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In this Discussion
- Cherry_Pie June 2013
- Dr_William_Hayward June 2013
- flossy_log_lady June 2013
- kdawg June 2013
- Leland June 2013
- MirandaJuly June 2013
- swamp_knobbler_mahan June 2013
- ThickeningAgent June 2013
- YoursTruly June 2013
1 Like
Fuck This Shit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records
"Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama."
"Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama."
Comments
I'm counting on Eric Holder to prosecute this individual to the fullest extent that the secret laws in the secret courts allow.
Whoa! I did not know there was such a thing...
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/06/senate-intel-members-on-verizon-order-nothing-to-see-here/
Also, Glenn Greenwald is still a dishonest and terrible person.
am i going to jail
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9845595-7.html
The Schneier essay could be construed to take Obama off the hook, somewhat. The new conditions of surveillance are hardly Obama's fault, after all.
Where Obama has been disastrous for American civil liberty is in viciously holding on to the secret authority for the executive branch claimed by Cheney. This includes the invention of new laws, courts, legal procedures, and interrogation techniques for conducting the so-called Global War on Terror (which will never end without major structural reforms to global society - think more than a hundred years).
The first President after Cheney/Bush had a chance to restore equality before the law. That would have meant pursuing an accountability campaign akin to the Frank Church Commission investigations and reforms of the FBI and CIA during the 70's. Instead we got "turn the page" everywhere truth and reconciliation could have counted.
I expect Hilary to stay on this course through 2024.
Resistance to the corporate secret security state will continue to grow from below, worldwide, but it is unclear whether talented clear-eyed people of goodwill will risk lucrative careers and social standing to help the amateur volunteer rabble press their complaints.
It's all connected. This leadership's incapacity to build a popular counter-vision to corporate authority is why there is no mobilization of any significance against the climate crisis.
Mind you, I don't despair, because I know people can change their minds.
But Obama and the Democratic party (Holder, Geithner, Summers, Emanuel, Feinstein, Schumer, Reid) have been an absolute disaster. People ought to put their faith and energy into entirely different moves.
O well.
It's my birthday. I'm 50. And it's been my observation that the process of getting stuff right often involves standing with the freaks.
Hear hear!
Happy birthday!
What a milestone!! How are you celebrating, besides ranting on the internet, which I am in favor of????
Happy birthday Dr. J
you are an inspiration to us all
& you all are a great inspiration to me.
One day, sooner than I imagine I'm sure, I'll be leaving all this to you.
It's cool here. Rock on.
Here is a thought. Robert Chesney made this point earlier this week: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/06/minimization-procedures-data-collection/ We don't have any sense of what the minimization procedures attached to the programs are. If we did, these stories might look very different. But the details on the minimization procedures are classified so the government can't share them. What this means is the government can't actually defend itself by contextualizing the boundaries within which data is collected in these programs without further compromising whatever legitimate data collection efforts may exist. So we're stuck relying on Glenn Greenwald or his source to tell us the truth about the minimization procedures.
I'd say this is quite a problem as Greenwald is not a serious thinker or reliable journalist.
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-udall-question-the-value-and-efficacy-of-phone-records-collection-in-stopping-attacks
(Senate Intelligence Committee members in the know call BS on phone record collection)
And happy birthday too!
it is very dark to speculate about this stuff, but i have to admit that i am very surprised there have not been any major terrorist attacks on US soil since 9-11 (I don't mean to suggest Boston or other incidents weren't terrible, just nowhere near the scale of 9-11). What if the reason for this is because of all this surveillance?
This is totally speculative, and i have no real idea what i'm talking about.
Hasn't it been widely established that the program that Ashcroft refused to certify as legal did exactly what the program Snowden exposed does?
The activity Ashcroft refused to render legal was eventually made legal by amendments to the FISA Act in July of 2008 during the Presidential Primary. Among other things, this act granted retroactive immunity to the phone companies for complying with the government's illegal demand for access to broad swaths of US phone data, illegal at least, in the opinion of Atty General Ashcroft.
When Sen. Obama reversed his position to support the amendments, it was a major point of contention among his would-be supporters during the 2008 primary.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/blogtalk-obamas-fisa-vote/
We will never know what might have happened had the rogue state violence of the Bush Administration been held to account and its actors discredited. Instead, as with the elite abuses within the financial system, this administration has used its powers to normalize rather than correct the abuse. The result is a ruling class with endlessly celebrated careers built on contempt for the law while the hundreds of millions of ordinary people remain subject to state discipline and market casinos.
Why didn't Mr. Obama have greater confidence to take on the corruption of our key institutions when he took office? Was it a lack of imagination? Did he not think he could get the people at his back?
I think it's pretty tragic. I believe in the power of culture and narrative to spin the world and I think he had the chance, not to monologue, but to encourage, and he basically chose the grown-ups over the kids.
It's the kids that need to win.
It addresses all at once our cultural expectation of real day to day safety, social networks and crazy-idealism driven individuals bent on harming anonymous people. That's some meta.
I propose a third way. Completely un-American but potentially so American.
An intimate social mesh responsibility and communication, 'hood, institutions and social. Captures bad bombs, anti-social and self destructive life stuffs.
There's something to what Bill McK is saying, but I will note that the Greenwaldian narrative which proposes near-total continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations on these sort of issues is dismissed immediately as a laughable oversimplification when you talk to anyone who actually works in govt.
There is more continuity than I'd like. But there is a world of difference too. (Especially on the torture stuff).
And in some very important ways, we don't actually know what PRISM does either.
Or gay marriage, Greenhouse gases, adoption of technology, innovation in popular music.... The Egyptian revolution.... The reversal of Apartheid....
Emerson wrote of The Establishment versus The Movement. Some people have a stake in the status quo, no matter how dead-end it is. Youth, being relatively stakeless, not so much.
Re: Ashcroft Incident
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/07/14/26152/iglesias-ashcroft/?mobile=nc
Bill McKibben is not young, and polling data indicates that "millennials" are frequently identified with issues like climate change that they actually care about the least.
Innovation in popular music is certainly not the exclusive province of the young and I'm frankly stunned that you would suggest that!
"Establishment" vs "Movement" is just a weirdly one dimensional way of describing how change happens; it should have died in the 60s. Change happens through a complex dialectic relationship between a whole range of players. Leadership happens from within and without.
Youth are some of my favorite people, but the political fetishization of youth is the province of overpaid consultants and ad-men.
The Snowden issue is not about wiretapping, which refers to the listening of phone calls.
In general, I don't begrudge anyone their cynicism at this point, but I think cynicism is one of our most precious political resources; far too precious to be spent up carelessly.
Personally, I think the threats of expensive, useless, destabilizing wars, or sliding past the chance to make corrections to avoid permanent climate chaos, or setting the conditions for the next disastrous financial re-alignment are all on par with an incident of large-scale terroristic violence. These existential security disasters are continuing to occur.
I think you are mistaken about the Ashcroft incident. Part of the shock of the current revelations is that the way 'wire-tapping' protocols were modernized allowed for this procedure of total collection of metadata, or at least this is how the agencies interpreted their authority under the law. The fact that there was no broad and open discussion about this interpretation, it just happened, and was authorized by judges on a secret court, and with briefings to a few members of congress who were not able to speak about it legally.... that's what the fuss is all about.
or maybe it doesn't matter. this is what i am personally struggling with concerning this issue. i don't like the idea of the government spying on me. BUT if the government spying on me was part of an effort that ultimately stopped a nuclear bomb from detonating in a US city (or any city for that matter) then I'd probably be fine with it. MY IDEOLOGY IS CONFUSED.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113427/nsa-spying-scandal-one-leak-more-damaging-other#
Basically it posits that these two leaks are very different. One is worth debating, the other is unsurprising, but potentially damaging.
The briefings on the program were not to "a few members of Congress." There were thirteen briefings. Congress knew about this, and if they're suggesting otherwise now, it's for the cameras. http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/06/official-briefings-for-hill-on-calltracking-legal-165732.html
It is easier for me to engage your illustration when it is just about surveillance policy, rather than when that is gathered up with torture and GITMO, etc. There are different issues with some of those, serious questions about whether or not they even work. Surveillance works, but there are questions about how, particularly in a democracy with foundational Constitutional constraints, it should be built and managed in a manner that is legal, consistent with democratic values, avoids abuse, and has the mechanisms in place to self-correct when abuses take place.
I think modern youth have a special interest and opportunity to participate in the construction of identities that distinguish themselves from their parents' position in the culture and I think that was the fuel for the explosive global growth of each of the music movements I mentioned.
I'm not sure what provoked this comment.
It's the kids that need to win."
This was a clumsy playful and possibly cliche-ridden allusion to the commonplace image of security hawks and advocates of austerity as 'grown-ups'.
Sorry to stick dumb words in your electric face.
Downside, some say that terrorism is so bad that we must must control and surpress every even non-threat. I may be the only UHr that has faced a car bomb and it is something Americans have yet to grapple with. It is not and won't be pretty. It will challenge to the core every value. So though a liberal, liberal, liberal, I fully support capturing and jailing Portland's Christmas tree-type bomber individuals.
Upside, we sacrifice huge possibilities as a civilization checking the soaring inspirations of innovators self limiting in fearing surveillance.
The debate is about the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of ubiquitous surveillance verses its creativity-chilling effect. Fear vs hope. Downside vs upside.
I'm for up.
I don't think it is cynical to criticize the Dems and agitate for better.