K&R

I know you know, whatchamacallit. Here's one guy who wishes no one remembered:

President Gore would have listened to Richard Clark and done something before bin Laden. Where would all the military contractors and lobbyists be today? Collecting unemployment, I hope. The warmongers and traitors who used the attacks of 9-11 to make war on Iraq would probably still be free as they would never have had the chance to lie America into war.

to the crap one we're in. Keep up the info flow, Octafish!

JFK.

I wonder if this is the next thing they will cop to in order to defuse Snowden...

Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 10:18 AM - Edit history (1)

First Wyden and Udall, then Grayson, now Gore.

Democrats will be jumping off the ship. This is an unwinnable issue for the Party.

Pelosi and others are already declaring the, "If I only knew the magnitude" meme.

I expect a mass exodus. Democrats with political aspirations will be running for the exits. Feinstein, Obama, and a few MIC paid bluedogs will be left holding the bag.

The defenders have typed hundreds of words demonizing Snowden, for nothing.

Tear down the Utah facility.

Even though the little turd from Crawford ignored warnings about an attack on America, she took chimpeachment off the table.

Ms. Pelosi never really expressed what that reason was, other than what can be called "buy-partisanship."

Those are damned shattering words from a former President.

9/11 futures orders, I have to question the efficacy of the entire operation.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=753506&mesg_id=754168

Money does that to people, along with making innocent ones dead.

which we are not allowed to talk about.

...but I don't see no elephant. No sirree, not even any elephant dung. Nobody's gonna laugh at me by golly-- I'll just stand here and attract more democrats with my blank stare and obedient stance.

http://cattailmusic.com/mp3/DontObey_Ainslie04.mp3

January 05, 2006
Ray McGovern

EXCERPT...

But “speed and agility” cannot be the rationale for breaking FISA. The FISA law contains intentionally flexible provisions designed to provide speed and agility in expediting emergency requests. The law grants the attorney general enormous power and discretion to authorize secret “emergency” electronic surveillance and searches for up to 72 hours, before any court order is granted. No court order at all is required if the surveillance is terminated before the 72-hour period ends. So why did the Bush administration order NSA to skirt the FISA law protecting Americans from eavesdropping? This remains the most puzzling question.

The most cynical and, I fear, the most direct answer can be gleaned from Vice President Cheney’s bizarre assertion—supported, no doubt, by a stack of in-house legal opinion, that in war time the president “needs to have his powers unimpaired.” As noted above, on Dec. 19, Gonzalez invoked the “inherent authority under the Constitution” of the commander in chief, as well as the equally ludicrous claim that Congress’ authorization of war after 9/11 trumps FISA—a claim that even The Washington Post has termed “impossible to believe.”

These extreme views are the same ones that underpin the president’s decision to flout international and U.S. criminal law by approving practices like torture, until now almost universally rejected by civilized societies. The answer may be simple—“imperial hubris,” one might call it. And if—as seems to be the case—senior leaders like Colin Powell acquiesce in torture and Gen. Mike Hayden in illegal eavesdropping, shame on them. This would merely show, once again, that absolute power truly does corrupt absolutely—indeed, that even closeness to absolute power can.

A more nuanced explanation may lie in the physics of the challenges faced by NSA and the availability of sophisticated technologies not foreseen when the FISA law was passed in 1978. At the press conference, the attorney general issued a pointed reminder that there have been “tremendous advances in technology” since 1978. Recent press reports on the number of communications being monitored by NSA suggest that the number may be so large as to be technically or practically impossible to take to the attorney general for approval as individual FISA “emergencies.” Consistently high numbers of monitored communications could have trouble passing muster at the FISA court as “emergencies,” for the exceptions would quickly swallow the rule.

A recent article by Charles Freid in the Boston Globe suggests that communications are now selected for monitoring based on highly sophisticated algorithm programs and that “at the first, broadest stages of the scan, no human being is involved—only computers.” This, and the high numbers involved, would make it impossible to obtain “emergency” AG approval on an individual basis, as required by FISA.

As Gonzales has indicated, initial soundings were taken with Congress and the prognosis was deemed poor for obtaining NSA vacuum-cleaner-type authority to suck up communications—including those to or from Americans—from wires and the ether. But is that not what government lawyers are for; i.e., to devise ways to make such things legal and possible at the same time? There is no sign of any serious effort on the administration’s part toward that end. Rather, administration officials preferred to fall back on the “anyway” rationalization; i.e., the notion pushed by top administration lawyers that the president has the power to authorize eavesdropping anyway.

CONTINUED via Waybac Internet Archive...

http://web.archive.org/web/20060111185026/http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060105/j_edgar_hoover_with_supercomputers.php

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A veteran of 27 years in CIA's analysis directorate, he is now a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Good article.

The mainstream media’s assault on Edward Snowden’s character has begun, with columns in outlets like the Washington Post and The New Yorker calling him “narcissistic” and reckless. But his brave disclosures highlight how out of control the U.S. surveillance state is and how it threatens democracy.

By Christopher H. Pyle
ConsortiumNews.com, June 13, 2013

Edward Snowden is not a traitor. Nor is he a hero, at least not yet. But he probably will be martyred by an Establishment that cannot abide critics.

Both House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have called him a traitor, which only shows how ignorant they are. Under the U.S. Constitution (and the Espionage Act of 1917), it is not enough for a leaker to do something that might arguable “aid or comfort” an enemy; the leaker must also have the intent, by his disclosures, to betray the United States. No proof exists the Mr. Snowden had either motive.

SNIP...

But Congress probably won’t investigate, because Booz Allen has hired Mike McConnell, the former NSA (and National Intelligence) director, as its vice chairman.

Since 9/11, private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the community’s budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.

Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it can’t find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as “terrorists.” So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.

Again, most Americans do not worry because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.

Snowden has revealed just enough to show how pervasive this spying is. Will we pay attention, or will we be distracted by irrelevant attacks upon his character? Given all he has sacrificed to let us know what is happening inside our secret government, don’t we owe it to him to pay attention?

Professor Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, Getting Away With Torture, and The Constitution under Siege (with Richard Pious). In 1970, he disclosed the military’s spying on civilian politics and worked for three congressional committees to end it, including Sen. Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence.

CONTINUED...

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/13/edward-snowdens-brave-choice/

Thanks for your input, Mr. President!

excerpted from the book

Brave New World Order

by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
Orbis Books, 1992, paper

EXCERPT...

The role of the media is another apparent difference between the National Security States of El Salvador and the United States. The Salvadoran state uses violence and terror to intimidate or silence major progressive information outlets such as El Diario or the presses at the Catholic University. The mainline media in the United States, like the church, are instruments of conformity within the dominating society. This conformity isn't achieved through terror and intimidation, as in El Salvador, but there is conformity nonetheless. This can be illustrated by a look at coverage of the Gulf War.

The war in the Gulf was probably the most censored and media-managed war in U.S. history. The Pentagon launched the war to coincide with the evening news, forced reporters into escorted press pools, banned coverage on U.S. soldiers returning in coffins, blacked out the first forty-eight hours of the ground war, provided selective footage of "smart bombs" hitting their targets with precision, exercised the right of approval over final copy and footage, and flew local reporters in to cover selected "hometown troops." "I've never seen anything to compare to it," said New York Times war correspondent Malcolm Browne, "in the degree of surveillance and control the military has over the correspondents."

Heavy-handed government censorship was only part of the problem confronting U.S. citizens wanting to make informed judgments about the war. They also faced biases in the U.S. media. According to Colman McCarthy, twenty-five of twenty-six major U.S. newspapers supported the Gulf War. The print and other media uncritically adopted Pentagon phrases such as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs." After the war it was reported that only 6,520 of 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait were "smart," and even these often hit targets that were important to the civilian population. The media ,) throughout the war helped to sanitize civilian casualties and reduced the war to a glorified video game. A report by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) describes the conflict of interest of major TV news channels that are owned by major corporations tied to military weapons production and oil:

Most of the corporate-owned media have close relationships to the military and industry: The chair of Capital / Cities/ABC . . . is on the board of Texaco, and CBS's board includes directors from Honeywell and the Rand Corporation. But no news outlet is as potentially compromised as NBC, wholly owned by General Electric.... In 1989 alone GE received nearly $2 billion in U.S. military contracts for systems employed in the Gulf War effort ... NBC's potential conflicts go beyond weaponry. The government of Kuwait is believed to be a major GE stockholder, having owned 2.1 percent of GE stock in 1982, the last year for which figures are available.... Having profited from weapons systems used in the Gulf, and anticipating lucrative deals for restocking U.S. arsenals, GE is also poised to profit from the rebuilding of Kuwait. GE told the man Street Journal (3/21/91) it expects to win contracts worth "hundreds of millions of dollars."

Conflict of interest may help explain the results of a FAIR survey of sources for ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news. The survey "found that of 878 on-air sources, only one was a representative of a national peace organization." This, FAIR noted, contrasted with the fact that "seven players from the Super Bowl were brought on to comment on the War.''

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/US_Nat_Secur_State_BNWO.html

That's Gulf War I, another war for profit launched by Poppy Bush under false pretenses in 1991.

Obscenely outrageous.

Oh. They did appoint Gen Clapper to investigate himself...

Obama Has Already Broken His Pledge on Surveillance Reform

Last week, he promised an "independent" review by "outside experts." Then he assigned insider James Clapper to lead it.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
The Atlantic, AUG 13 2013

President Obama pledged last week that he would take "specific steps" to reform U.S. surveillance policy. This week, he proved unable to keep his word for any longer than a weekend.

What was the latest Barack-and-switch? Here's what Obama said Friday to reassure Americans about the NSA, with my emphasis:


Got that?

An independent group of outside experts, whose tasks include ensuring that there is no abuse and assessing the impact of surveillance on privacy. That's what he promised the American people.

Yet here's the order he released Monday to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, again with my emphasis



As Marcy Wheeler notes, "In the memo Obama just released ordering James Clapper to form such a committee, those words 'outside' and 'independent' disappear entirely." Indeed, putting the director of national intelligence in charge all but guarantees that the effort will be neither of those things -- especially since the Clapper has already lied to Congress about NSA spying. This "Review Group" won't even report its findings directly to the public or Congressional oversight committees. It'll report to Obama ... but indirectly, through Clapper.

CONTINUED w links n details...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/obama-has-already-broken-his-pledge-on-surveillance-reform/278613/

Can't be less like Brave New World as, other than Miller Lite and its ilk, there's no soma for the proles.

The rest of us are pretty happy to watch America turn into a surveillance state run by the corporations.

I, for one, welcome our Corporate Overlords.

Not without adequate compensation, anyway.

Meat Ax or Scalpel
Sensational Scoops
Abuses & Aberrations

excerpted from the book

Challenging the Secret Government

The Post-Watergate Investigation of the CIA and FBI

by Kathryn S. Olmsted
University of North Carloina Press, 1996, paper

EXCERPT...

Congress's first serious attempt to limit the post-Vietnam CIA came in 1973, as legislators angrily reasserted their power against a deceitful and discredited executive. A bipartisan group of senators, hoping to restrict the president's power to conduct military operations without congressional approval, introduced the War Powers Bill. Senator Tom Eagleton objected, however, that the bill had a major loophole: it did not apply to nation's secret warriors. He introduced an amendment to extend it to include the CIA. When his amendment was decisively defeated, the Missouri senator decided to oppose the bill, arguing that it was useless without constraints on the CIA.

Although the CIA easily survived this first salvo, it would continue to fight a defensive battle against congressional assaults for the next two years. In 1974, Senator Howard Baker and Representative Lucien Nedzi headed separate inquiries into the agency's murky role in Watergate. Neither committee was able to solve this mystery definitively. But Baker's report implied that there was a good deal more to the CIA's involvement in the scandal than was then known. Baker believes that his report was the beginning of a new era of congressional oversight of intelligence. "I don't think there ever would have been a Church committee without that [report]," he says. When hawkish Republicans like Howard Baker doubted the CIA's truthfulness, the agency had good reason to worry.

Then in the fall of 1974, Seymour Hersh revealed that the White House and the CIA had lied to Congress about U.S. involvement in Chile. Mike Mansfield, now Senate majority leader, tried to use Congress's outrage over Chile to win approval for another of his periodic proposals to increase oversight of the CIA and to investigate the intelligence community. This time a liberal Republican, Charles Mathias, cosponsored his effort. Other congressmen introduced similar proposals.

Two liberal legislators, Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota and Representative Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, attempted to do more than investigate: they wanted to ban all covert operations. Abourezk believed that the CIA would never inform Congress of its most secret actions, even if the oversight system were reformed. So, he concluded, "since they are never going to tell us, the only real alternative is to take away their money, abolish their operations so that we shall never have that kind of immoral, illegal activity committed in the name of the American people.'' Abourezk's bill gained the support of only seventeen senators. Holtzman's similar bill in the House lost 291-108.

Although the Ninety-third Congress refused to ban covert actions, it did decide to enact the toughest oversight bill in history. The Hughes-Ryan amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, named after Representative Leo Ryan and Senator Harold Hughes, expanded the number of ~ congressional committees to be briefed by the CIA from four to six, adding the more liberal Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees to the list. Most important, the amendment attempted to improve accountability by requiring the president to make a "finding" that covert action was necessary for national security before reporting it "in a timely fashion" to the six committees. It was widely understood that this meant within forty-eight hours.

The Hughes-Ryan amendment was more significant than anything that would later come out of the Pike and Church committees. It substantially increased the amount of control Congress exercised over the CIA and, indirectly, the nation's foreign policy. By forcing the CIA to brief six (and later eight) congressional committees, and by demanding timely notification of covert actions, the Hughes-Ryan amendment gave Congress more oversight power than it had possessed before-or than it would have after the amendment was gutted in 1980.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Meat_Ax_CTSG.html

by Mark Jaycox
Published on Saturday, August 24, 2013 by Electronic Frontier Foundation, via CommonDreams.org

Since the revelations of confirmed National Security Agency spying in June, three different "investigations" have been announced. One by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), another by the Director of National Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper, and the third by the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally called the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

All three investigations are insufficient, because they are unable to find out the full details needed to stop the government's abuse of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The PCLOB can only request—not require—documents from the NSA and must rely on its goodwill, while the investigation led by Gen. Clapper is led by a man who not only lied to Congress, but also oversees the spying. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which was originally designed to effectively oversee the intelligence community—has failed time and time again. What's needed is a new, independent, Congressional committee to fully delve into the spying.

The PCLOB: Powerless to Obtain Documents

The PCLOB was created after a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission to ensure civil liberties and privacy were included in the government's surveillance and spying policies and practices.

But it languished. From 2008 until May of this year, the board was without a Chair and unable to hire staff or perform any work. It was only after the June revelations that the President asked the board to begin an investigation into the unconstituional NSA spying. Yet even with the full board constituted, it is unable to fulfill its mission as it has no choice but to base its analysis on a steady diet of carefully crafted statements from the intelligence community.

As we explained, the board must rely on the goodwill of the NSA's director, Gen. Keith Alexander, and Gen. Clapper—two men who have repeatedly said the NSA doesn't collect information on Americans.

In order to conduct a full investigation, the PCLOB will need access to all relevant NSA, FBI, and DOJ files. But the PCLOB is unable to compel testimony or documents because Congress did not give it the same powers as a Congressional committee or independent agency. This is a major problem. If the NSA won't hand over documents to Congress, then it will certainly not give them to the PCLOB.

The Clapper Investigation: Overseen by a Man Accused of Lying to Congress

The second investigation was announced by President Obama in a Friday afternoon news conference. The President called for the creation of an "independent" task force with "outside experts" to make sure "there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used." Less than two days later, the White House followed up with a press release announcing the task force would be led by Gen. Clapper and would also report to him. What's even worse: the task force was not tasked with looking at any abuse. It was told to focus on how to "protect our national security and advance our foreign policy." And just this week, ABC News reported the task force will be full of thorough Washington insiders--not "outside experts." For instance, one has advocated the Department of Homeland Security be allowed to scan all Internet traffic going in and out of the US. And another, while a noted legal scholar on regulatory issues, has written a paper about government campaigns to infiltrate online groups and activists. In one good act, the White House selected Peter Swire to be on the task force. Swire is a professor at Georgia Tech and has served as the White House's first ever Chief Privacy Officer. Recently, he signed an amicus brief in a case against the NSA spying by the Electronic Privacy Information Center arguing that the NSA’s telephony metadata program is illegal under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Despite this, and at the end of a day, a task force led by General Clapper full of insiders,—and not directed to look at the extensive abuse—will never get at the bottom of the unconstitutional spying.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Has Already Failed

The last "investigation" occurring is a "review" led by the Senate Intelligence Committee overseeing the intelligence community. But time and time again the committee has failed at providing any semblance of oversight. First, the chair and ranking member of the committee, Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Saxby Chambliss (GA), respectively, are stalwart defenders of the NSA and its spying activities. They have both justified the spying, brushed aside any complaints, and denied any ideas of abuse by the NSA.

Besides defending the intelligence community, the committee leadership have utterly failed in oversight—the reason why the Senate Intelligence Committee was originally created by the Church Committee. As was revealed last week, Senator Feinstein was not shown or even told about the thousands of violations of the spying programs in NSA audits of the programs. This is in direct contradiction to her statements louting the "robust" oversight of the Intelligence Committee. Lastly, the committee is prone to secrets and hiding behind closed doors: this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has met publicly only twice. What's clear is that the Intelligence Committee has been unable to carry out its oversight role and fresh eyes are needed to protect the American people from the abuses of the NSA.

A New Church Committee

All three of these investigations are destined to fail. What's needed is a new, special, investigatory committee to look into the abuses of by the NSA, its use of spying powers, its legal justifications, and why the intelligence committees were unable to rein in the spying. In short, we need a contemporary Church Committee. It's time for Congress to reassert its oversight capacity. The American public must be provided more information about the NSA's unconstitutional actions and the NSA must be held accountable. Tell your Congressmen now to join the effort.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Mark Jaycox is a Policy Analyst and Legislative Assistant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His issues include user privacy, civil liberties, EULAs, and current legislation or policy rising out of Washington, DC

SOURCE w links: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/24-1

"If you don't let us spy on everybody, and pay us for doing so, we'll let the 'terrorists" kill you."

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.  H.L. Mencken

By Thomas Gaist
World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org 23 August 2013

FBI Director Robert Mueller alleged that new terrorism threats were emerging in Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Algeria, Syria, and Egypt, as well as in the United States during an interview with cable channel CNN on Thursday. The purpose of Mueller’s statement is to stoke fear and apprehension in the American population to justify the police state surveillance programs set up by the government.

“You have al Qaeda growing in countries like Somalia, but most particularly in Yemen. And there’s still substantial threat out of Yemen,” said Mueller. “And now you have the countries in the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Mali; Egypt most recently, where they’re breeding grounds for radical extremists … you have, within the United States, the growth of homegrown, radicalized extremists who are radicalized on the Internet and then get their instructions for developing explosives on the Internet, as well.”

Mueller provided no facts to support his claims. Of course, even accepting this were all true, no American media interviewer would ask why so many in the Middle East hated and wanted to attack the US and whether or not that anything to do with predatory American military and foreign policy in the region.

Overall, the FBI director’s comments to CNN were a series of lies and distortions. For example, Mueller asserted that the NSA surveillance programs developed since the 2001 attacks could have prevented the 9/11 events by allowing the government to identify the individual plotters in advance: “I think there’s a good chance we would have prevented at least a part of 9/11. In other words, there were four planes. There were almost 20—19 persons involved. I think we would have had a much better chance of identifying those individuals who were contemplating that attack.”

The claim that NSA spying might have prevented 9/11, which is not original to Mueller, is contradicted by an entire body of evidence. Many, if not all, of the perpetrators were well known to the FBI and the CIA, who monitored and tracked the plotters for many months. The CIA and FBI ignored repeated warnings from local agents and agents abroad of the threat of an impending attack, including the use of aircraft against buildings. The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests, in fact, that the Bush administration permitted some sort of terrorist attack to proceed, in order to provide it the pretext for the launching of wars in the Middle East and the passage of anti-democratic, repressive legislation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/24/muel-a23.html

As for NSA spying possibly stopping 9-11, Mueller must've missed last year's release which indicated NSA did warn Smirko to no avail:

New NSA docs contradict Bush Administration 9-11 claims

...and absolute secrecy for itself.

Any politician who doesn't see that is either too stupid or too corrupt to be in office.

To them the rest of us are like cicadas. A noise that you only have to deal with every four years.

No Scrutability.
No Accountability.
No Telling Who Benefits.



Seeing how the rich keep getting richer and everyone else poorer, we've got a pretty good idea what they're doing with all that data.



SOURCE: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Way to go, sir! A scholar, a gentleman and someone who gets it.

by Evan McMurry
MEDIAite.com, 11:17 pm, June 14th, 2013

Former Vice President Al Gore was quick and vociferous in denouncing the NSA’s surveillance programs when they were revealed last week, and he continued his intense critique on Friday.

[font color="blue"]“This in my view violates the Constitution,” Gore told The Guardian. “The Fourth Amendment and the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment language is crystal clear. It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the Constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is.”

Whereas many high-profile Democrats have defended the practice as necessary to stop terror plots, Gore remained steadfast in his belief that the surveillance programs went against the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, saying “I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way.”[/font color]

When asked about public support for surveillance, which wavers depending on which survey you consult, Gore replied, “I am not sure how to interpret polls on this, because we don’t do dial groups on the Bill of Rights.”

[font color="blue"]“I think that the Congress and the administration need to make some changes in the law and in their behavior so as to honor and obey the Constitution of the United States,” he said. “It is that simple.”[/font color]

CONTINUED w links...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/al-gore-tears-into-nsa-defenders-we-don%E2%80%99t-do-dial-groups-on-the-bill-of-rights/

PS: He does get it, Pholus. Do you think Albert G. will run in '16? I sure hope so.

look around, digital cameras everywhere, not all owned by the guvment.

Folo the Money: House members who opposed NSA clampdown got most $ from defense contractors

Joe Garofoli
SFGate.com

Last week an unholy alliance of — gasp!!! — Republicans AND Democrats — narrowly defeated the now-storied Amash amendment that would have cut funding for the NSA surveillance program. How unholy: Nancy Pelosi and Michele Bachmann were voting the same way.…and Pelosi is STILL catching heat for it. Stop, the room is spinning.

So our pals at the nonpartisan Maplight.org got out their abacus and did a little ciphering. [font color="green"]About 70 percent of the money Congress sends to the NSA goes to defense contractors. (The NSA’s annual budget is between $10-$20 billion. )[/font color]

You’ll never guess what: The House members who opposed curtailing the NSA’s power got, on average, 122 percent more money from defense contractors than did members who voted to defund it, according to a Maplight a breakdown. The top recipient: California’s very own Rep. Buck McKeon, R-CA, with $526,600.

Pelosi, by the way, was way down the list with $47,000 from defense industry types. Rep. Justin Amash, the amendment’s sponsor, only received $1,400.

CONTINUED w the names of the Reps, how much they got, and how they voted:

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/07/29/folo-the-money-house-members-who-opposed-nsa-clampdown-got-most-from-defense-contractors/

Sing it, brother!

Mathematicians, why are you not speaking out?

By Charles Seife
Slate.com Aug. 22, 2013

Most people don't know the history of Von Neumann Hall, the nearly windowless building hidden behind the engineering quadrangle at Princeton. I found out my junior year, when, as a bright-eyed young math major, I was recruited to work at the National Security Agency.

Von Neumann Hall was the former site of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a math-heavy research organization that did work for an agency that, at that time, dared not speak its name. The close ties between Princeton and the NSA went back decades, I discovered, and some of the professors I had been learning from were part of a secret brotherhood of number jocks who worked on really tough math problems for the sake of national security. I was proud to join the fraternity—one that was far bigger than I had ever imagined. According to NSA expert James Bamford, the agency is the single largest employer of mathematicians on the planet. It's a good bet that any high-quality math department of a reasonable size has a faculty member who's done work for the NSA.

I worked for the NSA in 1992 and 1993 under the auspices of the Director's Summer Program, which snaffles up hot young undergraduate math majors around the country each year. After clearing a security check—which included not just a polygraph exam but also a couple of FBI agents snooping around campus to see what mischief I had been up to—I wound up at Fort Meade, Md., for indoctrination.

It was more than 20 years ago that I received my first security briefing, and a lot of what I learned is now outdated. Back then, few had heard of what was nicknamed "No Such Agency," and the government wanted to keep it that way. We were taught not to breathe a word about the NSA; if anyone asked, we worked for the Department of Defense. That's even what it said on my resume and one of my NSA-issued ID cards. Now there's little point to such pretense. The agency has been outed and is a regular fixture of Page 1 headlines. In 1992, I was taught that the code words we stamped on all our classified documents were a closely guarded secret, that it was a crime to reveal them to outsiders. But a quick Google search shows that government websites are chock-full of papers clearly marked with words and phrases that were at one time for the eyes of only those few with the need to know.

Another thing they used to say at those briefings was that the might of the NSA would never be used against U.S. citizens. Back when I signed up, the agency made it crystal clear to us that we were empowered to protect our nation against only foreign enemies, not domestic ones. To do otherwise was against the NSA charter. More importantly, I got the strong sense that it was against the culture of the place. After working there for two summers, I genuinely believed that my colleagues would be horrified if they thought our work was being used to snoop on fellow Americans. Has that changed, too?

CONTINUED...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/nsa_domestic_spying_mathematicians_should_speak_out.html

There are a lot of people who want to return America to a democracy, including Mr. Gore and Mr. Seife. Thanks for being one, Th1onein.

You serve. It is appreciated.

Please don't believe the hype sir, 95% of this whole issue is about what fear a relative few can stoke up about the government and what abilities computers do an don't have.

I drive on the highway and cameras look at where my car is going all the time, theirs not proof that they are looking into the car for anything

The digital highways are little difference, they're public...it easier to look at where the traffic is going but to presume the government is looking INTO all the traffic, in this case data, when there's no solid proof that it's widespread or continuous is what the masters of sophistry are pushing.

The stoking is the equivalent of the second X-Men movie where the public was afraid of them because the mutants had these powers and they didn't, there were a few of the stoking up fear.... a few of the mutants and humans that wanted war in the first place.

We need to look at the 1976 law again, make sure the breadth of what can be surveyed today is appropriate, I don't think it is... it's like a cat chasing billions of mice tails to no where.

All gov isn't all bad at all times, there's a generation that has grown up with not only seeing the need for gov but have seen where gov can help...and this gov = bad meme doesn't make sense

thx for reading Mr President

Regards

Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 10:17 AM - Edit history (1)

Good job!

ETA: article.

FYI: When it isn't "We the People" running the government we have a problem. Police States spy on the citizens, giving them an edge with perceived enemies, almost certainly with particular elected representatives. Democracies are aware of what the government does in the name of the People.

Keep reading. Try learning. Never give up.

Who knows? One day you might be a contributor, uponit7771.

...not have caught the bombers if there were no cameras surveying the area.

SPYING is totally different, that's looking into non public places or were there's an expectation of privacy.

There's been no proof of widesperad systematic spying, only people stoking fears of the "computerizers" doing such

Thank you. Priceless.

Inspired by a newsletter called Flush Rush...

Just when I think I've seen the worst argument for the surveillance state, along comes one worse...

I blame a lot of it on television, Murphy Brown, and the liberals in Hollyweird.

Roseanne Barr - MK ULTRA Rules In Hollywood

EXCERPT...

Hollywood is the one that keeps all of this power structure. They perpetuate the culture of racism, sexism, classism, genderism and keep it all in place. They continue to feed it, and they make a lot of money doing it. They do it at the behest of their masters, who run everything.

I speak on behalf of Hollywood. I go to parties, Oscar parties and things like that and big stars pull me aside, take my arm and whisper: “I just want to thank you for the things you say.” And it blows my mind, but that’s the culture, it’s a culture of fear.

... and he's a racist!

... and our FREEDUMBS!



(For the really clueless.)

Disinformation. Misinformation. Black Information. The possibilities are endless, now that it's legal for the government to lie to the American people.

Police State USA USA USA!

If the sheep won't push back against that outrageous assault on privacy and dignity, they won't push back against the spying by their own government.

Edward R. Murrow: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."

what you have provided with the links is outstanding. Kudos!
I see I have lots to read...bookmarking.