Again, the scope here seems broad, but then I suspect it has to be, for any meaningful connections to be identified by the NSA. The warrant came in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that perhaps we’d be better off merely collecting data on, say, Islamists who happen to be on government assistance, we all know that such “profiling” violates our PC covenant, “thou shalt not distinguish, lest that distinguishing be for purposes of special dispensation” being the first of the secular Ten Commandments.
So it isn’t so much the meta-data collection that is problematic here. It’s that the left was once adamantly against such meta-data collection, assuring us that the data mining was a civil liberties violation. In fact, as Jim Geraghty reminds us, candidate Barack Obama’s position was, at least publicly, this one:
Barack Obama believes that we must provide law enforcement the tools it needs to investigate, disrupt, and capture terrorists, but he also believes we need real oversight to avoid jeopardizing the rights and ideals of all Americans. There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the current administration has abused the powers given to it by the PATRIOT Act. A March 2007 Justice Department audit found the FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the PATRIOT Act to secretly obtain personal information about American citizens. As president, Barack Obama would revisit the PATRIOT Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.
• Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administration’s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law.
To be fair, many on the left are showing some consistency here: they opposed these kinds of high tech attempts to thwart orchestrated terror attacks when it was President Bush whose Administration was attempting to stop them, and they’re against similar (though even broader, it would seem, given advances in technology) attempts to thwart orchestrated terror attacks now that it is Obama who, out of sense of embarrassment, I’d guess, signed off on this operation.
The takeaway — at least on my part — being that Obama is a cynical, opportunistic hypocrite; and that the left in general is still so committed to its institutional belief that the country itself is evil and in need of punishment that they continue to embrace impediments to our security, be it for terror threats or border policing. And a fair number of Republicans and libertarians join them.
So long as there are legal safeguards in place to prevent the usage of data collection from moving beyond the kind of matrix hunting that the NSA is doing with meta data, I don’t feel — and haven’t since back when Bush was under assault for similar programs; sorry, but I just don’t — that these programs are scandalous. They are part of national security in a high tech era, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and data collection, while it must be jealously delineated by the courts to err on the side of individual autonomy and privacy, has probably helped thwart any number of terror attacks.
In fact, had such a program been in place prior to the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s possible that atrocity may have been prevented.
It’s perfectly acceptable, obviously, to mistrust Obama. Lord knows I do. And it’s also troublesome to think of how readily this Administration has politicized agencies and turned them on a certain faction of the American people. The cabal of Marxists occupying the highest positions of power most certainly problematize programs such as these, and yes, it is perfectly acceptable that we’re all of us paranoid now — the right because it’s been the subject of politicized abuses of data, and the left because it cheered such activity on before it dawned on them that they, too, could easily be placed in the figurative crosshairs of a narcissistic president and his ruling cabal; one can still feel the stunned shock of many journalists from the AP finding out that it wasn’t just a Faux News reporter who was being singled out.
But in this instance, it is Obama’s leftist sanctimony — he’d probably scuttled a number of these data programs meant for national security, while embracing others, such as the massive collection of real individual data that will come from the alliance of ObamaCare with the IRS — that is on display, because the moment his Administration suffered a successful terror attack on US soil, only then did they put this program into action, limiting it to 3 months.
The nature of the NSA program, if we can believe Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
[…] does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls. The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber. The only type of information acquired under the Court’s order is telephony metadata, such as telephone numbers dialed and length of calls.The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism -related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time. The FISA Court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions.The information acquired has been part of an overall strategy to protect the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it may assist counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.
I believe this program was implemented because Obama lost face in Boston. I honestly believe that’s how he thinks. He’d been again unprepared, because his ideology — and the pervasive anti-Americanism of his far left base — prevented him from taking preemptive action to secure us from such threats, just as it had in Benghazi. This knee-jerk response to Boston, therefore, illustrates only that Obama cares about Obama. Which is why once they get over their initial outrage and realize exactly what’s happening here, the progressive mainstream press will circle the wagons once again around its “historic” pet president.
Let’s not lose the forest for the trees.
(h/t JHo)
U.S. intel chief blasts leaks on web, phone use tracking
Right. Knowing how much of our data you’re hoovering up makes us unsafe. Please, lie to us some more, Clapper.
There are legal safeguards in place to keep, say, the IRS from targeting people for their political positions. There are safeguards to prevent IG’s from being terminated for finding malfeasance by friends of the Administration. There are safeguards to prevent an Administration from appointing NLRB members without confirmation.
I put as much faith in safeguards as I do in the rest of government, especially Chicago on the Potomac.
“Chicago on the Potomac”….good one.
The information needed to act preemptively against the 9/11 attackers, the Tsarnaevs, Nidal Hassan et al, legally, was in the hands of the government and they did nothing. The information needed to act preemptively against the legitimate political opposition, illegally, was in the hands of the government and they got right to work.
Repeal the USA Patriot Act.
And in Utah:
This may indeed be a program to find terrorist threats and stop them before they materialize. However it must be looked at in light of what we know about the administration now in charge and the bureaucrats they will leave behind as sleeper cells inside the beltway.
The (continuing and morphing) Obama campaign used a huge data mining project to help them win in 2012. One which would not be ended but expanded to serve the forever ongoing campaign. Plus this administration has at every turn destroyed our ability to gain actual real-time actionable intelligence on actual real terrorists.
These intelligence gatherings have more in common with the way TSA searches for terrorists by suspecting everyone because it is institutionally not allowed to profile those who might be threats and so must expend resources, most resources, on those who pose no threat and thus not have enough scrutiny of those who do.
But then perhaps for the ones running things in this administration, terrorist hunting is just a pretext for the hunt for their real enemies, those who oppose them, politically. That being the main threat they have always seen and worked to stomp out.
Given the left’s totalitarian underpinnings, and given that the left only protested Bush for being Bush and not a Utopianist, I’d concluded that the SHEER UNCONSTUTIONALITY of prior administration malfeasance that motivated the left was noise. There was never any there there, just opportunity. A totalitarian government run by The Right People was always the dream, The Right People naturally having no capacity for tyranny. QED.
That being the case, JHo asks how the left has suddenly discovered that in the midst of their now-actualized fantasy, their Jesus is suddenly suspect for delivering just what they wanted.
I don’t join the left in thinking the country is evil for the terrible social injustices wrought by the founding’s SLAVE-RAPING principles. I know it’s evil for violating the real ones as a matter of course.
PS: I agree with your post, Jeff, with one quibble: I think the conservatives and libertarians opposing the security quo are not all of the same stripe. I think that as with posters in this thread, many realize that threat of potential foreign harm has to be held in perspective with the reality of domestic harm committed by the agency sworn to prevent the former and not inflict the latter.
Your view is refreshingly positive and optimistic and I think it needs more airtime: The nation deserves the best, including the best security. It is indeed worth defending.
Our problem is vastly compounded by having to clear seas of internal cancer before we can see about defending a newly-legitimate Constitutional Republic. God help us.
I’ll admit that I was more comfortable when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were focused on, well, foreigners.
I have little problem with the data collections per se, but, if nothing else, this administration has shown via IRS, EPA and other alphabet agencies that targets can be easily shifted from external/terrorist enemies to political enemies in a heart-beat.
And the more both the press and Democrats pooh-pooh the targeting of TEA Party & other conservative groups and the commitment of actual felonies against them as “you deserved rape because of your short skirt” rationale, then more problematic I find the data collection.
This does NOT give me a warm fuzzy
Richard Fernandez spells out the problem with PRISM:
“For those who don’t know what this means, it means that the administration is able to draw a graph (like a network chart) of who is talking to whom. It is able to say what are the key nodes through which any business passes, find all its Internet ‘friends’ and interlocutors and potentially drill down into the comms themselves — in time series.
…
The fact that you belong to a large group, for example the 50% of the US population that is conservative or Republican, does not give you safety in numbers. Within this large group of millions are a much smaller number of key leadership nodes. They are the nodes that matter, the top of the hierarchy mandated by Dunbar’s Number.
If you can control, corrupt or even bait those nodes you can reduce the entire group to impotence. You can effectively decapitate it, a strategy applied not only to al-Qaeda but apparently also by the IRS in its hunt of Tea Party and Republican fundraising groups. The virtual world let’s you dominate the virtual high ground. You don’t have to clobber all Muslims and Republicans. You just have to clobber the key nodes and the rest will mill around like leaderless ants.
What the IRS and AP wiretapping scandals demonstrated was the administration’s intent in action. They want to clobber key nodes. What the FBI/NSA data mining operations show is capability. They can clobber key nodes. The Obama administration has demonstrated the intent to pick apart affinity groups with IRS. The Verizon and PRISM stories show how they have potentially been doing it.”
http://tinyurl.com/lr5bvzf
Indeed they are.
But remember, Conservatives and TEA Party types are most definitely “Foreign” to this administration…
I too thought, once, that it was possible to trust the politicians who run the government to obey the law and observe the safeguards therein.
That was back when I had some confidence in congressional jealousy for its own powers and prerogatives, and in Republican opposition to the Democrat agenda. Both have proven exactly as real as the Unicorn Prince’s respect for the Constitution and for the people of this country.
(Of course, even then I opposed the creation of even the White House Office of Homeland Security as an unnecessary additional focus of power and petty empire-building…)
That it is possible to bring things to this point proves to my satisfaction that it is the power that is at fault, not the particular men wielding it. So long as the power is there, the draw will be too great; fallible men will convince themselves and others that they alone can use it for good, only to follow this same path.
If we learn anything from this, it must be that you cannot use the One Ring against Sauron.
This country is at war with liberty. Liberty is losing. The goverment is interested in a war on terror only insofar as it allows them gain control over the people. We didn’t invade Canada in WWII. We kicked the shit out of Germans and Japanese. When they were good and beat we helped them rebuild and now we’re best buddies. We should be kicking the shit out of Islam untill its good and beat then help it become a prodective member of the planet with all the other religions who seem able to refrain from frequent mass killings. Instead we invade Canada because identifying the enemy is just too fucking racist. Progressives have destroyed our ability or will to even identify what it is we are at war with.
In fact, had such a program been in place prior to the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s possible that atrocity may have been prevented.
But it was there. They began collecting this kind of data right after 9/11/2001.
Remember that we’re talking about two different things, here: the metadata that the fed demands from the telecoms, and PRISM, which is full-on content. The Verizon story is not PRISM.
So long as there are legal safeguards in place to prevent the usage of data collection from moving beyond the kind of matrix-hunting that the NSA is doing with metadata, I don’t feel – and haven’t since back when Bush was under assault for similar programs; sorry, but I just don’t — that these programs are scandalous.
But they already HAVE gone beyond metadata. They already HAVE your phone conversations: the CONTENT. It’s being warehoused just a couple of miles from where I’m sitting.
The software that they use to analyze the metadata ALSO permits them to extract the content of your phone call with a couple-three more mouse clicks. It’s so easy to do that there’s no reason for them not to. Just as teens don’t recognize that sharing MP3s on a peer-to-peer network is theft — because it doesn’t FEEL like theft — the reconstruction of your FaceBook posts and phone calls is similarly so easy that even honest people would be hard-pressed to resist the temptation.
You’re basing your opinion on the assumption that all they’re doing is analyzing the metadata (which is not protected by the 4th amendment). But your assumption is false. They’re doing WAY more than that and they have been for several years. Including prior to Obama. Whistle-blowers at the NSA have quit their jobs over the overreach. (Binney, Drake)
You’re assuming that the barn door has an adequate lock, so why worry, when in fact the barn door is wide open and the horse escaped YEARS ago.
we know these fascist government piggy fags can’t be trusted not to abuse their uber-fascist snooping powers
we know that
To make you even more warm and fuzzy, here’s an article from Bruce Schneier about how easy it is to crack passwords, even passwords like:
momnof3gr8kids
k1araj0hns0n
Sh1a-labe0uf
Apr!l221973
Qbesancon321
DG091101%
@Yourmom69
ilovetofunot
windermere2313
tmdmmj17
BandGeek2014
all of the lights
i hate hackers
allineedislove
ilovemySister31
iloveyousomuch
Philippians4:13
Philippians4:6-7
qeadzcwrsfxv1331
I’m almost exclusively using a password vault and generating random character strings of at least 16 characters (all types) for every different login. Call me paranoid…
I would just generate a random 128-bit binary number and convert it to ASCII.
Oh. Some combinations can’t be done with keystrokes. I’m sure I’ll come up with something to get around that.
Can I take it that we’re now living Abott and Costello meet Jason Bourne
—in Brazil?
Mark Levin: ‘We have the elements of a police state’ [VIDEO]
I’d like to remind everyone that every single act that breaches the 4th amendment ALSO makes law-enforcement and security easier.
Every. Single. One.
If Jack Bauer and his trusty sidekick Chloe were the ones analyzing the telephony metadata, I’d have no worries.
But the Chicago Gang and the Establicans are analyzing the metadata AND going way, way beyond the limits of the Patriot Act.
When I’m presented with new information, I reevaluate my opinion. What do you do?
There was his crazy, moralizing, Anglo-Catholic of English-German extraction who had something pithy to say about power, I believe.
But he had this good book, you see, so he’s unworthy of admission to the pantheon of classical liberals.
I’m almost exclusively using a password vault and generating random character strings of at least 16 characters (all types) for every different login. Call me paranoid…
Everyone who knows Internet security does that.
Also, the XKCD cartoon on password strength is pretty illustrative.
Can I remind people that I work in the Big Data Analytics and Network Security industry? Can I get a little credibility from that?
So it isn’t so much the metadata collection that is problematic here. It’s that the left was once adamantly against such metadata collection, assuring us that the data mining was a civil liberties violation.
Reading back on this thread, I see that it’s not just the metadata analysis that had the Left apoplectic but the presumption that content was being scrutinized.
We scoffed at their politically motivated paranoia — not because it was political but because we believed that it wasn’t happening. Had we known about PRISM then, would we have been so sanguine about the data collection? Would we have said, “OK, you can look for terrorist networks using telephony metadata, but hands off our Facebook posts and VoIP content?”
Or were we so damned sick and tired of the Left attacking EVERYTHING having to do with combating jihad that we didn’t think this through?
link
The nature of the NSA program, if we can believe Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
He’s talking about the Verizon leak, which in fact does not authorize content.
But when they asked Holder if the content of congressional phone calls were being monitored, he declined to say No.
Don’t let them argue for the legitimacy of metadata analysis when behind the curtain they’re glutting themselves on content.
Well, at least we now understand (not that we didn’t already) why the institutional Left is so damned determined to link the political right with domestic terrorism.
/gallows humor
I’d be much more worried either about speculation that TLS/SSL is either easily crackable by TLAs, or (much more likely) that the major CA signing keys are already in their possession, making man-in-the-middle teardown/inspect/assembly that much easier.
One does not simply walk into D.C.
And for those who don’t work in the biz, you’d be surprised what a commonly-available layer-7 inspection/firewall device (such as, say, Palo Alto, Naurus, Netronome etc.) can pull out of network traffic.
And that’s not even discussing what can be done if you build up custom hardware, or even fab out your own silicon if needed…
I’d be much more worried either about speculation that TLS/SSL is either easily crackable by TLAs
Like eCurmudgeon said, Netronome can decrypt your SSL traffic, and other products can extract VoIP and IMs and stuff with the greatest of ease. The network security field has given up on the idea that you can block most breaches and they’re now into forensics: figuring out how it happened. Which means recording and analyzing every byte that crosses the wire.
Your stuff is ALREADY WAREHOUSED by the gubmint, and it takes only a few mouse-clicks to display your entire life. No doubt this is how they got to John Roberts. They may even have planted some kiddy-porn searches in his record for good measure.
The only way to avoid being electronically monitored is to unplug it all.
When the IRS scandal first happened, I thought all the extra paperwork was basically just make work to slow and discourage the applicants. Dumb stuff like “what is the content of your prayers”… stuff like that.
Now I’m pretty much convinced they were building a data base of words and phrases used by TEA party types (I’m sure they have many other categorizations as well) to distinguish and track them once they scooped everyone’s phone (and let’s face it, that includes all internet and GPS info too) records and had a brand new storage place to analyze them.
Orwells 1984 ain’t got noth’in on where we are.
I wish I could believe they needed to get to Roberts that way.
It’s maybe worth pondering whether Orwell’s story had a 1984 inside it in the sense in which ours does though.
The really scary thing is I can’t tell if you’re joking around, being sarcastic, or are in dead earnest seriousness.
The knives still out for Dave Petraeus regarding the Benghazi story do tend to give one pause as to what exactly is going on viz the looney-leftists’ use of his sins, particularly in light of his relative silence on the matter (the Libya matter, the Nakoula film matter, etc.).
DarthLevin says June 7, 2013 at 10:48 am
This link kinda bugs me. If a hacker gains unrestricted access to a password hash, the game is pretty much over, anyway. Modern computers are just too fast with guesses. The purpose of passwords is to prevent access for a reasonable number of guess attempts, after which the account disables, and even a correct entry will not gain access until the account is restored.
Pretty much any password of 8 characters or more will stop any 3 to 10 guess-before-lockout access attempt, and 16 characters should be overkill for at least 50 guesses-before-lockout (which is more guesses than most places give).
I don’t claim to be any kind of expert, I’ve just grown up around computers.
If only they (the Guv) used their genius for good instead of evil. It never works out that way, though.
By all lights, the terrorist cells should have all been busted years ago and all incoming terrorist tagged and watched like hawks and in turn, busted if they made any squeaks or purchases of bomb making materials. But, BOOM went the Boston Marathon putting the lie to the “We’ve got an eye on all the bad guys” scenario.
Unless, we’re the bad guys. I suspect the latter to be the case as far as Holder, et al are concerned.
link
Scribe of Slog (McGehee) says June 7, 2013 at 1:07 pm
I wish I could believe they needed to get to Roberts that way.
This.
DC is full of unprincipled phonies. You don’t need to get any more complicated than that.
NSA Eavesdropped on People Whom They Had Personal Grudges (Audio)
Soldier Told Not to Read Levin, Limbaugh or Hannity in Uniform
Soldier Told Not to Read Levin, Limbaugh or Hannity in Uniform
Heh, that’s just the flip-side of the data collection coin: the No-data collection principle.
DHS insider: It’s about to get very ugly
Stephen Colbert: ‘Obama Is a Tyrannical Despot Who Ignores All the Rules’
So we will have an evil humans variation on Varley’s “Press Enter” world.
The really scary thing is I can’t tell if you’re joking around, being sarcastic, or are in dead earnest seriousness.
The kiddy-porn thing I made up on the spot. I was trying to think of something they could get you on that was more devastating than merely hooking up with a tranny hobo.
The warehousing thing is dead serious.
The point is to intimidate the opposition into unplugging so there won’t be any adverse preference cascades.
I say fuck ’em. If my stating my opinions bothers them, good.
Here’s Megyn Kelly talking to the whistleblowers, who had devised a system that would have protected our rights AND helped catch the bad guys.
They said that the NSA chose to “go to the dark side” not because they had no other way to catch the terrorists, but because they wanted to.
“I say fuck ‘em. If my stating my opinions bothers them, good.”
Hear, hear! My thoughts exactly.
Oh, I’ve got nothing to hide from them, and anyone who wants to “out” me as an enemy of the O-ministration would be doing me an honor.
However.
Data is extremely easy to fake, especially when only a few people have access to the original files. Gubmint says you’re a pedophile and have your activity on those networks to prove it. How you gonna prove otherwise?
Secession Plan Floated By Some Northern Colorado Leaders
From newrouter’s “Seven Days in May” (coming to you soon!) link above:
People like you,perhaps, Mr. NSA Insider?
Or are you as phony as the other fellow’s White House Insider?
I’m skeptical of the leaker in the Canuck’s article, too. If they can’t produce anything more specific than a Glenn Beck monologue, there’s not much worth to it.
Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks
Maybe it sounds like a Beck monologue because the aim is to provoke a Beck listener into doing something rash.
Mystery deepens: Are tech behemoths participating in PRISM voluntarily?
Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance
America in the Midst of a Coup d’Etat
Who In the UK Had Access To PRISM Intel?
And what are their political affiliations?
From newrouter’s Rush link:
The story is that practically every major tech group and company in this country is participating with the government in allowing the government access to their servers.
E-mails, texts, phone calls, photographs. Virtually any communication that’s taking place via the Apple servers, the Microsoft servers, the Google servers, the NSA is able to look at in real time. This is the story now. The guy that went to the Washington Post said, “It was so scary. They can watch us as we type.”
Also, consider the “cloud” technology. pretty much everything anyone has ever done on their computer, phone, kindle, whatever is stored in a cloud.
Let that sink in…
it is called “the purge” billy ayers might like it
Is This New Horror Flick an ‘Obvious Attack’ on Tea Party, NRA?
Humm, what happened to my blockquote? Well, it was supposed to be the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, so pretend…
ummm, nnno. No, it does not sound like a good storyline.
Unless you’re a dumbass of course.
Well, they say the government can control the weather, don’t they?
Jupiter’s Jodhpurs, David Corn is making sense.
That’s the opening of the seventh seal, isn’t it? Busted wide open and everything.
Look: they don’t NEED to access Google’s servers to get the info; they just need to tap into the fibre-optic trunks.
Which, it’s still like trying to drink out of a fire hydrant, but capture speeds are catching up. Tapping in to the clouds and server farms is merely easier than capturing it off the wire, because then it’s already in a database format.
for the laughs
Obama 2009: “We Reject the False Choice Between Our Security and Our Ideals” (Video)
I hate to interrupt NSA-gate, but we’ve been fed lies about IRS-gate
Jeff, I think you are “node” status and many of your followers are at least nodettes in the grand scheme of things. I aspire to such heights/depths.
Tea Party Groups May Be Too Political For IRS Comfort, But Here’s How OFA Defines Itself
Look. I get that the government has a big ol’ building presumably full of hard drives, and can record and store traffic or whatever.
What I don’t get it what sort of monster database could contain continuously updating records on 300 million people in real time and still be queried to yield actual usable information on time scales shorter than geologic.
I would also assert that with the huge flow of net traffic pouring in, it would be a very difficult target to defend. You’d need an army of packet capture experts just to keep the place from being compromised.
Check out the new NSA facility in Utah.
That’s the storage piece. Now what can they actually do with it?
who watches the watchmen cont.
Google bans Glass from its own shareholder meeting
That’s because his security is his ideal.
” Now what can they actually do with it?”
not much because they’re in league with the islamofacists
Obama in Palo Alto: Fundraising with the rich radicals – zombie
What I don’t get it what sort of monster database could contain continuously updating records on 300 million people in real time and still be queried to yield actual usable information on time scales shorter than geologic.
Oh dear. Let’s see if I can explain this without losing my job. (I’m at home now, so only the NSA can read this.)
The Big Data Analysis field is expanding exponentially in terms of its ability to sort through enormous amounts of information, especially metadata. The larger reports can be produced in a matter of hours.
I would also assert that with the huge flow of net traffic pouring in, it would be a very difficult target to defend. You’d need an army of packet capture experts just to keep the place from being compromised.
They use a splitter, which sends a copy of all of the traffic to the capture interfaces, none of which has a TCP/IP stack on it, so you can’t even ping them. Once that data passes through the splitter to the capture interfaces, it’s essentially isolated from the network. They store the captured packets on servers that cannot be accessed except by the analysis machine, which is on-site, and the reports generated by the analyzer would be physically moved off the analyzer to a device that can transport the report elsewhere.
They HAVE the technology, trust me. Whatever limitations they have are legal and moral only.
Why the hell do I feel like I was just pulled into an A-ha video, and instead of finding myself in a frickin’ comic book, I’m in the middle of an episode of Person of Interest.
You guys, I just watched the Glenn Beck documentary on the NSA whistleblowers, and it’s chilling.
This is what I learned:
Prior to 11 Sep 2001, there were two security programs under development, and I mean “programs” both in the sense of “software application” and “organizational effort.”
One was code-named TrailBlazer and the other was called ThinThread.
ThinThread was developed mostly by nerds, and so it was focused on technical precision. Furthermore, ThinThread had provisions to genuinely mask personal information of innocents and American citizens. It did not involve massive data storage and analysis.
If ThinThread had been deployed prior to 9/11, they could have prevented the attacks.
TrailBlazer, however, was politically favored by the NSA, because it was pretty much a money hole: it took tons of people to maintain and develop, and so it was better suited for keeping the post-9/11 gravy pouring in. The contractors who were invested in TrailBlazer were powerful enough to make sure TrailBlazer was deployed instead of ThinThread.
The whistle-blowers emphasize that one of the primary reasons that TrailBlazer was favored is that it provided for the massive warehousing of data on Americans: essentially the entire Internet. (The Bluffdale center has the capacity to store 10 years worth of Internet data in that facility. Oh yes, hardware storage is THAT advanced.) Politicians wanted (and still want) the luxury of being able to go in and use that data whenever they wanted. ThinThread would not have permitted them to do it.
The NSA whistleblowers began their objections during the Bush administration. They were not contributors to the NY Times article of 2005 that exposed the “warrantless wiretapping,” but they were definitely suspected of the leaks and were raided by the FBI and put through hell anyway.
The documentary did not specify what the warrantless wiretapping was, from a technology perspective. I can’t tell if it is the metadata collection from telecoms or something else.
Anyway, the term “StellarWind” is used to describe the program that involves the NSA data center in Utah.
Jeff, Andrew McCarthy, Hugh Hewitt, and Jack Yoo are basing their opinions not on StellarWind or PRISM or TrailBlazer but on the idea that Jack Bauer and Chloe are sorting through telephony metadata to find terrorist cell activity, and that it doesn’t go any farther than that.
However, the whistleblowers are asserting that it goes WAY farther than that, and that the NSA is not exercising any restraint whatsoever with the data collection.
I don’t care that the Left was shrieking bloody murder about something that actually was wrong — their motives are so venal and horrid that even when they’re right, they’re wrong.
I also don’t care that we were dismissive about the “warrantless wiretapping” back in the day. We had incomplete information and were working off incorrect assumptions about what the gubmint was up to. We were also banking on the fact that Bush Derangement Syndrome was a sure-fire indicator that Bush was doing something right.
There’s no need to insist on “consistency” when new facts come to light. And there’s definitely no need to believe that the NSA under Bush was always acting in good faith.
It appears that they weren’t. It appears that they decided early on to favor data warehousing and to stick the 4th Amendment where the sun don’t shine.
Well, Di, if you do lose your job, at least you’ll know that the NSA was reading this.
Other technological capabilities of the NSA data-analysis system:
Create a query (e.g., IP address, subject-line keyword, e-mail recipient or sender [including CC and BCC fields], phone number, geographic location, filename, MD5 hash) such that any traffic that matches the query is shunted off to a separate directory.
Instant dossier.
at least you’ll know that the NSA was reading this.
I’ll feel SO important!
I’m in the middle of an episode of Person of Interest.
Poor baby. You thought that was a work of fiction.
How the hell does Glen Beck have a documentary on the NSA whistleblowers up so damn fast if this story is just breaking?
Or am I operating under false assumptions here?
Next you’ll be telling me that the Bourne Ultimatum was a documentary.
Say the wrong word, and you’ll be dead inside of six hours.
They’ve been blowing the whistle for a long time, so Beck started work on the documentary quite a while ago.
Glenn has been interviewing these guys for at least a year: here a little, there a little. It wasn’t until someone leaked the thing about Verizon and PRISM that it went mainstream.
So, felicitous timing for him, although he’s known for changing direction on a dime: “OMG! Everyone drop what you’re doing and write a WHOLE NEW BOOK on gun control!”
Yup, that’s what he does.
Oh, and Rand Paul is in the documentary, too, saying what you’d expect him to say.
Oh hey: a timeline on NSA spying.
I don’t know whether to be really impressed or just really scared.
Scared.
You can be impressed when you’re sitting at the controls.
You’re 10:38 kind of points to the problem I’m having with guys like Ulstermann and Hagmann. You don’t really know who to believe any more. I don’t believe them, (too good to check, so…) but Glenn Beck says something similar, so am I supposed to not believe Beck too?
I’m fairly certain it’s deliberate obfuscation.
Or maybe I really am as paranoid as I pretend to be?
Or maybe I’m not paranoid enough.
I don’t believe Ulstermann and Hagmann because it’s obvious to me that they’re just sitting around, spinning yarns. Their narratives read like what conservatives like to imagine is happening behind the scenes, but they never provide any details that you can’t get anywhere else.
When Beck says something, he’s got research behind it: whistle-blowers, copies of documents, footnotes. You can go look it up yourself. Beck provides the dramatic impact, though, because he’s a total drama-queen.
Furthermore, the fake!insiders prolly get their stuff from Beck, while I fully doubt that the reverse is true.
when they’re talking about how they can see the thoughts as they form in your head they must be talking about google instant search type stuff
I wonder where else that shit is
i never been a facebook whore personally
when they’re talking about how they can see the thoughts as they form in your head they must be talking about google instant search type stuff
Not sure what that means, unless they’ve installed keyloggers on all our machines.
As far as I know, this stuff I’m typing in this window is not visible to anyone until I hit “Post Comment.” That is, unless there’s something on my local box that is sending the info back over the wire.
Which, can’t rule it out.
but with google instant search they know what you type as they type it
they use special internet transistor relay demodulators
as *you* type it i mean
as they type it
Heck, that would do just as well, ‘specially for their purposes. And besides, they’re probably better typists than we.
If you haven’t read Jonah’s latest Goldberg File you shoud do so.
Welcome to the Brave New World Order world.
“The Bluffdale center has the capacity to store 10 years worth of Internet data in that facility.”
Skeptical, unless you’re talking about (empty) physical space rather than fresh drives ready to fill up.
According to Cisco, Internet traffic was about 12 TB/second in 2012. 12x3600x24x365x10 = 3,784,320,000 TB.
Consumer-grade hard drives cost about $50/TB the last time I looked. Commercial-grade drives cost several times that, but let’s go with $50.
That gives us about $189 billion for the required drive space, at lower bound. Probably more like $500 billion given server-grade drives and government “efficiency”.
The black budget is big, but not big enough to hide half a trillion without Questions Being Raised, IMO.
Yes, drives are getting cheaper all the time, but the amount of traffic is also growing all the time.
i’m a sucky typist cause of i was gonna take typing in summer school between my junior and senior year of h.s. but the class didn’t make
stupid hicks didn’t want to take typing during summer so now NONE of us can type
I hope they’re happy
“That is, unless there’s something on my local box that is sending the info back over the wire.”
Yeah, pretty easy to do with Ajax. That’s how Google does it, as hf mentions.
they can probably enlist the unused space of about 7 billion under-utilized government PCs in an encrypted and redundant fashion to store at least 10 klerbozytes of data Mr. Spies
10 years of internet traffic would get them to 1% of their supposed design capacity.
I can’t blame a lack of instruction hf, since I got a good summer class between 7th and 8th grades, so I can only blame the discontinuation of use after ’74, not to be renewed in any volume until 2005ish.
SBP says June 7, 2013 at 11:20 pm
Skeptical,
Yeah, I’m having a tough time with it, too.
I would increase your cost estimates for the drive space by a bit. There was flooding in Thailand in late 2011, which affected availability and price of drives for most all of 2012. They have only normalized in the last few months.
I’m guessing that a demand for nearly 4 billion Terabytes of storage would have been really hard to miss in the affected market, also.
I think I should help them fill that up.
(pentagon piggies + trillions of other people’s money = this one subway train what maybe was gonna get blowed up didn’t)
plus – BONUS – the fascist lil pentagon piggies have shit on EVERYBODY and they will fuck you up if you try to lay one finger on their fucking piggy trough
Then again 2.7 billion internet users would themselves be storing by then something along the lines of 5 to 10 thousand yottabytes which would be around 1 million times the storage held in the Bluffdale archives.
Kind of like how DHS buys 1 billion rounds of ammo for a 5 year period. Gun owners buy that much in a slow weekend.
Mr. sdferr it’s not like riding a bike and it’s very much an old dog new tricks thing
I envy people what can type well though
i guess that’s why I overcompensate by typing incredibly erudite and sophisticated stuff, albeit awkwardly and slowly
Sorry that math is wrong. Make that 5 to ten times not 5 to ten thousand.
Playing piano had a certain value to it, I found out. Typing made easier. So there was that.
i had like five years of piano lessons
we really shoulda put that into walmart stock mom
Typing I never had a problem with. But I spent so much time flirting with the blonde sitting next to me in Intro to Computing (or something like that, it was the late 80s) that I flunked the course.
But it was worth it!
I got maybe 8 weeks of lessons when I was 9 or so, from the first Korean lady I’d ever met, name of Laura Faulkenstrom. She made a dandy Korean grilled steak strips on a hibachi. Didn’t like the piano lessons though, so quit. Both my folks played, so that helped, and then I had Howard Brubeck’s perfect transcriptions of Dave’s stuff to teach myself from, and then onward and upward with the arts.
I’m a terrible typist. Maybe 20 words per minute at the very fastest.
Couple that with a brain that doesn’t compose ideas as sentences very quickly, and each post is like a small victory.
you’re an autodidact
there’s almost certainly a special notation in your nsa file to that effect
She made a dandy Korean grilled steak strips on a hibachi.
Ever tried yakiniku? I think it is the Japanese take on Korean grilled meat.
If to piano, closer to a shite-o-didact, but musically, I get along ok.
Ever tried yakiniku?
nope, but it sounds worth chasing after.
Maybe this belongs on the other thread, but proof that there is a God:
I liked it, and used to get it a lot. The place I used to order it changed their menu, and I don’t think they have it anymore.
never hurts to ask
Apropos to Jeff’s original remarks here:
read the whole thing, as they say.
i remember when spies were glamorous and sexy
now they’re mostly fat pasty american piggy fascists in a basement somewheres
matt damon better start hitting the krispy kremes
Spies are only glamorous and sexy in the movies.
Grow the fuck up, will you?
He asked surlily.
I flunked also typing in high school, even though I learned to type with speed and accuracy (the speed is still there, but accuracy has gone to shit since the day I got my first computer).
See, back then, “typing class” was actually more like “training to be a secretary class”, a topic in which I had no interest. I wanted to learn to type to help me write my own stuff, not so I could transcribe the words of others. Being the undisciplined child that I was, I just blew off the boring parts and failed the class.
Glamourous spies: yes, field agents tend to look more like shoe salesmen or accountants than James Bond. Which only makes sense if you think about it.
Grilled meat: it’s amusing to reflect that the so-called “Mongolian barbecue” is actually a Japanese invention. It was renamed as “Mongolian” when introduced into Korea, Japan and all things Japanese being…less than popular… in Korea at the time. Which also makes sense, given that a 5,000 pound cast iron griddle would be somewhat inconsistent with the nomadic lifestyle of the actual Mongolians.
I wasn’t able to comment from the road, but as the context should have made clear, I was dealing here solely with the Verizon 3-month, FISA-approved warrant, that required additional FISA approval to even look at specifics connected to the metadata if that metadata raised flags. The social data sites, the Utah data center, records from ObamaCare, DNA swabs, cars, smart meters, etc., — well, I’m pretty sure (at least I was) that you all know my position on such things.
Though reading through some of the comments here, it turns out I may just be a phony conservative in need of your intervention.
Save me. For liberty.
And now I’m off again.
NSA Whistleblower: Obama Took Down General Petraeus By Using Illegal Surveillance (Video)
When everything is a crime, government data mining matters
When it was still possible to believe anyone in the government could be trusted to observe the explicit limits on what they can do, the need for an additional warrant would have been reassuring.
Sadly, even when it was possible to believe it, it wasn’t actually true. Republicans like Speaker Boehner, Senators McCain and Lyndsey Graham, and Chief Justice Roberts have proven that.
Didn’t like the piano lessons though, so quit. Both my folks played, so that helped, and then I had Howard Brubeck’s perfect transcriptions of Dave’s stuff to teach myself from, and then onward and upward with the arts.
My eldest son was playing backing electric guitar with my youngest son’s pipe band at a concert rehearsal. During a break in the set he started playing “Take Five”; all of a sudden the bass drummer started in, and before you knew it, the weirdest Brubeck was going on.
Heh, or Desmond, to be distributive about it.
Just some low level staffer’s mistakes you see. And so easily corrected by those “betters” in charge who only have your best interests in mind.
Nothing to see, now move along little dogies.
Obazm: “. . . And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing.”
Bizzaro Obazm: ” . . . Modest encroachments I say. As opposed, for instance, to the more generous encroachments we undertake with our tax collection agency — you know, inquiring into the content of your silly prayers, or your reading lists, or into the names
and the tattoo numbers on the forearmsof the children you teach your Constitutional abominations to. These are also, on net (no pun intended), very much worth doing.”Fine.
The mathematician who blew the whistle on the NSA is a liar about site capacity.
Roll over and go back to sleep.
somebody tell beck
Binney, who was with the NSA for almost four decades, said it was “unfortunate” that he had been proven 100 percent correct on the spy agency’s surveillance capability.
Guardian: PRISM “collection directly from the servers”
Inside America’s $1.9billion data mine: How all your private details will soon be stored in this vast NSA nerve center in Utah Valley
“The mathematician who blew the whistle on the NSA is a liar about site capacity.”
It depends on what you mean by “site capacity”.
A huge empty warehouse big enough to hold that many drives? Sure.
That many drives online right now? No friggin’ way.
February 2013: Smoking Gun
Blabbermouth Maxine Waters:
That many drives online right now? No friggin’ way.
They don’t need to be. They just need to be setting it up.
As to my previous, I’m not the first to point out that Slo-Joe Biden has gone walkabout. Anyone asks him about any of the scandals, he’ll probably give the game away.
Also, Maxine Waters might be talking about a database of Democrat donors and activists and such, not this NSA thing.
I find it kinda hard to believe that even an administration as incompetent as this one would make Waters privy to such information. :-)
Maxine Waters might just be making shit up. She’s also sure that the CIA invented crack cocaine and the AIDS was engineered to kill blacks at a secret government laboratory.
Yes, Maxine is probably not in the NSA loop.
She’s just loopy.
What a difference a Y can make.
Well, you need to buy a different cut of pants for one thing.
Steyn: Holder taking US from a ‘respectable society’ to something ‘far more sinister and unattractive’
crap from clapper
Parts of NSA’s PRISM program declassified
Well, you need to buy a different cut of pants for one thing.
lul
Maxine is absolutely right.
Recognizing how useful all that data can be, can you trust the federal government to keep their hands off all of the data they’re collecting unless there’s a potential terror attack involved? You can if you’re an idiot.
saxby cuntstick says the complaint box is empty
can you trust the federal government to keep their hands off all of the data they’re collecting
Nope.
You’ll have better luck putting a few vials of heroine in front of a junkie and asking him not to grab ’em.
not unlike yesterday today is a good day to delete your google youtube doubleclick cookies I think
plus make deviled eggs
Nah, I just buy more ammo. Online.
I was gonna ask how come there didn’t seem to be an explosion of interest in the Santa Monica shooter, but then just now I glanced at Daily Caller and see his last name is Zawahiri, so that kinda tells that tale.
Folks, I think NSA has been listening in to all phone calls since well before 9/11. I predict the president is going to regret saying that no one is listening to our phone calls.
The only thing that has been slowing them down is the sheer volume of the data they are dealing with.
i wonder what this’ll do to the pressure cooker market
sudden jihad syndrome?
kos kids
Americans Are Outraged Because in Voting for Obama, They Thought They Were Rejecting Bush
Maxine Waters was likely talking, and mis-talking, about Obama’s computerized system[s] for his re-election campaign. Narwhal & Dreamcatcher. Not to say that there might have been some exchange of information between them but that has not come to light so it would be just me speculating.
“Boundless Informant” however is not speculation.
This is just disgusting and clearly was being abused root and branch, without Constitutional regard, for years. That Bush put this in place was typical; that Obama expanded it beyond the wildest imaginings of civil libertarians anywhere is delicious. That maybe this is a tipping point that will head back up the social political uptake valve is to be hoped for.
The Jane Mayer piece from the New Yorker is wonderful. I know many here won’t like her but it is good to see a fine reporter lay out what our government–and the men and women who enforce policy–are really like.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer
They are not good people and they do not love America. Let’s hope some headaches come their way.
Folks, I think NSA has been listening in to all phone calls since well before 9/11.
Not sure how they could do THAT prior to 2001. At most, they might have computers scan recordings for keywords, but even that is pretty processor-intensive, and they’d have been wise to limit it to overseas calls to certain nations.
Which, had they been doing that, they might have caught on to 9/11 before it happened.
One thing the NSA whistleblowers say is how devastated they were when 9/11 happened, because the system ThinThread — had its deployment not been obstructed by politics — probably could have prevented 9/11.
Or at least it had the capability to do so, depending on how it’s wielded.
From the New Yorker link, emphases mine:
Lady, whatever Barack Obama praises the highest is the thing he hates the most. Learn to interpret.
IRS employee: Washington showed “unprecedented interest” in Tea Party groups
For today’s chuckle: Google Now has just informed me that Glenn Beck’s The Eye of Moloch will be available June 11th.
Well played, Google, well played.
i’m kinda stupid plus lazy what’s the google thinger?
It’s a phone app on Android devices, nr.
Moloch is big these days.
Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies
If the heart of the NSA vacuuming is ThinThread minus the protections then the folks who originally wrote the code and are now against the bastardization of it should hack and fix the system. Maybe just intercept the communications of NSA officials and send them to a twitter feed.
What’s a little rebellion amongst friends.
merci buttercups
If the heart of the NSA vacuuming is ThinThread minus the protections
I got the impression that ThinThread and TrailBlazer were developed in parallel and therefore aren’t compatible.
It’s not unusual for the gubmint to duplicate efforts, spending bazillions on both systems and then just dumping one, like that.
I’m used to seeing “Molech” rather than “Moloch,” but I reckon they’re the same.
Molech required child sacrifice, didn’t he?
“Moloch is big these days.”
Yeah. Especially when you think about all the aborted babies that get fed into “medical waste” incinerators.
link
Yep.
The one plus side to all of this is that I really, really, really love making jokes about how the Phoenicians are terrible people who deserve a good comeuppance.
The Unions sent busloads full of union minions to protest rallies on private banker’s front lawns, reportedly startling the bejeebus out of their kids and neighbors.
We won’t see ordinary Americans — jealous of their liberties — howling on the front lawns of faceless bureaucrats, to say nothing of the front lawns of government Union leaders.
Surely, however, that doesn’t speak to the Visigoths.
So, where does Carter Hull live?
“Molech required child sacrifice, didn’t he?”
Yes. Burning them alive.
We’re a little more “civilized”, and just give them a “snip”.
Having every nerve below your neck severed at the same time must be one of the most monumentally painful experiences possible.
“So, where does Carter Hull live?”
impeach the bastards. orangeman they be giving you freebies. holder, lerner, hull. do it monday morning and give dingy harry a headache.
no they are evil and wrong
link
Hull wouldn’t be subject to impeachment, but also won’t be available for any procedural removal from his position in any event, if only because he’s getting out while the getting is good. Lerner similarly isn’t subject to impeachment, whereas Holder, though he may be subject to the possibility of impeachment, wears a magic shield which would prevent it.
bh, you’re Roman?
At least a little bit, probably. My people were not known for their navy.
link
Well, one side was known for their navy, the other side not so much. There’s gotta be all kinds of boat people on that other side.
Darn scallywags.
the civil servants can be impeached. in holder’s amerikkka that’s the only way to punish them.
“Lerner similarly isn’t subject to impeachment,”
says who?
seems to my stupid self that congress with the power of the purse, has a fiduciary responsibility to remove those in the executive branch that are violating the law.
Glad it is your time then.
Says me. That isn’t to say I’m not wrong, I could easily be shown otherwise. It’s just to say I’ve not only never heard of such a thing, and I can’t imagine it possible in either of the two Houses now sitting in Congress. Granted, they shouldn’t be doing anything else than cutting spending and repealing bad law, but they won’t be doing any of that any time soon. Instead, they’ll waste their time on a moronic non-comprehensive immigration bill, and who knows what other follies. With whatever spare time they scrape up, they might even get around to interviewing survivors of the Benghazi disaster.
Look at “similarly” in that comment, nr. The sentence before it says what it is similar with.
Impeachment takes someone from their position. If they are not at the position you want to impeach them from then impeachment becomes irrelevant. If someone doesn’t play first base for the Yankees you don’t attempt to remove them from playing first base for the Yankees.
You attempt to prosecute them for illegal activity instead.
“You attempt to prosecute them for illegal activity instead.”
There’s an interesting nuance here, though, in that the Justice Department, which would normally prosecute such cases, appears to have joined the other side.
I’ve always taken impeachment as a remedy for getting rid of people who aren’t simply hired hands. You wouldn’t impeach a guy hired to take out the trash at the Reagan Office Building. You impeach people who are either elected to their positions by the people, or installed by nomination by the Executive concurred to with the advice and consent of the Senate. It’s a hugely time consuming and energy consuming enterprise, not something to be dragged out willy-nilly every time someone has a beef with some idiot in a position of power.
well at irs lois lerner is still around. holder and his staff are still around. over at the epa most that top level staff is still there. over at ag those pigford clowns are still there. if i be speaker i don’t want baracky and slo joe. i want all the political appointees carrying out the orders.
Oh, I agree, sdferr, in general.
But what happens if their superiors refuse to fire them and the Justice Department refuses to prosecute them?
Can Congress act in that case?
I’m not sure the situation has arisen before.
Lois Lerner may find herself testifying or refusing to testify in front of a Grand Jury in the not too distant future. In the meantime, she’ll be collecting her pay, due to the rules constructed to “protect” the civil service work force from political interference and harassment, precisely the tools she chose to use on taxpayers. But there we are.
” You wouldn’t impeach a guy hired to take out the trash at the Reagan Office Building.”
lois lerner was doing baracky’s dirty work @$180,000/yr she ain’t the janitor. the house has the power of the purse. use it or lose it.
“Lois Lerner may find herself testifying or refusing to testify in front of a Grand Jury”
eric holder
Could Obama even be losing Al-Reuters?
They’re running a pic of him in a classic “Heil Hitler” pose along with their most recent NSA piece.
after the scotter libby jam down i ain’t in playing nice mood
But what happens if their superiors refuse to fire them and the Justice Department refuses to prosecute them?
I’m not legal student enough to say with any confidence as to the powers Congress can use to dig down into the treatment of individuals on the Federal pay rolls. In general terms, I think of an unjust and recalcitrant Executive (and we’ve had a few) as mostly subject to the “political” remedy, i.e., to be voted out of office at the first opportunity by any polity that retains even the tiniest modicum of self-respect. But we haven’t had a polity like that in over 65 yrs.
I was under the impression that L. Lerner wasn’t currently in her position/office. That she was in some sort of union dictated “on leave”, “taking time with her family”, “in rehab”, or some such.
If I’m wrong about that particular then I think I’m wrong in the whole as well.
impeaching some folks is the best way to take the gang of 8s crap off the table
“I was under the impression that L. Lerner wasn’t currently in her position/office. ”
a leave of absence means you still have your job. ask the maternity leave gals. or the reserve military folks. hound these peeps out of barack’y gov’t
I understood Lerner to be on forced leave with pay (though that may not be the precise term), but not subject to removal “at will” of the Commissioner or whatever the head of the IRS is called. That there is a procedure to remover her, I’ve little doubt. That the procedure is ridiculously complex and painfully drawn out, I’ve also little doubt. I think the usual alternative is either promotion into a position which is deemed to be structurally “out of the way”, or movement sideways into a new position which is undesirable or filled with morons no one in their right mind wants to work with. Kinda like a human rubber room effect.
“I understood Lerner to be on forced leave with pay”
she is an officer of the us impeach her. she is most likely a political appointee. hound her out of office.
you could impeach all of baracky’s political appointees. alot easier than impeaching baracky. gives dingy harry sumthing to do.
she is an officer of the us impeach her. she is most likely a political appointee.
First, I don’t think she’s an officer in the sense in which the Constitution intends it. And second, I’m fairly certain she is not a political appointee, but just a politically motivated top o’ the heap civil service worker. Who violates a passel of laws before breakfast.
“First, I don’t think she’s an officer in the sense in which the Constitution intends it.”
well the present gov’t is surely not what the Constitution intend? go big or go home.
Cincinnati IRS staffer: D.C. showed interest in Tea Party cases
Is there some source material I might look to when it comes to the category of “civil officers” in this respect?
There’s a goodly chance I’ve been a bit loose with my thinking here.
newrouter, it’s peculiar to me that a fellow like yourself who seems to love the Constitution is yet so cavalier with regard to it, to say nothing of your view of what government must do now — which, were it doing what it should be doing couldn’t possibly attend to the demands you make on it here. I mean, in a rational sense couldn’t do what you demand, that is.
Heck, the Congress sitting can’t seem to organize itself to conduct sensible and efficient hearings of information, let alone build cases against lowly trolls in the civil service. (And this is to say nothing about their discovering a proper motivation for action.) They’re so incompetent it’s obscene.
But what would a competent and proper Congress look like? We haven’t had such a thing in over a couple of decades, or longer. In that sense, I guess it oughtn’t to surprise that we find difficulty imagining what such a thing would look like.
I don’t have a source at my memory’s finger-tips bh, but I’d look to the Federalist first, and Madison’s Notes second. Lawyers would look elsewhere, at cases, but I’ve no idea what that would be.
Possibly Hamilton’s 76th? Officers are those appointed by the Executive?
I’ve been doing a crawl search on “impeachment” one by one starting with #48, and have a hit at 62, 64, 65 (jackpot) and moving on from there
Here’s a sweep search result.
impeachment is too merciful
i think the executive portion is filled with civil officials. i think impeach them and let the executive (and their counterparts in the senate) make their arguments about whether or not these folks are “civil officials”. yes let us debate the constitution at the highest levels. yo orangeman?
Notice the debility at impeachment the Senate has been placed into by the 17th Amendment, when we consider Hamilton’s description of the rightness of the placement of judgment at trial in the hands of the Senate. The condition he describes no longer obtains!
Fed. 65 *** Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers? ***
The Senators, he thought, could be impartial (or have an appearance of impartiality, at least) because they were not elected directly by the people, whose interests enter into the outcome of the trial, but quite indirectly by their State representatives, setting the Senator’s own fortunes apart from that influence the people would come to hold sway by direct election under the 17th. God what a mess.
As I read 84, I’d have a hard time not including L. Lerner under that usage.
65 seems to be more about should or should not while the question of can or can not might well be far a simpler thing. To ask Mr. Hamilton a question, in a crazy future when bureaucrats might hold extreme power perhaps they then become the chicken we want the monkey to observe?
One of these days I’m going to go back and study in detail just how the 17th Amendment got passed.
Some half-assed appeal to “democracy”, no doubt.
16th, 17th, 18th… worst run of amendments ever.
“by direct election under the 17th. ”
in this particular query the “federalists” have been proggtarded. orangeguy should do it to start the process of redefining lines of authority. but no breath holding pleases
In 65 he speaks of “Is it not designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men?”
But I don’t understand Lois Lerner to fit that description. She’s a private individual employed by the government. She doesn’t stand for election (a “public” man), nor depend on anyone elected for her position of trust (an appointee of a public man). She serves from administration to administration without regard for the political judgments of the polity.
I hain’t read 84 yet though.
see my prob with orangeman is that he can’t see a good “reality tv” show if it hit him in a tanning bed
” She’s a private individual employed by the government.”
really? like when she as fec gov’t employee said:
Lois Lerner to 1996 U.S. Senate Candidate Al Salvi: “We’ll get you!”
congress should be able to impeach anyone in the executive branch, otherwise your at the mercy of a holder ag.
I’m starting in terms of can or can not. In 84 we’re using “officer” almost interchangeably with employee.
That’s where I’d pivot to the difference between a bureaucrat in that age versus our own to address the notion of should.
Would Hamilton recognize a bureaucrat of our age? Pepys surely would. Hamilton? I don’t know.
” She’s a private individual employed by the government.”
Yes, really. There were good reasons the Hatch Act was written, for there are many such private individuals working for the government who could nevertheless act out of their own political interests in conflict with or to the detriment of the people of the whole United States they are supposed to be serving. And this, in the general sense (not to say regarding the Hatch Act itself, but as to its intended tenor) it seems to me, is what she has done, willfully and knowingly.
“That’s where I’d pivot to the difference between a bureaucrat in that age versus our own to address the notion of should.”
lois ain’t a bureaucrat. she’s a faction hack put in place in various demonrat administrations to do political work. the demonrats effectively “impeached” scooter libby
Is this possibly hinging on the use of “officers” in some equivocal sense in various places? That’s to say, on an inconsistent use of the term, here one way, there another?
”
sdferr says June 8, 2013 at 11:16 pm ”
the bird is upside down and you make 0 sense
officers are peeps who have gov’t jobs
“Would Hamilton recognize a bureaucrat of our age?”
Jefferson would. “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”
I’m making an argument that more than a few of our current bureaucrats share many of the same characteristics that caused us to implement our rather genteel options that stop far short of violent death, nr.
That’s the basic Hobbesian argument for these sorts of bloodless sanctions. That there are bloody sanctions for these sorts of offenses we can take if everyone understands what the basic deal is. We should all understand this basic dynamic. Thus, the underlying argument for the one (politicians) is the same for this other thing (bureaucrats who only exist through patronage or a one-sided surrender).
the demonrats not only “impeached” scooter they hurt him. my little proposal just turns the spotlight on the roaches. i’ll let someone else step on them.
Certainly. I have no great certainty in my reading here.
otherwise you’re at the mercy of a Holder AG.
How are we at the mercy of a Holder AG when he is subject to impeachment? Of course, disregarding his magic shield for the moment.
so that brings us back to the nsa and what they know about orangeman or his Jamaican son in law or mcconnel or cantor or tommey?
” Of course, disregarding his magic shield for the moment.”
ask baracky’s val gal. oh fu nsa
“How are we at the mercy of a Holder AG when he is subject to impeachment?”
i’m trying to use what ever powers are left in our moribund constitution to regain its strength. it ain’t over til its over. it maybe over!
To view the matter in the simplest terms of “can this government employee be impeached?”, I’m fairly sure that the Constitution is remarkably indistinct on the question. It just isn’t clear right off the get go.
It seems as though the exact parameters could easily have been spelled out, but weren’t.
Then we probably start to ask ourselves, “why is that?” Why wouldn’t more care have been taken, more exactitude given? Was there a good reason to keep the matter indistinct? Or was it more a case that the men there thought the thing so obvious it simply didn’t warrant the effort? That is, they well understood how politically fraught any such charges would become (they say as much), and therefore may have believed that the more frequent use of the tool was to be found as much in its mere threatening presence as in the act of use itself.
i’m trying to use what ever powers are left in our moribund constitution to regain its strength.
It may be more useful, more effective, to study the thing than to mull fantastic flights of reassertion of powers hardly used in the first instance. I mean, there haven’t been that many impeachments undertaken, even in a time when the members of Congress had a semblance of respect for the document.
” Why wouldn’t more care have been taken, more exactitude given? ”
seems to me in you don’t know what the future holds you leave some doors ajar.
” I mean, there haven’t been that many impeachments undertaken, even in a time when the members of Congress had a semblance of respect for the document.”
and an executive who finds the document quite negative? dude use what you got against the chitown gangbangers.
In general terms, I think of an unjust and recalcitrant Executive (and we’ve had a few) as mostly subject to the “political” remedy, i.e., to be voted out of office
Velociman, he knows.
and could you fix your bird?
They’re so incompetent it’s obscene.
Incompetent or implicated?
All those words look alike to me.
The President cannot pardon anyone impeached.
What is it about impeachment which puts those convicted beyond a power which could be used in the case of a common, if heinous, criminal?
It’s political, is what. But what is political?
It’s public, the res publica, belonging to everyone, going directly to the order — the organization — of everything to be commonly organized.
But the private isn’t commonly organized, or legislated upon. One guy masterbates with his left hand, another with his right.
This too points to the civil society — the private society — as over against the political society. Such was the meaning of the liberal society.
“I mean, there haven’t been that many impeachments undertaken”
haven’t had many proggtards going for the gold in the past
My bird is fixed. In distress. Win tomorrow, flip about.
Let’s look at that in terms of the IRS office in the middle of one of the current scandals, sdferr.
If something is political (in that sense) and it is commonly organized then why put it in another category?
This is that bad thing that deserves the sanction.
“It’s public, the res publica, belonging to everyone”
given we rely on the effin’ ENGLISH PRESS to tell us what the ef is happening in this country, a little “reality tv” from orangeman , THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, might be soothing.
when lois lerner can move easily between the fec and irs she ain’t trash person at some podunck place. she’s a political tool that bushes refused to remove. like portman and schulman from o hi o
For what it’s worth I think that our framing this discussion within the context of impeachment rather than criminal charges has tilted it all a bit and made it a bit harder to get on the same page.
why put it in another category?
Why put the status of the individual into a “private employed” sphere than in a “publicly elected [or appointed]” sphere? It’s a good question.
And the distinction, such as it is, seems to me to be whether the individual stands to public election (politically) or merely takes a job open to anyone without regard to a public judgment on their character.
That latter position, however, would seem to me to be necessarily terminable at the discretion of the immediate superior (i.e. the douche just gets fired for being a crappy worker or breach of agreement, as per the private workforce), but here the complexities described by the reforms Velociman cites took hold, reinserting politically motivated action into the picture.
And the further reforms embodied in the Hatch Act type measures. The trade-off, I take it, was apolitical job performance for protection from politically motivated job terminations or harassment, persecution or whatever. But here we’ve a breach of the quid pro quo.
It’s political, in the sense it’s politically motivated bad behavior. But it’s a simple terminable offense, in the sense that its a simple breach of contract type deal.
I think it’s in your second paragraph that we find our disagreement here, sdferr.
My bold. I think that Obama appoints Obama types. Obama won. He appointed his ilk. This is the way of things.
That’s one way of looking at this, of course.
The other is that as the bureaucracy has created it’s own administrative law (that’s a thing now!) they’ve obliterated these lines we’re now discussing. When the EPA can issue rulings, then this argument itself loses it’s footing.
My view for all of this.
I think that Obama appoints Obama types. Obama won. He appointed his ilk.
These, of course I take it, we agree about, at least with regard to whether their conduct may constitute an impeachable offense. It may.
If on the other hand, the newly and possibly un-contemplated bureaucracy makes law (outside the reach of the lawmakers themselves, i.e. Congress) then we’ve a situation the Constitution wouldn’t countenance, and would force the people themselves to remedy, through the elections they alone decide. Or so goes the theory.
This, it seems to me, is well beyond (above!) the secondary question whether the Constitution contemplates the impeachment of janitors [in principle], as functionaries or ‘officers’ of the peoples’ government.
Impeachment was the wrong frame, I agree.
It did serve to usher in a bit of forthright discussion though. That’s not such a bad thing all in all.
I notice that I have, without thought — or carelessly — been using the term “political” where most likely “partisan” would have done better to describe the behavior in question, thus inserting an equivocation of my own into the problem, and probably exacerbating it. But in some respects, the mental substitution wouldn’t be too hard to make.
Of course, I do still maintain that folks like L. Lerner aren’t really janitors. They’re the people who make this all happen. Specifically. Concretely.
Yes, it’s true she’s not a janitor. But in terms of the principle, where is the line drawn? That is, if some second tier member of the hierarchy is impeachable, then what of the third tier schlub committing the same sort of wrongdoing? And so on all the way down into the basement, where the janitor is busy persecuting bozos upstairs by hook or by crook, who he happens to believe incline toward his opponent political party because they’re reading a certain book or other?
Only a silly person ends a thread with a slightly argumentative comment like that. As I’m that silly person, please enjoy a bit of the ol’ BB instead with my apologies.
Good deal. You’re still around. (The slightly argumentative comment was my own. I just got stuck listening to the song.)
Here’s a page collecting at least some (possibly all) of the debates at the Convention showing up in Madison’s Notes. I can’t say, and can’t tell whether this collection is exhaustive. But on the hope that something is better than nothing, let’s go with it for now.
a youthful Schönberg backatcha.
Good discussion of the “can” as it applies to impeachment.
As for the “will” in any punishment for those such as Lerner…
There are only four people who are important in this. The Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Attorney General of the US and the President.
Impeachment is an indictment and the Speaker is for this like a prosecutor. If he wants someone impeached they will be, if he doesn’t, they won’t. Ham sandwiches included.
After impeachment the Senate holds a “trial.” The Chief Justice is technically the judge but the Majority Leader is the de facto one. He will determine the rules of evidence, what and how any of it may be presented and by being the leader of the majority will decide what the verdict will be.
To bring criminal charges against any of those government employees will have to be done with the approval of the Attorney General. If he opposes charges then they won’t happen. Plus there is the pardon power of the President. All can be forgiven and made un-chargeable, un-punishable, even crimes that have not been discovered yet.
All the Progressive Democrats have to do is never break ranks. The worst that can happen is that they might be voted out of office and fall into some cushy no-show no-work “job” paid for by all those billionaire friends and their foundations, 501(3)/(4)s, academia and the like.
Getting to the bottom of the whole mess they are. Tightly focused on the most important aspect. Who leaked, supposedly without their permission.
meghan’s sniveling coward daddy is exploiting the boston bombing to smear Rand Paul by lying about what Mr. Senator Paul had said about terrorisms
#theydidsomethingtohisbrain
You left off the 19th.
Well, they don’t have to worry about finding the leaker. He’s introduced himself.
I’ve been all for repealing the 19th for a number of years now.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.
Okie-dokie. But what about Mumia Abu Jamal?
Fry Mumia, of course.
I still fail to see how Manning blew any whistles. Fry him too.
Yeesh, my superstition devils are itching away at me just now on account of that bird-flip (I flip the bird and the Rays tack another run on the board). Eh, sobeit, we’re out of the inning.
“You left off the 19th.”
Not gonna go there. There’s already enough yelling in this thread. :-)
That Was Quick… NSA Whistleblower Already Has a Facebook Support Page
Arrrgh, shutup f’in devils, dammit — but they won’t shutup, they just keep whispering “Brian Matusz” for some reason, and “J.J. blows another save”, the bastards.
They ARE the Debbil Rays, sdferr. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
*** Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary. ***
*** Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”
He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.***
Took awhile to get to, but then, on the one hand the authors needn’t necessarily understand what it is they’re about, or on the other, equally possibly think we needn’t understand what they think they’re about (if they do happen to have marginally hidden partisan political intentions).
Glenn Beck
Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden
shocking
It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.
thank you Mr. Snowden
It’s a Sunday jokefest: *** Russia said Friday that the UN peacekeeping force in the Golan Heights is in “dire straits” and called on the United Nations to rethink a rejection of President Vladimir Putin’s offer to send Russian troops there.
Putin said Russian troops could replace 377 soldiers that Austria is withdrawing from the UN ceasefire force between Syria and Israel. But the UN turned down the bid because of an accord saying the five permanent members of the Security Council, including Russia, cannot take part in the force.
“Obviously we are aware of that document but we believe that times have changed,” Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters as he entered emergency UN Security Council talks on the UN force. ***
Heh. That’s a thing of comic beauty, if it weren’t so redolent of rotting carcasses.
Try another for the laugh factor? : *** The civil war now pits Assad, from the Alawite offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, and Shi’ite Hezbollah against mainly Sunni Muslim rebel groups. Assad is backed by Shi’ite Iran and armed by Russia. The rebels are armed by Sunni Arab countries Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and backed by Turkey and the West. ***
Yeah, not actually side-splitting given the comparison with Obazma sitting over there with the whirly-gig on his rainbow beanie cap spinning around so furiously.
Ok, how about this one? *** Police again deployed tear gas and water cannons to quell more than thousands protesters that gathered in downtown Ankara. Just a few kilometers away, the Turkish PM was addressing his supporters after warning his patience with the demos “has a limit”. ***
Paydirt! Erdogan claims he has patience! Hilarious.
Or? : *** Asked by Guardian correspondent Glenn Greenwald about his presence in Hong Kong and whether he plans to defect to China, Snowden said the assumption that “China is an enemy of the United States” is wrong. “It’s not,” he said.
Despite conflicts between the U.S. and Chinese governments, the peoples of the two countries do not care, he said. “We’re not at war, in armed conflict … we’re the largest trading partners,” he said.
Hong Kong, a Chinese province that was once a British colony, has a long tradition of free speech and has an “unfiltered Internet,” Snowden said.
“And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading western governments,” Snowden said.
However, China has been slowly over the years tightening its grip on Hong Kong, by infiltrating communist cadres into the legislature and muzzling the press.
For Chinese intelligence, Snowden would be a gold mine of intelligence on U.S. electronic spying capabilities, a known target of the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. ***
This Mr. Snowden is a marvel. I for one am certainly confident that when Mr. Snowden says “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest”, that he knows everyone’s legitimately proper “public interest”. Being as Mr. Snowden is our “ensurer-in-chief” and that the legitimacy to which he refers is seated in the people’s sovereignty over its government, that is.
he has to go somewheres where the spy fags can’t do on him what they did to the guy what posted the youtube
and Russia is a squalid cesspit with bad weather where all the whores have hepatitis
he has to go somewheres
Oh yes, very much like Ben Franklin to France, taking his prodigious diplomatic wisdom along with him.
Which, that’s the marvel, such a young man at a mere twenty nine years could acquire such unfathomable wisdom.
gop the the yout vote is fleeing the country
i think once you get older it gets harder to meaningfully repudiate the machinery of fascism cause of you’ve made your accommodations
i can’t imagine doing what Mr. Snowden did
i’d be too afraid I would get in trouble
i can’t imagine doing what Mr. Snowden did
Yeah, I can’t either. Starting with that believing in Obazma part. But the self-confidence he must have to get over such a blunder so quickly is truly impressive.
I give Mr. Snowden the benefit of the doubt
he’s made an extraordinary sacrifice
I’m glad he exposed what he exposed
I think America is the better for it, and he may inspire others to stand up to the fascist piggy whores what have infiltrated America’s government
We can hope things work out for him. We can hope too that nothing untoward is ever back-traced to his choices. Y’know, like anything remotely akin to that Gavrilo Princip guy.
it is better when the bird is right side up
i know what you mean
he’s ex-CIA himself, so it’s really hard to have 100% faith in him
but my feeling is that America is at an inchoate crux of sorts
and I choose to view this as a hopeful sign that there are people what won’t let America go gently into that fascist good night
My grandad used to be fond of the saying ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.
‘Course, it’s one thing to take your chances with your own life, and quite another to take your chances with the lives of oh, say, 330 million other non-entities.
he’s an audacious feller that’s for sure
How the coffee vendor got his faith on. Nope, no wider war a-brewing there, nopes. Fer sure.
The literally gut-wrenching nature of Snowden’s expose seems to rest on the notion that the bad guys were unaware that we were monitoring their communications.
I’m calling bullshit.
you can’t really call bullshit on a fait accompli
Mr. Snowden and the spy fags faced off in the thunderdome
Mr. Snowden emerged triumphant
spy fags are left to pick up the pieces of their shattered machinations
sorry Mr. Pablo I was responding more to Dr. Evil’s whinings in the article you linked I should’ve been more clear
“I’m calling bullshit.”
at least baracky gets the bush treatment
Friendship, lets hope someone broke out the right dictionary this time.
lawn fucking furniture? really?
did he even think to throw in a 6 of pbr?
It’s best not to think of the thousands of years the Chinese have been crafting exquisite wooden furniture, is my guess.
Which is only to say there’s simply a mysterious spiritually uplifting je ne sais quoi to a fine piece of factory truculence.
yea baracky puts his shit on the top and the chinks in their place
baracky be doing 0.5 white priviledge
This whole Snowden thing screams like a remake of the Falcon and the Snowman
oh my
What If China Hacks the NSA’s Massive Data Trove?
rube self identifies
How Obama Scandals Threaten to Kill ‘Good Government’
Unlike his speech not being ready for him, I’ll bet he made damn sure one of the low level staff got it bolted together “Chop – chop” as he’d say.
This whole Snowden thing screams like a remake of the Falcon and the Snowman
what does that mean
link
porch furniture will do that. ask wvu.
It was a movie in the 80’s i think starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. Hutton plays Christopher Boyce who is shocked to learn that we are spying on our allies Australia and New Zealand and gets involved with his drug dealing childhood best friend in selling secrets to the Soviets. Not a bad movie. But Iin other words Deja Vu
Flight of the Falcon is the better story which chronicles Boyse’s life on the run mostly in the wilderness of the Pacific North West. Anyone wanting to disappear should read that.
In other words Deja Vu.
What is very convenient is the press has focused our attention on Snowden and distracted us from the discussion of at what price liberty in conjunction with at what price security.
i don’t get it of course the piggy fascist american spy fags are gonna try and smear Edward as a sinister chinese spy
but they have the credibility of
piggy fascist american spy fags
Snowden is a distraction.
do we want to live in a country run by the piggies or do we want to walk right past tsa security cause we aren’t scared of no shoe bombers.
what do you want ? liberty or security?
what is Snowden a distraction from exactly
The larger question of what kind of country do we want America to be.
Rand Paul’s America sounds ok except for the anti-gay business and the fetus idolatry
A December 2000 NSA memo to the incoming Bush administration.
Is he anti-gay?
What is his position on abortion?
he’s a run of the mill sacred definition lifeydoodle
he’s from tennessee remember
‘protected’ communications
senior leadership can suck my
kentucky I mean
same difference
I thought he was from Kentucky.
So he thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman? How does that make him antigay?
Would me being against reparations mean i am anti black?
I would think his stance on abortion what with his libertarian roots would be it is a state issue and public monies should not support it directly or indirectly.
yes you are right kentucky
the federal government, especially our amoral piggy whore one, has no business saying that same sex couples what are married in NY or Iowa or what have you are illegitimate
Rand Paul knows that of course
i’m against any further reparations… the ones we done already haven’t reparated anything
that is not his stance on abortion, what you said
If the a state says same sex marriage are legitimate within their jurisdiction. Other have codified their position is that marriage is between man and a woman. I’m sure it will get sorted out eventually, but why would his position regarding same sex marriage in anyway make him anti gay. Seems to me that’s a bullshit conditional.
What is his stance? Is he for outlawing abortion via amendment?
you can google his abortion stance, which is different than what he really actually thinks I’m sure
the gay marriage thing is an agree to disagree thing
Team R has already lost that argument I don’t know what to tell you
So all in all you would be pretty happy if he were elected.
I think it’s too early look that far ahead.
i dunno
probably, all in all
i think it would send the right signal
Rand Paul is the new Sarah Palin, evidently.
And any senator who supports an America where traditional marriage is respected and encouraged and unborn children are protected from slaughter is just fine with me.
As a truly great American once said,
“There you go again.”
i did go again
If you mean that you continue to make inaccurate and baseless assertions, yes.
Rand Paul is one of the few senators who is against Eric Holder reading your email or droning your ass any time he damned well pleases.
So, there’s that.
This whole Snowden thing screams like a remake of the Falcon and the Snowman
Great soundtrack by Pat Metheny, featuring “This Is Not America” by David Bowie.
Though Timothy Hutton’s character simply got disillusioned by the activity he discovered and then decided to punish America by selling other secrets to the Soviets for his own profit. Like Manning, his actions were calculated to do harm to America, not to expose criminal activity.
A whistleblower discovers wrongdoing and exposes only the wrongdoing.
I’m still not sure what to make of Snowden. If you’re going to sell secrets to the Chinese (or anyone else), you do it in secret because you’re a cowardly crapweasel who is terrified of having a target on your back. You don’t give the stuff to journalists and then out yourself a week after it all goes down.
OTOH, he IS only 29 and does not possess the wisdom of the ages. Word on the street is that he’s a Ron Paul supporter, and yet he “believed in Obama.” If the telephony metadata is — as Andrew McCarthy points out — not protected by the 4th Amendment and if it’s being done with the blessing of the appropriate parties in Congress…
In other news Glenn Beck and Glenn Greenwald are on the same page. The rodeo clown and the sock-puppet master.
IIRC, Greenwald HAS been critical of the O-ministration for some time because of the drone strikes. Doesn’t seem to have drunk that particular batch of Kool-Aid, but wasn’t he a textbook case of BDS back in the day?
So confused.
Mr. Smoke? Please to clear the frame, thx.
New Twitter account @Federal_PRISM: “Go about your business. I’m just here to observe. By the way, I have become self-aware”
What do we know about Snowdon’s girlfriend? They were living together in Honolulu. There are a large number of Chinese in Hawaii, so maybe she is from Hong Kong and they are holed up with relatives. If he speaks any Mandarin, they can come and go as they please and slip into mainland China where we have no extradition treaty.
What reminded me of the Falcon was how quickly Snowden rose from being a high school dropout to his positions with the CIA and the NSA. Like Boyle he must have had a sponsor with solid connections.
Boyce not Boyle.
Hewitt has pronounced him guilty, guilty, guilty: “Snowden is Walker is Ames is Hanssen is Manning is Hiss is Rosenbergs. All the same. Treason is treason, no matter motive, naive stupidity”
See, Hewitt used to be in the DoJ back in the mid-1980s, and he helped them process warrants to get telephony metadata (which was analog in those days, and you couldn’t listen-in except in real time).
So he KNOWS there aren’t any shenanigans going on.
Someone should tell Hugh not to be hasty. Perhaps there is there there.
The blankness of the canvas is useful to everyone, who each can put there whatever they choose.
Look where that got us last time round.
Andrew McCarthy reminds us that the 4th Amendment does not cover telephony metadata.
So if SCOTUS has pronounced it OK, back in 1979, there’s no reason to holler about it today.
I’m with Glenn Reynolds: wait and see what develops.
Snowden is a good egg I think we should have cake and ice cream
At least according to the reporter he outed himself to he is staying in a hotel.
If Chinese intelligence doesn’t have the entire area covered with their agents watching the moves of anyone anywhere near him then they have their heads up their asses. In this kind of society it wouldn’t be out of line to have the whole staff of the hotel by now be replaced by security personnel. He is the biggest catch of this new century and has fallen right into their laps.
One might wonder whether, should his thumbs be twisted back, Snowden would howl in pain as ordinary folk? Or would he heroically hold his agony to himself?
Hmmmph. Because my newly-found sympathy with Snowden, and because my increasing disillusionment with the path descending to evil despotism our little Republic seems to be taking, I’m reassessing my earlier condemnations of Assange and Manning. And other reassessments necessitated because: this path our little Republic is taking is crowded with damned souls rushing to pleasure the barbed cock of Satan, who awaits at the end of the path.
Or is that just Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton ?
I’m on Team Edward
but Manning is on his own he’s a weirdo
I’m reassessing my earlier condemnations of Assange and Manning.
I’m not. Manning indiscriminately dumped everything he could access, regardless of whom it might endanger. Assange is a smug hipster.
Snowden leaked a PowerPoint slide deck and a warrant. Didn’t reveal names of assets or diplomatic cables. He’s former CIA: if he just wanted to cause pain and chaos, he could have done much, MUCH worse.
Nakoula speaks.
Some people say as much about Ted Hall.
And Klaus Fuchs, Daniel Greenglass, Harry Gold,
the Rosenbergs.
Fallen? Or landed?
if he just wanted to cause pain and chaos, he could have done much, much worse.
Is he breathing still? Why then, he can yet do much much worse.
Sdferr, we don’t know enough to make an assesssment, let alone a reassessment.
Way to drop the ball, lamestream media.
I’m on board with the bulk of “we don’t know enough” — would extend it generally, for that matter — but wonder what assessment in particular, or reassassment, you would here refer to Ernst?
Yipes, that was an unfortunate typo. I do miss the comment preview, and apologize for that typo in the meantime.
oops. My 12:14 was in response to serr8d. For some reason I thought the comment was yours.
I regret the error.
Didn’t the Rosenbergs flat-out sell our nuclear secrets to the Soviets?
Why? Were they trying to effect a balance of power or what? That’s extracurricular policy-making, and obviously wrong.
Assange is a rat bastard.
Heh, two birds! But one with Orange! Long may he sing. Or caw, in the alternative.
Word is he’s checked out now.
*** “I would like to say sorry to everybody,” Nakoula said.
Once freed, Nakoula said he hopes to reconcile with his three estranged children, who he says shunned him in the wake of the Obama administration’s accusations.
“I lost everything,” he said. “Everybody left me.” ***
There are probably some people who still might think “Well, it serves you to right for having got those four Americans killed”, ya reckon?
Beat me to it, Pablo.
Theodore Hall claims he was motivated by idealism –specifically that the atomic bomb was too much power for one nation to alone possess.
It’s analagous to PRISM that way.
Also in that Ted Hall was a punk kid who, like all punk kids, thought he knew better than his elders.
Again, we don’t know what we don’t know. If the only way to get the foreign metadata we want is to also scoop up domestic metadata we have no interest in, it may be an acceptable burden on privacy, so long as safeguards are in place. At the same time, safeguards are supposedly in place to keep the IRS from doing what the IRS did.
The only thing I’m sure of is that Snowden’s motives (whatever they turn out to be) we in part shaped by this blame-America-first-and-foremost mentality that arose after WW II.
We’re all paying for the sins of Zinn, so to speak. As well as Alinsky, and whatever the names of those two Ivy Leaguers are who wanted to crash the system by overloading the welfare state.
Heh. Crows are special bird-brains, in that not only can they recognize a threat by face, they can teach others about it…
http://m.phys.org/news/2011-06-bird-brained-clever-crows-recognise.html
Cloward & Piven
“Guest privacy rules” and the word of a receptionist. Well that certainly trumps the largest State security apparatus and informer network on earth. Brave “Condor?” flies free to Iceland or will it be some other icy place.
run Edward run
scamper to freedom
I find his choice of refuge unsettling. He’s told the American people only the things he thought they ought to know.
What does he think the ChiComs ought to know?
I don’t think we should be looking at Hong Kong and the PRC as one and the same. They’re not.
Theodore Hall claims he was motivated by idealism –specifically that the atomic bomb was too much power for one nation to alone possess.
It’s analagous to PRISM that way.
…
The only thing I’m sure of is that Snowden’s motives (whatever they turn out to be) we in part shaped by this blame-America-first-and-foremost mentality that arose after WW II.
I don’t see it that way AT ALL.
The idea that the Soviets ought to have the bomb, thus to make both superpowers even-steven, is definitely based on the idea that the U.S. was likely to misuse nuclear weapons, and so the Soviets ought to be able to defend themselves or whatever. Total false moral equivalence.
For the NSA thing, all you need to assume is that the information age has made All Our Data highly available, and what politician or spook is just going to let all that info fly by on the wires without picking it up?
You don’t need to be an oikophobe to see the NSA as overstepping — regardless of whether they have or not — you just need to be suspicious of all gubmint power, all the time.
Which, that’s our duty as Americans.
This guy might turn out to be a punk, but so far, he doesn’t seem to have been motivated by “Blame America First.”
So long as there are legal safeguards in place
Those “legal safeguards” have really been working out well for us recently, eh? I mean, it’s not like any high officials in this administration like, say, the Attorney General would actively circumvent “legal safeguards” that were already in place in order to further an agenda… none of them would go so far as to lie to a judge about the reasons for getting a warrant.
Is something still a legal safeguard if those whom the safeguard seeks to constrain are willing to utterly disregard its existence?
and yes, it is perfectly acceptable that we’re all of us paranoid now
Coming from someone who has made their bones on arguing against the misapplication of language, this is deeply disappointing, Jeff. The two most common definitions of paranoia involve either “a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, etc” or “suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification” (emphases mine).
There is nothing remotely delusional about the notion that this administration is keen to “punish our enemies”, and the IRS scandal and a host of other examples should have made that clear. The rational takeaway, in my view, is that it is fully proper and reasonable to be deeply suspicious that this admin will willingly abuse any given trust which is granted to it, so long as it advances the personal interests of the CIC.
That doesn’t strike me as “paranoid” in the slightest. They have shown themselves to be deeply untrustworthy. There is evidence and justification galore for that position.
For you to cast this as us all being “paranoid” now is precisely the sort of semantic infiltration that you’ve spent years warning us about. You’ve adopted their lexicon and are now using it to inflict friendly fire upon us, as I see it.
The nature of the NSA program, if we can believe Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
Yes, by all means, let’s believe another administration high official who is out trying to do damage control on a controversial program that is taking some heat right now. After all, the most believable thing in the universe right now is a high official for this administration.
They would have no reason at all to lie to us.
(thump… ouch!)
OK kids, important safety tip: if you roll your eyes too much, you might induce vertigo in yourself and fall over. Let’s be careful out there!
(From Clapper) The FISA Court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions.
Oh, there are stringent restrictions, Mr. DNI? Well, why didn’t you say so before? There’s a secret court of judges, and administration officials will have to go to that court and ask permission before searching the data… and there will be no public oversight at all of that process, because (you know) it’s secret.
If administration officials will lie under oath to a judge in a setting with public oversight, and will lie to Congress on publicly-broadcast hearings, why in the world would a rational person believe that this would never happen in a setting where they would be offering their reasons in secret, where no one will ever have the opportunity to call “Bullshit!” on their justifications for their search?
Why in the world should we ever believe that the secret FISA court would never be lied-to, or that the custodians wouldn’t simply ignore these “stringent restrictions” entirely, and do as they damned well pleased, knowing all along that with a corrupt AG, they have absolutely nothing to fear with respect to prosecution for engaging in criminal acts… so long as those acts happen to align with advancing the personal goals of the CIC?
Let’s not lose the forest for the trees.
Indeed. In my assessment, this is a circumstance that amounts to (as our Vice-Clown might say) “a big effin’ deal”. A database of truly monumental size, scope and depth is being assembled, and the only protections that we have against that data being used against us for illicit purposes is trust… trust that the administration will follow the rules and the “stringent restrictions” that were originally intended to protect us.
That trust has, in my view, been completely and utterly lost… so I’m less concerned about the existence of the database itself than I am in the fact that the database is accessible by those who have repeatedly demonstrated that they will employ The Chicago Way to get what they want, and the rules be damned.
The goal might have been laudable if there were proper safeguards to ensure that it could never be used for illicit purposes, and accessible only for truly legitimate purposes. I get that we want to “be safe” from terrorists, and this is an appealing tool to get us further down that road.
But it’s a false promise. We will never be safe, and I’m utterly uncomfortable giving the government tools this powerful which can be so thoroughly abused in violation of our Constitution in order to chase that illusion of safety.
We would all be safe if we were never allowed to contact anything or anyone that might harm us… if we lived our lives in personal bubbles which were utterly impervious to all attempts to disrupt us.
We would be safe, but we wouldn’t be free.
This program alleges to help make us safe, but it most definitely makes us less free when an administration as lawless as this one is at the helm.
I know next to nothing about espionage. I just assume that everything I ‘m told is a lie and go from there.
Dicentra, the Rosenbergs were part of the whole “the Axis isn’t sharing with the Soviets so let’s help” group of Commies.
He also went judge shopping. It took 3 judges to get the answer he wanted. Some check on power that is.
Rosenbergs were part of the whole “the Axis isn’t sharing with the Soviets so let’s help” group of Commies.
But they didn’t broadcast to the world what they’d done, IIRC. Commie-symps in those days operated in total secret, because they knew they’d get a bullet to the head if they were found out.
This guy, if he were hoping to sell secrets secretly, is totally doing it wrong.
Snowdon? I haven’t read where he’s selling anything.
Descartes took a no trust policy as far as he knew how. It’s not clear he actually got anywhere with it though.
Let me check something on the Rosenbergs. BRB.
404 not found. Oh, well.
ohnoes they got the rosenbergs
In case anyone is wondering about how metadata can be exploited, it goes considerably beyond a basic “who called who” thingie.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
Warning: contains math.
The full-blown content gets you much, much, more of course, but even just the metadata can lead to significant invasions of privacy.
I do, Di. For now, owing to a lack of time for a fuller reply, I’ll attempt a brief explaination by focusing on your last point.
Then why is he hiding out in Hong Kong? Why did he go the leaker (and perhaps also defector) route instead of the whistleblower route? Answer: He doesn’t trust the system to deal with him fairly.
How’d we get to the point where we can’t trust the American courts and press to deal with us fairly, in ways both real and imagined?
The blame America First crowd is how. This is a rotten dishonest corrupt nation built on lies, and we’re going to have to do rotten dishonest corrupt lying things in order to purify it from its sins.
Why worry when there are safeguards in place?
It’s sweet to see Aristotle, even if only in the goofy appellation of his work on first philosophy, pasted there by his followers to given an indication that it should come “after” the study of nature, still hanging around in our common speech. Not to say quaint, but pleasing.
No. We stopped paying attention. We failed in our duty as citizens to hold our government accountable. We can’t trust them because we’ve tolerated untrustworthiness. We reelected it, even! It’s out of control because we let it get out of control.
Hong Kong is only as different from the PRC as the PRC wants it to be.
Hong Kong still has to answer to Beijing. It isn’t autonomous even though they like to pretend it is.
Accountability is incompatable with a hip, cultivated air of cynicism, irony, etc. Pablo.
It is no accident, as the (cultural) Marxists would say blah blah blah
I’m just trying to suggest that the cancer has metastasized
or something.
Self-fulfilling prophecy. Pretty soon after all the things get “fixed” by people with all the wrong answers, the country becomes every bit as corrupt (by the actions of the America-haters they’ve elected) as they have claimed all along. I’m glad Snowden informed, and it will take a lot of very convincing information to get me to change from that stance.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see Carney and Company have yet to toss their shovels aside and quite digging.
bush did it too
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
Apathy and ignorance are bigger problems. Without them, the proggs would never have gotten their noses in the tent.
Say! We haven’t had the trolls roll in with their new talking points, yet.
The “blame it on America” propoganda serves two purposes, to accuse its defenders and to excuse its critics.
That seems to me to be the best way to explain how all these people who started out anti-Nixon wound up more Nixonian than Nixon.
Well, that, and the fact that it was the ends they objected to, never the means.
guess the speaker:
link
edward is disdainful of apathy and ignorance
edward says it’s time to wake the fuck up america
edward has our best interests at heart
edward is a class act and a true american
edward has taken the tiger by the tail
edward is the nemesis of piggy fascists like eric holder
and barack obama
and meghan’s coward daddy
and ennui
I think the “blame it on America” mentality encourages apathy and ignorance.
“Say! We haven’t had the trolls roll in with their new talking points, yet.”
The only, and I mean the only talking point I’ve seen so far is “Boooooosh!!!!!! did it too!”.
Same here, Spies. I guess they’re trying to come up with something pithy.
We may be in for quite a wait.
But, we have only to remind ourselves, Stalin was the nemesis of Hitler. Who could apply Hitler’s own teachings better than Hitler himself.
This isn’t to say that Snowden in any respect rises to such a level of viciousness, but simply to say that simply opposing two adversaries doesn’t tell us much about the substance of either one.
It must be tough after 8 years of constant screeching, but I’m sure there’s some way for them to convince themselves that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. But yeah, it seems to be taking a while.
Mr. Snowden inspires hope Mr. sdferr
way moreso than Mitt Romney or porky porky or Rand Paul or any of those losers ever have
I think that’s a kind of substance
This is a rotten dishonest corrupt nation built on lies, and we’re going to have to do rotten dishonest corrupt lying things in order to purify it from its sins.
Then that’s one remove from Snowden. The Rosenbergs were first-tier.
So.
This is the only live thread, then.
One thread to rule them all, and well, bind them, I guess. But only at night.
Apathy and ignorance are bigger problems.
I don’t know why you’d say such a thing, nor do I care!
Apparently. It’s becoming very slooooow to loooooad, too.
I’ll throw up an open thread.
i didn’t know you could eat an open thread
You can’t.
Like sputum, it can only be egested.