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Labels are meaningless... you could just as easily say dubya was a moderate liberal (look at the spending, Medicare Part D, stimulus, etc)... plenty of people calling him a RINO, etc.
Obama is basically a moderate Republican.
Labels are meaningless... you could just as easily say dubya was a moderate liberal (look at the spending, Medicare Part D, stimulus, etc)... plenty of people calling him a RINO, etc.
Let me add one other thing... what really gets me is the BS I've been reading "oh well, americans don't care about privacy, 85% of them posts all sorts of in facebook anyways", which is an incredibly stupid argument.
If people *chooses* to share whatever intimate bull , it still *their* choice.
The thing that cracks me up is how people are blind and/or stupid to how similar Obama is to Bush. The similarities are endless.
The man on the street stuff I've read is that most people don't like, but feel, or know, they can't do anything to stop it. iow, they're disenfranchised from affecting govt actions, directions, they're powerless, which is exactly the same when people are getting screwed by corporations.
NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment
The National Security Agency pushed for the government to “rethink” the Fourth Amendment when it argued in a classified memo that it needed new authorities and capabilities for the information age.
The 2001 memo, later declassified and posted online by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, makes a case to the incoming George W. Bush administration that the NSA needs new authorities and technology to adapt to the Internet era.
In one key paragraph, NSA wrote that its new phase meant the U.S. must reevaluate its approach toward signals intelligence, or “SIGINT,” and the Cons ution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today,” it wrote. “The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...ent-92416.html
the police/natsec state is apolitical, runs on its own logic, objectives, and enriches itself with many $10Bs/year without interference from either party, exactly like the MIC.
You right-wingers would be approve or at worst be silent, indifferent about NSA privacy raping if a Repug were President, trashing opponents as weak on terrorism, aiding the enemy, traitors, etc, all of which we heard from y'all here and from Repugs when FISA was in the news under dubya.
N.S.A. ENFORCES ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY ON CONSCIENCE
The National Security Agency moved swiftly and forcefully today to remind its employees of its longstanding zero-tolerance policy on conscience, warning that any violation of that policy would result in immediate termination.
“When you sign on to work at the N.S.A. you swear to uphold the standards of amorality and soullessness that this agency was founded upon,” said N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander. “Any evidence of ethics, decency, or a sense of right and wrong will not be tolerated. These things have no place in the intelligence community.”
To enforce the policy, General Alexander said that once a month all N.S.A. employees will be wired to a computer to take full inventory of what is going on in their minds: “We want to be sure they are spending their free time playing Call of Duty, not reading the Federalist Papers.”
The N.S.A. director attempted to reassure the American people that despite “unfortunate recent events,” the agency remains “one of the most heartless and cold-blooded organizations on the face of the earth.” He added, “We refuse to let one good apple spoil the whole bunch.”
He said that going forward, the N.S.A. would try to recruit people who had already demonstrated “a commitment to invading people’s privacy” by working at Google or Facebook.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...rowitz%20(135)
boutons you tow the company line every post you do.
.
Glenn Greenwald ftw
Tangential but interesting: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...1/frankel.html
this nsa program...makes rupert murdock phone tapping amateurish
One American Who Isn’t For Sale
So it’s true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us, the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. That’s the $176 billion private equity firm that once employed former President George H.W. Bush, his Secretary of State James A. Baker III and a host of political luminaries that would put any other list of America’s ruling elite to shame. Plenty of Democrats too, including former President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the man Clinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation of the housing bust.
It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government’s immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation’s citizenry. This is systematic snooping through the telephone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans conducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allen’s employ who had the highest access to our most private personal data while working at a for-profit company.
Our data is their commerce, and ever since 9/11, observing us has become mega lucrative. “Booz Allen Hamilton,” The New York Times reported Sunday, “has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States.” The word “serving” might be pushing it here, since 98 percent of the firm’s revenue of $5.8 billion last year came from the taxpayers, who are the same folks being spied upon.
Heck, Booz Allen knows all about those taxpayers, since back in 1998, during the Clinton presidency, the firm was hired to “modernize” the IRS. “We made some very dramatic changes in the way the IRS is organized,” Booz Allen’s CEO claimed at the time. How perfect: Make tax collection more efficient and less painful, so the suckers might not notice when you scoop up the loot at the other end.
Of course, to those swinging through the revolving door between the government and its defense contractors, it must be difficult to draw a distinction between their changing roles. James R. Clapper, the chief intelligence official in the Obama administration, who is now investigating this security lapse, was himself a top Booz Allen executive. And it should be of little surprise that John M. McConnell, currently vice chairman of Booz Allen, was previously the chief intelligence official in the George W. Bush administration. It’s crony capitalism at its patriotic best.
“The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told the Times. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...sale_20130611/
the government's interpretations of law are secret, and so is most of the oversight. FISA rarely denies applications for wiretaps, btw.
there is hope. abuse of power can provoke judicial reaction. anyone recall this old chestnut?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
btw, doesn't a surrep ious mass electronic dragnet make court supervision moot?
The administration that implemented this capability was wrong, and the administration that continues to utilize it is wrong. We should all agree that everyone is at fault, and get rid of it. In the end that's what matters.
US: No plans to end broad surveillance program
A senior U.S. intelligence official on Monday said there were no plans to scrap the programs that, despite the backlash, continue to receive widespread if cautious support within Congress
http://news.yahoo.com/us-no-plans-en...073602699.html
the militarized-police/natsec state is unstoppable.
Apparently, Greenwald has a LOT MORE secrets to reveal.
A nice big you to everyone.
Good for them. While this Snowden saga is still in the early stages, it would appear that Ellsberg may be onto something
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-stasi-americaIn my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.
If the current police state would have been in force at the time of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg would still be in prison.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...tml?1370644410Mere hours after President Barack Obama said Friday morning that he welcomes a debate on the federal government's highly classified surveillance programs, his Department of Justice tried to squash the release of a secret court opinion concerning surveillance law.
A 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling found the U.S. government had uncons utionally overreached in its use of a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The National Security Agency uses the same section to justify its PRISM online data collection program. But that court opinion must remain secret, the Justice Department says, to avoid being "misleading to the public."
The DOJ was responding to a lawsuit filed last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation seeking the release of a 2011 court opinion that found the government had violated the Cons ution and cir vented FISA, the law that is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance aimed at foreigners.
The DOJ had been given a Friday deadline to submit the filing, well before the revelation of the PRISM program's existence in The Washington Post and The Guardian on Thursday.
The part of the FISA law addressed in the opinion in question, Section 702, is the same one the NSA is now using to scoop up email and social media records through its PRISM program.
But the court that released the opinion under dispute is no ordinary legal body. Made up of federal judges on loan from other courts, FISC conducts its highly classified business in secret. Its rulings, too, are classified -- which means Americans don't know how the law governing surveillance is being interpreted.
The Justice Department would like to keep things that way. Its filing asked the court to keep its ruling smacking down uncons utional surveillance under seal, and to prevent disclosure of even part of its contents.
"Any such release would be incomplete and quite possibly misleading to the public about the role of this Court and the issues discussed in the opinion," the Justice Department wrote.
Google to Gov: Can We Spill?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archive...+%28TPMNews%29
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/...ces_prism.html
"We are failing the EU citizens and we should be ashamed of ourselves," Sophie In 't Veld, a Dutch member of the ALDE group. She criticised the Commission and the "doublespeak" of member states. "Obama said to his citizens: 'Don't worry, we are not spying on you as citizens, we are only spying on foreigners.' But this is us." She added: "What kind of special relationship is that?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us...anted=all&_r=0
WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged.
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