The Good News: You're Not Paranoid - Part 2

FBI Director Robert Mueller told senators the agency uses drones infrequently for surveillance in the U.S., and only in regards to specific investigations. “Our footprint is very small,” Mueller said in testimony. “We have very few and have limited use.”

  The Hill

Trust us. Where have we heard that before?

Mueller said the FBI was in “the initial stages” of developing privacy guidelines for how the agency balances civil liberty concerns with security threats.

Nice. Up until now….just whatever strikes their fancy???

Michael Hastings Is Dead

The coroner’s office had yet to identify the victim, but both Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, where Hastings worked most recently, reported that it was him.

The solo-vehicle crash happened near the intersection of Highland and Melrose avenues around 4:15 a.m., according to the LAPD.

Hastings’ Mercedes-Benz slammed into a tree and caught fire.

“I was just coming northbound on Highland and I seen a car going really fast, and all of a sudden I seen it jackknife,” said Luis Cortez, who witnessed the wreck.

“I just seen parts fly everywhere and I slammed on my brakes and stopped and tried to call 911,” Cortez added.

The engine of the vehicle was found in a yard about 100 feet away.

The driver was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroner’s officials said the body was too badly burned to make an immediate identification.

[...]

Friends said that, because of the nature of Hastings’ work, he often led a very paranoid lifestyle.

“A lot of his friends were worried that he was in a very agitated state, yes. No question, people were concerned,” said Cenk Uygur, host of “The Young Turks.”

“He was incredibly tense and very worried and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” he said.

“I don’t know what his state of mind was at 4:30 in the morning, but I do know what his state of mind was in general, and it was a nervous wreck.”

  KTLA

Hastings gained national attention in 2010 after exposing inflammatory comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal about President Barack Obama and the civilian leadership of the military.

Rolling Stone, which employed Hastings as a contributing editor, praised him Tuesday as a “fearless journalist” who sought out hard stories and refused to “cozy up to power.”

  Raw Story

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

[...]

[The] two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.

[...]

The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.

[...]

Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.

[...]

Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.

  Michael Hastings’ last article

"He was alone in a brand new Mercedes."

"It sounded like a bomb. It woke me up. My whole house shook."

Are they making Mercedes Benzes shoddy these days?  Just asking. 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/journalist-michael-hastings-killed-car-crash-article-1.1376574

UPDATE: 6/23 - Don't be so quick to call me a conspiracy theorist.

UPDATE:  8/17 - Follow-up

Holy F#%k

In a major loss for individual rights vis-a-vis the police, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that prosecutors could use a person’s silence against them in court if it comes before he’s told of his right to remain silent. The prosecutors used the silence of Genovevo Salinas to convict him of a 1992 murder. Because this was a non-custodial interview, the Court ruled that the prosecutors could use his silence even though citizens are allowed to refuse to speak with police. It is of little surprise that the pro-police powers decision was written by Samuel Alito who consistently rules in favor of expanding police powers.

[...]

Citizens will now be able to have protected silence only after being placed in custody.

  Jonathan Turley

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

You Just Don't Understand

“Unless you’ve been involved in those conversations, then it’s kind of hard for you to understand the complexity of the situation.”

  The Hill

Not that you’re going to get the chance to be involved in those conversations.  Obama’s talking about Syria here, but frankly, this is the sum and substance of his position (and that of essentially all the presidents before him, no doubt): ‘ I know more than you, so just go back and sit down.’ And, in fact, this is a typical response from some citizens:  'I trust the president is doing the right thing, because he knows more than we do.'

I have no doubt that is the way they want it to be. In their minds, it relieves them of moral responsibility. When I worked on the landscape crew at the University of Missouri, one of the planners installed angel trumpet around the campus. I went to the director and asked, “Do you know that angel trumpet is currently being experimented with as a hallucinogen and is highly toxic; that there have even been deaths from its use; and we’re planting it all over a college campus?” His reply: “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. If I know, then I’m obligated to do something or be legally responsible.” Interestingly enough, he didn’t “do something.”  And, fortunately, as far as I know, there were no poisoning incidents, although I did know one young lady off campus who went into the hospital after giving it a try.  I understand it does not induce a pleasant trip, so maybe word got around.

We do what we want to do, as long as we feel a degree of certainty that we won’t face any consequences for doing it. But really, if we think it’s wrong , we’d prefer someone else get it done without involving us.

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

Why Didn't Ed Snowden Go Through "Proper" Channels?

Like a "good" American. Let these guys tell you.

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

And, just for the YWA record, there have been media/government claims that Snowden is a braggart and a liar; that he couldn’t do the things he said he could do. William Binney would like you to know otherwise:

Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.

So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.

  USA Today

Live Now (6/17 10am CST): Edward Snowden Is Answering Questions Online - You Can Join In

Go here.

"Likely to Lead to"

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

[...]

The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

This included:

• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

  Guardian

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

UPDATE: As you might expect…

Turkey, South Africa and Russia have reacted angrily to the British government demanding an explanation for the revelations that their politicians and senior officials were spied on and bugged during the 2009 G20 summit in London.

The ministry summoned the UK's ambassador to Ankara to hear Turkey's furious reaction in person.

[...]

Igor Morozov, a senator in Russia's Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, suggested that the Obama administration's attempts to improve relations were clearly insincere: "2009 was the year the Russian-American 'reset' was announced. At the same time US special services were listening to Dmitry Medvedev's phonecalls."

[...]

Nikolai Kovalev, the former head of the FSB, Russia's powerful domestic spy agency, [...] added however: "To avoid diplomatic and international scandal, security agencies are forbidden from doing this. And usually they don't do it."

  UK Guardian

Usually. But somehow, I’m not convinced. Spies exist to spy. I am guessing all governments spy on anyone and anything they have the capability to spy on.

Squirming

Update on the Nadler story:

Since the scandal broke, Nadler has walked back his comments in a statement. "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant," the New York Democrat told Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski.

  Yahoo

Perhaps, legally, you mean. Otherwise at any rate, the government can collect any of the information without warrants and hold it until it decides to request a specific warrant to look at it. And I assume that means the government can record the content of your phone calls and stash it.   And, even in the unlikely event that is untrue, it is definitely true that the government has been collecting the metadata on calls, which can tell them who you are, who you call and who they call. This business about not knowing exactly what you are saying is meaningless distraction.

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

Minimal Intrusion

Facebook announced late Friday that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all levels of government in the U.S., from local law enforcement to classified national security requests, in the second half of 2012 alone. Microsoft said Friday that it received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests from all levels of government in that same time period, while Apple disclosed in a statement late Sunday that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement from December 2012 through May 2013.

  TPM

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

Happy Father's Day