NSA's phone spying began under Bush

Whether you agree or not with the NSA's massive, indiscriminate collection of telephone "metadata" on terrorist suspects and innocent Americans alike, this op-ed by the Bush Administration lawyer who got initial court approval to collect such data highlights that the NSA's domestic spying program was started under Dubya.

As a good Democratic soldier, I just wanted to point that out to all my outraged, I say outraged, Republican friends who suddenly rediscovered the 4th Amendment once a Democrat with a Muslim name became POTUS.

Enjoy.

Don’t limit the NSA’s effectiveness

By Steven G. Bradbury

January 3, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1av09yd

The whistleblowers are winning

I'll say it again: I have yet to hear any American say, "I wish I didn't know about the NSA's spying on us."  And if more and more Americans are turning against the NSA's domestic spying, then that means the whistleblowers are winning:

Meanwhile, Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning. At the outset Snowden said his biggest fear was that people would see "the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society and that 'nothing will change'". But his disclosures have already created a new debate, and political change will follow. 

Two weeks ago there was a surprisingly close call in the US House of Representatives, with the majority of House Democrats and 94 of 234 Republicans defying their House (and Senate) leadership, the White House, and the national security establishment in a vote to end the NSA's mass collection of phone records. The amendment was narrowly defeated by a vote of 205 to 217, but it was clear that "this is only the beginning," as John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee announced. 

A week later Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Democratic Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called a hearing where he challenged the Obama administration's claims that the NSA dragnet had been effective in disrupting terrorist plots. According to Leahy, the classified list that he had been shown of "terrorist events" did not show that "dozens or even several terrorist plots" had been thwarted by the NSA's surveillance of domestic phone calls.

It is beginning to sink in that the main target of the NSA's massive spying programmes is not terrorism but the American people themselves (as well as other non-terrorist populations throughout the world). 

Weisbrot sums it up with a few provocative questions:

And as Washington threatens to worsen relations with Russia - which together with the United States has most of the nuclear weapons in the world - over Snowden's asylum there, it's hard not to wonder about this fanatical pursuit of someone Obama dismissed as a "29-year-old hacker". Is it because he out-smarted a multi-billion dollar "intelligence community" of people who think they are really very smart but are now looking rather incompetent? 

If Snowden really leaked information that harmed US national security, why haven't any of these "really very smart" people been fired? Are we to believe that punishing this whistleblower is important enough to damage relations with other countries and put at risk all kinds of foreign policy goals, but the breach of security isn't enough for anyone important to be fired? Or is this another indication, like thegenerals telling Obama what his options were in Afghanistan, of the increasing power of the military/national security apparatus over our elected officials?

It's another matter that whistleblowers and journalists themselves may suffer personally for their revelations.  For their suffering for the sake of our liberty we can only thank them.

UPDATE (08.11.2013): Julian Assange called Obama's decision to reform Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act a victory for Edward Snowden, despite Obama's denials that it has anything to do with Snowden. Yeah, right.

Snowden, Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning

By Mark Weisbrot

August 7, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201387957162873.html

Only politics, not law, can secure Snowden's extradition

Other commentators have pointed out that Snowden's alleged political crimes do not merit extradition under international law.  Says Falk:

If anything, President Vladimir Putin, considering the nature of the Snowden disclosures about the global reach of American surveillance systems, acted with exceptional deference to the sensitivities of the United States. Instead of merely pointing out that Snowden could not be transferred to the United States against his will, Putin went out of his way to say that he did not want the incident to harm relations with the United States, and even went so far as to condition Snowden's asylum on an unusual pledge that he refrain from any further release of documents damaging to American interests.

[...]

Of course, Putin's new identity as 'human rights defender' lacks any principled credibility given his approach to political dissent in Russia, but that does not diminish the basic correctness of his response to Snowden. There is a certain obtuseness in the American diplomatic shrillness in this instance. Snowden's acts of espionage are pure political offense. Beyond this, the nature of what was disclosed revealed sustained threats to the confidentiality of government communications throughout the world.

Falk also points out the hypocrisy in the indignation of the Obama Administration and Senators McCain and Graham:

We should ask these deeply aggrieved senators for honest answers, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham never ones to shy away from a good fight, what they would have done had a comparable Russian whistleblower revealed a Russian surveillance system that was listening in on secret government deliberations in Washington as well as invading the privacy of ordinary Americans. The righteous indignation surrounding such revelations and the gratitude that would be bestowed on a Russian Snowden would know no bounds.

There is also the U.S. record of hypocrisy in refusing to honor other countries' extradition requests for genuine terror and genocide charges, as mentioned recently by Noam Chomsky. 

Indeed, most extradition cases are "90% politics and 10% law," a fact worth remembering as we huff and puff and threaten to blow Putin's house down.

Snowden's Asylum: 'It's the law, stupid'

By Richard Falk

August 5, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/2013841016657318.html

Chomsky: Latin America is no U.S. whipping boy

Here's how my man Chomsky sums up a revolution that's going on down below us, unnoticed by all but a few U.S. elites:

There are other cases, but the crime of rendition returns us to the matter of Latin American independence. The Open Society Institute recently released a study called “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.” It reviewed global participation in the crime, which was very broad, including among European countries.

Latin American scholar Greg Grandin pointed out that one region was absent from the list of shame: Latin America. That is doubly remarkable. Latin America had long been the reliable “backyard” for the United States. If any of the locals sought to raise their heads, they would be decapitated by terror or military coup. And as it was under U.S. control throughout the latter half of the last century, Latin America was one of the torture capitals of the world.

That's no longer the case, as the United States and Canada are being virtually expelled from the hemisphere.

Without the threat of Communism to cover our crimes in Latin America, we don't have the great excuse we once did to foment coups and back dictators. The War on Drugs still serves that purpose to some extent, but not everywhere.

America's Imperial Power Is Showing Real Signs of Decline

By Noam Chomsky

August 2, 2013 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/chomsky-americas-imperial-power-showing-real-signs-decline?paging=off

NSA has trouble recruiting cyber militia

Back in January 2011, I suggested that the U.S. could follow tiny Estonia's lead and create a "cyber militia," instead of relying exclusively on expensive defense contractors to fight cyber warfare.

I guess I was kind of prescient, considering that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden came from one of those contractors.  

Anyhow, now NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander is having a hard time convincing America's distrustful, trenchant hackers to help out Uncle Sam.  It didn't help his credibility this year that hackers now know, thanks to Snowden's leaks, that Gen. Alexander lied to them at the same Black Hat conference a year ago about the NSA's domestic spying.

NSA chief asks a skeptical crowd of hackers to help agency do its job

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.

August 1, 2013 | Washington Post

URL:  http://wapo.st/18NwZvc

Robinson: Love or hate him, we should thank Snowden

Great point by Robinson:

This month, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement announcing that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government’s authority to collect “metadata” about our phone calls. This was being disclosed “in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the . . . collection program.”

Isn’t that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no “continuing public interest” in the program.  We wouldn’t know it exists.

Aren't we all glad we know about this program, even if some of us happen to support it?  Personally, I don't understand how Snowden's revealing the program compromised U.S. intelligence.  No names were leaked, no agents put in danger.  

Moreover, the DOD-NSA's domestic spying program continues unchanged and unabated... which kind of undermines the argument that Snowden's whistle-blowing damaged the program. Usually, unsavory clandestine operations are cancelled or revamped once they are exposed, since they rely on secrecy.  These domestic spying programs don't rely on secrecy, just brute force collection of all our electronic communications.

In NSA leaks, Edward Snowden performed a service

By Eugene Robinson

July 30, 2013 | Washington Post

Edward Snowden’s renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance is being vindicated — even as Snowden himself is being vilified.

Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. Many of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA’s domestic snooping is now unavoidable.

This would be impossible if Snowden — or someone like him — hadn’t spilled the beans. We wouldn’t know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn’t know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications — even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations — from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.

Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the last five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won’t send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But Snowden fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that have offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It’s a tough situation, and time is not on his side.

You can cheer Snowden’s predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA’s fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.

This month, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement announcing that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government’s authority to collect “metadata” about our phone calls. This was being disclosed “in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the . . . collection program.”

Isn’t that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no “continuing public interest” in the program. We wouldn’t know it exists.

The new position espoused by President Obama and those who kept the NSA’s domestic surveillance a deep, dark secret is that of course we should have a wide-ranging national debate about balancing the imperatives of privacy and security. But they don’t mean it.

I know this because when an actual debate erupted in Congress last week, the intelligence cognoscenti freaked out.

An attempt to cut off funding for the NSA’s collection of phone data, sponsored by an unlikely pair of allies in the House — Justin Amash, a conservative Republican, and John Conyers, a liberal Democrat, both from Michigan — suffered a surprisingly narrow defeat, 217 to 205. The measure was denounced by the White House and the congressional leadership of both parties, yet it received bipartisan support, from 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats.

The Amash-Conyers amendment was in no danger of becoming law — the Senate would have killed it and, if all else failed, President Obama would have vetoed it. But it put the intelligence establishment on notice: The spooks don’t decide how far is too far. We do.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that three out of four Americans believe the vacuum-cleaner collection of phone call data by the NSA intrudes on our privacy rights.  At the same time, nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said it was “more important right now” to investigate possible terrorist threats than to respect privacy. A contradiction, perhaps? Not necessarily.

It is possible to endorse sweeping and intrusive measures in the course of a specific investigation but to reject those same measures as part of a fishing expedition. At the heart of the Fourth Amendment is the concept that a search must be justified by suspicion. Yet how many of those whose phone call information is being logged are suspected of being terrorists? One in a million?

Equally antithetical to the idea of a free society, in my view, is the government’s position that we are not permitted to know even how the secret intelligence court interprets our laws and the Constitution. The order that Snowden leaked — compelling a Verizon unit to cough up data on the phone calls it handled — was one of only a few to come to light in the court’s three decades of existence. Now there are voices calling for all the court’s rulings to be released.

We’re talking about these issues. You can wish Edward Snowden well or wish him a lifetime in prison. Either way, you should thank him.

Taibbi: All journalists are 'advocacy journalists'

Yes, yes, yes!  Taibbi makes a great point about "objective" journalists, in the context of Glenn Greenwald's scoops on the NSA domestic spying story [emphasis mine]:

... because all reporters are advocates. If we're only talking about people like Glenn Greenwald, who are open about their advocacy, that's a crazy thing to say. People should be skeptical of everything they read. In fact, people should be more skeptical of reporters who claim not to be advocates, because those people are almost always lying, whether they know it or not.

[...] That's what makes this new debate about Greenwald and advocacy journalism so insidious. Journalists of all kinds have long enjoyed certain legal protections, and those protections are essential to a functioning free press. The easiest way around those protections is simply to declare some people "not journalists." Ten years ago, I would have thought the idea is crazy, but now any journalist would be nuts not to worry about it. Who are these people to decide who's a journalist and who isn't? Is there anything more obnoxious than a priesthood?

Journalists are supposed to be fair, not objective.  "Objectivity" is impossible, so let's not set the bar there.  I would much rather have a journalist be honest with me about his convictions (aka biases), then I can filter his reporting as I like, instead of looking for his "hidden" messages.  

This is similar, yet also unrelated, to my personal practice of prefacing any discussion of politics with strangers with, "I'm a big lefty liberal who voted for Obama twice."  Why do I do that?  Because why not?  It's the truth, and I have nothing to hide.  Surprisingly, things go much better after that.  At least my interlocutor knows where I'm coming from.  Then it's all about the merit or weight of my arguments.  Plus people just appreciate honesty.  People are funny that way.  

Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism

By Matt Taibbi

June 27, 2013 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-msm-all-journalism-is-advocacy-journalism-20130627

'Falcon' spy: NSA whistleblower 'doomed'

Very interesting interview!  

Convicted U.S. spy Christopher Boyce: 'Snowden is doomed'

By Peter Shadbolt

June 14, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/asia/hong-kong-boyce-snowden/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Greenwald: Dems are hypocrites on NSA spying

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden-NSA story, is right: many Democrats and liberals are being hypocritical in defending Obama's vast program of spying on innocent Americans without probable cause, totally trashing the 4th Amendment and any semblance of privacy we had left.

For stark evidence of how a majority of Democrats have flip-flopped on whether they like the NSA spying on them, Greenwald offers us two Pew polls, one during Dubya's reign and one this month:

P.S. -- Respect to Yahoo, who, according to the New York Times, went to court to fight the PRISM program directive to turn over its users' info to the NSA.  Yahoo lost.

On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda

By Glenn Greenwald

June 14, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3gt5x