Drip, Drip, Drip

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

[...]

The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

[...]

Although the memorandum is explicit in saying the material had to be handled in accordance with US law, and that the Israelis agreed not to deliberately target Americans identified in the data, these rules are not backed up by legal obligations.

"This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law," the document says.

[...]

The document mentions only one check carried out by the NSA on the raw intelligence, saying the agency will "regularly review a sample of files transferred to ISNU to validate the absence of US persons' identities". It also requests that the Israelis limit access only to personnel with a "strict need to know".

[...]

Notably, a much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to "destroy upon recognition" any communication "that is either to or from an official of the US government".

  Glenn Greenwald

And I’m sure they do.

And the jury will disregard that statement, which will be stricken from the record.

Two Takes on the Speech

“When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory.” In democracies, we just wait until a new president says we need to look forward, not backward.

He did the slippery slope thing: if we don’t bomb Syria, Syria will keep using chemical weapons, then other tyrants will, then they’ll use them on our troops, then terrorist groups will get them, then George Zimmerman. Then they’ll be used against Israel, because everything is about Israel. Then everyone will acquire other prohibited WMDs and Iran will build nukes, and we’re back to Israel. Smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud.

  WIIIAI

Barack Obama pretends to believe [...] that it was his idea to wait for a congressional debate before blasting Syria to smithereens. “So even though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security to take this debate to Congress.” He didn’t take the debate to Congress; the congressional detour was forced on the White House on August 31 when it became clear that Obama lacked both domestic and foreign support for a speedy strike. That was Obama’s first big defeat. The second was a knockout, after Russia and Syria seized on Secretary of State John Kerry’s “joke” about Assad giving up his chemical weapons, at which point Obama’s handlers advised him that his political position was, for the time being, untenable. He arrived in front of the cameras shaken, angry, and humiliated – with a patched together script and a mouth full of crow.

[...]

The president’s roiling emotions, visible through his eyes, got in the way of his oratorical skills. But then, he didn’t have much material to work with, just an endless string of prevarications and half-truths strung almost randomly together. Obama, who was reluctantly asking permission from Congress to violate the most fundamental tenets of international law – permission that Congress is not empowered to give – framed Syria as a rogue nation because it has not signed a treaty on chemical weapons like “98 percent of humanity.” This makes Syria ripe for bombing. The president does not explain that Syria’s neighbors, Israel and Egypt – both U.S. allies – have also not signed the treaty.

[...]

The president who claimed that he could bomb the sovereign nation of Libya for seven months, overthrow its government and kill its president, without triggering the War Powers Act – and, further, that no state of war exists unless Americans are killed – told his [...] audience that he opposes excessive presidential power.

  Glen Ford: Black Agenda Report

And whether they fell off their chairs seized with laughter, I do not know.

Revolutionary

Oath Keepers has placed three back-lit signs on the subway platform in the Washington Metro Pentagon Station, group founder Stewart Rhodes announced today.

"The first sign at the Pentagon Station is done in the style of the theater scene from George Orwell's 1984 and features Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, as 'Big Brother,'" Rhodes wrote, stating the "sign makes it clear that by exposing the NSA spying on Americans, Snowden honored his oath."

"This artwork will also be going on a billboard along a major freeway in Maryland, near the NSA headquarters at Ft. Mead within the week," Rhodes added.

[...]

"The third sign is intended to reach our military personnel within the Pentagon, and any other government employees who have ever served in the military, using the Iwo Jima flag-raising as a backdrop to the message."

  reason.com

Inciting military personnel to go against command?  Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for appealing to police and military in San Salvador to stop following orders to kill campaneros and obey instead God’s command “Thou shalt not kill.” But this isn’t El Salvador, and this isn’t 1980, and nobody's being killed, so no worries.

Drip, Drip, Drip

Last month we learned that in 2011 a FISA judge slammed the NSA for "the third instance in less than three years" in which an NSA surveillance program had been misrepresented to the court. […It turns] out that for three years, from 2006 to 2009, NSA had been routinely breaking its own rules; had been routinely providing false affirmations to the court; and apparently had no one on their staff who even understood how their own systems worked.

  Mother Jones

"The documents released today are a testament to the government's strong commitment to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes," said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

  NPR

A testament.

[H]undreds of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[...]

The NSA told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court it misunderstood restrictions on accessing data once it was archived, but Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in a March 2009 order that such an interpretation of the court's orders "strains credulity."

That’s why it’s a secret.

”Misunderstood” restrictions.

After discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records for nearly three years without "reasonable, articulate suspicion" that they were connected to terrorism, the judge said in a blistering opinion that he had "lost confidence" in officials' ability to legally operate the program.

Walton noted, for instance, that just 1,935 phone numbers out of 17,835 on a list investigators were working with in early 2009 met the legal standard.

[...]

Later in 2009, a Justice Department lawyer reported to the spy court a "likely violation" of NSA surveillance rules. The lawyer said that in some cases, it appeared the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone records by email to as many as 189 analysts, but only 53 were approved by the spy court to see them.

Excerpts from the judge’s determination:

[...]

A Shame, But Not a Surprise

Valerie Caproni, the FBI's top lawyer from 2003 to 2011, is scheduled to receive a vote on Monday in the Senate for a seat on the southern district court of New York.

Caproni has come under bipartisan criticism over the years for enabling widespread surveillance later found to be inappropriate or illegal.

[...]

"It is a shame that the White House has chosen to nominate former FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni to a lifelong position as a federal judge given her narrow views of Americans' privacy rights as demonstrated by her actions in the George W Bush administration," said Lisa Graves, a Justice Department official in the Clinton and early Bush administrations.

  UK Guardian

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

Barry Goes to Russia

Syria confirmed it would accept a Russian-brokered deal to hand over its chemical weapons Tuesday.

  NBC

Okay, that’s sloppily written. They won’t be handing over chemical weapons today, surely. It will take some time. I assume the writers (three of them) mean that on Tuesday, Syria confirmed the deal.

Now, we can continue.

That added to the international momentum behind the proposal, which has already been endorsed by Iran and China and cautiously welcomed by Britain and Germany.

Obama said Monday that the Russia plan offered a potential path that averted U.S. military strikes.

Did Obama ever offer any such proposal? Any option to avoid a strike? Especially considering that it was “common sense” that told him Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack and not concrete evidence. No? No option? Just, hang on a minute while I drum up support to bomb your asses, and maybe I’ll do it even if I don’t have support. Hey, he already got his Nobel Peace Prize. What would he want with another? They’re pretty much meaningless after his receipt of one anyway.

"We see this as potentially a positive development and we see this as a clear result of the pressure that has been put on Syria,'' [WH Spokesman Jay] Carney told MSNBC.

Right.  Assad is not really responding to an offer from Syria's strongest ally to save face for everyboy (and literal faces for many), but crumbling under the great might and wrath of the United States of America.

Senior Senators - including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) - announced they were working on a new plan that would authorize the president to use force only if Syria did not comply with a U.N. resolution to remove chemical weapons by a pre-determined deadline.

Oh, yes. We are still very much in control.  (Wait a minute.  Didn't we go down this same path with Saddam?)

In a further development, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin said the Russian president had discussed the weapons handover plan with Obama at last week’s G-20 summit.

Barry, I will fix this for you. You will owe me, da?

"We held a very fruitful round of talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday, and he proposed an initiative relating to chemical weapons. And in the evening we agreed to the Russian initiative," Walid al-Moualem was quoted as telling the speaker of Russia's lower house parliament house in Moscow.

He said Syria had agreed because this would "remove the grounds for American aggression," the Interfax report said.

[...]

While Obama called Syria's response "a potentially positive development," he said on NBC News that it would need to be taken "with a grain of salt." "We are going to run this to ground," Obama said. "[Secretary of State] John Kerry will be talking to his Russian counterpart. We're going to make sure that we see how serious these proposals are."

  alJazeera

There’s your only ground.

Oh yes, we are very much in control. Make no mistake about it.

Is It Getting Hot in Here?

General Keith Alexander apparently got pretty busy right after the world discovered that the National Security Agency, which he heads, has back doors built into much of the Internet's encryption.

He has cancelled his spot as a keynote speaker at a cybersecurity conference, three days before he was supposed to go on. The Dutch telecommunication company KPN announced Saturday that Alexander, who was scheduled to speak at their Cybersecurity Congress, wasn't going to make it, citing pressure on his agenda.

  Daily Dot

Is that a medical issue?

Game On

Both a spokesperson for Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Interior Ministry admitted on Monday that a [German] Federal Police helicopter had conducted a low-altitude flyover of the United States Consulate in Frankfurt in order to take high-resolution photographs. The apparent aim of the mission was to identify suspected listening posts on the roof of the consulate.

[...]

The magazine quoted an unnamed government official stating that Germany wanted to send a message to the Americans that it would not tolerate eavesdropping technologies on German soil.

  Der Spiegel

Here's Your "Free Market"

Readers may recall an ugly story that broke earlier this summer, when New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman rebuked the news/business information firm Thomson Reuters for selling access to key economic survey data two seconds early to high-frequency algorithmic traders. The story strongly suggested that some Thomson Reuters customers were using their two-second head start (an eternity in the modern world of computerized trading) to front-run the markets.

[...]

Rolling Stone has since learned that a whistleblower complaint has been filed to the SEC identifying 16 of the world's biggest banks and hedge funds as the allegedly even-earlier recipients of this key economic data. The complaint alleges that this select group of customers received the data anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the markets.

[...]

If true, it's yet another story suggesting that the markets are a sharply uneven playing field, with the general public playing the role of suckers trading on sloppy-seconds information, while powerful insiders pay for enhanced access.

  Matt Taibbi

And you think maybe there's a chance this ISN'T true?

Oh, Bother

[Obama] met with the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, both of whom are pissed off that the NSA has been spying on them (personally, as well as their countries). “I said that I would look into the allegations.” You’d have thought he’d have “looked into” them before actually meeting the two presidents.

  WIIIAI

It’s called disdain.