No-Fly Shot Down in Portland

A Portland Federal Judge ruled that people who end up on the no-fly list have a right to due process, they can't just be denied air travel with no recourse or explanation.  The ACLU represented 13 muslims that are on the list and can't travel internationally as a result, no word if they also represented children and infants that have also found themselves on the list.

U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown's opinion did not declare the no-fly list unconstitutional, but it came close. She noted in her Wednesday ruling that those on the list are not given any reasons for their inclusion and do not get a hearing that might clear their names.
Brown's opinion came in the case of 13 U.S. citizens, including the prayer leader of Oregon's biggest mosque, who have sued the United States for excluding them from flying. They accuse the government of denying their Fifth Amendment guarantees to due process by failing to explain why they have not been permitted to fly in the past or when they might be able to fly again.

"Although there are perhaps viable alternatives to flying for domestic travel within the continental United States, such as traveling by car or train, the court disagrees with (the government's) contention that international air travel is a mere convenience in light of the realities of our modern world," Brown wrote.  
Moreover, she noted, the implications of the no-fly list are potentially far-reaching. For example, she wrote, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center shares watchlist information with 22 governments, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection also makes recommendations to ship captains, which could interfere with a person's travels.
"Accordingly," she wrote, "the court concludes on this record that plaintiffs have a constitutionally protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the list."

I expect the Department of Justice and the FBI to emit a loud howl of protest, they're not used to this kind of treatment, they've always been the ones making the rules.

Portland takes the Number 1 Spot. In Pollution?

The story hit the front page of the Oregonian on Monday, Aug. 26 2013 that Precision Castparts was designated the number one toxic air polluter in the nation, based on a report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, an independent research organization affiliated with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The ranking combines measures of pounds released with toxicity of pollutants and population exposure to yield a score for each company. One-third of Precision's score comes from three Portland-area factories that emit cobalt and cobalt compounds. Acute exposure to high levels of cobalt, a natural element found throughout the environment, results in respiratory effects, such as a significant decrease in ventilatory function, congestion, edema and hemorrhage of the lung, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Ranked solely on pounds of pollutants released in 2010, Precision drops low in the list of the nation's top 100 air polluters. But an author of the University of Massachusetts study says the company's high score raises questions that members of the public should ask companies and regulators. "I would be concerned if I were downwind from the company that comes up at the top of this list," said Michael Ash, a UMass professor of economics and public policy.

In a follow-up story Precision disputed the number 1 ranking as "Deeply Flawed". based on incorrect assumptions in the underlying EPA data.

Precision ranked No. 1 despite a relatively low volume of emissions because of its plants' proximity to population centers and reportedly higher toxicity. One-third of Precision's pollutant score came from Portland-area plants that emit cobalt and cobalt compound.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality confirmed Thursday that Precision is in compliance with its emissions permits and hasn't been the target of an enforcement action in at least a decade.

Michael Ash, a UMass professor of economics and public policy and one of the researchers behind the rankings, said Thursday their report isn't intended to be a risk assessment tool.
"We think we've used the data in an appropriate way, as a screening tool to engender public understanding and dialogue over potential health risks from industrial toxic emissions," Ash said.

You may come to your own conclusions if you happen to live in Portland near one of their plants.

Congress, Your Civil Rights, and Money

The defeat of an amendment to eliminate the NSA dragnet of all phone call records in the US failed by only 12 votes (217-205), and an analysis by Wired Magazine found that the supporters of continued spying got twice as much in contributions from the Defense lobbyists as those who opposed the massive spy program.

The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.
That’s the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request. The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a member’s vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted to dismantle it.
Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765.
Of the top 10 money getters, only one House member — Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) — voted to end the program.

I no like, this is corruption...

Broken US Health Care

The NY Times is running a series of articles on our health care system and why it costs so much.  They pretty much conclude that the health care industry has hijacked public benefit for corporate profit.  Consider these numbers from a recent article.

The US Average price for a colonoscopy is $1,185. 

In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care.

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

In another article on the bizarre cost of IV solution (a plastic bag, filled with plain sterilized water with 2 teaspoons of salt), they found:

The average manufacturer’s price, according to government data, has fluctuated in recent years from 44 cents to $1.

Yet there is nothing either cheap or simple about its ultimate cost, as I learned when I tried to trace the commercial path of IV bags from the factory to the veins of more than 100 patients struck by a May 2012 outbreak of food poisoning in upstate New York.

Some of the patients’ bills would later include markups of 100 to 200 times the manufacturer’s price, not counting separate charges for “IV administration.” And on other bills, a bundled charge for “IV therapy” was almost 1,000 times the official cost of the solution.

It is no secret that medical care in the United States is overpriced. But as the tale of the humble IV bag shows all too clearly, it is secrecy that helps keep prices high: hidden in the underbrush of transactions among multiple buyers and sellers, and in the hieroglyphics of hospital bills.

 No wonder we can't afford health care.

Facebook and the Government

Facebook has reported that they received 38,000 new secret requests for information on their users from Governments around the world in the first 6 months of 2013, with over 20,000 of those coming from the US government.  Applying the standard NSA arithmetic, that is only 0.006% of the US population, nothing to worry about right?  Applying my arithmetic, a new terror suspect that interests the US government pops up about every 15 - 20 minutes.

If you think that sounds reasonable, then no worry, but it looks like the standard NSA procedure of generating a haystack to obtain a needle to me.

Bad Fire Year in the West

As the month of August wraps up, the Oregon fire season has finally started to wane. having scorched about 100,000 acres.  The Southern Oregon fires are predicted to be fully contained by Labor Day, and the fire near the Dalles is now the first priority. 

In Idaho, Ron Wyden was at the fire command center in Boise, discussing the failure of forest thinning to prevent big fires.

But a decade of aggressive thinning and prescribed burning projects widely supported by the Western Governors’ Association and pushed by the Bush administration — and even many environmental groups — has not reduced the size or intensity of wildfires across the West.
Critics say Congress is to blame because it has cut funding for thinning and logging since timber harvest levels dropped in the 1990s.
Risch stood up Tuesday at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise with Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, who all said they will make fuel-reduction projects a priority in Congress this fall.
“The fires that are ripping their way through Oregon, Idaho, California and much of the West are proof that the federal government’s policies for fire prevention are broken,” Wyden said.
Simpson said the Forest Service isn’t to blame when Congress doesn’t provide enough money for firefighting, forcing the agency to take money from fire prevention and other programs.
Earlier this year, the Senate stripped out $97 million of fire-suppression funds that had been added by Idaho’s Simpson, chairman of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee. The budget bill passed without the fire money.
“You’ve got to quit stealing money from other accounts,” he said.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/25/2724601/flame-act-fails-to-curb-fires.html#storylink=cpy

A U.S. Department of Agriculture report predicts that the acreage burned by wildfires will double by 2050 to about 20 million acres annually. Another USDA report predicts that for every 1.8-degree temperature increase the earth experiences — expected by 2050 — the area burned in the West could quadruple.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/25/2724601/flame-act-fails-to-curb-fires.html#storylink=cpy

 Meanwhile the Yosemite fire in California is only 7 percent contained and the governor has declared a State Emergency.  Over 2,800 firefighters are trying to get it under control.

 The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise has added six new large fires to its list, two in California and one each in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Texas. The fire center reports that there now are 43 active large fires across the West covering more than 850,000 acres.

A New Foreclosure Solution

The mayor of Richmond, CA is Gayle McLaughlin and she was elected as the Green Party candidate in a working class city of about 103,000 people near San Francisco.  Their housing situation has never recovered from the crash of 2008 and 50% or more of all mortgages in the city are underwater, the mortgage is for far more than the property is worth.  The federal government has been trying to get the banks to renegotiate underwater mortgages nationwide to keep people in their homes, but the programs have been largely ineffective.

Mayor McLaughlin was approached by a company called Mortgage Resolution Partners with a plan to force the banks to resolve the situation by demanding they sell the mortgage for fair market value, with the threat that the city will seize the property under the eminent domain statutes and force them to accept the deal at fair market value.  Then the city will offer the homeowner a reduced mortgage that has a better chance of keeping homeowners in their home. 

The entire financial community is aghast at the prospect, and they have launched a lobbying campaign to stop it.  They have even been joined by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, currently operated by the Obama administration.  It seems like all the financial players are opposed to letting the homeowner win, and they are fighting to the death.  They threaten to implement a scorched earth retaliation by refusing to do any mortgage business in the city if this plan is implemented, making it impossible for people to get financing to buy any property there.

She said she fears homeowners will begin to abandon their homes, leading to blighted neighborhoods and the draining of public coffers to the point of municipal bankruptcy experienced by Stockton, Calif., and Detroit.
"The city is stepping in where Wall Street and where the federal government have been unable or unwilling to do so," she said.
Federal regulators said eminent domain isn't the answer. The Federal Housing Finance Agency said plans to seize loans "present a clear threat to the safe and sound operations Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks."
Tim Cameron, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist with the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said there is more at play than a single person's underwater loan.
Cameron said pension funds, banks and other groups that made loans in Richmond stand to lose millions of dollars if the city is allowed to use eminent domain to force lenders into accepting less than the original terms of the loan.
He also predicted that cities using eminent domain will make lenders wary of doing business there.

The city may have little to lose if Richmond goes the way of Detroit.  I will watch this story.

Wyden "Just the Tip of a Larger Iceburg"

The latest NSA documents revealed by Edward Snowden show the NSA violated it's own rules thousands of times, with reactions from the NSA and Dianne Feinstein (no big deal) to Ron Wyden and Mark Udall "Just the Tip of a Larger Iceburg".  I think I'll go with Wyden on that conflict of opinion.

"While Senate rules prohibit us from confirming or denying some of the details in today's press reports, the American people have a right to know more details about the scope and severity of these violations, and we hope that the executive branch will take steps to publicly provide more information as part of the honest, public debate of surveillance authorities that the Administration has said it is interested in having.
"In particular, we believe the public deserves to know more about the violations of the secret court orders that have authorized the bulk collection of Americans' phone and email records under the USA PATRIOT Act. The public should also be told more about why the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has said that the executive branch's implementation of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has circumvented the spirit of the law, particularly since the executive branch has declined to address this concern.
"We appreciate the candor of the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding the court's inability to independently verify statements made by the executive branch. We believe that the court is not currently structured in a way that makes it an effective check on the power of the executive branch. This highlights the need for a robust and well-staffed public advocate who could participate in significant cases before the court and evaluate and counter government assertions. Without such an advocate on the court, and without greater transparency regarding the court's rulings, the checks and balances on executive branch authority enshrined in the Constitution cannot be adequately upheld."

Wyden Former Chief of Staff Speaks on Spying

Jennifer Hoelzer was Wyden's Chief of Staff during the years that Wyden was trying to expose the NSA practice of warrantless surveillance, and she wrote an Op-Ed for Techdirt, a progressive news site where she recounted the many years Obama and NSA gagged the discussion, or even the mention, of their warrantless surveillance despite Wyden repeatedly requesting a public dialog.  Ron Wyden and Mark Udall then put out a statement that you ain't seen nothin yet, there's a lot more to come.

"The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans have been violated thousands of times each year. We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg.
"While Senate rules prohibit us from confirming or denying some of the details in today's press reports, the American people have a right to know more details about the scope and severity of these violations, and we hope that the executive branch will take steps to publicly provide more information as part of the honest, public debate of surveillance authorities that the Administration has said it is interested in having.

Wyden Will See the Fight to the End

Wyden says "I want it understood that we're going to stay at this until we win." He did an interview with Rolling Stone on the struggle to gain transparency of the secret FISA rulings and the dragnet surveillance activities of the NSA.  

The way we deal with this best, in my view, is to recognize this is a unique time in our constitutional history. These digital technologies have grown so rapidly, and we really can't even get our arms around it. It used to be that the limits on technologies were to a great extent a form of protection for the American people. A lot of that seems to be going to the wind. We're sitting here with computers in our pockets, smartphones, with the ability to track people 24/7. These issues are as important as it gets. And Americans have a right to real debate [on] the way you deal with the constitutional teeter-totter of liberty and security. It's hard to think of anything more important to our country and our bedrock values. And I think what will protect people now will be the laws that we write to rein in this omnipresent, ever-expanding surveillance state. And if we don't do it now – if we don't recognize that this is a truly unique moment in America's constitutional history – our generation's going to regret it forever.

Portland Police Tracking You

The Portland PD has a new tracking toy that has become wildly popular across the country, Automated License Plate cameras that can read (and recognize) all license plates of cars that happen to pass by the camera.  See a video of it here.  They can be mounted on patrol cars (Portland has 16 car mounted ones) or at intersections, and they automatically make a record of all license plates whizzing by.

The PD says they can recover stolen cars in an instant if one passes by the Police Cruiser, which is a good thing, but what happens if you are going about your business and your plate gets captured?  They keep it on record for 4 years, that's what.  This is a lot like the NSA keeping all phone records, and just as personal.  Here is a link to their policy on these creepy things.  The ACLU doesn't like them much either.

Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse. The tracking of people’s location constitutes a significant invasion of privacy, which can reveal many things about their lives, such as what friends, doctors, protests, political events, or churches a person may visit.
In our society, it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about citizens’ innocent activities just in case they do something wrong. Clear regulations must be put in place to keep the government from tracking our movements on a massive scale.

As the technology spreads, the ACLU calls for the adoption of legislation and law enforcement agency policies adhering to the following principles:

License plate readers may be used by law enforcement agencies only to investigate hits and in other circumstances in which law enforcement agents reasonably believe that the plate data are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.

The government must not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period. Unless plate data has been flagged, retention periods should be measured in days or weeks, not months and certainly not years.

People should be able to find out if plate data of vehicles registered to them are contained in a law enforcement agency’s database.

Law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data with third parties that do not follow proper retention and access principles. They should also be transparent regarding with whom they share license plate reader data.

Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report its usage publicly on at least an annual basis.

Wyden reacts to Obama Press Conference

President Obama talked about his proposals for reforming oversight in a press conference on Friday, Aug 9 2013.  He made a few proposals, but Ron Wyden didn't think he went far enough.

Democratic senator Ron Wyden, a leading critic of the NSA's bulk surveillance powers in the Senate, welcomed Obama's proposals, but called for greater detail. "Notably absent from President Obama's speech was any mention of closing the backdoor searches loophole that potentially allows for the warrantless searches of Americans' phone calls and emails under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Wyden said.
The senator was referring to a disclosure in the Guardian based on a top-secret document which indicates the NSA has a secret backdoor into its databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant.
The document, published on Friday three hours before Obama's announcement, contrasts with assurances that president and senior intelligence officials have previously given that the privacy of US citizens is protected from dragnet surveillance programs targeted at foreigners. "I believe that this provision requires significant reforms as well and I will continue to fight to close that loophole," Wyden said.

Reporter may go to jail for publishing story

James Risen is a NY Times reporter and he is is a new class of criminal, a journalist.  He had obtained information for a book from a knowledgeable source for a book, and now Central Intelligence Agency official Jeffrey Sterling has been indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 – for leaking classified information to Risen for publication in his book.  The government says Risen has to name his source or go to jail.

The current DOJ seems to know no limits on declaring everybody to be enemies of the state, recently adding reporters to the list.  According to the Guardian,

In effect, the court has ruled that the journalist must reveal his source. That sets a dangerous precedent now applicable in Maryland and Virginia, home to the NSA and CIA – the very states in which national security journalism matters most. If a reporter cannot guarantee confidentiality to an important source willing to provide information that may be of vital public interest, the job of journalism itself has been criminalised. If a reporter like Risen refuses to co-operate and name names, he himself may face time behind bars.
Indeed, like a dedicated few before him, Risen has vowed to go to prison rather than break his vow of confidentiality in the courtroom. Although there will almost certainly be an appeal, the court's ruling is a potentially devastating blow to investigative journalism. Given its significance, it is shocking how little publicity the Risen/Sterling case has yet received from major media outlets with a direct interest in its outcome.
The Obama administration's war on whistleblowers coupled with the court's ruling against watchdog reporters highlight the federal government's efforts to curb the flow of information from both ends. No one disputes that at times journalists have a duty of care when entrusted with secret information with possible national security implications, but Risen is critical of how government officials will use this argument cynically to delay or suppress a story. He said recently:

I've been an investigative reporter for a long time, and almost always, the government says that ['you can't publish that because of the national security risk'] when you write a story. And then they can never back it up. They say that about everything. And it's like the boy who cried wolf. It's getting old.

There is virtually no mainstream press coverage on this story.

NSA Spying Killing Internet

The Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School wrote about anonymous-EMail providers Lavabit and Silent Circle that are choosing to close rather than turn over their client Emails to the NSA.  This is what the blog called "the canary in the coal mine", probably the first of a series of bad news for Internet freedom.

There are two sad lessons to learn from the (potentially temporary) demise of Lavabit.
First, communications service providers are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to resisting even abusive or overbroad government surveillance demands. The court processes and the reasons for surveillance are kept secret from the companies. The cases that interpret the government's powers under the law are secret. Knowledgeable counsel is hard to find… and expensive.
Yet, in a world where the FISA court has rubber stamped government collection of every phone record on everybody, where foreigners have no rights and the contents of Americans’ international communications are regularly scooped up, where the FBI is installing malware on phones and laptops, and where spies are demanding user passwords and SSL network decryption keys, complying with court process can be directly at odds with protecting your customers’ right to privacy. Some lawyers believe there is little, if anything, companies can say to successful challenge even potentially dangerous forms of surveillance. Yet, failure to comply can mean fines, or jail time, or, potentially worse, seizure of the business’ servers.
So, in the choice between complicity or death, Lavabit chose death.
Second, the fact that neither Americans nor foreigners trust the U.S. government and its NSA anymore puts the U.S. communications companies at a severe competitive disadvantage. American law provides almost no protection for foreigners, who comprise a growing majority of any global company's customers. And even though Americans receive more nominal legal protection, we now know that these legal protects haven’t stopped the NSA from wiretaps fiber optic cables inside the United States, warrantlessly gathering Americans’ emails and chats from service providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, collecting phone records on every American for the past seven years, or demanding that companies build, or at least maintain, surveillance backdoors in products advertised as secure from eavesdropping.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published the letter from Lavabits founder announcing they were quitting rather than turn over data to the NSA.

Oregon Burning

Fires in Oregon are being created as fast as firefighters can contain them.  Most are in Southern Oregon, but newer ones are also springing up in Eastern Oregon.  The Oregonian is reporting over a thousand lightning strikes in a 24 hour period, alongside the huge fires in Southern Oregon that have been burning over a week.

Elsewhere, firefighters are battling four big complexes in southern Oregon, one large fire in central Oregon and two big fires in Washington.
The biggest concern is the Douglas complex north of Glendale, which has scorched nearly 43,000 acres. About 470 homes and 40 commercial buildings are under some form of evacuation alert. The fire has destroyed two commercial properties and two other buildings, Mills said. But no homes have been burned.
The Douglas complex is 28 percent contained.

The air quality in Southern Oregon has hit hazardous levels, with little relief in sight.

Smoke from wildfires burning across the state prompted the Oregon Health Authority Public Health Division and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on Thursday to warn residents about risks associated with increasingly poor air quality.

Oregon DOJ Goes After Doctors Taking Kickbacks

The Oregonian is reporting that doctors who receive money from medical device makers have to divulge that to their patients as a potential conflict of interest.

The case could ripple nationwide, exposing a little-known but common practice of payments to doctors from implant manufacturers. Locally, for instance, the practice is tolerated by the biggest hospitals in the state who do not require patients be informed of such payments. The DOJ case could do for the artificial-implant makers what similar court cases did for drug companies' payments to doctors, says Jerry Avorn,  a Harvard Medical School professor who has written about the ethics of undisclosed physician payments.
"The patient has a right to expect that whatever device is implanted or procedure is recommended is a decision that is based solely on what that patient would most benefit from," he said, calling the case "potentially so important."

Oregon's Unlawful Trade Practices Act requires that professionals disclose this sort of information when providing services. And by failing to, the doctors were leading the patient to believe they were free of any conflict of interest and doing the implants "for the exclusive benefit of the patient ... when this was not the case," according to the DOJ.

I'm glad to see this practice receiving more scrutiny.

DEA Outdoes NSA in Illegal Spying

It now appears the DEA has their own version of the NSA spy apparatus, but it operates in secrecy and without any review, either Congressional or Judicial, and it is geared to drug crimes which involves US Citizens.  It is even more illegal than the NSA, if that's possible.  The ACLU is not amused.

NEW YORK - The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is using secret surveillance tactics - including wiretaps and examining telephone records - to make arrests while concealing the source of the evidence from judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, according to a story published today by Reuters. In cases where this intelligence is used to make an arrest, the DEA trains law enforcement to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence.
"The DEA is violating our fundamental right to a fair trial," said Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Criminal Law Reform Project. "When someone is accused of a crime, the Constitution guarantees the right to examine the government's evidence, including its sources, and confront the witnesses against them. Our due process rights are at risk when our federal government hides and distorts the sources of evidence used as the basis for arrests and prosecutions."
"When law enforcement agents and prosecutors conceal the role of intelligence surveillance in criminal investigations, they violate the constitutional rights of the accused and insulate controversial intelligence programs from judicial review," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. "Effectively, these intelligence programs are placed beyond the reach of the Constitution, where they develop and expand without any court ever weighing in on their lawfulness. This is inappropriate, dangerous, and contrary to the rule of law."

Oregon Camping Trip

I went with my family to Nehalem Falls Campground, about 10 miles up the Nehalem River from the Oregon Coast.  The weather was perfect, the campground was quite nice, but no showers, and it was quite peaceful.  Here are a few photos of our trip.

Wyden speaks to the Senate on NSA

Ron Wyden summarized this issue in a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, read it here.

He made several damning points.
1. The NSA has actively misled (i.e. lied to) the American people and Congress at every opportunity.
2. They are still doing it.
3. The phone metadata collection has produced no value in fighting terrorism. The "liberty or security" argument is a false choice, both are possible.
4. The programs NSA have in place have been abused repeatedly, producing numerous violations of even the miniscule rules the NSA has for themselves. The details of the violations are classified, but Wyden urged every legislator to go to the NSA and see the classified documents themselves. Wyden says the offenses are very serious and troubling, and, of course, much more serious than the NSA has admitted. to.

Wyden has been at this issue for years, he has always known the real truth, but could not reveal it in a lawful way until Snowden broke it open. He is a patriot and I'm proud to live in Oregon and have him as our Senator, and the same goes for Senator Jeff Merkley who has supported Wyden every step along the way.