprised to learn via Twitter that FarsiNet was, in fact, affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Still, the NSA has no plans to change the program as long as there is no reaction from the public. “We desperately need that extra spending money,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “For example, you know the $14 million everyone’s making such a fuss about? We used that to add a new wing to the NSA’s new data farm in Utah. And will use the data we store there to make another $140 million, and so on and so forth, until we can finance maybe a quarter of our next war.”

For aNewDomain, I’m Red Tall.

Nothing to Hide

Many people say there’s no reason to worry about the NSA’s surveillance because their lives are so boring that they have nothing to hide.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Censor Google

Last week’s EU court ruling ordering Google and other search engines (there are other search engines?) to process requests from European citizens to erase links to material about them is being criticized by techno-libertarians. Allowing people to clean up what has become the dreaded Permanent Record That Will Follow You the Rest of Your Life, they complain, creates an onerous inconvenience to tech companies, amounts to censorship, and infringes upon the free flow of information on the Internet.

Even if those concerns were valid — and they’re not — I’d agree with the European Court of Justice’s unappealable, final verdict in the case of Mario Costeja González, a Spanish national who asked that a Google link to a property foreclosure ought to be deleted since the debt had since been paid off and the matter has been resolved. He did not request, nor did the court rule, that the legal record itself, which dated back to 1998, be expunged from cyberspace — merely that he ought not to suffer shame or embarrassment for his former financial difficulties every time an acquaintance or potential employer types his name into a browser, for the remainder of his time on earth, and beyond.

Offline, the notion that people deserve a fresh start is not a radical concept; in the United States, even unpaid debts vanish from your credit report after seven years. So much stuff online is factually unreliable that “according to the Internet” is a joke. There are smears spread by angry ex-lovers, political enemies, bullies and other random sociopaths. The right to eliminate such material from search results is long overdue. It’s also not without cyber-precedent: after refusing to moderate comments by “reviewers,” many of whom had not read the books in question, Amazon now removes erroneous comments.

The ruling only affects Europe. But Congress should also introduce the U.S. Internet to the joys of forgetting. Obviously, obvious lies ought to be deleted: just last week, conservative bloggers spread the meme that I had “made fun of” the Americans killed in Benghazi. I didn’t; not even close. Google can’t stop right-wingers from lying about me, but it would sure be nice of them to stop linking to those lies.

But I’d go further. Lots of information is accurate yet ought to stay hidden. An unretouched nude photo is basically “true,” but should it be made public without your consent?

We Americans are rightly chastised for our lack of historical memory, yet society benefits enormously from the flip side of our forgetfulness — our ability to outgrow the shame of our mistakes in order to reinvent ourselves.

“More and more Internet users want a little of the ephemerality and the forgetfulness of predigital days,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute, said after the EU court issued its decision. Whether your youthful indiscretions include drunk driving or you had an affair with your boss as an intern, everyone deserves a second chance, a fresh start. “If you’re always tied to the past, it’s difficult to grow, to change,” Mayer-Schönberger notes. “Do we want to go into a world where we largely undo forgetting?”

Ah, but what of poor Google? “Search engine companies now face a potential avalanche of requests for redaction,” Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, fretted in a New York Times op/ed.

Maybe. So what?

Unemployment, even among STEM majors, is high. Tech companies have been almost criminally impecunious, hiring a small fraction of the number of employees needed to get the economy moving again, not to mention provide decent customer service.

Google has fewer employees than a minor GM parts supplier.

Would it really be so terrible for Google to hire 10,000 American workers to process link deletion requests? So what if lawyers make more money? They buy, they spend; everything trickles down, right? Google is worth more than Great Britain. It’s not like they can’t afford it.

Onerous? Google has a space program. It is mapping every curb and bump on America’s 4 million miles of roads.

They’re smart. They can figure this out.

“In the United States, the court’s ruling would clash with the First Amendment,” the Times reported with an unwarranted level of certitude. But I don’t see how. The First Amendment prohibits censorship by the government. Google isn’t a government agency — it’s a publisher.

This is what the EU story is really about, what makes it important. In order to avoid legal liability for, among other things, linking to libelous content, Google, Bing and other search engines have always maintained that they are neutral “platforms.” As Zittrain says, “Data is data.” But it’s not.

Google currently enjoys the liberal regulatory regime of a truly neutral communications platform, like the Postal Service and a phone company. Because what people choose to write in a letter or say on the phone is beyond anyone’s control, it would be unreasonable to blame the USPS or AT&T for what gets written or said (though the NSA would like to change that).

Google-as-platform is, and always was, a ridiculous fiction. Search results, Google claims, are objective. What comes up first, second and so on isn’t up to them. It’s just algorithms. Data is data. The thing is, algorithms are codes. Computer programs. They’re programmed by people. By definition, coders decide.

Algorithms are not, cannot be, and never will be, “objective.”

That’s just common sense. But we also have history. We know for a fact that Google manipulates searches, tweaking their oh-so-objective algorithms when they cough up results they don’t like. For example, they downgrade duplicated content — say, the same essay cut-and-pasted across multiple blogs. They sanction websites that try to game the system for higher Google listings by using keywords that are popular (sex, girls, cats) but unrelated to the accompanying content.

They censor. Which makes them a publisher.

You probably agree with a lot of Google’s censorship — kiddie porn, for example — but it’s still censorship. Deciding that some things won’t get in is the main thing a publisher does. Google is a publisher, not a platform. This real-world truth will eventually be affirmed by American courts, exposing Google not only to libel lawsuits but also to claims by owners of intellectual property (I’m talking to you, newspapers and magazines) that they are illegally profiting by selling ads next to the relevant URLs.

Although the right to censor search results that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” (the words of the EU ruling) would prevent, say, the gossip site TMZ from digging up dirt on celebrities, there would also be a salutary effect upon the free exchange of information online.

In a well-moderated comments section, censorship of trolls elevates the level of dialogue and encourages people who might otherwise remain silent due to their fear of being targeted for online reputation to participate. A Google that purges inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant items would be a better Google.

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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

9/11 Memory Hole

13 years after the attacks, the 9/11 Memorial has opened at the site of Ground Zero. Among other criticisms, the facility has been drawing fire for an exorbitant $24 admission fee, behind which lie the remains of the victims of the attacks, thus monetizing their deaths. A gift shop will also sell T-shirts.

The Lives of Not Others

Between the NSA, nosy workers and ex-mistresses who surreptitiously record your racist phone rants and release them to the gossip media, Americans’ thoughts are no longer their own…not even in bed. Unless you take certain precautions.

A New Home for the Tinfoil Hat

The Snowden revelations about the NSA have switched things up: Now, if you DON’T think the government is spying on you, you’re crazy.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Will Polygamy, Adult Incest, Prostitution, Masturbation, Adultery and Obscenity Be Legalized Next? Let’s Hope So.

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Privacy is a basic human right. Yet, for 200+ years, Americans have tolerated “morals laws” that told us who we could marry and what sexual positions they were allowed to enjoy.

You couldn’t marry outside your “race” in every state until 1967. Oral and anal sex were illegal until 2003. But morals laws are doomed. Courts are throwing the government out of our bedrooms.

Puritanism is dying hard. Some people still want the police to regulate our sex lives. In his dissent to the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws in Texas, right-wing Justice Antonin Scalia complained that the SCOTUS had undermined “the ancient proposition that a governing majority’s belief that certain sexual behavior is ‘immoral and unacceptable’ constitutes a rational basis for regulation.”

The ancient stupid proposition.

Agonizing about an imminent “massive disruption of the current social order,” Scalia predicted ten years ago that, after the government relinquishes its power to govern personal sexual behavior and accepts that what happens between consenting adults in Americans’ bedrooms is their own damned business, “every single…law” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity” would fall in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas.

“This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation,” Scalia said.

It looks like Scalia was right about that. Bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication and obscenity will likely be legalized in the near future. (But not bestiality. Animals can’t consent, so hands off Fido and Mittens.)

Thank God!

Lawrence has been repeatedly cited by judges ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

Next to go: Laws against polygamy and bigamy.

Citing Lawrence, a federal judge recently declared parts of Utah’s anti-polygamy statutes unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution, Judge Clark Waddoups ruled, protects Americans from “unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places” and allows “an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression and certain intimate conduct.” Which includes butt sex. And having multiple spouses. Assuming you can handle them.

Legal experts say though the politics are different than they are for gay marriage — there isn’t a big, well-funded polygamist-rights movement — it’s only a matter of time before anti-polygamy laws get thrown out. Right-wingers, reeling from the fact that gay marriage has been made legal in 14 states, are freaking out about polygamy.

“Same-sex marriage advocates have told us that people ought to be able to ‘marry who they love’ but have also always downplayed the idea that this would lead to legalized polygamy, a practice that very often victimizes women and children,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christianist group, said in a statement. “But if love and mutual consent become the definition of what the boundaries of marriage are, can we as a society any longer even define marriage coherently?”

Heaven forbid that “love and mutual consent” become the defining requirements for marriage!

Nothing lasts forever — not in a nation with a 50% divorce rate — but it’s clear that same-sex marriage will eventually be the law of the land.

Polygamy logically follows. “Liberals and libertarians tend to believe private sexual conduct between consenting adults ought to be beyond the reach of the law,” as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic. “Applying that principle consistently would seem to carve out a decriminalized sphere for polygamous families.” Also, one assumes, for those organized around polyandry (one wife, multiple husbands).

It is estimated that there are 30,000 to 50,000 polygamous families living in the United States.

When gays and lesbians began agitating for the right to be married, I didn’t understand why they’d want to. Obviously, the legal protections, tax benefits and healthcare advantages are nice. But wasn’t one of the best parts about being gay that you couldn’t get married?

After mulling it over, same-sex marriage passed my one-question test for proposed changes: What harm might result? I couldn’t think of any. The best argument against same-gender that it “violates the sanctity of marriage.” Which is a set of words strung into a meaningless phrase. What sanctity? How does gay marriage hurt straight marriage? It can’t. It doesn’t. The same is true of polygamy and Scalia’s other bugaboos.

Same-sex marriage has been a rapid, and radical, change. Yet now, most Americans agree with me that it’s a good idea.

Let freedom march on. Including the freedom to jerk off.

As Justice Scalia said, there is no longer a constitutional basis for laws against masturbation. In Connecticut, where prisoners are banned from self-pleasure, it is time to let inmates touch their nutmegs. In Alabama, where you can yank it with your bare hands but not with the aid of a device, let a thousand Fleshlights sing.

Let us join the civilized world by decriminalizing the 50% to 70% of married Americans who have sex with people who are not their spouse. “In nearly the entire rest of the industrialized world, adultery is not covered by the criminal code,” The New York Times reported in 2012. In the U.S., on the other hand, cheating is a crime in 23 states, and, for members of the military, grounds for court-martial.

In Minnesota, single women who have sex at all are subject to one year in prison plus a $3000 fine.

Prosecutions for adultery are rare but not unheard of. “Just a year after the Lawrence decision, John R. Bushey Jr., then 66, the town attorney for Luray, Va., was prosecuted for adultery and agreed to a plea bargain of community service. A year later, Lucius James Penn, then 29, was charged with adultery in Fargo, N.D. In 2007, a Michigan appellate court ruled that adultery can still support a life sentence in that state,” reported USA Today.

Many arguments in support of moralizing legislation focus on the effect of targeted behavior on the vulnerable, including women and children. Moralizers miss that their proscriptions increase abuse by driving victims underground. For example, polygamous religious cults use their illegal status to isolate children, forcing some to marry against their will. Because they’re in secret compounds, they can’t call the police. Prostitution is most dangerous in states and countries where the oldest profession is illegal.

As gays and lesbians marry, there is zero sign of Scalia’s “massive disruption of the current social order.” To the contrary: morals laws are the disruptive force. Laws against victimless crimes subvert the primary purpose of law: to promote the common good. Laws that ban behavior that is widespread (such as adultery and masturbation) effectively criminalize the majority of citizens, which undermines respect for government.

Society can and will debate morality. It should not enforce moral judgments about personal behavior through the courts.

Moral laws are immoral.

(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

ANewDomain.Net Essay: NSA versus Tech Economy, Cost-Benefit Analysis

Silicon Valley worries that NSA spying is hurting American tech companies’ ability to compete internationally. Who wants to store their data here when they know it’s going to be spied upon? But the post-9/11 police state indirectly employs millions of Americans. What’s more valuable to the U.S. economy — the security surveillance sector, or IT? The answer may or may not surprise you…but it will bum you out:

But then I began thinking about the vast scale of the post-9/11 police state. Tens of thousands of employees. Hundreds of thousands of private contractors. Many of them, like former CIA contractor Snowden, paid six-figure salaries. That huge data farm in Utah. That’s a lot of economic activity. For the moment, let’s set aside the moral and political ramifications of law-breaking citizens (the NSA’s charter prohibits both intentional and accidental data collection in the United States) who spy on law-abiding citizens. As a simple matter of short-term cost-benefit analysis, what’s better for the American economy: privacy or police state?

This essay is exclusively at ANewDomain.net. Please check it out and spread the word.

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