Reply With Quote
lol boutons defending big brother.
"whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”
tipped off by the Russians, CIA/NSI/FBI prevented the Boston Marathon bombing.
lol boutons defending big brother.
WhineHole totally lost
you said what you said
and you don't have a clue what I said.
LE not intelligence. I misunderstood your riposte.
Obama upholds British style state secrecy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us...&rref=politics“Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
So, he said, he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.
The filings also included similar declarations from earlier stages of the California litigation, which were classified at the time and shown only to the court but were declassified on Friday. The judge, Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California, had ordered the government to evaluate how the disclosures since Mr. Snowden’s leaks had affected its earlier invocations of the state secrets privilege.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/1...buses-of-powerTorturers are excused for committing acts that cons ute crimes under U.S. law and international treaties signed by the U.S. Neither high-level officials who authorized brutal treatment — including, by his own admission, President George W. Bush — nor low-level personnel who carried it out were brought to justice.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Congress in 2008 that 108 detainees had died in U.S. custody, with at least 25 classified as homicides. But no one was ever prosecuted. Obama renounced any action against Bush administration officials, contending that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
The leniency extended all the way down. Among the last cases closed by the Justice Department involved the death of an Iraqi detainee after his interrogation in CIA custody. According to a U.S. military autopsy, he had five broken ribs, and his death was a homicide caused by "blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration."
So a lot of Americans who participated in acts that caused the deaths of inmates have no fear of prison. But Snowden faces the prospect of spending decades behind bars for his violation of the law.
What was so horrific about his leaks? Leon noted that "the government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature." Nor have I seen anyone in the executive branch or Congress offer specific evidence to support the claim that the leaks helped our enemies.
But so what? Snowden should have known the Washington rule: Abuse power, and you'll be protected by those with power. Expose abuse, and you're on your own.
- See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/#sthash.k50MwgV1.dpufThe one common theme that I can discern from a scan of a couple of note is that there is no reason in the world minimally redacted versions such as these could not have been made public from the outset. No reason save for the conclusion that to do so would have been embarrassing to the Article II Executive Branch and would have lent credence to American citizens properly trying to exercise and protect their rights in the face of a lawless and cons utionally infirm assault by their own government. The declarations by Mike McConnell, James Clapper, Keith Alexander, Dennis Blair, Frances Fleisch and Deborah Bonanni display a level of too cute by a half duplicity that ought be grounds for sanctions.
The record has been conned. Our federal courts have been conned. All as the Snowden disclosures have proven. And the American people have been defrauded by pompous terror mongers who value their own and ins utional power over truth and honesty to those they serve. Clapper, Alexander and Obama have the temerity to call Ed Snowden a traitor? Please, look in the mirror boys.
Lastly, and again as Trevor Timm pointed out above, these are just the declarations for cases the EFF and others are still pursuing. What of the false secret declarations made in al-Haramain v. Obama, which the government long ago admitted were bogus? Why won’t the cons behind “I Con” release those declarations? What about the frauds perpetrated in Mohamed v. Jeppesen that have fraudulently ingrained states secrets cons into the government arsenal?
If the government wants to come clean, here is the opportunity. Frauds have been perpetrated on our courts, in our name. We should hear about that. Unless, of course, Obama and the “I Cons” are really nothing more than simple good old fashioned cons.
I sometimes get lonely over the holidays…Then I remember that NSA is right there with me….
"You better watch out,I sometimes get lonely over the holidays…Then I remember that NSA is right there with me….
you better not cry,
you better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
NSAnta Claws has come to town."
"He sees you when you're sleeping,
he knows when you're awake,
he knows if you've been bad or good,
so be good for goodness sake."
Truman’s True Warning on the CIA
Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed led “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”
It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.
Truman began his article by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.”
Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”
It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support.
After Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the patrician, well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Do ents in the Truman Library show that Dulles also mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour one-on-one with the former president, trying to get him to retract what he had written in his op-ed. No, said Harry.
Not a problem, Dulles decided. Four days later, in a formal memorandum of conversation for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA general counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction for Truman, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”
Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and in then covering it up? In my view, the best dissection of the evidence pertaining to the murder appeared in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer is Yes.
Obama Intimidated?
The mainstream media had an allergic reaction to Douglass’s book and gave it almost no reviews. It is, nevertheless, still selling well. And, more important, it seems a safe bet that President Barack Obama knows what it says and maybe has even read it. This may go some way toward explaining why Obama has been so deferential to the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Pentagon.
Could this be at least part of the reason he felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief Leon Panetta to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than leader.
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/22...ng-on-the-cia/
NSA/CIA/FBI/militarized police are the American Stasi
The US Marshals Service slurps your cell phone data from small planes:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...ans-phone-dataThe US government defended the Department of Justice's US Marshals Service on Friday following the revelation that the agency is spying from the skies with airborne devices that mimic cell towers and slurp mobile phone data.
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that since 2007 the US Marshals Service program has been using Cessna aircraft, flying them out of at least five metropolitan area airports, to slurp data from mobile phones in a flying range that covers most of the country's population.
The technology in the two-foot-square device enables investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location.
It's just to find crooks, a DOJ official told the WSJ, without admitting that the program actually exists.
In a statement sent to the paper, the official said that the Marshals Service doesn't maintain a database of innocent citizens' phones.
The official said that any of the service's investigative techniques are deployed "only in furtherance of ordinary law enforcement operations, such as the apprehension of wanted individuals, and not to conduct domestic surveillance or intelligence-gathering."
Sources familiar with the program told the WSJ that the cell tower mimicking devices - sometimes known as "dirtboxes" because of the Boeing unit, Digital Receiver Technology (DRT), that makes them - are two-foot-square boxes that scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight.
dp
hard to keep track of the reversals. here's another one:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/0...tower-data.htmLaw enforcement collection of cellphone data is a hot issue that some observers believe is destined for a hearing before the Supreme Court.
The 11 th Circuit ruled in June 2014 that police need a warrant to get cell tower data. The three-judge panel in Atlanta ruled that Quartavius Davis, whose cell tower data placed him near the scenes of six robberies, had a Fourth Amendment right to keep his whereabouts private.
Davis's records showed he was near the stores when they were robbed. He won his appeal of his conviction and sentence of 162 years in prison.
Unsatisfied with the ruling, the government sought an en banc hearing before the circuit, which was held Feb. 24.
The 5th Circuit took a different view in 2013, with a 2-1 ruling that determined "cell site records were ordinary business records of the provider in which the customer had no reasonable expectation of privacy," according to Smith's opinion.
Cell tower data can include the originating and receiving phone numbers for calls, the date, time and length of the calls and whether the communication was a call or text.
Smith gave a respectful nod to three rulings on the issue by his colleague, Corpus Christi federal magistrate Brian Owsley, the upshot of which was that cell tower records are protected by the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement needs a warrant to get them, and such requests are not authorized by the Stored Communications Act.
But Smith said he must defer to the 5th Circuit.
"The net effect is that the Fourth Amendment ground for Judge Owsley's rulings on cell tower dumps has been cut away, at least for the time being, in this circuit," Smith wrote.
Orders letting police obtain cell tower records are sometimes called "cell tower dumps."
the ACLU tries and very occasionally wins. the attempt is worthy.
your unceasing counsel of despair and futility is cowardly: you mock the powerless and their struggle to fight back
your disdain for the oppressed and sympathy for the powerful couldn't be any clearer, tbh
Even if ACLU wins, who's going to enforce it?
Who's going to police the American Police State, which will LOL and continue as before.
Do you have ANY evidence of anybody Raging Against the Machine and winning?
The VRWC has installed a corporatocracy that is invincible.
Even socialist/Muslim terrorist Obama is pushing TTP/TTIP to be ratified verbatim, which will promote corporate power ABOVE country-state power.
O Noble Warrior, show us the way forward to do battle with the corrupt, wealth-sucking establishment corporotacracy.
How will we elect 225 Graysons, Warrens, etc to the House, and elect 60+ equivalent Senators?
How will we beat the VRWC's SCOTUS5?
Come on, my dear little pollyanna, show us the way to shut Pandora's box.
you mock the struggle against power and oppression. you hate the 99% and envy their masters.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...655001,00.htmlA federal appeals court on Thursday said a National Security Agency program that collected the records of millions of Americans' phone calls was not authorized by Congress.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a lower court judge erred in dismissing a lawsuit challenging the program's cons utionality, and returned the case to the judge for further proceedings. It also upheld the denial of a preliminary injunction to block the collection of phone records under the program.
Thursday's decision vacated a December 2013 dismissal of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit contending that the NSA's collection of "bulk telephony metadata" violated the bar against warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment.
totally false, but you're full of , per usual
FBI's gonna win, ignore Congress
The FBI is fighting a losing battle over phone snooping
The FBI says it wants a golden key to access Americans' phones. Now, politicians are pushing back.
A top FBI official, Amy S. Hess, said at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday that encryption of phone data is limiting the FBI's ability to spy on communication. She said law enforcement needs a way to access smartphone content in order to stop criminals and terrorists, suggesting that the FBI have access to keys that can unlock customers' data.
But in a rare show of unity, Congressmen almost universally fought back against that idea.
U.S. Representative Rod Blum, a Republican from Iowa, likened that to homebuilders putting a camera in every new house -- and telling people to blindly believe they won't be turned on later.
"Isn't this analogous to that?" Blum asked Hess. "You're saying, 'Trust us, we'll only do it if we'll need to do it.'"
This hearing is the latest sign of a potential turning point. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a nation in turmoil passed security-focused laws like the Patriot Act that widely expanded the use of secret surveillance.
But sentiment is starting to shift in the other direction. In 2013, we learned that government spies are collecting emails, phone records and tapping into phone and video chats.
Tech companies, feeling betrayed, are encrypting more of their own communication -- and offering that to customers too, guarding them from hackers, cybercriminals and government spies. Apple(AAPL, Tech30) has enhanced the security of iPhones by requiring a person's password to unlock his or her phone. Google (GOOGL, Tech30) allows Android users to encrypt their phones -- but not by default.
When a phone is encrypted, law enforcement can't secretly search someone's phone remotely. Police need the physical device and a warrant. And -- theoretically -- detectives need someone's cooperation to go through their device.
The FBI says encryption of data shields kidnappers and pedophiles from cops. Hess reiterated this Wednesday, saying encryption has "a tremendous impact on our ability to fight crime and bring perpetrators to justice."
"If these devices are encrypted, the information they contain may be unreadable to anyone but a user," she said. "The process of obtaining a search warrant... could be an exercise in futility."
But in reality, cops can get into your phone if they grab it. Local police in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando told CNNMoney that devices exist to pull the data off smartphones, then hack into it.
Matt Blaze, one of the nation's top encryption experts, told members of the committee that breaking into an encrypted phone is a cinch. It'll take 10,000 tries to get past a four-digit passcode.
"On modern computing hardware, essentially no time at all," Blaze said. Seconds maybe.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/30/tech...cy-encryption/
DPS retracts:
http://www.dallasnews.com/investigat...om-arrests.eceI reported something to you about the Texas Department of Public Safety that is in error.
DPS told me that its TrapWire super-surveillance detection system set up by former FBI and CIA agents to find terrorists is a success.
How do we know?
DPS told me, and by extension you, and also members and top staffers of the Texas Legislature that TrapWire resulted in 44 arrests.
Turns out that’s not true.
DPS is the one that made the boo-boo. And it’s a big one.
The Watchdog learned this week that the actual number of arrests resulting from the secret system that cost taxpayers millions of dollars is none.
Zero.
sameIf only this one exaggeration of success were an isolated incident for DPS. But it’s not. The agency, which received hundreds of millions of dollars more for crime-fighting and border security from the 2015 Legislature, is on the receiving end of criticism in newspapers in Houston, El Paso and Austin for a pattern of brags that ring false.
This week Austin American-Statesman reporter Jeremy Schwartz reported that DPS falsely claimed drug seizure numbers actually handled by federal officers as part of its own statistical haul. More puffery.
DPS puffs up its stats the way Donald Trump puffs his hair.
The agency’s credibility is in tatters. Whether you’re running a tiny police department or, like DPS, one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the nation, you can’t make up stuff to look good.
DPS does.
" newspapers in Houston, El Paso and Austin"
hmm, all BLUE cities. No rural red burgs gonna call out the DPS for LYING?
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
