NSA spies on entire EU

Another revelation from Edward Snowden, the NSA has an active to spy n EU diplomats in NYC, Brussels and Washington DC.  Well if you're going to spy on everybody everywhere, might as well include our friends and enemies alike.  Next I suppose they'll have tapes of JFK and Marilyn Monroe cavorting.

Wyden turns up the heat on NSA

Ron Wyden issued a Press Release today detailing a letter sent to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was signed by 26 Senators (24 Democrats and 2 Republicans) demanding answers and justification of the bulk data collection secretly conducted by the NSA. 

The senators are seeking public answers to the following questions in order to give the American people the information they need to conduct an informed public debate.

• How long has the NSA used PATRIOT Act authorities to engage in bulk collection of Americans’ records? Was this collection underway when the law was reauthorized in 2006?
• Has the NSA used USA PATRIOT Act authorities to conduct bulk collection of any other types of records pertaining to Americans, beyond phone records?
• Has the NSA collected or made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site location data in bulk?
• Have there been any violations of the court orders permitting this bulk collection, or of the rules governing access to these records? If so, please describe these violations.
• Please identify any specific examples of instances in which intelligence gained by reviewing phone records obtained through Section 215 bulk collection proved useful in thwarting a particular terrorist plot. 
• Please provide specific examples of instances in which useful intelligence was gained by reviewing phone records that could not have been obtained without the bulk collection authority, if such examples exist.
• Please describe the employment status of all persons with conceivable access to this data, including IT professionals, and detail whether they are federal employees, civilian or military, or contractors.

Wyden Says "Enough" to NSA

Wyden finally got a break courtesy of Edward Snowden.  Wyden knew all the dirt on the lies and constitutional abuse that the NSA was dishing out, but he couldn't come out and say so.  He is a senior member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence so presumably he was privy to almost everything going on, but he was unable to say a thing about it publicly.  Finally Snowden blew the lid off everything and Wyden could speak frankly.

During a panel sponsored by the American Society of News Editors, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said while the information collected by the National Security Agency involves phone numbers, location and time of the call, it might also contain vital personal details, such as relationships, medical issues, religious matters or political affiliations.
"I have to believe the civil liberties of millions of Americans have been violated," Wyden said.
"I have not seen any evidence that demonstrates that the bulk collection of all of these records provides unique value," he added.

Wyden is a man of principle and truth and a defender of the constitution, rare these days.

Pesticides Cause Massive Bee Kill in Wilsonville

The Oregonian is reporting that the discovery of 50,000 dead bees in Wilsonville was caused by a pesticide called Safari.

The state is investigating any violation of pesticide laws, which could take up to four months, said Dale Mitchell of the Agriculture Department. 

Mitchell said the bee deaths, the largest documented die-off of bumblebees, could prove important in determining the use and regulations of Safari and other insecticides in the United States. 

Safari's main ingredient is dinotefuran, a neonicotinoid. There are two main kinds of neonicotinoids, both of which are general use insecticides. Safari is a member of the nitro-group.  Research published in 2012 shows these are generally more toxic to bees than the other type. The European Union issued a temporary ban on three other kinds of nitro-group neonicotinoids, which will go into effect this December.

The Monsanto Wheat Mystery

Agriculture investigators have a mystery involving a Monsanto Genetically Modified wheat strain that was never approved for use, but appeared in a small portion of a 125 acre wheat field in Eastern Oregon.  Neither Monsanto or the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service can come up with a plausible reason why the wheat was there.  It had been grown experimentally in Oregon in 2001, but not in that field, and was thought to have been eradicated completely.

The discovery has put all Northwest wheat exports on hold, as the foreign buyers in Europe, Japan and South Korea will not allow any NW wheat into their countries until it has been certified to be non-GMO wheat. 

Monsanto floated a story that they thought eco-terrorists were responsible.

"There's a lot of potential for how it could have got into the supply," said Carol Mallory-Smith, a professor of weed sciences at Oregon State University. "It could have already been processed. It could have gone for animal feed somewhere or it could have gone for something else. It could have gone for storage."

While Monsanto's chief technology officer suggested eco-activists were to blame, Mallory-Smith said deliberate contamination was the least likely scenario:

The sabotage conspiracy theory is even harder for me to explain or think as logical because it would mean that someone had that seed and was holding that seed for 10 or 12 years and happened to put it on the right field to have it found, and identified. I don't think that makes a lot of sense.

She was also sceptical of Monsanto's claims to have gathered up or destroyed every last seed from its earlier GM wheat trials. In recent years, as American farmers rely increasingly on GM crops, there have been a spate of such escapes, including rice, corn, soybean, and tomato. Oregon is still trying to contain a 2006 escape of GM bentgrass, used on golf courses, which has migrated 13 miles from where it was originally planted.

Monsanto could be on the hook for big damage claims filed by NW farmers over the contamination. The wheat export market is worth billions of dollars in exports.

Top Ten Absurd Statements about Spying

The national dialog being conducted by the defenders of NSA spying seems to rely on the assumption we don't have any intelligence, it is so littered with absurdly illogical false statements.  Since everyone seems to enjoy Top Ten lists, here's mine.

10. What the NSA is doing is legal.  You have to follow a trail of nitpicking twists of logic to give this statement any credence.  In short, acquiring information by spying isn't really spying if nobody knows about it or bothers to look at the data.  The NSA record of every phone call made in the US is deemed to not legally exist if nobody uses it.

9.  9/11 Could have been prevented if this had been in place.  Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record.  U.S. intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al Mihdhar, long before 9/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so.
"There were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar," says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 as chairman of the Senate's intelligence committee.

8.  NSA surveillance disrupted "over 50" Terrorist plots.  There have been all sorts of numbers claimed, ranging from dozens (refuted by Mark Udall and Ron Wyden here) to maybe 10 in the US.  They cite David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks, but ProPublica did extensive research that shows NSA missed him entirely for 7 years until British Intelligence told them he was up to no good.

7.  We need to trade some Civil Liberties to fight Terrorism.  This ignores the fact that we are governed entirely by the Constitution, no law or policy can legally violate any of its provisions.  Period.  As argued in this article, we can not "trade" any violation of the Constitution without amending it, but that is precisely what the government is arbitrarily and secretly doing.

6.  All 465 Members of Congress were fully briefed on NSA spying.  Funny, other members of Congress, including one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis expressed outrage and concern about the data collection.

5.  President Obama says the NSA and FISA policies are "Transparent".  Well, maybe it is transparent to him, but not much of anyone else.  It operates in total secrecy, in fact anyone who is included in that "transparency" is prohibited from revealing anything about it, like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall.

4.  Edward Snowden does not classify as a Whistleblower.  Apparently whistleblowers can only blow the whistle on someone the current administration doesn't like.  Daniel Ellsberg thinks he's a hero, and we need more patriots like him. Ellsberg did a similar act in revealing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

3.  Eric Holder defends the First Amendment right of Freedom of the Press.  Holder said he would never contemplate prosecuting reporters for publishing classified material, but his DOJ named Fox News reporter as a possible co-conspirator for publishing a news story, and they also bugged the Associated Press offices for 2 months.

2.  NSA spying has been effective in protecting US against Terrorism.  Boston Marathon bombers didn't seem to have any problems.

1.  The Government is concerned with preserving our Civil Rights.  The ACLU doesn't think so, and neither do I.  President Obama said he welcomed the dialog on the subject, while keeping it a close secret to prevent the possibility of any dialog.  Absurd.

Guide to NSA Terminology

Is NSA Spying on me? - Now we hate to quibble, but the "spying" word is getting misused these days and that causes confusion and anxiety.  You know how much we hate confusion and anxiety, so let's clear this issue up.  If you are a law-abiding US citizen, (Christian or redneck, white, and you know how to pronounce EYE-RACK) then we are not spying, we're keeping you and your loved ones safe.  If however you are a Middle-Eastern looking character, we're all over you bub.

Does the NSA violate our Constitutional rights? - Oh good heavens no, whatever gave you that idea?  Look, ask yourself if today is any different than any other day?  You went about your business and did whatever you wanted to do.  Sure we made a note of every phone call,  text message, google search, twitter inquiry, GPS location, phone image, credit card use, visit to a public place, cab trip, bus trip, Email and spreadsheet update you made and you got a pat-down at the airport, but did that keep you from doing whatever you wanted?  No!  Of course it didn't.  You can be assured we value your Constitutional rights above all else.   Those traitor news reporters only got what they were asking for.  But tell me, was that Italian Restaurant you went to last night any good?  Why did you withdraw $200 and call that sexy ad listed in Backpage?  Were you satisfied with the quality of the Trojan condoms you purchased?  Just asking.

Is the government lying and keeping secrets about what they do? - Absolutely not!  We have been doing this for over 7 years and we've never had a complaint about dishonesty or secrecy.  Why in fact when it was mentioned by a traitorous dangerous psychopath that we were ever on the alert, we divulged that every member of congress had been fully briefed on our activities for years.  There were a few members who said they didn't have a clue, but we have video of them either sleeping or texting somebody during the briefings.

Feel better now?

Curry County “We’re cut to the bone.”

The Curry County Board of Commissioners met last week to try and figure out how to keep the wheels of government turning a little while longer.  It was a long painful meeting.  Since the voters voted down a property tax increase to fund law enforcement, their first priority was to fund that. 

Curry County will borrow $950,000 from its road department to help pay for sheriff’s deputies and fire suppression at the jail, commissioners decided Tuesday.

To highlight the painful decisions, they reluctantly aggreed to allocate $100,000 to install a fire suppression system in the 50 year old jail.  One of the citizens attending objected, noting that "It hasn't burned in 50 years".

Commissioners also debated — and eventually approved — allocating $100,000 from the road fund to install a fire suppression system in the jail. The state fire marshal has “given us a pass” for the past 15 years, Bishop said, but his last letter was more terse and implied the county needs to bring that part of the operations to code.

After that, there was nothing left for other County functions.

Many departments no longer exist under the auspices of the county, having been spun off into nonprofit agencies in the past two years. Among them are Home Health and Hospice, Curry Community Health, the animal shelter, mental health and addictions.

Next year, Healthy Start will receive no funding, nor will liquor law enforcement, planning, building or environmental offices.

And the county will have less than $95,000 to do desperately-needed repairs on buildings.

Commissioners expressed their thanks to the budget committee, whose members noted their struggles with the budget.

“I hate doing it this way,” Scaffo said. “I hate eating up those reserve funds. I hate taking road funds for a second year in a row. But the alternative is worse.”

“There wasn’t anywhere else to cut,” Smith said. “We’re cut to the bone.” 

The Oregon State legislature is making plans to take over the county administration and possibly levy an emergency State Income Tax on the county residents, anticipating that the county will soon be unable to fund the most basic functions.

What we learned about spies

The Edward Snowden saga playing on the front pages are giving us a lot of insights into the business of spying.

1. Spies look like ordinary people living upper middle class lives.
2. Even a high school dropouts can pull in six figure salaries if they're good with computers and can keep their mouth shut.
3. It's pretty tough to keep anything secret with 1.5 million people having top secret clearance.  About one-third of those people work for private contractors.  The US has outsourced a lot of their spying business to industry.
4. They can get any information they want, phone calls, emails, the works.  They can record your phone conversations and store them digitally and keep them as long as they want.

Spies Gone Wild

While everyone from Dick Cheney to President Obama are saying we have nothing to fear from our government, and they have the highest regard for the constitution and our rights, they have hidden everything they do behind a veil of secrecy, and as Bill Clinton said, "Deny, Deny, Deny" when questioned about their crimes.

They collaborated with UK intelligence in spying on all government officials attending the G20 Conference in London, 2009.  Now those guys are obviously talking with terrorists, right?  What is the justification for that?  There is another G8 Conference next month in Ireland, think they'll spy on everyone there too?  You betcha.

They are now revealed to be recording and storing  phone calls made in the US, and their analysts can listen to you in real time without a warrant.  Yep, every word you've said on the phone for years could be in their computers.

The Washington Post disclosed Saturday that the existence of a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which "intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words" to a database. Top intelligence officials in the Obama administration, the Post said, "have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content databases such as ­NUCLEON."

 George Orwell didn't have enough imagination to dream up something as totalitarian as this.
UPDATE:  I wish I had written this article in the Toronto Star.  The author documents how the administration claims to be open and truthful, while playing word games instead of giving answers.

Citizens United Resolution in Oregon Will Move Forward

The Oregon Legislature is embroiled in budget battles and it appears that both the Citizens United Repeal measures introduced in the House and Senate will die without a vote yet again, which is a real shame.  I would have wished for a real push on those measures and at least have a vote.  The Oregon Legislature has never voted on the issue despite having measures introduced last year and again this year.

UPDATE 06/17/13  I discovered that there are several parallel measures in the Legislature, and the issues raised in the House Memorial Resolution 5 are essentially duplicated in House Memorial Resolution 6, which is moving forward and will be discussed in the House Rules Committee today.  Maybe there is hope after all.

Here is a Link to the Bill and a link to the bill text of HJM 6..  The text was amended for clarity and passed the House Rules Committee with a recommendation for passage in the House.

Update 6/24/13  HJM 6 was introduced in the House on Friday, 6/21/13 and passed 48 - 11.  Victory in sight.

Wyden Wants Public Hearings on Intelligence

Ron Wyden has for many years had a dilemma about the goings on at NSA - they lied about almost everything they were doing, but the topic was classified so Top Secret he couldn't reveal that he knew they were lying without breaching security.  Thus he set about forcing their hand with a direct question to David Clapper in hearings last March, and Clapper told a direct lie.  Meanwhile President Obama (through Jay Carney) said...

“[Obama] certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he’s given,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters today.

Clapper himself explained his answer in a news interview, using bizarre language.

Clapper acknowledged this weekend that he was less than forthcoming with Wyden. “I thought though in retrospect I was asked when are you going to start–stop beating your wife kind of question which is, meaning not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, “No.” And again, going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library. To me collection of U.S. Persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it.”

Wyden  issued a press release directly accusing Clapper of lying.  Here is a video clip of Wydens question and Clappers reply.

“One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community.  This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions. When NSA Director Alexander failed to clarify previous public statements about domestic surveillance, it was necessary to put the question to the Director of National Intelligence.  So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance.  After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer.  Now public hearings are needed to address the recent disclosures and the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives.”

Terrorism and Principle

One big fact verified in the latest Pew Poll released Monday is that while a majority of people polled think that the NSA phone dragnet is "acceptable", the composition of that majority has varied wildly in the last 7 years, with 75% of Republicans gung-ho for NSA surveilance in 2006, but falling to 52% in 2013, after the Guardian released the NSA story.  Similarly only 37% of Democrats thought that was good in 2006 but now 64% think it's just fine.  The overall acceptance was 51% in 2006 and now it is 56%.

So much for consistency of principle.  The results appear to me to reflect extreme polarization in our politics and the hardening of party allegiance, not to mention the fear the word terrorism evokes.

We at least now have the opportunity to have a national discussion on the issue.  President Obama is not immune to flip-flop either.  In 2005 during arguments on reauthorizing the act, he stated on the Senate floor...

And if someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document - through library books they've read and phone calls they've made - this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear their plea, no jury will hear their case.
This is just plain wrong.

 Well I guess that was then and this is now, we still have no right to know if we're being investigated, nor right to appeal, and while President Obama is doing what he decried 8 years ago, one thing hasn't changed. 

It is still just plain wrong.

We The People Pardon Edward Snowden

There is an online petition to pardon Edward Snowden on the We The People site.  Sign it if you dare.

NSA Whistleblower

A man of principle, Edward Snowden claims to be the whistleblower who leaked documents to the Guardian voluntarily revealed his identity, opening himself to the unprincipled wrath of the Obama administration, who have shown unswerving dedication to persecuting whistleblowers. 

"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I have done nothing wrong."

The Obama administration has shown itself willing to aggressively pursue those who leak confidential information, and Snowden says that he fully expects to be held accountable for what he did, but he remains unapologetic.
"I am not afraid, because this is the choice I've made," he told The Guardian
Noting that he enjoys a relatively comfortable life - a stable career, a girlfriend with whom he lived in Hawaii, a close relationship with family - Snowden said he is "willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

Good for him, I hope millions of Americans stand up to support him.

Lawful but Unconstitutional

I am disgusted by the media blitz trying to pose the idea that the unconstitutional spying on innocent US citizens is lawful behavior.  It is unconstitutional, violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, and must be stopped.  I think also that government officials that defend the lie saying that congress approved it should be removed.

Nuff said.

Spying on America

The Obama Administration went into spin-control mode with the outlandish claim that

President Obama told reporters Friday that members of Congress are repeatedly briefed on how these programs are conducted and that they were approved by bipartisan majorities. “What you’ve got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress,” he  said.

That is an outright lie according to Jeff Merkley (okay he didn't use the lie word), but here is what he had to say about who knew what in congress.

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley says he had no idea the National Security Agency was tapping into the servers of top Internet companies, and was only aware that the NSA was monitoring phone records after he specifically sought that information out.
“It was not something that was briefed outside the Intelligence Committee,” he said of the government’s access to phone company data. “I had special permission to find out about the program. It raised concerns for me.”
On Now with Alex Wagner Friday, Merkley said he was prohibited from saying anything about the program because it was classified. “The part I was aware of was that there was a broad vacuum sweeping up data across America. The details were another step removed from what I found out when I asked what was going on.”

 The administration is lying.  Furthermore they are opening a criminal investigation to find out which of the millions of people who knew, leaked it.  I hope they don't find out, the leaker should get a medal, and take possession of the Nobel prize given to Obama.

Corporations rewrite US law

As we go about our day to day life, our economic future is unfolding in the secret draft of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  You probably never heard of it because it's so secret that even most members of congress are not allowed to even see it.  A NY Times Opinion Article calls it a "Covert Trade Deal".

While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released. Even the George W. Bush administration, hardly a paragon of transparency, published online the draft text of the last similarly sweeping agreement, called the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in 2001.

There is one exception to this wall of secrecy: a group of some 600 trade “advisers,” dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators.

This covert approach is a major problem because the agreement is more than just a trade deal. Only 5 of its 29 chapters cover traditional trade matters, like tariffs or quotas. The others impose parameters on nontrade policies. Existing and future American laws must be altered to conform with these terms, or trade sanctions can be imposed against American exports.

Whatever one thinks about “free trade,” the secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership process represents a huge assault on the principles and practice of democratic governance. That is untenable in the age of transparency, especially coming from an administration that is otherwise so quick to trumpet its commitment to open government. 

Since it constrains what laws can be passed in the future, one commentator decries it as a way for multi-national corporations  to override US laws they don't like.

WTO Stands For “We’re Taking Over”
Public Citizen, which has been doing excellent work on this issue, reports on three U.S. laws that were nullified by the World Trade Organization (WTO):  country-of-origin labels on meat, dolphin-safe labels on tuna, and the ban on sweet-flavored cigarettes designed to get kids addicted to the tobacco companies’ carcinogenic products. (What’s next:  Cherry-flavored crack?)

The WTO and the WTO “Appellate Body” – two bodies most Americans don’t even know exist – overruled these laws in a preemptory manner that would have outraged the Continental Congress.
We didn’t elect them. We can’t communicate with them. But they’ve issued three decrees which we must obey:
1) We are not to know where the meat we’re eating comes from.
2) We must accept the fact that we may unknowingly wind up eating the flesh of dolphins, arguably the most intelligent nonhuman species on the planet. And,
3) We must continue to allow the distribution of products designed to addict our children to a deadly and habit-forming substance.
How’s that for “controlling our own destiny”?

 See here what Peter DeFazio thinks about it.

Security and the Constitution

Our voracious security establishment seems to have convinced our legislators that we can have the constitution or security, but not both.  Both Democrats and Republicans are opting to dump the Constitution, turning our day to day life over to the intelligence overlords who'll keep us safe.  Sign Jeff Merkley's petition if you disagree with that.  Counterpunch has a good analysis of the situation, well worth reading.

Constitutions are often needed to guard against political excess, the conscience of a state when its representatives have ceased to have any.  The responses from the Washington elite suggest the anaesthetised state they have fallen into – liberties need to be shredded to protect liberties; legality demands bouts of illegality and so forth.  Nothing to be surprised about, claimed Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga).  “This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this” (Forbes, Jun 6).
Even more striking of the amoral numbness of such surveillance activities is Chambliss’ remark that “we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information, and its simply what we call ‘meta data’.”  Give it a cryptic, functional label, and people are bound to go along with it.  That’s if they even know about it.
Senator Diane Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has again made it clear that the mass surveillance of public chatter and communications is entirely appropriate.  The Republic is besieged by enemies external and internal.  “As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the last seven years.” The message: This is normal.  Stop being so wet about it.

ABC News says spying in the US is legal

I'm taking Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) off my Christmas Card List, along with ABC News as they all are saying the massive spying going on every day is "Legal", and "nothing new".  The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is road-kill if this is legal.  Let's hustle this right up to the Supreme Court, if they rule it legal then they've publicly nullified the Constitution and declared civil liberties irrelevant.

I've already shared my thoughts with my members in Congress, and Senator Jeff Merkley is supporting a petition demanding a Congressional investigation.  Last time I looked they had over 15,000 signatures.  Feel free to add yours.

Spying a good thing says Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham was being interviewed by Fox News and said the snooping on every person in the US was just fine by him.

“I’m glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to,” Graham said. He was asked if he was sure: “Yes, I am sure that that’s what they’re doing.”
Prodded further by Gretchen Carlson as to whether the report of millions of phone calls being collected as true, Graham said: “I’m sure we should be doing this.”

The same guy who after the Boston Marathon bombings said he thought we should launch drones in Boston to hunt down whoever it was that did it.

What will they do with all those phone records?

What to do with all that data?  Fight terrorists?  Maybe.  Intimidate anybody they don't like?  Maybe that too.

Let's take an ambitious NSA employee and give him a list of all "sex for service" ads in Backpage and another list of all the phone numbers of people in the legislative branch, why heck just for grins let's check out the phone usage of FISA judge Roger Vinson and see who he's been calling lately too.  What do you think they'll find?  Who's going to stop them from doing just that?  Ron Wyden and the ACLU were right to warn darkly about the consequences of illegal spying.

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a March 2012 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that most Americans would “stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
“As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” the senators wrote in the letter. “This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

The blackmail notion has occurred to other bloggers as well.

Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.
Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

 Should you be worried too?

Government Spying on Everybody

In a free and open society you take for granted that if you've done nothing wrong, the government will leave you alone.  Today in a story in The Guardian it was revealed that the NSA has a record of every phone call made through Verizon's network, and it's a certainty the other carriers are feeding the NSA too.  Ron Wyden has been warning about the existence of such a program, but he could not be specific because he would be revealing "Top Secret" information.  He said:

In a Senate floor speech in December, Wyden hinted at classified information he had received but could not share due to Senate rules that indicated the law “on Americans’ privacy has been real, and it is not hypothetical.”
“When the public finds out that these secret interpretations are so dramatically different than what the public law says, I think there’s going to be extraordinary anger in the country,” he told the Huffington Post the following month.

Well, I think he's right about the extraordinary anger part, but he did vote for the bill that authorized this action, as did most of his colleagues in congress in a huge betrayal of our civil liberties.  So my note to Congress is "You broke it, now you fix it".  The ACLU had this to say.

"Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability."

Be sure to let your representative in Congress know what you think about this.

Tax Havens Under Fire

Ever since the ICIJ published their report on Tax Haven use, the tax fairness issue has finally gained traction in the press and the world governments have taken notice. 

• The UK Prime Minister David Cameron is escalating the issue as a top priority in a G8 summit this month.
• The normally defensive Bloomberg News is reporting that offshore cash holdings by US entities is growing fast, it's up to an estimated $1.9 Trillion at the end of 2012.
• The US PIRG organization reports Academic studies conclude tax haven abuse costs the United States approximately $150 billion in tax revenues every year. Multinational corporations account for $90 billion and individuals the rest.

 Hopefully we will eventually get some deficit relief when the tax dodgers start paying their share.

Secrecy or Democracy?

According to the ACLU web page on government secrecy,

Simply put, government secrecy is incompatible with a healthy democracy. As U.S. District Court Judge Damon Keith said, "Democracies die behind closed doors."

The government tendency to classify everything grew legs under George Bush and if anything has accelerated under Obama, despite his promise of a more transparent government. In a recent blog post on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood writes,

he Inspector General at each government agency that classifies national security information is required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to review the agency’s classification program as part of an effort to combat overclassification.  Those reviews are now underway.  But if properly performed, they could put the Inspectors General at odds with senior officials at their agency who habitually overclassify.

But at the Department of Justice, “misclassification of material” is arguably attributable to the senior leadership of the Department, if not the White House itself.
On May 22, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to Congress to formally acknowledge that four U.S. citizens had been killed in counterterrorism operations, including Anwar al-Aulaqi and three others.  The death of Al-Aulaqi (and all but one of the others) at the hands of U.S. forces had of course been previously reported and had long been implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by U.S. officials.
But remarkably, Attorney General Holder wrote that this information “until now has been properly classified.”
In other words, information that everyone around the world who cared to know had already known for years was, according to Attorney General Holder’s letter to Congress, “properly classified” until May 22, 2013.  The disconnect between objective reality and official classification policy could hardly be more apparent.

Given that Holder and Obama are maintaining their status as serial secrecy advocates, we'll have to see what the DOJ comes up with to combat the tendency.  I am not hopeful.

Fix The Debt Scam

The IPS did a study last year on the "Fix the Debt" crowd, CEOs of huge corporations who think Social Security and Medicare need to be cut to "save" the country, but not mentioning their own multi-millions in personal pensions and the underfunded employee pensions their companies maintain.  Here are the findings.

Key findings:

• The 71 Fix the Debt CEOs who lead publicly held companies have amassed an average of $9 million in their company retirement funds. A dozen have more than $20 million in their accounts. If each of them converted their assets to an annuity when they turned 65, they would receive a monthly check for at least $110,000 for life.
• The Fix the Debt CEO with the largest pension fund is Honeywell’s David Cote, a long-time advocate of Social Security cuts. His $78 million nest egg is enough to provide a $428,000 check every month after he turns 65.
• Forty-one of the 71 companies offer employee pension funds. Of these, only two have sufficient assets in their funds to meet expected obligations. The rest have combined deficits of $103 billion, or about $2.5 billion on average. General Electric has the largest deficit in its worker pension fund, with $22 billion.

Those wise guys feel they're entitled to offer lumps of coal to the 99% while increasing their own wealth, often at taxpayer expense - look for many of those pensions to be "bailed out" by the government down the road, while the CEOs don't sacrifice a dime.  Looks like a scam to me.

Government Secrecy makes us less secure

Senator Ron Wyden, the unrelenting champion of transparency and opponent of secrecy, revealed last July that:

Wyden has stated that on “at least one occasion” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that “some collection” carried out under the revised law “was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
The FISA Amendments Act allows the government to collect, inside the United States and without a warrant, the communication of foreign targets located abroad. Americans’ communications can be picked up if they are talking to, or e-mailing, the foreign target. The communications are gathered from commercial providers under a directive from senior government officials, following court approval.

So what happened?  If the DOJ has their way we'll never know, they are opposing making the breach public on "National Security" grounds.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but DOJ wants to block it.

David Sobel, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the government is playing “a shell game.” He noted that in 2007, when the American Civil Liberties Union asked the surveillance court to release a different opinion, the Justice Department argued that the group should file an FOIA request to the department.
This “DOJ-imposed Catch-22 blocks the public from knowing more about the government’s illegal surveillance,” the group said in a statement.
In a letter to Wyden last year, Kathleen Turner, director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the government had “remedied” the surveillance court’s concerns.

Do you feel more secure now?

US brands whistleblowers as terrorists

The US is going over the top in pursuit of whistleblowers and the press as the military trial of Bradley Manning gets going, and as The Guardian reported:

On Monday Bradley Manning, the young man who leaked those diplomatic cables, goes on trial in a military court in Maryland. He has pleaded guilty to 10 charges which would put him behind bars for 20 years. But that is not enough for the US military that has levelled 22 charges against him, including espionage and "aiding the enemy", which carries up to life in prison without parole. At the time Manning released the diplomatic cables and military reports he wrote: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He hoped by releasing the cables he would spark "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".
If the leaks laid bare the hypocritical claim that the US was exporting democracy, then the nature of his incarceration and prosecution illustrate the fallacy of its insistence that it is protecting both freedom and security at home. Manning's treatment since his arrest in May 2010 has involved a number of serious human rights violations.
At various times since his arrest he has been held in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours a day for five months in succession, held in an 8ft by 6ft cell, been forced to sleep naked apart from an anti-suicide smock for two months, and been woken up to three times a night while on suicide watch. Following an investigation, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Méndez, last year argued Manning had been "subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

Meanwhile, the case against him indicates the degree to which the war on terror (a campaign that has been officially retired describing a legal, military and political edifice that remains firmly intact) privileges secrecy over not only transparency but humanity. This is exemplified in one of his leak's more explosive revelations – a video that soon went viral showing two Reuters employees, among others, being shot dead by a US Apache helicopter in Iraq. They were among a dozen or so people milling around near an area where US troops had been exposed to small arms fire. The soldiers, believing the camera to be a weapon, opened fire, leaving several dead and some wounded.
"Look at those dead bastards," says one pilot. "Nice," says the other. When a van comes to pick up the wounded they shoot at that too, wounding two children inside. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one of the pilots says.

This administration has pulled out all the stops to preserve secrecy and stifle First Amendment rights, a poor path for a President who advocated greater transparency.  Meanwhile Eric Holder faces accusations of committing perjury when he testified that the free press was not being targeted criminally, but was discovered to have signed off on a warrant naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible co-conspirator in a leak case.