The NSA is in the process of profiling every one of us

as horrifying as this sounds, it's no surprise... since the government is collecting information on not only every electronic transaction - from phone calls to atm withdrawals to airline tickets to supermarket affinity card swipes - as well as assembling facial recognition information and feeds from the millions of surveillance cameras located virtually everywhere, the next reasonable step is to do something with it... kevin at cryptogon has been all over this for years (here and here, among others) and i've been posting on it since at least 2006 (here)... the objective clearly is to build not only profiles of individuals but also of their communities, their networks, their behavior patterns, their interests, their allegiances, their movements, their beliefs, and their vulnerabilities... why...? control... the more information the government has about ordinary citizens and their proclivities, the more control can be exercised, and the more control that can be exercised, the greater the opportunity to instill fear which, in turn, increases the control...


from raw story...

NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

a video clip of binney's summary of his talk...


 

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Don't worry about that clicking on your phone

courtesy of firedoglake...

Amidst the inevitable 9-11 retrospectives, I feel like only the Los Angeles Times is putting the past ten years in the proper perspective. Because the longest-lasting legacy of the 9-11 attacks is clearly the terror industry it spawned. Over the weekend the LAT looked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on absurd “security” projects, filling the pockets of contractors, and for little benefit:

“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Today’s entry from the LAT is even better, and something I feel we pay too little attention to. In the decade since 9-11, this has become a surveillance state, and the government collects enormous amounts of data on every man, woman and child in America, in all likelihood too much to process. We all know about this, but it’s important to see all that surveillance together in one package:

…the secret domestic intelligence gathering [...] is one of the most significant legacies of Sept. 11. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies now collect, store and analyze vast quantities of digital data produced by law-abiding Americans. The data mining receives limited congressional oversight, rare judicial review and almost no public scrutiny.

Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.

We had one moment where this was subject to any debate at all, during the fight over the FISA amnesty legislation. But that was really about a small portion of the total data collection. Most of the surveillance remains a secret. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to tease out a little more this summer, when they tried to get the intelligence community to admit to how they were misinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow for more data collection. But that never went anywhere. From NSA surveillance to national security letters to the AT&T room on Folsom Street in San Francisco, what bits and pieces we do know about point to a giant network Hoovering up every piece of information you let out into the world digitally.

I appreciate the LA Times highlighting this legacy. Nobody really questions why we’ve deprived American civil liberties to this degree, to protect the homeland from a threat that mirrors the threat posed by full bathtubs. Read the whole story for yourself. This has been an inexorable slide downward for ten years, and it shows no sign whatsoever of letting up.

i've said repeatedly for years, anyone who uses any digital network, no matter what it is, from swiping a supermarket discount card to making an atm withdrawal to using email to making a credit card purchase, can safely assume that all those transactions are being swept up in the national surveillance dragnet to be sniffed and ultimately filed for possible later use... anybody who thinks otherwise is simply living in a dream world...

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Tunisia now freer than the U.S...? Arguably, yes...

as juan cole points out in the headline of his blog post...

It’s Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S.

Posted on 03/08/2011 by Juan

Tunisian Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi announced on Monday the dissolution of the country’s secret police arm. This step toward democracy is the most important taken by any Arab country for decades.

Tunisia’s interim government also abolished the ‘Ministry of Information,’ which had been in charge of censorship, allowing a free press to flourish. Of course censorship, especially habits of self–censorship, does not actually disappear with the stroke of a pen. Employees of state t.v. have struck recently to protest what they consider government censorship of their news reports.

An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics.

[...]

Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

The Fourth Amendment is on the verge of vanishing, and this attack on the Constitution is being abetted by pusillanimous and corrupt judges and fascistic elements in our national security apparatus. Freedom of peaceable assembly is also being whittled away in the United States of America via devices such as ‘free speech zones;’ the founding generation intended that the whole of the United States be a free speech zone. Many of the protests in the Middle East being cheered on by Americans would be illegal in this country.

Tunisian secret police dismantled



we've been watching our supposedly constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties being eroded for quite some time...

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Warrants required for Feds to read our emails

i'll take all the good news i can get... it's pretty scarce these days...

After many years of legal uncertainty, a federal appeals court has finally declared that emails have the same Fourth Amendment protections as regular mail and telephone calls.

"Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication, it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection," the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (PDF).

If the ruling is not overturned by the Supreme Court, it will put an end to the practice of law enforcement agents using court orders, rather than warrants, to gain access to emails. Court orders require a much lower standard than warrants.

Kevin Bankston of the digital rights group EFF told Wired.com he expects Internet service providers will comply with the ruling, meaning they will start requesting warrants when law enforcement requests access to emails.

Privacy advocates say law enforcement has been using a loophole in the 1986 Stored Communications Act to get emails without a warrant. Under that law, information stored on servers is subject only to a court order.

every once in a while, the courts remember that the 4th amendment is actually part of the constitution...

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Mark Fiore - domestic surveillance can be just so - so SNUGGLY...!

a good follow-on to the post prior to the prior post...

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No bit or byte left behind

gosh, i would hate to think that any text message i tapped out, any word i uttered, password i entered, pin number i punched in or any data scooped up when i swiped a card might escape the gaping maw of government surveillance...

U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping

Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.

The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that create technical obstacles to surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.

it's so comforting to know that my country's leaders want to keep an eye on me...

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Our police state

the u.s. is jumping on the bandwagon with india, saudi arabia and the united arab emirates and - no surprise - going further, deeper and much more invasive... ya gotta love that obama...!

[O]fficials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

oh, yeah... swell...

here's what they're going to be asking for...

¶ Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.

¶ Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.

¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

paul craig roberts posted a piece a few days ago entitled "It Is Official: The US Is A Police State" in which he was lamenting the fbi raid on anti-war activists in minneapolis... it's all of a piece, i'm afraid...

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Every day, [NSA intercepts and stores] 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications

as glenn points out, this headline taken from the the wapo series by dana priest and william arkin, top secret america, captures one of the most stunning points made in the first installment... sadly, however, to those of us who have been paying the slightest bit of attention for the past dozen years, it's only the raw numbers in black and white that are news, not the fact that the nsa is vacuuming up every single byte of electronic data from every single public network around the world and probably most private ones as well...

here's glenn...

Here is [Arkin and Priest's] first sentence: "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." This all "amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight." We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

Anyone who thinks that's hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle. Consider this: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State. Here's but one flavoring anecdote:

Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

What's most noteworthy about all of this is that the objective endlessly invoked for why we must acquiesce to all of this -- National Security -- is not only unfulfilled by "Top Secret America," but actively subverted by it. During the FISA debate of 2008 -- when Democrats and Republicans joined together to legalize the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program and vastly expand the NSA's authority to spy on the communications of Americans without judicial oversight -- it was constantly claimed that the Government must have greater domestic surveillance powers in order to Keep Us Safe. Thus, anyone who opposed the new spying law was accused of excessively valuing privacy and civil liberties at the expense of what, we are always told, matters most: Staying Safe.

But as I wrote many times back then -- often by interviewing and otherwise citing House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt, who has been making this point repeatedly -- the more secret surveillance powers we vest in the Government, the more we allow the unchecked Surveillance State to grow, the more unsafe we become. That's because the public-private axis that is the Surveillance State already collects so much information about us, our activities and our communications -- so indiscriminately and on such a vast scale -- that it cannot possibly detect any actual national security threats. NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses, warned of what ABC News described as "the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack." As Kinne put it:

By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody. You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.

The Government did not fail to detect the 9/11 attacks because it was unable to collect information relating to the plot. It did collect exactly that, but because it surveilled so much information, it was incapable of recognizing what it possessed ("connecting the dots"). Despite that, we have since then continuously expanded the Government's surveillance powers. Virtually every time the political class reveals some Scary New Event, it demands and obtains greater spying authorities (and, of course, more and more money). And each time that happens, its ability to detect actually relevant threats diminishes. As Priest and Arkin write:

The NSA sorts a fraction of those [1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of daily collected communications] into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The article details how ample information regarding alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and attempted Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab was collected but simply went unrecognized. As a result, our vaunted Surveillance State failed to stop the former attack and it was only an alert airplane passenger who thwarted the latter. So it isn't that we keep sacrificing our privacy to an always-growing National Security State in exchange for greater security. The opposite is true: we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.

the 4th amendment...? how quaint...

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NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids

again, no surprise for any of us who have been following these things...

james bamford writing in the new york review of books via information clearing house...

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

there's a lot more but i find it odd that any mention of echelon (see my previous posts on echelon here) is omitted...

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Sigh... Yeah, it DOES feel like Bush's third term, doesn't it...?

argue with this if you dare...

dave swanson in tomdispatch via information clearing house...

[The] dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.

double sigh...

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Tomorrow, the ACLU begins presenting oral arguments in its FISA Amendments Act (FAA) lawsuit

this should be interesting...

from the aclu...

Tomorrow, we’ll be in court presenting oral arguments in our challenge to the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the law passed by Congress last year that gave the government virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls. As you may recall, we filed a lawsuit to stop the government from spying under the FAA less than an hour after the Act was signed into law by President Bush on July 10, 2008.

here's the skinny on the lawsuit...

1. The defendants in our lawsuits (e.g. the people we’re suing) are John (Mike) McConnell, Director of National Intelligence; Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the NSA and Chief of the Central Security Service; and Michael Mukasey, Attorney General.

2. We’ve filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

3. Our superstar roster of plaintiffs (e.g. the people and groups we’re suing on behalf of) include The Nation magazine, journalists Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges, attorneys David Nevin, Scott McKay, Dan Arshack and Sylvia Royce, and a whole bunch of orgs that run the gamut from Amnesty International to the Global Fund for Women. (You can check out the full list of our plaintiffs online at www.aclu.org/faa.)

4. Three of our main points:

* The FAA violates the Fourth Amendment because it allows the government to gobble up the constitutionally protected communications of American citizens and residents without getting individualized warrants, and without specifying the time, place or length of the surveillance, and not specifying how the info gathered will be disseminated, or how long it’ll be kept. (You know, the who/what/where/when/why.)

* The FAA also violates the First Amendment by chilling lawful expressive speech without adequate justification by authorizing the government to intercept constitutionally protected communications without judicial oversight.

* The challenged law violates the principle of separation of powers by allowing the government to continue surveillance activities even if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has deemed those activities illegal. (Good idea, right? Asking the government to obey the law?)

this youtube clip, posted a year ago, gives a nice summary...

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Are our so-called liberal-progressive friends starting to wake up to the Obama bait-and-switch...?

from the progress report...

For all of the administration's promising early steps to restore transparency and accountability, however recent developments are less encouraging. Some of these stumbling points have been simple failures of implementation; many of the administration's budget transparency websites, for example, publish inconsistent numbers. Other transparency failures, however, suggest a more disturbing trend. Despite promises to end "secret meetings" and restore the White House as the "people's house," the administration has refused to disclose the names of individuals who have visited the White House since Obama took office, while echoing similar excuses by Bush administration officials who wanted to hide secret meetings with energy industry executives. But most disturbing are recent, tenuous invocations of "national security" to cast a shade over government transparency. After the Environmental Protection Agency uncovered nearly four dozen toxic coal ash sites in Tennessee that "could cause death and significant property damage if an event such as a storm, a terrorist attack or a structural failure caused them to spill into surrounding communities," the administration choose to keep the locations of the toxic sites secret from Tennessee residents because of fears that such disclosure could present a "security risk." Similarly, despite earlier disclosure of the infamous torture memos, the Obama CIA has thus far successfully kept secret a comprehensive account of that agency's interrogation practices. Although a heavily redacted version of the report was uncovered by the ACLU, the administration insists that disclosing the full report would endanger national security. Even more alarming, however, is the Obama administration's adoption of Bush's "state secrets" claim in court cases dealing with issues ranging from extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. The "state secrets" privilege allows the administration to withhold information in a lawsuit or even dismiss the suit altogether if the subject matter of the suit could potentially reveal information that puts national security at risk. In one suit, brought by an Islamic charity challenging the previous administration's warrantless wiretapping program, a federal judge finally threatened sanctions against the Justice Department if it did not comply with an order to turn over a document to the plaintiff's attorneys. Incidents such as these led the New York Times to lament that Obama has "backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office."

the center for american progress, the publisher of this e-newsletter and the weblog, think progress, has lost a great deal of credibility with me over the past few years... i became a regular reader when i saw that they often got the goods on the multiple abuses and outright crimes of the bush administration ahead of the rest of the baying blogosphere... then it started to dawn on me that they too often played the fawning sycophant to anyone and everyone aligned with the democratic party, frequently turning a blind eye to the fact that we have been and are continuing to be just as thoroughly screwed by the democrats as we are by the republicans, the only difference being that, with the dems, there's no sand in the vaseline...

since obama's election and inauguration, they've taken a turn for the worse, spending WAY too much time, imho, vilifying the likes of bill kristol, bill o'reilly, glenn beck, rush limbaugh, karl rove, and the like, a tactic that only serves to give those despicable characters even more air time and exposure than they already have and thus reinforcing their loathsome presence on the american scene... the best strategy in dealing with such obvious dark forces is to not give them the energy of even recognizing them... the dark feeds on attention whether it be positive or negative, and these guys don't deserve to be fed...

so, now our center for american progress friends seem to be waking up to the fact that our dear sunshine-is-the-best-disinfectant president may well be just another stooge - albeit a very well-spoken, intelligent and polished one - for those who so blithely and heedlessly pull our strings along with the strings of most of the rest of the world...

speaking for myself, i believe obama has a good heart and i would prefer to believe that some of what's going on is the result of his bowing to his handlers... otoh, if he IS a good soul, he'd better start showing it or i will be permanently checking out of the hope hotel...

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Greenwald and Olbermann on Obama's support for warrantless wiretapping [UPDATE: EFF perspective, a change for the worse]

worth stretching the fair use standard for...

from glenn greenwald in salon via information clearing house with a nod to brother tim...

April 08, "Salon" -- -Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right -- which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration -- large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, of all people, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here. Just as revealingly, the top recommended Kos diary today (voted by the compulsively pro-Obama Kos readership) is one devoted to attacking Obama for his embrace of Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity doctrines (and promoting the Olbermann clips). Also, a front page Daily Kos post yesterday by McJoan vehemently criticizing Obama (and quoting my criticisms at length) sparked near universal condemnation of Obama in the hundreds of comments that followed. Additionally, my post on Monday spawned vehement objections to what Obama is doing in this area from the largest tech/privacy sites, such as Boing Boing and Slashdot.

This is quite encouraging but should not be surprising. As much as anything else, what fueled the extreme hostility towards the Bush/Cheney administration were their imperious and radical efforts to place themselves behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and above and beyond the rule of law. It would require a virtually pathological level of tribal loyalty and monumental intellectual dishonesty not to object just as vehemently as we watch the Obama DOJ repeatedly invoke these very same theories and, in this instance, actually invent a new one that not even the Bush administration espoused.

To be clear: there are important areas in which Obama has been quite commendable, and I've personally praised him fairly lavishly for those actions (see, for instance, here, here and here), but it is simply unacceptable -- no matter what else is true about him -- for Obama to claim for himself the very legal immunity and secrecy powers which characterized and enabled the worst excesses of Bush lawlessness. Yet in a short period of time, he has taken one step after the next to do exactly that.

The Olbermann segments, which are really worth watching, highlight the exact passages of the Obama DOJ's brief which I excerpted and posted on Monday, and underscore how intolerable the Obama administration's conduct in the area of transparency and civil liberties has increasingly become. Credit to Olbermann for highlighting this issue and commenting on it with such unrestrained candor. This should help galvanize greater action to make clear to the Obama administration that this conduct is completely unacceptable, and -- with Accountability Now, FDL and others -- I expect there to be some specific actions announced very shortly to begin pushing back, hard, against these serious transgressions.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

brother tim and i had quite a discussion about this on the "And, yes, I DO take it personally" radio show yesterday, and we both agreed that this is a very disturbing development... i've been concerned ever since then-senator obama voted in favor of the fisa bill offering retroactive immunity to telecom companies, and i was hopeful that, upon becoming president, we would see obama unequivocally repudiate this kind of constitutional abuse... that it's not happening is a bad sign...

kevin at cryptogon has christened hopeful attitudes like mine "hopium"... i notice atrios is getting pushed to the edge as well, as evidenced by his occasional post title, "hopey - changey"...

meanwhile, i'm still waiting to get our country back...

[UPDATE]

from the horse's mouth...

eff...

We had hoped this would go differently.

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It's an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." He was right then, and we're dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it's the Department Of Justice's second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses "sovereign immunity" from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government's ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ's radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama's own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

This isn't change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.

the more i read, the more deeply troubled i'm finding all of this...

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When WILL Obama Speak to the Nation on Torture and Wiretapping?

buhdydharma at daily kos asks some very good questions...

In light of the DOJ's recent action to dismiss the right of citizens to sue for being spied on, which it is very difficult NOT to see as the government protecting it's right to spy on YOU without a warrant.

In light of the ICRC's, as the body charged with the task of charging torture, charges that the Bush Administration did indeed torture.

In light of the massive body of evidence in the public sphere that torture was systematically approved and used.

In light of Spain investigating the US for torture.

In light of the United Nations investigating the US for torture.

In light of the UK investigating itself for torture

In light of the assertion that the Obama Administration has apparently been pressured, either by Republicans or by the CIA or by a combination of both into not releasing the latest batch of Bush Torture Program memos.

And in the light of the fact that President Obama has not addressed either Domestic Spying or Torture in a meaningful and substantive way since he has taken office....yet in his campaign championed the Constitution, the rights of citizens, transparency, and the Rule of Law.

Finally, in light of the fact that Obama is rapidly losing the trust of many in his politically necessary base over his silence on these issues.

When will President Obama address these issues before the American people?

buhdydharma's concerns are immediately tempered on the same site by wmtriallawyer...

Now, it has been suggested that someone the new assertion of sovereign immunity made via the Patriot Act, FISA, etc. is breathtaking and such, but I just don't see it the way others do. I look at it from the perspective of the government lawyer, and if there is another argument to be advanced to defend my client on immunity grounds, even if that argument hasn't been advanced before, I'm going to use it. And I'm reasonably certain that is what the DOJ attorneys are doing...their job to defend their client. It has also been suggested that Congress, in passing the telecom immunity in the FISA revision claimed "Well, you can always sue the individual government actors," and that somehow, this Motion goes against the grain of that claim. This Motion doesn't change that one iota. Again, this is a Motion filed on behalf of the United States of America and related government Defendants, in their official capacity. If a Plaintiff finds that Wendy Wiretapper, working for NSA, violated a Plaintiff's civil rights, that lawsuit can still continue, but still be subject to personal immunities for official acts.

I am still wary of where this is going. Clearly, I'd like some more policy assurances from the Obama administration with respect to the wiretapping issue, and changes in the law.

But you can't blame the lawyers for defending their client. And you can't translate what they are doing to defend their client as a policy decision. At least not yet.

it's like i said in my post yesterday... i'm waiting for some REAL changes and so far all i'm seeing is more of same... the clock's tickin' and daylight's burnin'...

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The Bush administration memos behind torture, detention and warrantless wiretapping

from raw story...

Details about more than three dozen secret memoranda written by Bush Administration officials now sit atop a chart created by public interest reporting group. The memos track new details about dozens of secret Bush Administration legal positions on torture, detention and warrantless wiretapping.

Meanwhile, Obama's freshly-confirmed Attorney General Eric Holder told senators that he was open to declassifying White House legal memos if no support for their original classification could be found, signaling a likely showdown with former President George W. Bush over executive privilege.

from propublica...

The Missing Memos
by Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica - January 28, 2009

The Bush administration’s controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping were underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration kept far more memos secret than has been previously understood. At least three dozen by our count.

The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting the first comprehensive list of the secret memos. (The ACLU first compiled a list, which ProPublica verified and expanded on.)

Note: Our list is quite inclusive, but we have chosen to leave off some documents, such as early drafts of later memos.

Click here for more

can we PLEASE get rolling on PROVING we are a nation governed by a constitution and the rule of law...? PLEASE...?

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Now that Bush has "left the building," Russell Tice spills the rest of the beans on Olbermann

yeah, well, this is what most of us have been saying all along, only maybe now there's some chance of something being DONE about it... ya 'spose...?

from oxdown gazette via emptywheel, both at firedoglake...

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Russ Feingold describes the pending FISA bill as an "impeachable offense" and says he will filibuster

from democracy now...

“One of the Greatest Intrusions, Potentially, on the Rights of Americans Protected Under the 4th Amendment”–Sen. Feingold Blasts Telecom Spy Bill

here's some of the meat...

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, this is a great blow to the rights of the American people. And much of the publicity has been about a very important aspect: giving these telephone companies immunity that cooperated with the President’s illegal program. We think that should be decided based on current law, not some kind of a retroactive immunity. But that’s essentially what this bill does.

But you know what? Even worse are the provisions of the bill that will make it very easy for the government to essentially suck up the communications, all communications of Americans that go overseas, whether it’s an email or a text message or a phone call to a daughter, junior year abroad, or a child who’s in Iraq or a reporter or a business associate. This is one of the greatest intrusions, potentially, on the rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution in the history of our country.

And unfortunately, it’s going to go through with the help of some Democrats. So this is a very, very sad day for our Constitution and for our rights, and it’s not justified by the terrorism issue, because we do not have any problem at all with going after anybody that we have reasonable suspicions about. It has to do with sucking all this information into a huge database in a way that is very intrusive on the privacy of all Americans.

[...]

The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that’s absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it’s a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feingold, explain exactly what you think is an impeachable offense.

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: Well, you know, this is one of the things that’s been debated over the centuries, but I believe that when—it has to do with the rule of law and the very structure of our system of government, in other words, not just the issue that many have been concerned about, misleading the country into war, the Iraq war. That was a terrible thing, and, you know, some say that’s an impeachable offense. But to me, when the law is clear, when it’s absolutely clear that there is a clear statute and the President creates his own idea of a law and says he doesn’t have to follow the duly elected laws of the land, to me, that’s right at the core of what the founders of this country meant when they talked about high crimes and misdemeanors.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feingold, will you filibuster this bill?

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: We are going to resist this bill. We are going to make sure that the procedural votes are gone through. In other words, a filibuster is requiring sixty votes to proceed to the bill, sixty votes to get cloture on the legislation. We will also—Senator Dodd and I and others will be taking some time to talk about this on the floor. We’re not just going to let it be rubberstamped.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you filibuster, though?

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD: That’s what I just described.

hey, russ... when is your buddy, chris dodd, going to speak out publicly...?

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The Democrats are covering their own asses by supporting the odious FISA bill

jonathan turley on countdown with keith olbermann...

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clammyc on Nancy P and the odious FISA bill "compromise"

nancy and her esteemed congressional colleagues obviously believe in their dark little hearts that there aren't people out there who are actually paying attention to this shit and have memories of events that stretch back longer than last night...

You have got to be kidding me, Nancy

by clammyc [Subscribe]

Thu Jun 19, 2008 at 06:01:57 PM PDT

Over in the comments at Swampland, there is the text of a statement by Pelosi regarding the abomination that is the FISA compromise coming to a vote tomorrow. And, assuming that this statement is Pelosi’s, there is this head smacking passage in the statement (emphasis added):

Tomorrow, we will be taking up the FISA bill. As you probably know, the bill has been filed. It is a balanced bill. I could argue it either way, not being a lawyer, but nonetheless, I could argue it either way. But I have to say this about it: it's an improvement over the Senate bill and I say that as a strong statement. The Senate bill is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. This bill improves upon the Senate bill.

But you probably know that. What you may not know is that it's improvement over the original FISA bill as well. So it makes progress in the right direction. But these bills depend on the commitment to the Constitution of the President of the United States and of his Justice Department. So while some may have some complaints about this, that, or the other about the bill, it is about the enforcement, it is about the implementation of the law where our constitutional rights are protected.

Now, if I may ask, Madame Speaker, "what the fuck?"

What, over the past 7 years, makes you think that there is any way in hell that Bush or his Justice Department will do anything other than scoff at the rule of law or the Constitution? Look at each of the three Attorneys General, just for starters. The BEST thing that can be said about any of them is that John Ashcroft had a moment of clarity when he was gravely ill.

Once.

What happened to your statement about the big difference between your Congress and the prior ones is subpoena power. And how did that work out for you?

This administration has ignored subpoenas, destroyed email servers, illegally disenfranchised voters by the tens of thousands, approved of torture, illegally manufactured "evidence" to invade one country and wants to do the same to another, shredded the very Constitution that you "hope" that they will uphold, illegally politicized the US Attorneys, blew the cover of a covert CIA operative, negligently (at best) allowed a major city to be drowned by a natural disaster that was foreseen by everyone, and has engaged in rendition, just to mention a few things.

But that isn’t even the point.

The so-called "leadership" that was entrusted to you was abrogated the moment that you took impeachment off the table. The fact that some of the better successes of the Democratic "led" Congress, such as the minimum wage increase, the extension of unemployment benefits and some other bills are now just the lipstick on the pig that is a horrific occupation funding bill and an unacceptable FISA "compromise".

On what planet will this President abide by anything - the same President who lied over 900 times in the run up to the Iraq invasion? The same President who ignored hundreds of bills with signing statements. And if John McCain wins in November, do you really think that he will abide by the Constitution?

Actually, you probably do think that he will, so never mind there.

This is an issue that the American people are very clearly against. Yet, you seem to think that by trusting a President and a Justice Department to "do the right thing", that you can wash your hands of your responsibilities to America and the Constitution.

That is completely unacceptable, and stunning that someone who made it all the way to third in line for the Presidency would say something that is so very ignorant.

Update [2008-6-19 21:31:52 by clammyc]: For great in depth analysis, check out Greenwald (as always).

doubtlessly, among the TONS of people out there who are clueless about the unconscionable damage that is being done to our republic, our constitution, and the very fundamentals upon which our nation was founded, there are those who believe this is yet another demonstration of congressional democratic spinelessness... to those people i say, WAKE THE HELL UP...!

repeat after me...

THESE ARE NOT ACTS OF COWARDICE...!

THEY ARE NOT CAPITULATIONS...!

THEY ARE FULL-BLOWN, DELIBERATE COLLABORATIONS...!

THEY ARE BEING PERPETRATED ON THE BELIEF THAT PERSISTENCE AND THE DELIBERATELY ENGINEERED MICRO ATTENTION SPAN OF AMERICAN CITIZENS WILL ULTIMATELY ALLOW THEM TO GET THEIR WAY...!

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"Deal" on the FISA law...? "Deal"...? For whom...? Not the American people, that's for DAMN sure...!

from today's nyt...

Deal Is Struck to Overhaul Wiretap Law
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The deal reached by leaders in Congress overhauls the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provides some immunity to the phone companies.

whatever thread you choose to follow, money or power, it all leads to the same place, a place that has absolutely NOTHING to do with constitutional protections, civil liberties or the common good of u.s. citizens...

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