Finishing off America

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Real Resistance

It's not the Democratic Party.

In recent days, career employees at the State Department gathered nearly 1,000 signatures for what’s known as a “Dissent Channel” memo in which they express their anger over a Trump executive order that bars immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and halts refugee admissions to the country. The number of signatures was extraordinarily high, even though the letter was submitted after White House spokesman Sean Spicer essentially warned the dissenting diplomats they were risking their jobs.

[...]

Current and former employees of the Labor Department, meanwhile, are using their private e-mail accounts to send around a link to a letter asking senators to oppose the nomination of Andrew Puzder for the secretary of their agency. The employees may sign on to the letter using Google Docs. The letter will not be submitted to the Senate HELP Committee, and the signatures will not be made public, unless 200 current employees sign on.

[...]

At the EPA, a small group of career employees — numbering less than a dozen so far — are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trump’s political appointees undermine their agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, sources told POLITICO.

[...]

EPA employees are uniquely concerned about their future, having faced barbs from Trump advisers who have toyed with cutting the agency's staff by two-thirds and from other Republicans who want to eliminate the agency altogether. So career staffers are discussing the best way to alert the public to what’s happening behind the scenes.

[...]

Fearing for their jobs, the employees began communicating incognito using the app Signal shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Signal, like WhatsApp and other mobile phone software, encrypts all communications, making it more difficult for hackers to gain access to them.

[...]

[T]he goal is to “create a network across the agency” of people who will raise red flags if Trump’s appointees do anything unlawful.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  Politico

But will be furiously working on ways to get at those people.

And since Obama kicked the legs out from under whistleblower protections, they can't go there.

What will we call the American Stasi?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

State of Surveillance

Or, surveillance state. The future does not look good.

Are We Still Needing to Say This?

Are people still arguing that it's "only metadata"being collected?

 

Number 1) Hasn't this been broadcast enough now that everyone knows what metadata reveals?

Number 2) It's not true that they aren't collecting actual conversations.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Surveillance State - Part Whatever

In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.

And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.

The project is called JLENS – or “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.” And you couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for wildly inflated defense contracts, a ponderous Pentagon bureaucracy, and the U.S. surveillance leviathan all in one.

[...]

At one point, there were supposed to be nearly three dozen blimps. But after a series of operational failures and massive cost overruns, the program was dramatically scaled back to the two existing prototypes that the Army plans to keep flying continuously above the Aberdeen Proving Ground for three years, except for maintenance and foul weather.

  Dan Froomkin: First Look

So, say, if a country wanted to launch warheads at Washington, they should do it on a day when the weather is bad over the east coast.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Snowden & Ellsberg Conversation on Whistleblowing, State Surveillance, Integrity and Personal Courage

Let Daniel Ellsberg set you straight.



Every time I hear Edward Snowden speak, I am further amazed and impressed.

"We Can't Hold Our Government Accountable Because We Truly Don't Know What It's Doing"

Very nice two-part series from Frontline on the national surveillance state, including the story of Edward Snowden's leaks, with interviews from pertinent players: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/

Surveillance States and Their Economies

Theresa May summoned the internet giant Yahoo for an urgent meeting on Thursday to raise security concerns after the company announced plans to move to Dublin where it is beyond the reach of Britain's surveillance laws.

By making the Irish capital rather than London the centre of its European, Middle East and Africa operations, Yahoo cannot be forced to hand over information demanded by Scotland Yard and the intelligence agencies through "warrants" issued under Britain's controversial anti-terror laws.

[...]

In February, the Guardian revealed that Britain's eavesdropping centre GCHQ intercepted and stored the images of millions of people using Yahoo webcams, regardless of whether they were suspects. The data included a large quantity of sexually explicit pictures.

The company said this represented "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

[...]

The move to make Dublin the centre of its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was announced last month and will take effect from Friday.

[...]

Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: "It should not come as a surprise if companies concerned about maintaining their users' trust to hold their information start to move to countries with more rigorous oversight processes, particularly where courts oversee requests for information." Surveillance laws have a direct impact on our economy and Yahoo's decision should be ring an alarm in Parliament that ignoring the serious questions about surveillance that are being debated around the world will only harm Britain's digital economy."

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Drip, Drip, Drip

According to internal NSA documents from the Edward Snowden archive that SPIEGEL has been granted access to, the US intelligence service doesn't just bug embassies and access data from undersea cables to gain information. The NSA is also extremely interested in that new form of communication which has experienced such breathtaking success in recent years: smartphones.

[...]

For an agency like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an intelligence agency: social contacts, details about the user's behavior and location, interests (through search terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card numbers and passwords.

[...]

The material contains no indications of large-scale spying on smartphone users, and yet the documents leave no doubt that if the intelligence service defines a smartphone as a target, it will find a way to gain access to its information.

[...]

The results the intelligence agency documents on the basis of several examples are impressive. They include an image of the son of a former defense secretary with his arm around a young woman, a photo he took with his iPhone.

[...]

All the images were apparently taken with smartphones. A photo taken in January 2012 is especially risqué: It shows a former senior government official of a foreign country who, according to the NSA, is relaxing on his couch in front of a TV set and taking pictures of himself -- with his iPhone. To protect the person's privacy, SPIEGEL has chosen not to reveal his name or any other details.

[...]

Under the heading "iPhone capability," the NSA specialists list the kinds of data they can analyze in these cases. The document notes that there are small NSA programs, known as "scripts," that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iPhone 3 and 4 operating systems. They include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as the Google Earth, Facebook and Yahoo Messenger applications.

[...]

According to several documents, the NSA spent years trying to crack BlackBerry communications, which enjoy a high degree of protection, and maintains a special "BlackBerry Working Group" specifically for this purpose.

[...]

In March 2010, the problem was finally, according to the internal account. "Champagne!" the analysts remarked, patting themselves on the back.

[...]

If it now becomes apparent that the NSA is capable of spying on both Apple and BlackBerry devices in a targeted manner, it could have far-reaching consequences.

Those consequences extend to the German government. Not long ago, the government in Berlin awarded a major contract for secure mobile communications within federal agencies. The winner was BlackBerry.

  Der Spiegel

Und ve now haff effidence zat Assad did not gas his own people. You really vant to play ziss game?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

National Security

A pair of high-tech Army blimps is coming to the greater Washington, DC area, and soon they will be able to provide the military with surveillance powers that spans hundreds of millions of acres from North Carolina to Niagara Falls, Canada.

The airships are part of Raytheon’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS, and when all is said and done they’ll offer the United States military what the defense contractor calls “an affordable elevated, persistent over-the-horizon sensor system” that relies on “a powerful integrated radar system to detect, track and target a variety of threats.”

  RT

When do we get to officially call this a police state?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

True to Our Motto

Whatever is discovered about the government, it's always worse.

And is Jeremy Scahill too afraid to release that information?

A Timely Reminder

[P]lease just spend a moment considering the options available to someone with access to numerous Top Secret documents.

They could easily enrich themselves by selling those documents for huge sums of money to foreign intelligence services. They could seek to harm the US government by acting at the direction of a foreign adversary and covertly pass those secrets to them. They could gratuitously expose the identity of covert agents. [ed: and we have seen all of these done in the past.]

None of the whistleblowers persecuted by the Obama administration as part of its unprecedented attack on whistleblowers has done any of that: not one of them. Nor have those who are responsible for these current disclosures.

They did not act with any self-interest in mind. The opposite is true: they undertook great personal risk and sacrifice for one overarching reason: to make their fellow citizens aware of what their government is doing in the dark. Their objective is to educate, to democratize, to create accountability for those in power.

The people who do this are heroes. They are the embodiment of heroism. They do it knowing exactly what is likely to be done to them by the planet's most powerful government, but they do it regardless. They don't benefit in any way from these acts.

  Glenn Greenwald

LOL

[Attorney General Eric] Holder told lawmakers he was willing to discuss the NSA program in a classified hearing, but was limited in what he could say in public.

Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., asked for assurances that there had been no monitoring of members of Congress or the Supreme Court as part of the program.

  WaPo

Because the range of instruments and resources involved in the spying doesn't include those used by Congressmen or Justices, Mr. Kirk? 

And, it would seem, Mr. Kirk will object to the program if he thinks it covers those two entities, but not if it only covers us civilian peons.

Also, Holder assured us that he will not prosecute any “reporter for doing his job.” Parse that as you will, folks, but I suggest you bear in mind that government officials (who are not merely congressmen) choose their words very carefully, and the meaning of each can be construed either very broadly or very narrowly, depending on what suits their needs.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Never Fear!

Congress to the rescue

Lawmakers will review domestic surveillance laws in the wake of leaked document showing the National Security Agency has collected millions of phone records, which provoked an uproar in the Capitol.

The government's admission of "PRISM," a classified program in which data is mined from the servers of nine leading Internet companies, is also expected to garner scrutiny.

  The Hill

Ooooh. They’re trembling in their boots at the NSA.

Congress has repeatedly voted to reauthorize language in the 2001 PATRIOT Act granting intelligence agencies broad discretion to collect phone data but many lawmakers were not fully aware of the implication of their votes.

Need we say anything more?

Okay, we will.

Democrats emphasized the broad surveillance program began under the administration of former President George W. Bush.

Your point?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would review the law and the surveillance program.

“Is the program perfect? Of course not,” said Reid. “I think what we should do is make sure Sen. Feinstein has an opportunity to review what has gone on.

[...]

Feinstein expressed concerns over how The Guardian obtained a secret court order authorizing the surveillance and said it warrants an investigation.

[...]

Feinstein and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the blanket surveillance practices have been going on for seven years and lawmakers were informed of it.

[...]

Feinstein said colleagues should have known about the details of the surveillance program from briefings offered by the Intelligence panel.

“They don’t come,” she said.

See? No problem. Now calm down and go back to your room, or we’ll have to sedate you. For your own good. Meanwhile, Diane will find out what traitor leaked this information.

But Who Will Protect Big Brother?

Not just the phone companies.  On the heels of that leak, we have this one: 

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US internet companies to spy on foreigners, the Washington Post has reported.

According to the newspaper, even though US citizens were not the intended targets of surveillance, this has allowed investigators to examine emails, photos and other documents of tens of millions of Americans that can be used to track people and their contacts over time.

  alJazeera

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

  Glenn Greenwald

Those of you who think it's okay for the government (when it's run by your party) to gather information on you because you're not doing anything wrong and you want to be safe from terrorists: how do you feel about the possibility of that information being hacked by the Commies? And possibly fed to terrorists? Uh-oh. We never thought of that.  Don't worry.  We'll think of some reason that won't matter.  Or won't happen.  Or something.

DonkeyHotey

Damn Those Leaks!

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

[...]

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

[...]

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

[...]

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

[...]

[T] his is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

[...]

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. [...]

  Glenn Greenwald

Send out the gestapo. Find who leaked that document, and make ‘em sorry.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two [Democratic] US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

Start your search there.

And, citizens, do not worry. If you are not calling (or being called by) any bad guys, you have nothing to fear.

July 27, 2011: In a letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Kathleen Turner, director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, [...] said that a joint oversight team “has not found indications of any intentional or willful attempts to violate or circumvent” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which was amended in 2008.

[...]

The Obama administration continued Wednesday to resist the efforts of [the] two Democratic senators to learn more about the government’s interpretation of domestic surveillance law, stating that “it is not reasonably possible” to identify the number of Americans whose communications may have been monitored under the statute.

 WaPo July 2011

I guess not!  Let's just say…”all”…That should cover it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Donkey Hotey

Wyden Battling the Surveillance State

Good luck with that.  I'm surprised that he got this much:

The US government has admitted to violating the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures on at least one occasion during surveillance efforts.

In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden [D-OR], the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) confirmed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court finding that “some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government were unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

[...]

Without providing details about when and how the violation occurred, or the extent of the “unreasonable” surveillance, the DNI letter confirmed that FISA has “sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”

[...]

The government says it has “remedied” the FISA Court’s concerns regarding the constitutional violation and will continue to lawfully collect e-mails and phone calls, but the letter’s indication of at least one “unreasonable” search remains a troubling fact to Americans concerned about their privacy. 

While the DNI confirmed a fault, the director’s office claimed it was in the country’s best interest to publicize the issue, stating, "the public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.”

[...]

Wyden is threatening to block the government’s requested five-year extension of the statute unless lawmakers receive more information about the extent of the wiretapping. The Senator is concerned that communication between “law-abiding Americans” is being unlawfully intercepted.

[...]

In June, the National Security Agency (NSA) refused to disclose how many Americans have been affected by government surveillance. Wyden responded by noting that the fact that the number is unknown hides the extent of the spying.

In response to the NSA’s secrecy, Wyden offered an amendment prohibiting warrantless searches of domestic communication, which was rejected.
  RT

The letter, also sent to the Senate committee chairman, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, and ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, says Clapper concluded “the public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.”
  Business Week

Dianne might disagree. (See previous post.)

DoD Drone Surveillance in the US

So what's that empty strip up the center all about?

source 
source's source

Surveillance State

”If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that [the NSA] and all agencies that possess this [surveillance] technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

– Senator Frank Church 1975

It's a good thing then that Frank Church did not live to see the state of America today.

And he was right.  There is no return.

"The Land of the Free"

Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. The stories of [...] three Democracy Now guests — and so many others — provide that answer loudly and clearly.

[...]

We love to tell ourselves that there are robust political freedoms and a thriving free political press in the U.S. because you’re allowed to have an MSNBC show or blog in order to proclaim every day how awesome and magnanimous the President of the United States is and how terrible his GOP political adversaries are — how brave, cutting and edgy! — or to go on Fox News and do the opposite. But people who are engaged in actual dissent, outside the tiny and narrow permissible boundaries of pom-pom waving for one of the two political parties — those who are focused on the truly significant acts which the government and its owners are doing in secret — are subjected to [...] intimidation, threats, surveillance, and [a] climate of fear .

  Salon/Greenwald

Not to mention, arrests and trials for whistleblowers. *

Read Glenn Greenwald's entire post (Surveillance State evils) for summaries of the Democracy Now! trio:

William Binney: he worked at the NSA for almost 40 years, and resigned in October, 2001, in protest of the NSA’s turn to domestic spying. Binney immediately went to the House Intelligence Committee to warn them of the illegal spying the NSA was doing, and that resulted in nothing. In July, 2007 — while then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was testifying before the Senate about Bush’s warrantless NSA spying program — Binney’s home was invaded by a dozen FBI agents, who pointed guns at him, in an obvious effort to intimidate him out of telling the Senate the falsehoods and omissions in Gonzales’ testimony about NSA domestic spying (another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, had his home searched several months later, and was subsequently prosecuted by the Obama DOJ — unsuccessfully — for his whistleblowing).

Jacob Appelbaum: an Internet security expert and hacker, he is currently at the University of Washington and engaged in some of the world’s most important work in the fight for Internet freedom. He’s a key member of the Tor Project, which is devoted to enabling people around the world to use the Internet with complete anonymity: so as to thwart government surveillance and to prevent nation-based Internet censorship.[...] For the last two years, Appelbaum has been repeatedly detained and harassed at American airports upon his return to the country, including having his laptops and cellphone seized — all without a search warrant, of course — and never returned. The U.S. Government has issued secret orders to Internet providers demanding they provide information about his email communications and social networking activities. He’s never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.

Laura Poitras: she is the filmmaker about whom I wrote two weeks ago. After producing an Oscar-nominated film on the American occupation of Iraq, followed by a documentary about U.S. treatment of Islamic radicals in Yemen, she has been detained, searched, and interrogated every time she has returned to the U.S. She, too, has had her laptop and cell phone seized without a search warrant, and her reporters’ notes repeatedly copied. This harassment has intensified as she works on her latest film about America’s Surveillance State and the war on whistleblowers, which includes — among other things — interviews with NSA whistleblowers such as Binney and Drake.

The Democracy Now! video episode is also posted at the end of Greenwald's article.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

* bears reposting:.