Congress Trashes the Constitution, Blames Snowden

The NSA and Corporate Media are waging a bizarre sideshow over whether Edward Snowden tried to raise his concerns inside the NSA about their disregard of Constitutional protections of US citizens.  Wait a minute, these folks are arguing that he should have raised his voice privately to the folks running the unconstitutional operation?  You gotta be kidding, he'd have been squashed and locked up in some hole in a distant country and he knew it.  Even Ron Wyden didn't reveal it to the public because it would have been the end of his career.  The Intelligence game is rigged against whistleblowers and everybody knows it.

The current sideshow from Dianne Feinstein alleges essentially that Snowden didn't try to single handedly stop the criminal actions of Congress, the President and the NSA.  As The Guardian reported, first everybody claimed there were No emails on the subject, then claimed they found one email.  You can bet your ass there's lots more they're hiding, but even if there's only one the fact remains that whistleblowers were on a suicide journey if they told their bosses that they were criminals.

Senate intelligence committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long argued the administration may have been in breach of surveillance statutes in its activities. They were prevented from raising many of their concerns in public due to confidentiality requirements. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal adviser, said of the email: “This whole issue is a red herring. The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed – and deemed legal – without the knowledge or consent of the public. Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange after previously claiming that no evidence existed.”

The real issue that the media should be focusing on is the conduct of Congress, specifically the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees who are supposed to be protecting our rights and the Constitution, and whether or not they should be judged as criminals for their part in the unconstitutional acts, along with President Obama.  All of then knew what was happening and let it go on without even telling most other members of congress.

Don't Like Torture? CIA Says You're Too Emotional

Senator Ron Wyden blasted former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden when he suggested Dianme Feinstein was "too emotional" about torture undertaken by the CIA during the Bush administration.

General Hayden’s suggestion that Chairman Feinstein was motivated by ‘emotion’ rather than a focus on the facts is simply outrageous.  General Hayden unfortunately has a long history of misleading the American public – he did it on domestic surveillance when he was the head of the NSA, and he did it on torture when he was the CIA Director.
The best way to correct this culture of misinformation is to give the American people a chance to review the facts for themselves, and I’ll be working with my colleagues and the administration to ensure that happens quickly.

CIA Vrs the Senate

While Dianne Feinstein has long protected the US Intelligence agencies in the Senate, she finally had enough when the CIA accused her staff of hacking while investigating waterboarding Post 9/11 by the CIA.  She took to the floor of the Senate for 90 minutes denouncing the CIA and their tactics, accusing them of violating the US Constitution.  Ron Wyden agreed in a statement released Tuesday, 3/11/2014.  His language regarding the CIA was very blunt.

In my judgment, the Intelligence Community leadership’s misleading statements on interrogation and many other issues has undermined their credibility. I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure that the facts about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program are made public, so that the American people can make up their own minds about what happened and prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated.

 Even Lindsey Graham rose in wrath according to CNN.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the allegations "dangerous to a democracy," if it's substantiated that the CIA interfered with a congressional investigation.

"Heads should roll, people should go to jail, if it's true. ... I'm going to get briefed on it. If it is, the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA, if it's true," Graham said.

Ron Wyden, "The Culture of Misinformation"

Ron Wyden comments on the bill passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee over his objections in an interview with The Oregonian yesterday.

After a dozen years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden doesn't get surprised easily.  But Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, recently managed it, by assuring the committee that the NSA planned to put bulk data it had collected on American citizens into a secure lockbox. 
Repeatedly, the Oregon senator recalls, Alexander had told the committee the NSA didn't hold data on American citizens.  "Now," says Wyden, "he said he's going to put into a lockbox the data that he's said he doesn't have."
"The culture of misinformation," he says, "has caused a lot of people to say, they're telling us stuff that just isn't true." Even the supersecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, Wyden points out, has ruled that NSA has sometimes exceeded its legal and constitutional authority.
Wyden is introducing his own bill, very different from the committee's, that would prevent bulk data collection on American citizens, create an independent counsel to respond to NSA surveillance requests to the FISA court and eliminate "backdoor" breaking into social media systems. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has introduced similar legislation, and last week Leahy and Wyden formed an alliance, becoming co-sponsors of each others' bills.

Wyden also commented to The Guardian recently.

Ron Wyden said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform".

Ron Wyden and the NSA Steamroller

“We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”
Ron Wyden has his hands full in trying to rein in the NSA steamroller, which has powerful allies in Congress, such as Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Saxby Chambliss a Georgia Republican on the same committee.  Wyden has labeled their ilk the "Business as Usual Brigade", and true to form they steamrolled a NSA "reform" bill that just continues business as usual with a few weak tweaks to existing practice.

The bill is a direct challenge to one introduced Tuesday by senator Patrick Leahy that would end domestic phone-records collection. It was also opposed by leading intelligence committee member Mark Udall, who said it did not go far enough.
"The NSA's invasive surveillance of Americans' private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform, not incidental changes. Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee does not go far enough to address the NSA's overreaching domestic surveillance programs," Udall said.
Another Democratic member of the committee, Ron Wyden, said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform". 
Wyden suggested that recent concern about NSA spying on foreign leaders had distracted from the real focus on mass domestic surveillance in the US. “The statements that American intelligence officials have made this week about collecting on the intentions of foreign leadership, that’s consistent with the understanding I’ve had for years, as a member of the intelligence committee,” he said.
“That has implications for foreign policy. My top priority is ending the mass surveillance, digital surveillance, on millions and millions of law-abiding Americans.”
Feinstein unexpectedly announced on Monday that she was “totally opposed” to the foreign leader spying of the sort the NSA conducts of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Feinstein has been a staunch supporter of the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
“Americans are making it clear, that they never – repeat never – agreed to give up their constitutional liberties for the appearance of security,” Wyden said. “We’re just going to keep fighting this battle. It’s going to be a long one.”

NSA Circus, Nobody Can Keep Their Story Straight

The story of NSA spying on Angela Merkel and other friendly heads of state is a prototypical one of Washington circus, which has prompted a new round of "Reviews" ordered by President Obama and Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  According to the Guardian and CNN  there is a major fight brewing in the Administration over who is throwing whom under the bus.  He either knew and is denying it or he didn't know, which most people find not credible.  He either found about it last summer and ordered it stopped, or he let it go on.  Incredible stuff, but in my view we won't find out from any of the current circus performers, they all have no credibility.  I wouldn't trust anybody's word unless it came from Ron Wyden or Mark Udall, and so far they aren't saying.

First CNN.

It's plausible that Obama wouldn't know about specific surveillance targets, said CNN National Security Analyst Fran Townsend, a member of the CIA external advisory board.

She said overall intelligence collection priorities are well-known by the White House. "Specific targets, however, (like) Angela Merkel's cell phone, are not the sort of thing discussed with the President of the United States."

No one should expect the President to know everything the NSA is doing, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

"But when you're talking about the surveillance of world leaders, and an issue that's been controversial for a while now, you would expect that there's some knowledge either by the President or people surrounding him. ... I do think there's surprise that this was off the radar in the inner circles of the White House."

And from the Guardian,

Did President Obama know about US spying on its friends, apparently going back more than a decade in the case of Angela Merkel? The answer is either "Of course he did, idiot" or "It's plausible he didn't, actually" – depending on whom you ask.
The White House message is clear: the president was in the dark.
The Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous administration official on Sunday saying that the president didn't find out until this summer about spying on allies and he immediately ordered it stopped. The Washington Post published a corroborating report Monday.
Obama himself told ABC News on Monday that the White House merely gives the intelligence community "policy direction":

I'm the final user of all the intelligence that they gather. But they're involved in a whole wide range of issues.
We give them policy direction. But what we've seen over the last several years is their capacities continue to develop and expand, and that's why I'm initiating now a review to make sure that what they're able to do doesn't necessarily mean what they should be doing.

To members of the intelligence community, the president distancing himself in this way from data collection that fed his daily briefings is a betrayal. The intelligence officials involved aren't taking it sitting down, either. "Current and former US intelligence officials" are talking to Ken Dilanian of the Los Angeles Times, among others. The White House "signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders," he reports:

Obama may not have been specifically briefed on NSA operations targeting a foreign leader's cellphone or email communications, one of the officials said. 'But certainly the National Security Council and senior people across the intelligence community knew exactly what was going on, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.'

Blame It All On Snowden?

President Obama and the NSA brass have exhibited a basic flaw that has been exposed throughout the Snowden revelations, they make bad (I mean really bad) decisions and don't own up to them.  The US Press is still giving cover with soothing editorials, in one particularly mild, and offensive, NY Times article, they find no fault or deficiency in the decisions made, and in fact imply the NSA is out of control, totally ignoring the excuses President Obama has made for their actions.  It's clear that these were decisions made by Presidents Bush and Obama, not some out of control bureaucracy.  The NY Times helpfully offers this advice.

A good way out of this mess would be for Washington to take up the proposal made Friday by Germany and France to negotiate a formal pact that would set mutually acceptable surveillance guidelines.

The US press ought to be calling for blood on the floor, all the brass at the NSA, Feinstein, Chambliss, and all the rest of the toadying hawks on the Intelligence Committees.  The president has an opportunity to be presidential, but he's behaving like a school child caught shoplifting a pack of gum.  As for the NSA brass, General Keith Alexander is mouthing off that it's the fault of the press.  Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian have the only coverage fit to print.

Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted (Techdirt has the full video here):

The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.
"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared. [My italics]

There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".

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."