Whistleblower Award to Edward Snowden in Germany

Transcript of Snowden's comments.

Progress in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia has passed an unprecedented law that criminalizes domestic violence against women, children and domestic workers, a human rights official said Thursday. Rights activists hailed the development but cautioned that Saudi Arabia, named by the World Economic Forum as one of the five worst countries in which to be a woman, still has a long way to go.

"This is just the beginning, and it's an excellent step, but the road is long," Ibrahim Almugaiteeb, president of Human Rights First Society in Saudi Arabia, told Al Jazeera. "It will be like the civil rights movement was in the United States."

  alJazeera

Drip, Drip, Drip

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ¬intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.

[...]

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

[...]

Among the notable revelations in the budget summary: ●Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

[...]

●U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes. Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.” The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States.

  WaPo

Hoo Boy. We are in trouble now. Just kidding, Israel.

●The governments of Iran, China and Russia are difficult to penetrate, but North Korea’s may be the most opaque. There are five “critical” gaps in U.S. intelligence about Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, and analysts know virtually nothing about the intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

[...]

The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.

[...]

“It was a titanic struggle just to get the top-line budget number disclosed, and that has only been done consistently since 2007,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based organization that provides analyses of national security issues. “But a real grasp of the structure and operations of the intelligence bureaucracy has been totally beyond public reach. This kind of material, even on a historical basis, has simply not been available.”

[...]

Lee H. Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said that access to budget details will enable an informed public debate on intelligence spending for the first time.

What? Is this a democracy, or something?

The CIA’s dominant position [in funds received by the entire intelligence community] is likely to stun outside experts. It represents a remarkable recovery for an agency that seemed poised to lose power and prestige after acknowledging intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 attacks and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force.

[...]

The NSA is planning high-risk covert missions, a lesser-known part of its work, to plant what it calls “tailored radio frequency solutions” — close-in sensors to intercept communications that do not pass through global networks.

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The document describes programs to “mitigate insider threats by trusted insiders who seek to exploit their authorized access to sensitive information to harm U.S. interests.”

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For this year, the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed.

[...]

“NSA will initiate a minimum of 4,000 periodic reinvestigations of potential insider compromise of sensitive information,” according to the budget, scanning its systems for “anomalies and alerts.”

Which may indicate why Snowden appeared when he did. He had access to the files that let him see that coming.

One Good Thing

source: The Hill

Gay Strides

On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury announced that legally married same sex couples can now jointly file their taxes. This is a sea change from just nine years ago when George W. Bush’s re-election team used the issue of stopping same sex marriage to drive conservative voters to the polls.

“Democrats were terrible on the issue as well,” [TV Host Rachel] Maddow said, pointing to Bill Clinton’s two major anti-LGBT legacies, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

“Thanks for nothing, Bill Clinton,” she said, adding that it seems almost inconceivable in hindsight that things would change so quickly.

  Raw Story

And, BTW, in that same article, it’s mentioned that Ms. Maddow talked about marijuana laws.

She moved on to Thursday’s historic change in marijuana laws. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government will not be taking action for now against Colorado and Washington for legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use. The Department of Justice sent a memo to U.S. Attorneys with new guidelines on marijuana prosecution, urging them not to prosecute low level users.

These two things alone should bring out the religious right in droves come election day. Drugs and gays. God will be very angry.

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

New York Police to Wear Lapel Cameras?

Lawyers representing the city of New York have filed a request for a stay of Judge Scheindlin's decision and court order pending appeal. Scheindlin found components of the NYPD's stop and frisk unconstitutional in her decision and ordered several remedies, including the installation of independent oversight, changes to the UF250 (stop and frisk) form, an overhaul of the stop and frisk program itself and mandatory lapel cameras for police officers.

  Raw Story

I wonder how many lapel cameras will malfunction, be knocked off in a scuffle, be obscured behind an object...

Obama Legacy: Made the Nobel Committee Look Foolish

Lifted from Dependable Renegade

There You Go (Wish I'd Thought of It)

But, hey, take a look at the UK Daily Mail. (Glenn Greenwald says, "The Onion couldn't have done better.")

Seems That Way

Such Nerve

Thousands of fast-food and retail workers are set to go on strike across the United States Thursday to push for a $15 hourly wage, after a similar action last month bolstered confidence but not pay, organizers said.

"If you work in a fast-food or retail store anywhere in the country, we urge you to join our growing movement," striker Terrance Wise said in a news release earlier this month.

Wise, 34, is a Kansas City-based father of three who says he earns $9.30 an hour at Burger King, where he has worked for eight years.

[...]

The more than 4 million fast-food workers in the United States made an average annual wage of $18,130 in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  alJazeera

What? And they’re not happy just to have a job?

I heard on NPR this morning that the average age for a fast food worker these days is 29.

And, BTW, if you have an hour, watch this talk by Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford regarding political economics. If you have only a half hour, start in at about 30 minutes. He explains his belief that America’s imperialism is on the way out simply due to the realities of the economic political laws by which an economy based on finance rather than industry is governed. Very interesting, and perhaps hopeful, even though it doesn’t offer a rosy economic outlook for us. If you’ve got the hour, he lays out some nice history in the first half.

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