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

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: MSM misses the point of Bradley Manning trial

Matt Taibbi argues that the MSM is missing the point of Bradley Manning's public release of classified documents. The U.S. media has made it all about HIM, and whether he's a hero or a traitor:

[T]his case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the "classified" materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point

By Matt Taibbi

June 6, 2013 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/as-bradley-manning-trial-begins-press-predictably-misses-the-point-20130605#ixzz2W1lAjKC9

Ex-chair of GOP admitted to voter suppression of blacks

You don't have to take my word for it that the GOP, election after election, tries to suppress black voter turnout.  Take it from the GOP itself....

Former FL GOP Chair Testifies That Party Discussed How to 'Keep Blacks From Voting' in 2009

Deposition recalls FL Republican whistleblower Clint Curtis' 2004 affidavit on 'reducing black vote' before 2000 election...

By Brad Friedman

July 27, 2012 | Brad Blog

Well, this sounds familiar, and for good reason...

In a 630-page deposition, released to the press yesterday, former Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer described a systemic effort by Republicans to suppress the black vote. Referring to a 2009 meeting with party officials, Greer said "I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting." He also said party officials discussed how "minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party." Florida is currently embroiled in a controversy surrounding Gov. Rick Scott's (R) voter purge program, which disproportionately affects voters of color. Fifty-eight percent of Scott's original list of voters who were supposedly ineligible to voter were Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13 percent of Florida's eligible voters. Greer and the GOP cut ties in 2010, and he is currently facing felony corruption charges.

The summary above comes from ThinkProgress' Alex Brown who offer a hat-tip to Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald who opens his report this way:

In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations.

The entire matter echoes back to our initial 2004 exclusive on then Republican software programmer turned whistleblower Clint Curtis who had filed a sworn affidavit charging Florida Republican Tom Feeney had asked his company, Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), to create a vote-rigging software prototype in 2000.

At the time of his alleged meetings with Feeney, Curtis says the Congressman --- who had been Jeb Bush's Lt. Governor running mate in 1998 before becoming Speaker of the FL House and one of the most powerful elected officials in the state by 2000 --- discussed methods that he said the Republican Party had in place to "reduce the black vote" in the 2000 Presidential election.

According to the December 6, 2004 affidavit [PDF] filed by Curtis, just days before he would testify to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee panel...

10. In my role as a technology advisor at YEI, I was present at subsequent meetings between Mr. Feeney and Mrs. Yang [the company's owner]. In several of those meetings, prior to the 2000 election, it became clear to me that Mr. Feeney was well aware that by artificially reducing the margin of victory of the opposition party in areas where they were the strongest, the overall outcome would then favor his candidate. As well, he bragged that he had already implemented "exclusion lists" to reduce the "black vote". He further mentioned that the "proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%." I didn't know at the time, if Mr. Feeney had meant that as a racial joke or actually part of the plan.

In 2001, The Orlando Sentinel described Feeney as "one of Florida's most powerful elected officials." In 2000, Time Magazine called him "the only man more influential in Florida than football king Bobby Bowden."

Curtis' claims under penalty of perjury in his 2004 affidavit, about Feeney's statements on minority voter suppression in the Sunshine State before the 2000 race, sound as if they are right in line with former FL GOP Chair Greer's remarks made in his own sworn deposition about his time with the party in 2009.

The BRAD BLOG has also been covering FL Gov. Rick Scott's recently failed attempt at purging some 182,000 registered voters he had identified as "potential non-citizens" in advance of the 2012 election. Earlier this week, we filed a special investigative report detailing how, of the thousands of registered voters Scott and his hand-picked Sec. of State Ken Detzner believed to be "non-citizens", just 9 of them --- out of 11.2 million registered voters in FL --- have so far been confirmed as "non-citizens". Of those 9, none appear to have cast a vote in any election.

* * *

• Our index page listing of the most notable stories in our many years of coverage of the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney vote-rigging scandal is right here.

• Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, the award-winning documentary film on the Curtis/Feeney story and our coverage of it, isright here.

• Video and transcript of of Curtis' sworn 12/6/2004 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Judiciary Committee Democrats' hearing is right here.

Vet/Republican/NSA whistleblower speaks out

This is the kind of stuff that should be driving conservatives and militia types nuts, not Obama's non-existent restrictions on gun owners.

But so far, according to the mainstream, anything done in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism is permissible.  

[The NSA's 'Stellar Wind' program, based in Utah] is being designed to store huge amounts of accessible web information – such as social media updates – but also information in the "deep web" behind passwords and other firewalls that keep it away from the public.

As an example of Stellar Wind's power, Binney believes it is hoovering up virtually every email sent by every American and perhaps a good deal of the people of the rest of the world, too.

US data whistleblower: 'It's a violation of everybody's constitutional rights'

Former National Security Agency official Bill Binney says US is illegally collecting huge amounts of data on his fellow citizens

By Paul Harris

September 15, 2012 | Guardian

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/15/data-whistleblower-constitutional-rights?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

CBS investigates: Why no prosecutions of Wall St.?

All of you who think the FMs caused the mortgage crisis, you need to read this. Countrywide and Citibank both engaged in deliberate mortgage fraud. No regulator in the world can prevent the kind of fraud they perpetrated -- regulators can only prosecute them when it's uncovered. It has been uncovered. Whistleblowers from both companies are ready to testify. Yet the Justice Department hasn't opened a criminal investigation and made charges. Why not?

Is it because politicians -- including Obama -- are in the bankers' pocket? Or are federal prosecutors just afraid they'll be outgunned by dozens of high-priced lawyers? Whatever the excuse, it's not good enough. We put executives behind bars for S&L fraud, and that was mild compared to this. We need criminal cases and CEOs and CFOs behind bars, and we can do it using the 2002 Sarbanes Oxley Act.

Prosecuting Wall Street

December 4, 2011 | CBS News

URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57336042/prosecuting-wall-street/

Here is a real man

I don't use the word hero too lightly, but Charles Howard of Kentucky is one.

He has black lung but he continues to work in coal mines, and he continues to blow the whistle -- and be vindicated -- for unsafe working conditions for himself and his fellow miners. He is not some "movement" nerd with no skin in the game; he continues to work in, and will probably die from, Kentucky's coal mines.

All you who purport to be for the working man, for the Little Guy, should bow your heads in homage to this real man.

Charles Scott Howard: The Miner Who Took On Big Coal

By Dave Jamieson

September 14, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/14/charles-scott-howard-whistleblower-miner_n_960180.html

U.S. Chamber leads fight for global bribery

The "pro-business" U.S. Chamber of Commerce has lost all credibility in my book. They are just shameless slaves to multinational corporate interests.

"The proposals by the Chamber are quite dramatic," said Harvard Law School professor David Kennedy, who specializes in international law. "Although presented as modest legislative clarifications, the Chamber's proposals would seriously undermine the enforcement efforts and scale back criminal liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)."

Taking a stand for bribery?!? What big brass ones these guys have! They want to go back to the 1960s when U.S. firms could deduct foreign bribes as a legitimate business expense.

And what's worse -- they'll probably get their way!

It's depressing, outrageous stories like this one which make me feel like an insignificant observer of how the world really works, with absolutely no influence.

U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Battles Anti-Bribery Statute

By Dan Froomkin

August 12, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/12/chamber-of-commerce-foreign-corrupt-practices-act_n_919617.html