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There are several moving parts in this story: the Syrian war, ISIS and the push to remove Assad from power, the expansion of a militarized police state throughout Europe, and of course the refugee crisis.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:34:00 +0000

The Paris Attacks Are Just The Beginning

Storm Clouds Gathering
Dec. 9. 2015

It might be tempting to react to this event emotionally without looking beyond the official narrative, without examining the evidence, without questioning where this is headed. You wouldn't be alone, but blind indignation lends itself to easy answers, half truths and comforting lies.

On the evening of November 13th 2015, Paris was shaken by a series of coordinated attacks. 129 people were killed, hundreds more wounded. An ambience of fear gripped the country. Terrorists could strike anywhere at any time. Nothing was safe. Even the smallest venue could be targeted.

Any time a population is attacked (or believes that they have been attacked) by an outside force, the reaction is as predictable as it is dangerous. New wars, and totalitarian laws that would have been unthinkable days before are easily justified, voices of reason are drowned out, and entire nations can be driven towards a cliff. Given the nature of this particular cliff it would behoove you to look a little deeper this time.

There are several moving parts in this story: the Syrian war, ISIS and the push to remove Assad from power, the expansion of a militarized police state throughout Europe, and of course the refugee crisis. All of which has been conveniently tied together, by a passport, carried by a suicide bomber, a passport which miraculously survived the blast unscathed. (Never mind the fact that German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere came forward to say that he had reason to suspect that the passport had been planted.)

Let's deconstruct this one piece at a time.

Evidence of Foreknowledge

Without even looking beyond mainstream sources, we find evidence that the French government knew that the attacks were coming. They were warned by the Iraqi government, they were warned by the Turkish government twice, and according to this article from the Times of Israel (which as since been edited), security officials in Paris were specifically warned of an impending attack that very morning. (The same article goes on to mention that the Bataclan theater had financial ties to the Israeli Military.)

And of course the French government just happened to be running an exercise simulating a mass shooting in Paris just hours before the attacks began. Where have we seen that before?

Could someone please explain how Iraq, and the Turkey government (which are developing countries), were able to see this coming, while the NSA and French intelligence were caught completely off guard? Are we really to believe that this was just incompetence?

The Setup

Before the dust had even settled, the official narrative was clear. ISIS was responsible. This was war, and France was going to escalate that war, both at home and abroad. A state of emergency was declared, road blocks, border controls and a curfew were imposed, freedom of assembly was restricted, and the military was deployed on the streets. French President Francois Hollande soon announced that he intended to extend the state of emergency for three months (some are even saying it may be extended indefinitely), and to alter the French constitution.

The state of emergency gives the police the power to detain people without trial, search without warrants and to block any website they see fit.

France's parliament has already voted to extend the country's state of emergency following the Paris attacks for three months, giving the police powers to keep people in their homes without trial, search the homes of people without a warrant from a judge and block any website deemed a problem.

These powers are already being used! Activist have already been placed under house arrest, and not for crimes that they have been accused of actually committing, but preemptively!

The attacks are also being used as a pretext to justify the establishment of a new European Intelligence Agency modeled after the CIA. See also here.

Who Created ISIS?

And speaking of the CIA... let's not forget who actually created ISIS.

France didn't seem too concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism when they joined the U.S. in the 2011 regime change operation in Libya. If mainstream news outlets were publishing evidence of jihadists among the CIA backed rebels, (secondary confirmation from the BBC here) it would be utterly naive to think that French intelligence services didn't know.

France also didn't seem to mind the fact that Islamic extremists were receiving the lion's share of the weapons that were looted from Gaddafi's armories, and shipped through Turkey, and into Syria.

France didn't stand up or speak out for years as the U.S. government continued arming, funding and training these extremists.

There was no righteous indignation at the atrocities they were committing.

There were no calls for criminal proceedings after those same rebels got caught using sarin gas against thousands of civilians, and the French government has never so much as verbally condemned the numerous state actors which have been caught assisting ISIS and/or its allies logistically (Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia & Israel for example).

Why? Because ISIS serves a purpose. ISIS and its associates, Al-Nusra and the FSA are weakening the Syrian government, creating a pretext for military intervention, and providing the perfect excuse for a massive power grab on the home front.

"Whoah! That's not fair to equate the FSA with ISIS!"

Really? Then explain this away: ISIS and Al-Nusra have officially formed alliances, FSA commanders have gone on record to say that they cooperate with, and conduct joint operations with Al-Nusra, and it has been well established that the FSA command is dominated by Islamic extremists. Do The Math.

The Rise of Fascism in Europe

What's happening in France should not be viewed in isolation. Xenophobic sentiment has been on the rise throughout Europe, and is gaining ground politically. This trend has clearly been exacerbated by the ongoing migrant crisis (which is obviously tied to the regime change policies of the West) but one variable in this equation that no one is talking about is the fact that the way immigration has been handled in Europe is not merely a question of short sightedness, it is a reflection of policy.

In 2012 UN migration chief Peter Sutherland urged the EU to "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states. Such a proposition may sound absurd, unless you take into account that breaking down the national identity of a country makes it much easier to dissolve political boundaries and independence. And that's precisely what the technocrats in Brussels want.

Hollande has been one of the most outspoken voices in this push to hand over more power to a centralized European government, effectively stripping member states of any meaningful sovereignty. Give that European government a military, it's own surveillance apparatus and public which is struggling financially, looking for someone to blame, and practically begging for war, and you have a recipe for the rise of overt fascism in Europe.

Many have remarked that recent moves by the French president take several pages from the extreme right. Some have interpreted this as an attempt to prevent the right from capitalizing on the event, but it hasn't worked out that way, at all. (See also this article)

Taken on its own one might be inclined to interpret this as a political miscalculation, but what if it's not? Hollande's actions don't make much sense if we view him as an independent leader, but they make perfect sense if you understand that he's just a puppet.

The powers seized by Holland following the Charlie Hebdo and Paris Attacks, are not suited for the political left. The left is held back by the need to maintain a soft spoken, inclusive veneer. Those rising up to replace them will not be.

The right will not scale back these powers. They will expand them, and they will use them, even more than they are being used now.

It's the left, right, left, right two step to tyranny.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

This formula is not new. These tactics are not original, nor are the motives or response. Like the American public following 9/11, it's going to take the European population quite some time to realize where they are being led, and they're only going to come to that realization if those who see what is happening have the courage to speak out.

And make no mistake, this is just the beginning. They'll take it as far as you let them.

Source:

http://stormcloudsgathering.com/paris-attacks

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What If The "Crash" Is As Rigged As Everything Else?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 04:52:00 +0000

Take your pick--here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

By Charles Hugh Smith
August 25, 2015
Of Two Minds

Take your pick--here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

There is an almost touching faith that markets are rigged when they loft higher, but unrigged when they crash. Who's to say this crash isn't rigged? A few things about this "crash" (11% decline from all time highs now qualifies as a "crash") don't pass the sniff test.

Exhibit 1: VIX volatility Index soars to "the world is ending" levels when the S&P 500 drops a relatively modest 11%. The VIX above 50 is historically associated with declines of 20% or more--double the current drop.

When the VIX spiked above 50 in 2008, the market ended up down 57%. Now that's a crash.

Exhibit 2: The VIX soared and the market cratered at the end of options expiration week (OEX), maximizing pain for the majority of punters. Generally speaking, OEX weeks are up. The exceptions are out of the blue lightning bolts such as the collapse of a major investment bank.

Was a modest devaluation in China's yuan really that unexpected, given the yuan's peg to the U.S. dollar which has risen 20% in the past year? Sorry, that doesn't pass the sniff test.

Exhibit 3: When the VIX spiked above 30 in October 2014, signaling panic, the Federal Reserve unleashed the Bullard Put, i.e. the Fed's willingness to unleash stimulus in the form of QE 4. Markets reversed sharply and the VIX collapsed.

Now the VIX tops 50 and the Federal Reserve issues an absurd statement that it doesn't respond to equity markets. Well then what was the Bullard Put in October, 2014? Mere coincidence? Sorry, that doesn't pass the sniff test.

Why would "somebody" engineer a mini-crash and send volatility to "the world is ending" levels? There are a couple of possibilities.

1. The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein's landmark study of how manufactured crises are used to justify further consolidation of power, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, provides a blueprint for how financial crises set the stage for policies that extend the power of central and private banks and various state-private sector players.

A soaring VIX and sudden crash certainly softens up the system for the next policy squeeze.

2. A "crash" engineered to set up a buying opportunity for insiders. When easy gains get scarce, what better way to skim a quick 10% than engineer a "crash," scoop up shares dumped by panicked punters and momo-following HFT bots spooked by "the world is ending" VIX spike, and then reverse the "crash" with another round of happy talk?

3. Settling conflicts within the Deep State. I have covered the Deep State for years, in a variety of contexts--for example:

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

The Dollar and the Deep State (February 24, 2014)

Surplus Repression and the Self-Defeating Deep State (May 26, 2015)

Without going into details that deserve a separate essay, we can speculate that key power centers with the Deep State have profoundly different views about Imperial priorities.

One nexus of power engineers a trumped-up financial crisis (i.e. a convenient "crash") to force the hand of opposing power centers. As I have speculated here before, the rising U.S. dollar is anathema to Wall Street and its apparatchiks, while a rising USD is the cat's meow to those with a longer and more strategic view of dollar hegemony.

Take your pick--here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Sources:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-26/what-if-crash-rigged-everything-else
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2015/08/what-if-crash-is-as-rigged-as.html
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Devaluation Stunner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:52:00 +0000

China Has Dumped $100 Billion In Treasuries In The Past Two Weeks

By Tyler Durden
August 25, 2015
Zero Hedge

On August 11, China devalued its currency, and in the subsequent 3 days the onshore Yuan, the CNY, tumbled by some 4% against the dollar. Then, as if by magic, the CNY stabilized when China started intervening massively, only this time not through the fixing, but in the actual FX market.

This means that while China has previously been dumping reserves as a matter of FX policy, after August 11 it was intervening directly in the FX market, with the intervention said to really pick up after the FOMC Minutes on August 19, the same day the market finally topped out, and has tumbled into a correction since then. The result was the same: massive FX reserve liquidations to defend the currency one way or the other.

And yet something curious emerges when comparing the traditionally tight, and inverse, relationship between the S&P and the Treausry long-end: the tumble in stocks has not been anywhere near as profound as the jump in yields. In fact, the 30 Year is wider now than where it was the day China announced the Yuan devaluation.

Why is that?

We hinted at the answer on two occasions earlier (here and here) and yet the point is so critical, and was missed by virtually all readers, that it deserves to be repeated once again: as part of China's devaluation and subsequent attempts to contain said devaluation, it has been purging foreign reserves at an epic pace. Said otherwise, China has sold an epic amount of Treasurys in the past two weeks.

How epic? We turn it over to SocGen once again:

The PBoC cut the RRR for all banks by 50bp and offered additional reductions for leasing companies (300bp) and rural banks (50bp). All these will take effect as of 6 September, and the total amount of liquidity injected will be close to CNY700bn, or $106bn based on today's onshore exchange rate. In perspective, the PBoC may have sold more official FX reserves than this amount since the currency regime change on 11 August.

There you have it: in the past two weeks alone China has sold a gargantuan $106 (or more) billion in US paper just as a result of the change in the currency regime!

But wait, there's more: recall that one months ago we posted that "China's Record Dumping Of US Treasuries Leaves Goldman Speechless" in which we reported that China has sold some $107 billion in Treasurys since the start of 2015.

When we did that article, we too were quite shocked at that number. However, we - just like Goldman - are absolutely speechless to find out that China has sold as much in Treasurys in the past 2 weeks, over $100 billion, as it has sold in the entire first half of the year!

In retrospect, it is absolutely amazing that the 10 and 30 Year Bonds have cratered considering the amount of concentrated selling by China.

But the bigger question is how much more does China have left to sell, if this pace of outflows continues. Here is SocGen again:

From an operational perspective, China's FX reserves are estimated to be two-thirds made up of relatively liquid assets. According to TIC data, China held $1,271bn US treasuries end-June 2015, but treasury bills and notes accounted for only $3.1bn. The currency composition is said to be similar to the IMF's COFER data: 2/3 USD, 1/5 EUR and 5% each of GBP and JPY. Given that EUR and JPY depreciation contributed the most to the RMB's NEER appreciation in the past year, it is plausible that

the PBoC may not limit its intervention to selling only USD-denominated assets.

* * *

China's FX reserves are still 134% of the recommended level, or in other words, around $900bn (1/4 of total) and can be used for currency intervention without severely impacting China's external position.

Should the current pace of liquidity outflows continue, and require the dumping of $100 billion in FX reserves, read US Treasurys, every two weeks this means China has, oh, call it some 18 weeks of intervention left.

What happens when China liquidates all of its Treasury holdings is anyone's guess, and an even better question is will anyone else decide to join China as its sells US Treasurys at a never before seen pace, and best of all: will the Fed just sit there and watch as the biggest offshore holder of US Treasurys liquidates its entire inventory...

Source:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-25/devaluation-stunner-china-has-dumped-100-billion-treasurys-past-two-weeks

_________________

Is Trump Worse Than Hitler?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:27:00 +0000

Trump is worse than Hitler. Be very afraid.

August 24, 2015
Clusterfuck Nation
By James H. Kunstler

Even the formerly august New York Times grants that Donald J. Trump has ignited a voter firestorm of grievance against a dumb show election process that rewards a craven avoidance of real issues. Immigration is actually a stand-in for the paralysis, incompetence, overreach, and bloatedness of government generally in our time — but it is a good doorway into the larger problem.

Immigration is a practical problem, with visible effects on-the-ground, easy to understand. I’m enjoying the Trump-provoked debate mostly because it is a pushback against the disgusting dishonesty of political correctness that has bogged down the educated classes in a swamp of sentimentality.

For instance, Times Sunday Magazine staffer Emily Bazelon wrote a polemic last week inveighing against the use of the word “illegal” applied to people who cross the border without permission on the grounds that it “justifies their mistreatment.” One infers she means that sending them back where they came from equals mistreatment.

It’s refreshing that Trump is able to cut through this kind of tendentious crap. If that were his only role, it would be a good one, because political correctness is an intellectual disease that is making it impossible for even educated people to think — especially people who affect to be political leaders. Trump’s fellow Republicans are entertainingly trapped in their own cowardliness and it’s fun to watch them squirm.

But for me, everything else about Trump is frankly sickening, from his sneering manner of speech, to the worldview he reveals day by day, to the incoherence of his rhetoric, to the wolverine that lives on top of his head. The thought of Trump actually getting elected makes me wonder where Arthur Bremer is when we really need him.

Did any of you actually catch Trump’s performance last week at the so-called “town meeting” event in New Hampshire (really just a trumped-up pep rally)? I don’t think I miscounted that Trump told the audience he was “very smart” 23 times in the course of his remarks. If he really was smart, he would know that such tedious assertions only suggest he is deeply insecure about his own intelligence. After all, this is a man whose lifework has been putting up giant buildings that resemble bowling trophies, some of them in the service of one of the worst activities of our time, legalized gambling, which is based on the socially pernicious idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing.

I daresay that legalized gambling has had a possibly worse effect on American life the past three decades than illegal immigration. Gambling is a marginal activity for marginal people that belongs on the margins — the back rooms and back alleys. It was consigned there for decades because it was understood that it’s not healthy for the public to believe that it’s possible to get something for nothing, that it undermines perhaps the most fundamental principle of human life.

Trump’s verbal incoherence is really something to behold. He’s incapable of expressing a complete thought without venturing down a dendritic maze of digressions, often leading to an assertion of how much he is loved (another sign of insecurity). For example, when he attacked Jeb’s (no last name necessary) statement that we have to show Iraqi leaders that “we have skin in the game,” Trump invoked the “wounded warriors,” saying “I love them. They’re everywhere. They love me.” In the immortal words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”

Trump’s notion that he can push around world leaders such as Vladimir Putin by treating them as though they were president of the Cement Workers’ Union ought to give thoughtful people the vapors. It doesn’t seem to occur to Trump that other countries could easily get pugnacious towards us. He would have us in a world war before the inaugural parade was over.

The trouble is that it’s not inconceivable Trump could get elected. Farfetched, perhaps, but not out of the question. The USA is heading for a very rough patch of history — as those of you with your eyes on the stock indexes lately may suspect. The country stands an excellent chance of waking up some morning soon to discover it is broke and broken. When that happens, all the anxiety and animus will be focused on looking for scapegoats, and they are likely to be the wrong ones.

World leaders considered Hitler a clown in the early going, too, you know. But the Germans were wild about him. He pushed a lot of the right buttons under the circumstances. Trump is worse than Hitler. And the American people, alas, are now surely a worse lot of ignorant, raging, tattooed slobs than the German people were in 1933. Be very afraid.

Sources:
http://www.zerohedge.com
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/worse-than-hitler/
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THE REVOLT AGAINST THE RULING CLASS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:28:00 +0000

Don’t confuse this for the publics typical attraction to candidates posing as political outsiders who’ll clean up the mess, even when they’re really insiders who contributed to the mess.

8/5/2015
By Robert Reich
ROBERTREICH.ORG

“He can’t possibly win the nomination,” is the phrase heard most often when Washington insiders mention either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Yet as enthusiasm for the bombastic billionaire and the socialist senior continues to build within each party, the political establishment is mystified.

Political insiders don’t see that the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades.

In two very different ways, Trump and Sanders are agents of this revolt. I’ll explain the two ways in a moment.

Don’t confuse this for the public’s typical attraction to candidates posing as political outsiders who’ll clean up the mess, even when they’re really insiders who contributed to the mess.

What’s new is the degree of anger now focused on those who have had power over our economic and political system since the start of the 1980s.

Included are presidents and congressional leaders from both parties, along with their retinues of policy advisors, political strategists, and spin-doctors.

Most have remained in Washington even when not in power, as lobbyists, campaign consultants, go-to lawyers, financial bundlers, and power brokers.

The other half of the ruling class comprises the corporate executives, Wall Street chiefs, and multi-millionaires who have assisted and enabled these political leaders – and for whom the politicians have provided political favors in return.

America has long had a ruling class but the public was willing to tolerate it during the three decades after World War II, when prosperity was widely shared and when the Soviet Union posed a palpable threat. Then, the ruling class seemed benevolent and wise.

Yet in the last three decades – when almost all the nation’s economic gains have gone to the top while the wages of most people have gone nowhere – the ruling class has seemed to pad its own pockets at the expense of the rest of America.

We’ve witnessed self-dealing on a monumental scale – starting with the junk-bond takeovers of the 1980s, followed by the Savings and Loan crisis, the corporate scandals of the early 2000s (Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco, Worldcom), and culminating in the near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 and the taxpayer-financed bailout.

Along the way, millions of Americans lost their jobs their savings, and their homes.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to big money in politics wider than ever. Taxes have been cut on top incomes, tax loopholes widened, government debt has grown, public services have been cut. And not a single Wall Street executive has gone to jail.

The game seems rigged – riddled with abuses of power, crony capitalism, and corporate welfare.

In 1964, Americans agreed by 64% to 29% that government was run for the benefit of all the people. By 2012, the response had reversed, with voters saying by 79% to 19% that government was “run by a few big interests looking after themselves.”

Which has made it harder for ordinary people to get ahead. In 2001 a Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by working hard and 22 percent dissatisfied. By 2014, only 54 percent were satisfied and 45 percent dissatisfied.

The resulting fury at ruling class has taken two quite different forms.

On the right are the wreckers. The Tea Party, which emerged soon after the Wall Street bailout, has been intent on stopping government in its tracks and overthrowing a ruling class it sees as rotten to the core.

Its Republican protégés in Congress and state legislatures have attacked the Republican establishment. And they’ve wielded the wrecking balls of government shutdowns, threats to default on public debt, gerrymandering, voter suppression through strict ID laws, and outright appeals to racism.

Donald Trump is their human wrecking ball. The more outrageous his rants and put downs of other politicians, the more popular he becomes among this segment of the public that’s thrilled by a bombastic, racist, billionaire who sticks it to the ruling class.

On the left are the re-builders. The Occupy movement, which also emerged from the Wall Street bailout, was intent on displacing the ruling class and rebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up.

Occupy didn’t last but it put inequality on the map. And the sentiments that fueled Occupy are still boiling.

Bernie Sanders personifies them. The more he advocates a fundamental retooling of our economy and democracy in favor of average working people, the more popular he becomes among those who no longer trust the ruling class to bring about necessary change.

Yet despite the growing revolt against the ruling class, it seems likely that the nominees in 2016 will be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. After all, the ruling class still controls America.

But the revolt against the ruling class won’t end with the 2016 election, regardless.

Which means the ruling class will have to change the way it rules America. Or it won’t rule too much longer.

Source:
http://robertreich.org/post/125702366950
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Open Letter to John McCain:Get Out of Washington, You Low-Life Scum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 21:27:00 +0000

By Carl Gibson
Reader Supported News
January 30, 2015

ear Senator McCain,

What would you call a war veteran who answers a veteran’s question about providing more jobs to veterans by saying it’s his “highest priority,” only to vote against more jobs for veterans when he’s back in Washington?

What would you call a veteran who was tortured, survived miraculously, got elected to the U.S. Senate, sent more young men to die in a foreign war, voted to deny them jobs and benefits, and yet demands the arrest and full prosecution of those who exercise the constitutional rights he supposedly fought for?

To borrow phrasing from you, Senator, I would call you low-life scum.

The Code PINK protesters you called “low-life scum” during a Senate hearing this week are Americans exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, which you swore an oath to defend both as a naval officer and as a member of Congress. These protesters were also within their right to make a citizens’ arrest against someone who has committed a felony – in this case, war crimes.

It’s critical for you to understand why these protesters are patriotic Americans and not “low-life scum,” as you called them.

When Henry Kissinger, whom you just vociferously defended from the dais, authorized the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, his actions killed over 40,000 people, including civilians who had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. Kissinger has said he did so to stop North Vietnamese troops from using Cambodia as a staging ground. However, research has shown that all Kissinger’s bombing campaign did was pave the way for the brutal Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia, then use the B-52 bombings as propaganda to justify their cause, leading to more death and destruction.

Kissinger illegally bombed a sovereign nation that we never officially declared war on, destabilized its government, and allowed a violent, autocratic regime to seize power. If that isn't a felony, I don't know what is.

Washington D.C. statute allows for citizens’ arrests in the case of a felony.

And in Code PINK’s case, war crimes are certainly a felony offense. When you called on the capitol police, it should’ve been to arrest Kissinger, not Code PINK activists. But your classless outburst during that hearing is indicative of the allegiances you hold, and the longstanding hypocrisy of your entire Congressional career.

Despite going through a war firsthand, and going on record saying “war is wretched beyond description,” you are one of the loudest voices consistently in favor of going to war with anyone at the drop of a hat. You bragged to a conservative radio host that nobody supported President Bush's war in Iraq more than you. You were the first member of the Senate to call for airstrikes on Syria. You’ve openly said you’d like to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. You even made a joke about bombing Iran at a campaign rally. As a Vietnam veteran, haven't you had enough war for one lifetime?

Speaking of veterans, I would think that someone who has personally experienced the worst imaginable hell of war would be the first one to stand up for veterans when given the chance. But you, Senator McCain, have turned your back repeatedly on America’s veterans when they asked for even the most concrete necessities.

When the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) urged you to pass the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits & Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014, you voted against even bringing it to the floor for debate, despite the fact that several of your Republican colleagues supported it.

You claim to support better healthcare for veterans, and that bill would’ve provided that care by, among other things, expanding the Comprehensive Caregiver Assistance Program, and advanced veterans’ retirement payments even in the event of a government shutdown. As a fellow veteran who bears permanent scars of war, how could you deny your brothers and sisters at the PVA this vote?

After you came home from Vietnam, where you endured years of cruel imprisonment, solitary confinement, and torture, where would you be if you didn’t have for a father a four-star admiral who commanded all U.S. forces in Vietnam? Unlike you, many of the veterans who are lucky enough to come back from the wars you eagerly sent them off to don’t have wealthy, highly-connected families to support them when they return stateside.

Almost 50,000 veterans today are struggling to survive on the streets despite serving their country. Yet when you were given multiple opportunities to show your commitment to homeless veterans, you did nothing.

When the House of Representatives passed the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, which would have funded the transition for veterans to go from wandering the streets to having a roof over their head, you allowed the bill to die, and said nothing. You even allowed your party to kill the Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans with Children Act of 2009, which would have provided homes for single mothers who served their countries with distinction in the military.

But as bad as your inaction was on those bills, it still wasn’t your biggest slight to America’s veterans.

At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Meg Lanker-Simons, a veteran and journalist, asked you about providing more jobs to veterans, 14 percent of whom are unemployed. You responded, to her face, that you were going to “try to find more and better ways to hire veterans,” that chronic unemployment of veterans was a “national disgrace,” and that making more jobs available to veterans was your “highest priority.”

But just a month later, when the Senate was voting on theVeterans Job Corps Bill, which would’ve paired veterans up with job opportunities based on their skill sets, you mocked the idea before voting it down. While your reason was that the $1 billion cost was too high, the bill would have paid for itself by $1 billion of new revenue for the office of Veterans’ Affairs. So, Mr. McCain, not only are you a hypocrite, but a liar as well. If you didn’t run for elected office to serve your fellow veterans, why did you run in the first place?

With a net worth of over $10 million, you are one of the richest members of Congress. And as everyone learned in 2008, you own 8 properties, making you one of the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans.

During your Congressional career, you voted 19 times against increasing the minimum wage, yet in 2010, you voted to extend George W. Bush’s tax cut package. That was a complete 180 from your earlier position against it, in which you rightly called it “generous tax relief to the wealthiest individuals of our country at the expense of lower and middle-income taxpayers.”

You also voted for a $700 billion bailout of the big banks that crashed our economy in 2008. Those same banks gave you almost $2 million in campaign and leadership PAC donations between 2005 and 2010, including over $50,000 from bailout king Goldman Sachs. If someone who didn’t know any better took a look at that data, they would think you’re only in office to serve yourself.

You’ve been in Washington long enough, Senator McCain, and you’ve done enough damage to veterans and working people. Either resign now with some semblance of dignity, or prepare to be thrown out of office in 2016.

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Source: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/28329-focus-open-letter-to-john-mccain-get-out-of-washington-you-low-life-scum

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One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 13:18:00 +0000

What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society

By Kevin Roose
New York Magazine
Feb 18, 2014

Recently, our nation’s financial chieftains have been feeling a little unloved. Venture capitalists are comparing the persecution of the rich to the plight ofJews at Kristallnacht, Wall Street titans are saying that they’re sick of being beaten up, and this week, a billionaire investor, Wilbur Ross, proclaimed that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons.”

Ross's statement seemed particularly odd, because two years ago, I met Ross at an event that might single-handedly explain why the rest of the country still hates financial tycoons – the annual black-tie induction ceremony of a secret Wall Street fraternity called Kappa Beta Phi.

“Good evening, Exalted High Council, former Grand Swipes, Grand Swipes-in-waiting, fellow Wall Street Kappas, Kappas from the Spring Street and Montgomery Street chapters, and worthless neophytes!”

It was January 2012, and Ross, wearing a tuxedo and purple velvet moccasins embroidered with the fraternity’s Greek letters, was standing at the dais of the St. Regis Hotel ballroom, welcoming a crowd of two hundred wealthy and famous Wall Street figures to the Kappa Beta Phi dinner. Ross, the leader (or “Grand Swipe”) of the fraternity, was preparing to invite 21 new members — “neophytes,” as the group called them — to join its exclusive ranks.

Looking up at him from an elegant dinner of rack of lamb and foie gras were many of the most famous investors in the world, including executives from nearly every too-big-to-fail bank, private equity megafirm, and major hedge fund. AIG CEO Bob Benmosche was there, as were Wall Street superlawyer Marty Lipton and Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the former chairman of Bear Stearns. And those were just the returning members. Among the neophytes were hedge fund billionaire and major Obama donor Marc Lasry and Joe Reece, a high-ranking dealmaker at Credit Suisse. [To see the full Kappa Beta Phi member list, click here.] All told, enough wealth and power was concentrated in the St. Regis that night that if you had dropped a bomb on the roof, global finance as we know it might have ceased to exist.

During his introductory remarks, Ross spoke for several minutes about the legend of Kappa Beta Phi – how it had been started in 1929 by “four C+ William and Mary students”; how its crest, depicting a “macho right hand in a proper Savile Row suit and a Turnbull and Asser shirtsleeve,” was superior to that of its namesake Phi Beta Kappa (Ross called Phi Beta Kappa’s ruffled-sleeve logo a “tacit confession of homosexuality”); and how the fraternity’s motto, “Dum vivamus edimus et biberimus,” was Latin for “While we live, we eat and drink.”

On cue, the financiers shouted out in a thundering bellow: “DUM VIVAMUS EDIMUS ET BIBERIMUS.”

The only person not saying the chant along with Ross was me — a journalist who had sneaked into the event, and who was hiding out at a table in the back corner in a rented tuxedo.

I’d heard whisperings about the existence of Kappa Beta Phi, whose members included both incredibly successful financiers (New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones) and incredibly unsuccessful ones (Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, former New Jersey governor and MF Global flameout Jon Corzine). It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand.

I wanted to break the streak for several reasons. As part of my research for my book,Young Money, I’d been investigating the lives of young Wall Street bankers – the 22-year-olds toiling at the bottom of the financial sector’s food chain. I knew what made those people tick. But in my career as a financial journalist, one question that proved stubbornly elusive was what happened to Wall Streeters as they climbed the ladder to adulthood. Whenever I’d interviewed CEOs and chairmen at big Wall Street firms, they were always too guarded, too on-message and wrapped in media-relations armor to reveal anything interesting about the psychology of the ultra-wealthy. But if I could somehow see these barons in their natural environment, with their defenses down, I might be able to understand the world my young subjects were stepping into.

So when I learned when and where Kappa Beta Phi’s annual dinner was being held, I knew I needed to try to go.

Getting in was shockingly easy — a brisk walk past the sign-in desk, and I was inside cocktail hour. Immediately, I saw faces I recognized from the papers. I picked up an event program and saw that there were other boldface names on the Kappa Beta Phi membership roll — among them, then-Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Home Depot billionaire Ken Langone, Morgan Stanley bigwig Greg Fleming, and JPMorgan Chase vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Any way you count, this was one of the most powerful groups of business executives in the world. (Since I was a good 20 years younger than any other attendee, I suspect that anyone taking note of my presence assumed I was a waiter.)

I hadn’t counted on getting in to the Kappa Beta Phi dinner, and now that I had gotten past security, I wasn’t sure quite what to do. I wanted to avoid rousing suspicion, and I knew that talking to people would get me outed in short order. So I did the next best thing — slouched against a far wall of the room, and pretended to tap out emails on my phone.

After cocktail hour, the new inductees – all of whom were required to dress in leotards and gold-sequined skirts, with costume wigs – began their variety-show acts. Among the night’s lowlights:

• Paul Queally, a private-equity executive with Welsh, Carson, Anderson, & Stowe, told off-color jokes to Ted Virtue, another private-equity bigwig with MidOcean Partners. The jokes ranged from unfunny and sexist (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton and a catfish?” A: “One has whiskers and stinks, and the other is a fish”) to unfunny and homophobic (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Barney Frank and a Fenway Frank?” A: “Barney Frank comes in different-size buns”).

• Bill Mulrow, a top executive at the Blackstone Group (who was later appointed chairman of the New York State Housing Finance Agency), and Emil Henry, a hedge fund manager with Tiger Infrastructure Partners and formerassistant secretary of the Treasury, performed a bizarre two-man comedy skit. Mulrow was dressed in raggedy, tie-dye clothes to play the part of a liberal radical, and Henry was playing the part of a wealthy baron. They exchanged lines as if staging a debate between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. (“Bill, look at you! You’re pathetic, you liberal! You need a bath!” Henry shouted. “My God, you callow, insensitive Republican! Don’t you know what we need to do? We need to create jobs,” Mulrow shot back.)

• David Moore, Marc Lasry, and Keith Meister — respectively, a holding company CEO, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, and an activist investor — sang a few seconds of a finance-themed parody of “YMCA” before getting the hook.

• Warren Stephens, an investment banking CEO, took the stage in a Confederate flag hat and sang a song about the financial crisis, set to the tune of “Dixie.” (“In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”)

A few more acts followed, during which the veteran Kappas continued to gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously. Michael Novogratz, a former Army helicopter pilot with a shaved head and a stocky build whose firm, Fortress Investment Group, had made him a billionaire, was sitting next to me, drinking liberally and annotating each performance with jokes and insults.

“Can you fuckin’ believe Lasry up there?” Novogratz asked me. I nodded. He added, “He just gave me a ride in his jet a month ago.”

The neophytes – who had changed from their drag outfits into Mormon missionary costumes — broke into their musical finale: a parody version of “I Believe,” the hit ballad from The Book of Mormon, with customized lyrics like “I believe that God has a plan for all of us. I believe my plan involves a seven-figure bonus.” Amused, I pulled out my phone, and began recording the proceedings on video. Wrong move.

“Who the hell are you?” Novogratz demanded.

I felt my pulse spike. I was tempted to make a run for it, but – due to the ethics code of the New York Times, my then-employer – I had no choice but to out myself.

“I’m a reporter,” I said.

Novogratz stood up from the table.

"You’re not allowed to be here," he said.

I, too, stood, and tried to excuse myself, but he grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.

“Give me that or I’ll fucking break it!” Novogratz yelled, grabbing for my phone, which was filled with damning evidence. His eyes were bloodshot, and his neck veins were bulging. The song onstage was now over, and a number of prominent Kappas had rushed over to our table. Before the situation could escalate dangerously, a bond investor and former Grand Swipe named Alexandra Lebenthal stepped in between us. Wilbur Ross quickly followed, and the two of them led me out into the lobby, past a throng of Wall Street tycoons, some of whom seemed to be hyperventilating.

Once we made it to the lobby, Ross and Lebenthal reassured me that what I’d just seen wasn’t really a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, making light of the financial crisis, and bragging about their business conquests at Main Street’s expense. No, it was just a group of friends who came together to roast each other in a benign and self-deprecating manner. Nothing to see here.

But the extent of their worry wasn’t made clear until Ross offered himself up as a source for future stories in exchange for my cooperation.

“I’ll pick up the phone anytime, get you any help you need,” he said.

“Yeah, the people in this group could be very helpful,” Lebenthal chimed in. “If you could just keep their privacy in mind.”

I wasn’t going to be bribed off my story, but I understood their panic. Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (Or worse, sing about it — one of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street and that, if made public, could end careers and damage very public reputations.

After several more minutes spent trying to do damage control, Ross and Lebenthal escorted me out of the St. Regis.

As I walked through the streets of midtown in my ill-fitting tuxedo, I thought about the implications of what I’d just seen.

The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.

The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of a reporter making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum.

The last thought I had, and the saddest, was that many of these self-righteous Kappa Beta Phi members had surely been first-year bankers once. And in the 20, 30, or 40 years since, something fundamental about them had changed. Their pursuit of money and power had removed them from the larger world to the sad extent that, now, in the primes of their careers, the only people with whom they could be truly themselves were a handful of other prominent financiers.

Perhaps, I realized, this social isolation is why despite extraordinary evidence to the contrary, one-percenters like Ross keep saying how badly persecuted they are. When you’re a member of the fraternity of money, it can be hard to see past the foie gras to the real world.

Revealed: The Full Membership List of Wall Street’s Secret Society

See source for sound clips and photos

Source:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:30:00 +0000

FEBRUARY 11TH 2014 IS

The Day We Fight Back

AGAINST MASS SURVEILLANCE

Edward Snowden's journey from patriot to America's most wanted

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 18:50:00 +0000

How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower

By Luke Harding
The Guardian
Jan 31, 2014

In late December 2001, someone calling themselves TheTrueHOOHA had a question. He was an 18-year-old American male with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. Everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously.

TheTrueHOOHA wanted to set up his own web server. It was a Saturday morning, a little after 11am. He posted: "It's my first time. Be gentle. Here's my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?"

Soon, regular users were piling in with helpful suggestions. TheTrueHOOHA replied: "Ah, the vast treasury of geek knowledge that is Ars." He would become a prolific contributor; over the next eight years, he authored nearly 800 comments. He described himself variously as "unemployed", a failed soldier, a "systems editor", and someone who had US State Department security clearance.

His home was on the east coast of America in the state of Maryland, near Washington DC. But by his mid-20s he was already an international man of mystery. He popped up in Europe – in Geneva, London, Ireland, Italy and Bosnia. He travelled to India. Despite having no degree, he knew an astonishing amount about computers. His politics appeared staunchly Republican. He believed strongly in personal liberty, defending, for example, Australians who farmed cannabis plants.

At times he could be rather obnoxious. He called one fellow-Arsian, for example, a "cock"; others who disagreed with his sink-or-swim views on social security were "fucking retards".

His chat logs cover a colourful array of themes: gaming, girls, sex, Japan, the stock market, his disastrous stint in the US army, his negative impressions of multiracial Britain (he was shocked by the number of "Muslims" in east London and wrote, "I thought I had gotten off of the plane in the wrong country… it was terrifying"), the joys of gun ownership ("I have a Walther P22. It's my only gun but I love it to death," he wrote in 2006). In their own way, the logs form a Bildungsroman.

Then, in 2009, the entries fizzle away. In February 2010, TheTrueHOOHA mentions a thing that troubles him: pervasive government surveillance. "Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?"

TheTrueHOOHA's last post is on 21 May 2012. After that, he disappears, a lost electronic signature amid the vastness of cyberspace. He was, we now know, Edward Snowden.

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on 21 June 1983. His father Lonnie and mother Elizabeth – known as Wendy – were high-school sweethearts who married at 18. Lon was an officer in the US coastguard; Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, on North Carolina's coast. He has an older sister, Jessica. When Snowden was small – a boy with thick blond hair and a toothy smile – he and his family moved to Maryland, within DC's commuter belt.

As his father recalls, Snowden's education went wrong when he got ill, probably with glandular fever. He missed "four or five months" of class in his mid-teens. Another factor hurt his studies: his parents were drifting apart. He failed to finish high school. In 1999, aged 16, Snowden enrolled at Anne Arundel community college, where he took computer courses.

In the aftermath of his parents' divorce, Snowden lived with a roommate, and then with his mother, in Ellicott City, just west of Baltimore. He grew up under the giant shadow of one government agency in particular. From his mother's front door, it takes 15 minutes to drive there. Half-hidden by trees is a big, green, cube-shaped building. An entrance sign off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway reads: "NSA next right. Employees only." The Puzzle Palace employs 40,000 people. It is the largest hirer of mathematicians in the US.

For Snowden, the likelihood of joining was slim. In his early 20s, his focus was on computers. To him, the internet was "the most important invention in all human history". He chatted online to people "with all sorts of views I would never have encountered on my own". He wasn't only a nerd: he kept fit, practised kung fu and, according to one entry on Ars, "dated Asian girls".

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq prompted Snowden to think seriously about a career in the military. "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression," he has said.

The military offered what seemed, on the face of it, an attractive scheme, whereby recruits with no prior experience could try out to become elite soldiers. In May 2004, Snowden took the plunge and enlisted, reporting to Fort Benning in Georgia. It was a disaster. He was in good physical shape but an improbable soldier, shortsighted and with unusually narrow feet. During infantry training, he broke both his legs. After more than a month's uncertainty, the army finally discharged him.

Back in Maryland, he got a job as a "security specialist" at the University for Maryland's Centre for Advanced Study of Language. It was 2005. (He appears to have begun as a security guard, but then moved back into IT.) Snowden was working at a covert NSA facility on the university's campus.

Thanks perhaps to his brief military history, he had broken into the world of US intelligence, albeit on a low rung. The centre worked closely with the US intelligence community, providing advanced language training.

In mid-2006, Snowden landed a job in IT at the CIA. He was rapidly learning that his exceptional IT skills opened all kinds of interesting government doors. "First off, the degree thing is crap, at least domestically. If you 'really' have 10 years of solid, provable IT experience… you CAN get a very well-paying IT job," he wrote online in July 2006.

In 2007, the CIA sent Snowden to Geneva on his first foreign tour. Switzerland was an awakening and an adventure. He was 24. His job was to maintain security for the CIA's computer network and look after computer security for US diplomats. He was a telecommunications information systems officer. He also had to maintain the heating and air-conditioning.

In Geneva, Snowden was exposed to an eclectic range of views. On one occasion, he gave an Estonian singer called Mel Kaldalu a lift to Munich. They had met at a Free Tibet event in Geneva; they didn't know each other brilliantly well, but well enough for Snowden to offer him a lift. They chatted for hours on the empty autobahn. Snowden argued that the US should act as a world policeman. Kaldalu disagreed. "Ed's an intelligent guy," he says. "Maybe even a little bit stubborn. He's outspoken. He likes to discuss things. Self-sustainable. He has his own opinions."

The Estonian singer and the CIA technician talked about the difficulty pro-Tibet activists had in getting Chinese visas. Snowden was sceptical about the Beijing Olympics. Kaldalu said the Israeli occupation of Palestine was morally questionable. Snowden said he understood this, but viewed US support for Israel as the "least worst" option. Kaldalu suggested a "deconstructive" approach. The pair also discussed how rapid digital changes might affect democracy and the way people governed themselves.

At the time, the figure who most closely embodied Snowden's rightwing views was Ron Paul, the most famous exponent of US libertarianism. Snowden supported Paul's 2008 bid for the US presidency. He was also impressed with the Republican candidate John McCain. He wasn't an Obama supporter as such, but he didn't object to him, either.

Once Obama became president, Snowden came to dislike him intensely. He criticised the White House's attempts to ban assault weapons. He was unimpressed by affirmative action. Another topic made him even angrier. The Snowden of 2009 inveighed against government officials who leaked classified information to newspapers – the worst crime conceivable, in Snowden's apoplectic view. In January of that year, the New York Times published a report on a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran.

The Times said its story was based on 15 months' worth of interviews with current and former US officials, European and Israeli officials, other experts and international nuclear inspectors.

TheTrueHOOHA's response, published by Ars Technica, is revealing. In a long conversation with another user, he wrote the following messages:

"WTF NYTIMES. Are they TRYING to start a war?"

"They're reporting classified shit"

"moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this? those people should be shot in the balls"

"that shit is classified for a reason"

"it's not because 'oh we hope our citizens don't find out' its because 'this shit won't work if iran knows what we're doing'"

Snowden's anti-leaking invective seems stunningly at odds with his own later behaviour, but he would trace the beginning of his own disillusionment with government spying to this time. "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good," he later said.

In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA. Now he was to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan. The opportunities for contractors had boomed as the burgeoning US security state outsourced intelligence tasks to private companies. Snowden was on the payroll of Dell, the computer firm. The early lacunae in his CV were by this stage pretty much irrelevant. He had top-secret clearance and outstanding computer skills. He had felt passionately about Japan from his early teens and had spent a year and a half studying Japanese. He sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name – "E-do-waa-do" – and wrote in 2001: "I've always dreamed of being able to 'make it' in Japan. I'd love a cushy .gov job over there."

Japan marked a turning point, the period when Snowden became more than a disillusioned technician: "I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in."

Between 2009 and 2012, he says he found out just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities are: "They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them." He also realised that the mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. "You can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act." He left Japan for Hawaii in 2012, a whistleblower-in-waiting.

Snowden's new job was at the NSA's regional cryptological centre (the Central Security Service) on the main island of Oahu, near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor, working at one of the 13 NSA hubs devoted to spying on foreign interests, particularly the Chinese. He arrived with an audacious plan to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties and to leak them stolen top-secret documents. His aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgment.

According to an NSA staffer who worked with him in Hawaii and who later talked to Forbes magazine, Snowden was a principled and ultra-competent if somewhat eccentric colleague. He wore a hoodie featuring a parody NSA logo. Instead of a key in an eagle's claws, it had a pair of eavesdropping headphones, covering the bird's ears. He kept a copy of the constitution on his desk and wandered the halls carrying a Rubik's cube. He left small gifts on colleagues' desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined.

In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden's sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. He took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency's tailored access operations, a group of elite hackers.

On 30 March, in the evening, Snowden flew to the US mainland to attend training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton's office near Fort Meade. His new salary was $122,000 (£74,000) a year, plus a housing allowance. On 4 April, he had dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says he found his son preoccupied and nursing a burden. "We hugged as we always do. He said: 'I love you, Dad.' I said: 'I love you, Ed.'"

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world that the NSA hacked," Snowden told the South China Morning Post, adding that this was exactly why he'd accepted it. He was one of around 1,000 NSA "sysadmins" allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren't allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a "ghost user", able to haunt the agency's hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him.

Although we don't know exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents on to thumbnail drives. Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff, but a sysadmin could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile and needed a backup. Sitting back in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA's servers. Most staff had already gone home for the night when he logged on, six time zones away. After four weeks in his new job, Snowden told his bosses at Booz that he was unwell. He wanted some time off and requested unpaid leave. When they checked back with him, he told them he had epilepsy (a condition that affects his mother).

And then, on 20 May, he vanished.

In December 2012, a reader pinged an email to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, one of the more prominent US political commentators of his generation, based in Brazil. The email didn't stand out; he gets dozens of similar ones every day. The sender didn't identify himself. He (or it could have been a she) wrote: "I have some stuff you might be interested in."

"He was very vague," Greenwald recalls.

This mystery correspondent asked Greenwald to install PGP encryption software on his laptop. Once up and running, it guarantees privacy (the initials stand for Pretty Good Privacy) for an online chat. Greenwald had no objections. But there were two problems. "I'm basically technically illiterate," he admits. Greenwald also had a lingering sense that the kind of person who insisted on encryption might turn out to be slightly crazy.

A month after first trying Greenwald and failing to get a response, Snowden tried a different route. At the end of January 2013, he sent an email to Greenwald's friend and collaborator Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. She was another leading critic of the US security state – and one of its more prominent victims. For six years, between 2006 and 2012, agents from the Department of Homeland Security detained Poitras each time she entered the US. They would interrogate her, confiscate laptops and mobile phones, and demand to know whom she had met. They would seize her camera and notebooks. Nothing incriminating was ever discovered. Poitras became an expert in encryption. She decided to edit her next film, her third in a trilogy about US security, from outside America, and moved temporarily to Berlin.

Snowden's email to Poitras read: "I am a senior member of the intelligence community. This won't be a waste of your time." (The claim was something of an exaggeration: he was a relatively junior infrastructure analyst.) Snowden asked for her encryption key. She gave it. "I felt pretty intrigued pretty quickly," Poitras says. "At that point, my thought was either it's legit or it's entrapment."

The tone of the emails was serious, though there were moments of humour. At one point Snowden advised Poitras to put her mobile in the freezer. "He's an amazing writer. His emails were good. Everything I got read like a thriller," she recalls.

Then Snowden delivered a bombshell. He said he had got hold of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a top-secret 18-page document issued in October 2012. It said that the agency was tapping fibre optic cables, intercepting telephone landing points and bugging on a global scale. And he could prove all of it. "I almost fainted," Poitras says. The source made it clear he wanted Greenwald on board.

Poitras moved ultra-cautiously. It was a fair assumption that the US embassy in Berlin had her under some form of surveillance. It would have to be a personal meeting. In late March, she returned to the US and met Greenwald in the lobby of his hotel, the Marriott in Yonkers. They agreed that they needed to get hold of the national security documents: without them, it would be difficult to rattle the doors on these issues.

Poitras had assumed that Snowden would seek to remain anonymous, but he told her: "I hope you will paint a target on my back and tell the world I did this on my own."

By late spring 2013, the possibility of a meeting was in the air. Snowden intended to leak one actual document. The file would reveal collaboration between the NSA and giant internet corporations under a secret program called Prism.

Poitras flew again to New York for what she imagined would be her meeting with a senior intelligence bureaucrat. The source then sent her an encrypted file. In it was the Prism PowerPoint, and a second document that came as a total surprise: "Your destination is Hong Kong." The next day, he told her his name for the first time.

Poitras knew that if she searched Snowden's name on Google, this would immediately alert the NSA. Attached was a map, a set of protocols for how they would meet, and a message: "This is who I am. This is what they will say about me. This is the information I have."

In mid-April, Greenwald received a FedEx parcel containing two thumb drives with a security kit allowing him to install a basic encrypted chat program. Snowden now contacted Greenwald himself. "I have been working with a friend of yours… We need to talk, urgently." The whistleblower finally had a direct, secure connection to the elusive writer. Snowden wrote: "Can you come to Hong Kong?"

The demand struck Greenwald as bizarre. His instinct was to do nothing. He contacted Snowden via chat. "I would like some more substantial idea why I'm going and why this is worthwhile for me?"
Over the next two hours, Snowden explained to Greenwald how to boot up the Tails system, one of the securest forms of communication. Snowden then wrote, with what can only be called understatement, "I'm going to send you a few documents."

Snowden's welcome package was around 20 documents from the NSA's inner sanctuaries, most stamped Top Secret. At a glance, it suggested the NSA had misled Congress about the nature of its domestic spying activities, and quite possibly lied. "It was unbelievable," Greenwald says. "It was enough to make me hyperventilate."

Two days later, on 31 May, Greenwald sat in the office of Janine Gibson, the Guardian US's editor in New York. He said a trip to Hong Kong would enable the Guardian to find out about the mysterious source. Stuart Millar, the deputy editor of Guardian US, joined the discussion. Both executives agreed that the only way to establish the source's credentials was to meet him in person. Greenwald would take the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong the next day. Independently, Poitras was coming along, too. But Gibson ordered a third member on to the team, the Guardian's veteran Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill. The 61-year-old Scot and political reporter was experienced and professional. He was calm. Everybody liked him.

Except Poitras. She was exceedingly upset. As she saw it, an extra person might freak out the source, who was already on edge. "She was insistent that this would not happen," Greenwald says. "She completely flipped out." He tried to mediate, without success.

However, at JFK airport, the ill-matched trio boarded a Cathay Pacific flight. Poitras sat at the back of the plane. She was funding her own trip. Greenwald and MacAskill, their bills picked up by the Guardian, were farther up in Premium Economy. As flight CX831 took off, there was a feeling of liberation. Up in the air, there is no internet – or at least there wasn't in June 2013. Once the seatbelt signs were off, Poitras brought a present they were both eager to open: a USB stick. Snowden had securely delivered her a second cache of secret NSA documents. This latest data set was far bigger than the initial "welcome pack". It contained 3,000-4,000 items.

For the rest of the journey, Greenwald read the latest cache, mesmerised. Sleep was impossible: "I didn't take my eyes off the screen for a second. The adrenaline was so extreme." From time to time Poitras would come up from her seat in the rear and grin at Greenwald. "We would just cackle and giggle like schoolchildren. We were screaming and hugging and dancing with each other up and down," he says. Their celebrations woke up some of their neighbours; they didn't care.

The first rendezvous was in Kowloon's Mira hotel, a chic, modern edifice in the heart of the tourist district. Poitras and Greenwald were to meet Snowden in a quiet part of the hotel, next to a large plastic alligator. They would swap pre-agreed phrases. Snowden would carry a Rubik's cube.

Everything Greenwald knew about Snowden pointed in one direction: that he was a grizzled veteran of the intelligence community. "I thought he must be a pretty senior bureaucrat," Greenwald says.

Probably 60-odd, wearing a blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, receding grey hair, sensible black shoes, spectacles, a club tie. Perhaps he was the CIA's station chief in Hong Kong.

The pair reached the alligator ahead of schedule. They sat down. They waited. Nothing happened. The source didn't show. Strange.

If the initial meeting failed, the plan was to return later the same morning. Greenwald and Poitras came back. They waited for a second time.

And then they saw him – a pale, spindle-limbed, nervous, preposterously young man. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans. In his right hand was a scrambled Rubik's cube. Had there been a mistake?

The young man – if indeed he were the source – had sent encrypted instructions as to how the initial verification would proceed:

Greenwald: What time does the restaurant open?

The source: At noon. But don't go there, the food sucks…

Greenwald – nervous – said his lines, struggling to keep a straight face. Snowden then said simply, "Follow me." The three walked silently to the elevator. They rode to the first floor and followed the cube-man to room 1014. Optimistically, Greenwald speculated that he was the son of the source, or his personal assistant. If not, then the encounter was a waste of time, a hoax.

Over the course of the day, however, Snowden told his story. He had access to tens of thousands of documents taken from NSA and GCHQ's internal servers. Most were stamped Top Secret. Some were marked Top Secret Strap 1 – the British higher tier of super-classification for intercept material – or even Strap 2, which was almost as secret as you could get. No one – apart from a restricted circle of security officials – had ever seen documents of this kind before. What he was carrying, Snowden indicated, was the biggest intelligence leak in history.

Greenwald bombarded him with questions. His credibility was on the line. So was that of his editors at the Guardian. Yet if Snowden were genuine, at any moment a CIA Swat team could burst into the room, confiscate his laptops and drag him away.

As he gave his answers, they began to feel certain Snowden was no fake. And his reasons for becoming a whistleblower were cogent, too. The NSA could bug "anyone", from the president downwards, he said. In theory, the spy agency was supposed to collect only "signals intelligence" on foreign targets. In practice this was a joke, Snowden told Greenwald: it was already hoovering up metadata from millions of Americans. Phone records, email headers, subject lines, seized without acknowledgment or consent. From this you could construct a complete electronic narrative of an individual's life: their friends, lovers, joys, sorrows.

The NSA had secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre optic cables that ringed the world.

This allowed them to read much of the globe's communications. Secret courts were compelling telecoms providers to hand over data. What's more, pretty much all of Silicon Valley was involved with the NSA, Snowden said – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, even Steve Jobs's Apple. The NSA claimed it had "direct access" to the tech giants' servers. It had even put secret back doors into online encryption software – used to make secure bank payments – weakening the system for everybody.

The spy agencies had hijacked the internet. Snowden told Greenwald he didn't want to live in a world "where everything that I say, everything that I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of love or friendship is recorded".

Snowden agreed to meet MacAskill the next morning. The encounter went smoothly until the reporter produced his iPhone. He asked Snowden if he minded if he taped their interview, and perhaps took some photos? Snowden flung up his arms in alarm, as if prodded by an electric stick. "I might as well have invited the NSA into his bedroom," MacAskill says. The young technician explained that the spy agency was capable of turning a mobile phone into a microphone and tracking device; bringing it into the room was an elementary mistake. MacAskill dumped the phone.

Snowden's own precautions were remarkable. He piled pillows up against the door to stop anyone eavesdropping from outside in the corridor. When putting passwords into computers, he placed a big red hood over his head and laptop, so the passwords couldn't be picked up by hidden cameras. On the three occasions he left his room, Snowden put a glass of water behind the door next to a bit of tissue paper. The paper had a soy sauce mark with a distinctive pattern. If anyone entered the room, the water would fall on the paper and it would change the pattern.

MacAskill asked Snowden, almost as an afterthought, whether there was a UK role in this mass data collection. It didn't seem likely to him. MacAskill knew that GCHQ had a longstanding intelligence-sharing relationship with the US, but he was taken aback by Snowden's vehement response. "GCHQ is worse than the NSA," Snowden said. "It's even more intrusive."

The following day, Wednesday 5 June, Snowden was still in place at the Mira hotel. That was the good news. The bad news was that the NSA and the police had been to see his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, back at their home in Hawaii. Snowden's absence from work had been noted, an automatic procedure when NSA staff do not turn up. Snowden agonised: "My family does not know what is happening. My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner." He admitted, "That keeps me up at night."

But the CIA hadn't found him yet. This was one of the more baffling aspects of the Snowden affair: why did the US authorities not close in on him earlier? Once they had spotted his absence, they might have pulled flight records showing he had fled to Hong Kong. There he was comparatively easy to trace. He had checked into the $330-a-night Mira hotel under his own name. He was even paying the bill with his personal credit card.

That evening, Greenwald rapidly drafted a story about Verizon, revealing how the NSA was secretly collecting all the records from this major US telecoms company. Greenwald would work on his laptop, then pass it to MacAskill. MacAskill would type on his computer and hand Greenwald his articles on a memory stick; the sticks flowed back and forth. Nothing went on email.

In New York, Gibson drew up a careful plan for the first story. It had three basic components: seek legal advice; work out a strategy for approaching the White House; get draft copy from the reporters in Hong Kong. She wrote a tentative schedule on a whiteboard. (It was later titled The Legend Of The Phoenix, a line from 2013's big summer hit, Daft Punk's Get Lucky.)

Events were moving at speed. MacAskill had tapped out a four-word text from Hong Kong: "The Guinness is good." This code phrase meant he was now convinced Snowden was genuine. Gibson decided to give the NSA a four-hour window to comment, so the agency had an opportunity to disavow the story. By British standards, the deadline was fair: long enough to make a few calls, agree a line. But for Washington, where journalist-administration relations sometimes resemble a country club, this was nothing short of outrageous. In London, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, headed for the airport for the next available New York flight.

The White House sent in its top guns for a conference call with the Guardian. The team included FBI deputy director Sean M Joyce, a Boston native with an action-man resumé – investigator against Colombian narcotics, counter-terrorism officer, legal attaché in Prague. Also patched in was Chris Inglis, the NSA's deputy director. He was a man who interacted with journalists so rarely, he was considered by many to be a mythical entity. Then there was Robert S Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Litt was clever, likable, voluble, dramatic, lawyerly and prone to rhetorical flourishes. On the Guardian side were Gibson and Millar, sitting in Gibson's small office, with its cheap sofa and unimpressive view of Broadway.

By fielding heavyweights, the White House had perhaps reckoned it could flatter, and if necessary bully, the Guardian into delaying publication. Gibson explained that the editor-in-chief – in the air halfway across the Atlantic – was unavailable. She said: "I'm the final decision-maker." After 20 minutes, the White House was frustrated. The conversation was going in circles. Finally, one of the team could take no more. Losing his temper, he shouted, "You don't need to publish this! No serious news organisation would publish this!" Gibson replied, "With the greatest respect, we will take the decisions about what we publish."

Over in Hong Kong, Snowden and Greenwald were restless. Greenwald signalled that he was ready and willing to self-publish or take the scoop elsewhere if the Guardian hesitated. Time was running out. Snowden could be uncovered at any minute.

Just after 7pm, Guardian US went ahead and ran the story.

That evening, diggers arrived and tore up the sidewalk immediately in front of the Guardian's US office, a mysterious activity for a Wednesday night. With smooth efficiency, they replaced it. More diggers arrived outside Gibson's home in Brooklyn. Soon, every member of the Snowden team was able to recount similar unusual moments: "taxi drivers" who didn't know the way or the fare; "window cleaners" who lingered next to the editor's office. "Very quickly, we had to get better at spycraft," Gibson says.

Snowden now declared his intention to go public. Poitras recorded Greenwald interviewing him. She made a 12-minute film and got the video through to New York. In the Guardian US office, the record of Snowden actually speaking was cathartic. "We were completely blown away," Millar says. "We thought he was cool and plausible." When the moment arrived, with the video ready to go live, the atmosphere in the newsroom was deeply emotional.

Five people, including Rusbridger, were in the office. The video went up about 3pm local time on Sunday 9 June. "It was like a bomb going off," Rusbridger says. "There is a silent few seconds after a bomb explodes when nothing happens." The TV monitors were put on different channels; for almost an hour they carried prerecorded Sunday news. Then at 4pm the story erupted. Each network carried Snowden's image. It was 3am in Hong Kong when the video was posted online. It was the most-viewed story in the Guardian's history.

Snowden had just become the most hunted man on the planet. The chase was already on. Greenwald, in one of his many TV interviews, had been captioned by CNN as "Glenn Greenwald, Hong Kong" – a pretty big clue. The local Chinese media and international journalists now studied every frame of the video for clues. One enterprising hack used Twitter to identify the Mira from its lamps.

And then Snowden vanished.

This is an edited extract from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World's Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding

Source:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/01/edward-snowden-intelligence-leak-nsa-contractor-extract/print
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"We are, however, convinced that the public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order."

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 01:30:00 +0000

Snowden Nominated For Nobel Prize By Norwegian Politicians

By Mark Lewis
Huffington Post
January 29, 2014

Stavanger, Norway (AP) — Two Norwegian politicians have jointly nominated former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, saying his disclosures of secret U.S. documents have contributed to making the world more peaceful.

Anyone can be nominated for the prestigious award, so the submission Wednesday by Socialist lawmakers Baard Vegard Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen just means Snowden will be one of scores of names that the Nobel committee will consider.

"We do not necessarily condone or support all of his disclosures," the two lawmakers said in their nomination letter. "We are, however, convinced that the public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order."

The five-member Nobel committee won't confirm who's been nominated.

Saturday is the deadline for nominations from a range of people, including members of national parliaments and governments, university professors or previous laureates.

Valen agreed that the documents leaked by Snowden "have damaged the security interests of several nations."

"But to have the debate, you have to be aware of what is going on," he told The Associated Press.

The Nobel prize committee members can add their own candidates at their first meeting after Saturday's deadline. The winner will be announced in October.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won last year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/snowden-nobel-prize-nomination-norway-politicans_n_4686575.html
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How corporations are using the First Amendment to destroy government regulation.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 19:43:00 +0000

The Corporate “Free Speech” Racket

By Haley Sweetland Edwards
Washington Monthly
January February 2014

In late summer 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released a new rule requiring businesses to put up an eleven-by-seventeen-inch black-and-white poster notifying employees of their rights under federal law.

The poster, drafted over the course of a year by a committee of rule makers taking into account more than 7,000 public comments and dozens of meetings with industry groups, labor unions, and “right-to-work” advocacy organizations, emerged as would have been expected: even-keeled and rather bland. Beneath the official NLRB seal and above the phrase “This is an official government poster,” it informed employees that they have the right to join or not to join a union, and that they cannot be coerced into doing either.

Still, the business community was incensed. Describing the new rule as yet another government intrusion that would do nothing more than “create unemployment,” “weaken the economy,” and cause “immediate, irreparable harm for which no adequate remedy at law exists,” a coalition of industry groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) launched a firestorm of litigation, eventually suing the agency in two federal appellate courts.

On its face, this little drama isn’t all that surprising. For the past decade or so, industry groups have made a habit of waging war in the form of endless litigation on regulatory agencies, hoping to slow the rule-making process, drain agency resources, and, when possible, get final rules thrown out. In most cases, these lawsuits play out in the weedy battleground of administrative law, where lawyers tussle over economic analyses or some minutiae within the Administrative Procedure Act. But this time was different.

This time, NAM, the biggest trade group in the country, was arguing that by forcing companies to “engage in speech they would not otherwise issue,” the government was “in violation of their rights under the First Amendment.”

And that, dear readers, is a pretty ballsy claim. For one, it’s a little like dealing with your gopher problem by firebombing the neighborhood. By claiming that the government cannot, under the Constitution, compel companies to “engage in speech they would not otherwise issue,” NAM is essentially undercutting nearly all economic regulation. “If that seems alarmist, it’s not,” wrote University of Tulsa law professor Tamara Piety, the author ofBrandishing the First Amendment. In the legal context, the current definition of “speech” is famously fuzzy and could, depending on the situation, include very nearly everything a company does, from advertising and performing financial transactions to transferring data and utilizing computer algorithms. So if NAM’s claim were true, it’s very possible that the government couldn’t regulate any of those activities. “If you cannot regulate commercial speech,” Piety wrote, “you cannot regulate commerce, period.”

The other reason it’s such a ballsy claim is simply that until very recently, it would have been laughed out of court. Most jurisprudence from at least the past eighty or so years backs up the idea that the government, acting in the interest of the greater public, has the authority to force companies to convey certain non-ideological, government-mandated messages, so long as it’s clear that it’s the government “speaking,” not the company. Those messages can take the form of posters or warning labels, or those little placards in bathrooms reminding employees to wash their hands, or some other form of government-mandated “fine print” informing consumers, investors, shareholders, employees, or job seekers about risks or rights or government protections.

So with that, hold on to your socks. In September 2012, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit, made up of A. Raymond Randolph and Karen Henderson, both appointed by George H. W. Bush, and Janice Rogers Brown, a George W. Bush appointee, heard the case. And in May last year, they published their final decision, striking down the NLRB’s rule—on First Amendment and statutory free speech grounds.

It did not matter that the “speech” in question here was a non-ideological poster clearly stating U.S. law, the judges said. And it did not matter that the rule placed no other constraints on companies’ speech or on the free flow of information. (The mere act of compelling a company to “host or accommodate another speaker’s message” was enough to violate its free speech, according to the opinion.) And it did not matter that, in 2003, this same court—and the same judge, Randolph!—had confirmed the legality of President George W. Bush’s executive order requiring federal contractors to put up explicitly anti-union posters in their workplaces on the grounds that “an employer’s right to silence is sharply constrained in the labor context and leaves it subject to a variety of burdens to post notices of rights and risks.”

It is tempting, of course, to simply write off this decision; to chock it up to the fact that it had to do with organized labor, an incendiary topic these days, or that it was decided by a very conservative panel on a very conservative court. After all, Republican senators repeatedly filibustered Obama nominees to precisely this court, leading Democrats last November to end filibusters for all nominees except those for the Supreme Court. And indeed, ideology was a factor. But there’s also something else going on here.

As crazy as this decision was, as ill-founded and sweeping in its implications for government regulations going forward, it’s not exactly an outlier. In the past decade, both the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts have begun, with increasing frequency, to strike down rules and sometimes entire laws, on the grounds that they infringe on companies’ First Amendment rights to free speech and expression. This spring, for example, the Supreme Court will hear a case brought by the Christian-owned national craft supply chain, Hobby Lobby, claiming that the mandate in Obamacare requiring corporations to pay for some of their employees’ contraception is a violation of the company’s First Amendment right of religious expression. In another pending case, the Department of Justice filed a suit alleging that the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s behaved fraudulently in giving high, and often AAA, ratings to toxic securities before the housing collapse. S&P is claiming that the DOJ’s case is retaliatory and therefore a violation of its First Amendment rights. As Columbia law professor Tim Wu put it in the New Republic last year, it’s tempting to call industry’s use of the First Amendment “the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.”

The mother of all corporate First Amendment cases is, of course, Citizens United, in which the Supreme Court held in 2010 that any law constraining corporate political expenditures was a violation of companies’ rights to free speech. But it neither began nor ended there. Just a year after that precedent-contorting decision, the Supremes scrapped a Vermont state law on similar grounds. The law restricted data miners from selling pharmacy records to pharmaceutical companies, which were, in turn, using that data to target certain doctors for their sales pitches. The Vermont law was designed to protect doctors’ privacy and control health care costs, but the Court decided those weren’t compelling enough state interests to warrant violating the companies’ First Amendment-protected commercial speech. It was one of those decisions, a constitutional law professor told me, that was “like getting whacked by a two-by-four: what the hell? Where did that come from?”

There have been dozens more cases like it. Over the past few years, corporations like Nike, Verizon, Google, and the big credit ratings agencies like S&P and Moody’s have been crafting innovative new First Amendment defenses to parry all sorts of “government intrusions,” from antitrust suits to false advertising. Last summer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce attacked two new Securities and Exchange Commission rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that required publicly traded international corporations, including Exxon and Chevron, to disclose certain information to the public (such as how much they were paying host countries for their extraction rights). Forcing those companies to speak, the Chamber argued, was a violation of their First Amendment-protected commercial speech. The Chamber and Business Roundtable have appealed one of those cases to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which will hear it this month.

The same court will also hear another case this month from the American Meat Institute, representing behemoth meat-packers like Tyson and Cargill, which is taking a similar tack in an attempt to kill a Department of Agriculture rule mandated by consumer protection requirements in the 2002 Farm Bill. It requires meat-packers to label their products indicating in what country the animal, or animals, in their meat had been born, raised, and slaughtered. Forcing companies to use those labels, the meat-packers say, is equivalent to making them engage in speech they would not otherwise issue and is therefore a violation of their First Amendment-protected commercial speech.

While none of these cases is by itself a game changer, the collective weight of all of them—combined with sweeping decisions, like the one in the recent NLRB case—is enough to begin to bend legal precedent in favor of industry. Frederick Schauer, who was a First Amendment scholar at Harvard for nearly two decades and is now a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law, coined the term “First Amendment opportunism” more than a decade ago to describe precisely this trend. “It used to be that if a lawyer claimed free speech in most of the cases we’re seeing now, the judge would have looked at him and said, ‘Counselor, you can’t be serious,!” Schauer told me. “But now you see them being taken seriously. That’s a very big battle they’ve already won.”

And if industry goes on to win the war—if they collect a body of First Amendment case law establishing that corporations’ First Amendment-protected speech cannot reasonably be fettered by economic regulation—our society will be in a world of hurt. There will be no corporate transparency whatsoever. No way to enforce workers’ rights. No way to compel companies to protect investors or shareholders. And all regulations that require corporate disclosure, including most financial regulations, will cease to exist in any meaningful way.

And if you don’t believe me, how about the late William Rehnquist? After the Supreme Court first granted that commercial speech considerations can trump state law in the 1970s, the famously conservative Supreme Court justice described a similar vision in his dissent, recalling, with a shudder, the “bygone era of Lochner v. New York.” Named for a case in which the Supreme Court overturned a law limiting the number of hours bakers could be forced to work, the Lochner Era describes a period from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression characterized by unchecked corporate power, untouchable monopolists, very few worker or consumer rights, rampant environmental degradation, and extreme inequality.

One of the primary reasons those social conditions persisted for so long was because of a fiercely libertarian intellectual culture in many federal courts at the time, and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, which, during a fifty-year period, struck down all or part of more than 200 state and federal laws, including those outlawing child labor, banning sweatshops, and establishing a minimum wage and fair working hours. In the Lochner Era, big industry groups and their allies on the Court wielded the notion of “freedom of contract”—any regulation that abridged it was chucked. Today, the notion of “freedom of speech” is being used virtually the same way, just as Rehnquist worried it might be. Any rule or law that abridges a company’s claims to First Amendment-protected speech is now vulnerable to attack.

Many members of the younger, more radical generation of conservative lawyers and judges now working in the lower federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court dismiss their conservative forebears’ calls for judicial restraint; Rehnquist’s quaint worries are seen as outmoded by conservative activists today. They instead regard the First Amendment as one of the most powerful weapons in the battle to achieve “economic liberty.” And they are joined in their efforts by a cadre of eminent liberals who, having made their name in the 1970s arguing for the inviolability of the First Amendment under any circumstances, have been unwilling to unpack the flawed logic that got us here to begin with, and are now defending industry’s claims to free speech, lending both credibility and respectability to an argument powerful enough to dismantle the entire regulatory state.

The First Amendment dictates that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” It makes no mention of corporations, commercial transactions, or advertising, but nor does it name dissidents, or anarchists, or seditious radicals of any stripe, and for a long time, justices, judges, lawyers, and jurists were more or less in agreement that the First Amendment didn’t protect any of those things. In fact, it wasn’t until about eighty years ago that liberal judges and justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis began, in isolated cases, to use the broad language of “free speech” to protect religious minorities and marginalized groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and labor rights activists.

Our modern imagination of the First Amendment as a robust, powerful, content-blind doctrine didn’t even really hit the scene until about fifty years ago, in the 1960s and ’70s, when the definition of “speech” began to stretch and morph, becoming both more generous and more distorted in its scope. It was then that liberal Americans and the broader legal establishment began to embrace for the first time the rather radical notion that the First Amendment protects all political speech, regardless of who said it, or what was said. Almost overnight, acts that would have been considered seditious, blasphemous, or profane, and therefore jailable offenses just a generation before, became, by the late ’70s, cultural touchstones, symbols of an age defined by radical individualism. Under the banner of the First Amendment, a teenager could wear a jacket printed with the words “Fuck the Draft”; a man could burn the American flag; the New York Times could print top-secret government records that would help bring down a president.

By the end of the ’70s, it was written squarely into First Amendment case law that, aside from a handful of exceptions for libel, slander, and hate speech, no government—federal, state, or local—could pass a law that abridged citizens’ political speech, no matter how unpopular or despicable the speaker, no matter how unsavory his message.

This idea was sanctified in American lore in 1977, when the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in to defend the Nazis’ First Amendment right to parade through the predominately Jewish streets of Skokie, Illinois.

That’s generally where our high school textbooks stop. But a less-well-known redefinition of the First Amendment was beginning to appear at the same time. In the early ’70s, intellectual contrarians like Martin Redish, ingenious lawyers working for businesses and corporations, and liberal purists, who distrusted any constraints on any speech, began to promote in legal journals and the occasional lawsuit the idea that companies’ advertisements and marketing campaigns ought to count as “speech,” too. Conservative jurists like Robert Bork dismissed these ideas as wrongheaded and dangerous, writing that “the protection of the First Amendment must be cut off when it reaches the outer limits of political speech.” And for years, most legal experts shared Bork’s view. The notion that commercial entities possessed the ability to “speak,” much less that such “speech” should be afforded constitutional rights, was laughable.

But again, that changed almost overnight. In 1975, the consumer group Public Citizen, then still controlled by Ralph Nader, sued the state of Virginia over a law restricting pharmacies from advertising the price of their drugs. In that now-famous case, known as Virginia Pharmacy, Public Citizen argued that since consumers could benefit from “hearing” that speech—they could get a better deal by comparing pharmacies’ prices—the government should not be allowed to limit such speech without a “compelling state interest.” It’s important here to note that Public Citizen was arguing that commercial speech is deserving of protection only insofar as it’s valuable to the public. But the Supreme Court’s decision in 1976, in which it sided with Public Citizen and struck down the Virginia law, made a much larger point. It established, first, that a commercial entity can be legally defined as a “speaker” with limited claims to free speech, and second, that even “purely economic” speech, like advertising and marketing, enjoys some First Amendment protections.

Having flown us up to 10,000 feet and opened the hatch, however, the justices forgot to show us how to work the parachutes. “We of course do not hold that [commercial speech] can never be regulated in any way,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun for the majority. “Some forms of commercial speech regulation are surely permissible.” In other words: commercial entities’ economic speech is protected, but at a lower standard of scrutiny than citizens’ political speech. What, exactly, was that “lower standard of scrutiny”? It was left unsaid.

While liberals celebrated the decision as a win for consumer rights, conservatives like Rehnquist saw the writing on the wall. “The logical consequences of the Court’s decision in this case, a decision which elevates commercial intercourse … to the same place as had been previously reserved for the free marketplace of ideas, are far reaching indeed,” he wrote in a dissenting opinion.

The years that followed would bear out his warnings as the legal establishment fumbled with the parachute strings. A handful of cases in the 1980s attempted to address the questions that the Supreme Court had left unanswered: What is the definition of commercial speech? What forms of commercial speech regulation are permissible? And under what circumstances can commercial speech be abridged? A tangled and sometimes contradictory “doctrine of commercial speech” emerged, which attempted to set down criteria under which the government can regulate commercial speech—for instance, if the regulation is “narrowly tailored” to address a “substantial” government interest—and under which companies have the right “not to divulge accurate information.” But these criteria and definitions have been Silly Putty in the hands of clever industry lawyers, stretched and molded over the years to fit their needs.

Take, for example, the very definition of “commercial speech.” In theVirginia Pharmacy opinion, Blackmun wrote almost exclusively about advertising and other marketing materials designed for consumers. But in subsequent years, lawyers have stretched that definition, sometimes successfully, to include basically anything whatsoever that involves information—a very, very broad umbrella in today’s information economy—including the act of accessing or transferring digital data. That 2011 Supreme Court decision striking down the Vermont law barring data miners from selling information to pharmaceutical companies hinged on the assumption that the act of purchasing and utilizing digital records to facilitate a marketing strategy fell under the auspices of First Amendment-protected commercial speech. A dismayed Justice Stephen Breyer asked in his dissent why the Court had not given “significant weight to legitimate commercial regulatory objectives,” as precedent demanded. “The far stricter, specially ‘heightened’ First Amendment standards … are out of place here.”

In the midst of this intellectual tumult in the mid-’70s, another, even more powerful, idea began to take root. If commercial entities’ economic speech is protected by the First Amendment, but at a lower standard of scrutiny, and citizens’ political speech is protected by the First Amendment, at the highest standard of scrutiny, then what would happen if a commercial entity issuedpolitical speech? Would that get the highest standard of scrutiny, too?

This question bubbled all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978. A few years before, Massachusetts had passed a law barring companies from spending money to sway public referenda, unless their business was directly affected. The First National Bank of Boston sued Massachusetts Attorney General Francis Bellotti, arguing that spending money was a corporations’ form of political speech, and therefore protected by the First Amendment at the highest standard of scrutiny. The Supreme Court agreed: prohibiting corporate spending on political ends indeed violates corporations’ “protected speech in a manner unjustified by a compelling state interest.” The decision threw legal theorists into a tizzy. If the First Amendment treats corporations’ political speech the same way it treats citizens’ political speech, does that make corporations citizens? And if so, do corporations get the same rights as citizens? Justice Lewis Powell, writing for the majority in the Bellotti decision, sidestepped that burning question: it doesn’t matter “whether corporationshave First Amendment rights and, if so, whether they are coextensive with those of natural persons,” he wrote. The only question that matters is whether speech “that the First Amendment was meant to protect” is being abridged. In other words, it was all about the speech itself. Political speech, no matter who—or what!—the speaker was, or what was said, enjoys the fullest First Amendment protections, the Court decided.

Three decades later, Justice Anthony Kennedy would cite the Bellotti case as precedent twenty-four times in the Citizens United opinion, claiming that “the Government lacks the power to restrict political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.” But at the time, traditional conservatives were appalled by the idea that corporations and other commercial entities would be afforded the same rights as people when it came to political speech. Rehnquist argued that since the government allows corporations to exist by providing them with “special privileges or immunities different from those of natural persons,” it’s only logical that those entities would “be subject to like regulation.” The government, furthermore, allows corporations to exist so that they may perform a circumscribed economic purpose, not so that they can become political participants, he wrote. “[L]iberties of political expression are not at all necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist.”

Yet while traditional conservatives fulminated, a younger generation of conservatives was outright celebratory. Unlike their elders, these more radical conservatives “saw a link between the First Amendment and the larger project of restoring the ‘economic liberty’ that they believed had been eroding since the New Deal,” wrote Columbia law professor Wu. By granting complete, unlimited, inviolable protections to commercial entities’ political speech, Bellottidramatically elevated the stature of corporations under the First Amendment. If liberals insisted on brandishing the First Amendment to protect anarchists and communists, they reasoned, why couldn’t they could use it to protect businesses and restrict government interference in the economy? And that is more or less exactly what they did. Beginning in the early 1970s, a new crop of conservative think tanks, clubs, and legal funds, like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and what later became the CATO Institute, funded by the Koch brothers, formed alliances with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other powerful trade groups, in an effort to push an anti-regulatory, pro-business agenda, with expanded corporate free speech rights as a key weapon.

This revolution was aided in no small part by many in the liberal establishment, who, even today, continue to support the Bellotti decision on the grounds that it was framed as an anti-discriminatory measure: all political speech by all speakers enjoyed First Amendment protection—even if the speaker was a bank or a corporation. Many of the traditionally liberal First Amendment lawyers, like Floyd Abrams, Laurence Tribe, and Walter Dellinger, who made their names in the ’70s as defenders of the oppressed, have in more recent years dedicated themselves to advancing and defending this idea—that the identity, even the corporate identity, of a speaker cannot be a determining factor of whether or not speech is regulated. As a result, they have, along with organizations like the ACLU, lent their talents, as well their credibility and respectability, to corporations’ First Amendment attacks, often finding themselves among unlikely allies, like the National Rifle Association, Monsanto, and Exxon.

Abrams, for example, who earned his reputation defending the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, later wrote the brief in support of Mitch McConnell in Citizens United and, in 2012, successfully argued on behalf of the tobacco industry. In that case, the tobacco industry had claimed that a Food and Drug Administration rule, mandated by the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, that required newer, more graphic warning labels on cigarette packaging was a violation of companies’ First Amendment-protected speech. Abrams now represents the massive credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which has argued, repeatedly and successfully, that its irresponsible, dangerous, and overly optimistic ratings are just speech—the “world’s shortest editorials,” as one legal scholar put it—and that the company therefore cannot be held responsible for using those ratings to line its own pockets while fleecing investors of billions of dollars and contributing to the collapse of the housing market.

By the early 2000s, First Amendment jurisprudence had become a vague, messy, and sometimes-contradictory mess, vulnerable to exploitation. On the commercial speech side, it was clear that the First Amendment provided some limited protections to companies, but it wasn’t clear what activities were included under the definition of commercial speech, or where that “lower standard of scrutiny” began or ended. On the political speech side, the Supreme Court had clearly ruled that the First Amendment provided total protection at the “highest standard of scrutiny” to all speakers, including corporations, but it wasn’t clear what speech should be considered political, or what would happen in circumstances in which a company’s political and economic speech overlapped. And in the area of compelled speech—requiring companies to disclose certain information, say, or refrain from making false claims—things were even murkier.

Take, for example, the recent cases brought against the government by Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned national craft supply chain with 578 stores and tens of thousands of employees across the country. Hobby Lobby argues that the mandate in Obamacare requiring businesses of a certain size to pay for their employees’ contraception violates the company’s First Amendment-protected rights of religious expression. The company’s owners do not believe personally in using certain types of contraception. While that case is slightly different since it involves First Amendment protections of religious expression, rather than speech, much of the same case law applies. In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Tenth Circuit, based in Colorado, cited the First Amendment precedent of Citizens United to decide in favor of Hobby Lobby, leaving its thousands of employees, including those who do not share the religious beliefs of their employers, out of luck. “We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression,” wrote Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich for the majority. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case this year.

Or for another example, consider the aftermath of the Citizens Uniteddecision in 2010. Perhaps in an effort to quell fears, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, noted that while the Court held that laws restricting commercial entities’ expenditures on political messages violated their First Amendment-protected speech, he very pointedly left the door open for Congress to pass laws compelling commercial entities to disclose their expenditures. “Citizens and shareholders” must be able to “make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages,” he wrote. It sounded reasonable at the time. After all, if we can’t restrict corporate expenditures, at least we can see how much they’re spending on what, right?

Not so fast. In the months and years since that decision, corporations and industry groups have been fighting tooth and nail any laws or regulations that would require commercial entities to disclose their political expenditures on the grounds that—drum roll, please!—any such action would infringe on commercial entities’ First Amendment-protected political speech. They argue that such disclosure might subject them to criticism for making the expenditures, which would, in turn, have a “chilling effect” on their ability to spend—er, “speak”—in the future. Just as the government cannot force a citizen to speak or not speak about his political beliefs, they argue, the government cannot force a corporation to disclose its political donations either. Welcome to the NFL.

It helps to think of the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence the same way you might think of a sci-fi novel. Within its own self-contained universe, organized according to its own laws and assumptions, everything makes logical sense. Kennedy, Abrams, the ACLU, and all the rest of those “purists” make three main assumptions. First, they assume that the information issued by a corporation is “speech” and that the corporation itself should be considered a “speaker.” Second, they assume that all political speech, no matter what is said, enjoys the full protections of the First Amendment. And third, they assume that we cannot discriminate against anypolitical speech regardless of the speaker’s identity. On the basis of those three assumptions, their conclusion is logically inevitable: political speech issued by a corporate speaker enjoys the full protections of the First Amendment.

But there’s one fatal problem with that little proof: there’s no reason why the first premise—that information issued by a corporation qualifies as “speech”—should pass the test of common sense. As Rehnquist, Bork, and other old-guard conservatives noted decades ago, a corporation is a legal entity that exists because our laws allow it to exist, so that it may perform an economic purpose. It issues information to consumers and the public so that it might advance that economic purpose. That seems like a very, very different thing than a natural person, who is not a legal entity, and exists regardless of the will of the government, speaking about beliefs and convictions. Why not agree that entities that are not alive create information, while only people create speech?

It’s at this stage in the conversation that the First Amendment purists, having worked themselves into a bit of a froth, make three points. First, they argue that if we limit the definition of speech or wade into the muck of deciding who gets to be a “speaker” under the law and who does not, then we position ourselves on a slippery slope: we are in danger of creating loopholes that allow the First Amendment to protect one type of speaker but not another. Without total absolutism, wherein all speech, by all speakers is protected, they argue, we risk creating a world in which, say, Muslims are silenced just because they’re Muslims, or anarchists are denied free speech just because they’re anarchists. It is, admittedly, a scary prospect, but in reality, it seems that we are in no danger at all of that actually happening. Would it not be perfectly possible to guarantee, absolutely, free speech rights for every single solitary American—full stop, no exceptions!—without also agreeing to guarantee those rights to corporations? If the line is drawn between people and non-people, that slippery slope seems pretty sticky to me.

The second point the purists raise is what happens when people, who individually enjoy full First Amendment protections, arrange themselves into a group and form legal entities, like corporations, unions, or nonprofits. And the answer, again, seems fairly simple. After all, the government already treats legal entities differently than it treats people. Legal entities are taxed differently, they’re afforded different privileges, and they’re subject to different duties, punishments, and rights. Legal entities cannot be jailed. They cannot plead the Fifth so as not to perjure themselves. They can only be held to limited liability for their financial mistakes. So, in the same way that the law already treats a legal entity differently than it treats a person, so too should it treat the information issued (and cash spent) by a legal entity differently than it treats the speech created (and cash spent) by a person.

The third point the purists make is that since many newspapers and media outlets are corporations, any jurisprudence that does not consider corporations’ speech to be protected by the First Amendment threatens the freedom of the press. Again, that sounds scary, but it seems that there is no reason that must be the case. As Stanford law professor Michael McConnell points out, the First Amendment specifically names the “press” as worthy of its protections, and our laws reflect that, carefully defining and affording protections to editorial activities. “No one disputes that corporations, such as the New York Times Company, can editorialize during an election, and other groups performing the press function have the same right, even if they are not part of the traditional news media industry,” he wrote. But there is no reason to assume that the First Amendment’s press clause should apply to activities, like “campaign contributions, which are not an exercise of the freedom of the press.”

And that, of course, leads to the most important point of all. Shouldn’t our democratically elected governments—local, state, and federal—have the power to police commerce within their jurisdictions? That doesn’t mean that corporations, unions, or nonprofits would be unable to issue commercial or political information. They would simply have to fight, alongside the citizens who benefit from that information, for favorable laws in the political arena, lobbying elected officials and regulators, as they do now. What they wouldn’t be able to do is use the courts, marshalling a supposed constitutional right to circumvent the political process.

Of course, the only way to ensure that these commonsense lines between people and legal entities get redrawn is for political leaders to first understand the threat posed by runaway commercial speech rights, and then to put on the bench judges who do, too—and soon. Legal precedent is powerful and consequential, but it can, as we’ve seen, evolve or devolve over time, depending on who is making the calls.

Obama’s ability to shift the Court has been immeasurably strengthened by the Senate’s decision this past fall to end the filibuster for judicial appointments. He should use that power decisively and quickly. But that’s not the same as moving the Court “to the left,” at least on this issue. Rather, what’s needed are jurists dubious of both liberal First Amendment purism and radical corporate libertarianism.

What’s needed are moderate judges willing to admit that when it comes to commercial information, old-guard conservatives like Rehnquist were right, and so too was Justice John Marshall, when he wrote in 1819, “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.”

Source:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2014/features/the_corporate_free_speech_rack048355.php?page=all
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Channel4 broadcasts alternative to the Queens Christmas message

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 03:32:00 +0000

‘Tracked everywhere you go’: Snowden delivers Xmas message on gov't spying

Watch Edward Snowdens Christmas Message

Channel4
December 25, 2013

Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed the mass surveillance programs organised by the US and other governments, gives this year's The Alternative Christmas Message.

Six months ago, Snowden, a computer analyst turned whistleblower, brought to global attention top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents leading to revelations about widespread United States surveillance on phone and internet communications.

Snowden lays out his vision for why privacy matters and why he believes mass indiscriminate surveillance by governments of their people is wrong.

Source:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/alternative-christmas-message/4od
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The former NSA contractor’s leaks have altered the U.S. government’s relationship with its citizens and the rest of the world. Six months later, he reflects.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 01:09:00 +0000

Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post
December 23, 2013
[emphasis added -Ed]

MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not waste words.

“What time does your clock say, exactly?” he asked.

He checked the reply against his watch and described a place to meet.

“I’ll see you there,” he said.

Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.

During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.

Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for years to conceal.

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”

Six months after the first revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.

Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”

‘Going in blind’

Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check.

Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.

Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.

The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.

“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.

“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”

By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.

The cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals. The basic structure of the Internet itself is now in question, as Brazil and members of the European Union consider measures to keep their data away from U.S. territory and U.S. technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary steps to block the collection of data by their government.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost Orwellian” and said its bulk collection of U.S. domestic telephone records was probably unconstitutional.

The next day, in the Roosevelt Room, an unusual delegation of executives from old telephone companies and young Internet firms told President Obama that the NSA’s intrusion into their networks was a threat to the U.S. information economy.

The following day, an advisory panel appointed by Obama recommended substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end to the domestic call-records program.

“This week is a turning point,” said the Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack, who is one of Snowden’s legal advisers. “It has been just a cascade.”

‘They elected me’

On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage and felony theft of government property. It was a dry enumeration of statutes, without a trace of the anger pulsing through Snowden’s former precincts.

In the intelligence and national security establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless saboteur, and journalists abetting him little less so.

At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.

“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first. “Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a clue.”

It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.

In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”

‘Front-page test’

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people — deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and “incidentally,” when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

But Snowden also said acceptance of the agency’s operations was not universal.

He began to test that proposition more than a year ago, he said, in periodic conversations with co-workers and superiors that foreshadowed his emerging plan.

Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps.

His colleagues were often “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several said they did not want to know any more.

“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.

By last December, Snowden was contacting reporters, although he had not yet passed along any classified information. He continued to give his colleagues the “front-page test,” he said, until April.

Asked about those conversations, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post: “After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”

Snowden recounted another set of conversations that he said took place three years earlier, when he was sent by the NSA’s Technology Directorate to support operations at a listening post in Japan. As a system administrator, he had full access to security and auditing controls. He said he saw serious flaws with information security.

“I actually recommended they move to two-man control for administrative access back in 2009,” he said, first to his supervisor in Japan and then to the directorate’s chief of operations in the Pacific. “Sure, a whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”

That precaution, which requires a second set of credentials to perform risky operations such as copying files onto a removable drive, has been among the principal security responses to the Snowden affair.

Vines, the NSA spokeswoman, said there was no record of those conversations, either.

U.S. ‘would cease to exist’

Just before releasing the documents this spring, Snowden made a final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at the time as a “selfish fear” of the consequences for himself.

“I said to you the only fear [left] is apathy — that people won’t care, that they won’t want change,” he recalled this month.

The documents leaked by Snowden compelled attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had.

Internal briefing documents reveled in the “Golden Age of Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR, TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.

With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.

Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.

Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.

In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without authority from Congress and the courts.

When the NSA won those authorities later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.

Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with the government's request for data.

But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually all data handled by those companies.

To widen its access, it teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.

That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA, therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA to presume that data ingested overseas belonged to foreigners.

‘Persistent threat’

Disclosure of the MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanized U.S. technology executives. They believed the NSA had lawful access to their front doors — and had broken down the back doors anyway.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat” — the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises.

“For the industry as a whole, it caused everyone to ask whether we knew as much as we thought,” Smith recalled in an interview. “It underscored the fact that while people were confident that the U.S. government was complying with U.S. laws for activity within U.S. territory, perhaps there were things going on outside the United States . . . that made this bigger and more complicated and more disconcerting than we knew.”

They wondered, he said, whether the NSA was “collecting proprietary information from the companies themselves.”

Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of miles of cable. It was a direct — in some cases, explicit — blow to NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the information, it would have to request it or circumvent the encryption one target at a time.

As these projects are completed, the Internet will become a less friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can still collect data from virtually anyone, but collecting from everyone will be harder.

The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy stores for U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith said, “is fundamentally about ensuring that customer data is turned over to governments pursuant to valid legal orders and in accordance with constitutional principles.”

‘Warheads on foreheads’

Snowden has focused on much the same point from the beginning: Individual targeting would cure most of what he believes is wrong with the NSA.

Six months ago, a reporter asked him by encrypted e-mail why Americans would want the NSA to give up bulk data collection if that would limit a useful intelligence tool.

“I believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these powers to continue growing in secret,” he replied, calling them “a direct threat to democratic governance.”

In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take away life or freedom.

At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”

Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.

“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”

‘Everybody knows’

On June 29, Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, awoke to a report in Der Spiegel that U.S. intelligence had broken into E.U. offices, including his, to implant surveillance devices.

The 56-year-old Belgian, whose work is often classified, did not consider himself naive. But he took the news personally, and more so when he heard unofficial explanations from Washington.

“ ‘Everybody knows. Everybody does’ — Keith Alexander said that,” de Kerchove said in an interview. “I don’t like the idea that the NSA will put bugs in my office. No. I don’t like it. No. Between allies? No. I’m surprised that people find that noble.”

Comparable reactions, expressed less politely in private, accompanied revelations that the NSA had tapped the cellphones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The blowback roiled relations with both allies, among others. Rousseff canceled a state dinner with Obama in September.

When it comes to spying on allies, by Snowden’s lights, the news is not always about the target.

“It’s the deception of the government that’s revealed,” Snowden said, noting that the Obama administration offered false public assurances after the initial reports about NSA surveillance in Germany “The U.S. government said: ‘We follow German laws in Germany. We never target German citizens.’ And then the story comes out and it’s: ‘What are you talking about? You’re spying on the chancellor.’ You just lied to the entire country, in front of Congress.”

In private, U.S. intelligence officials still maintain that spying among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are giving greater weight to the risk of getting caught.

“There are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” Clapper told a House panel in October.

‘They will make mistakes’

U.S. officials say it is obvious that Snowden’s disclosures will do grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that adversaries will learn to avoid.

“We’re seeing al-Qaeda and related groups start to look for ways to adjust how they communicate,” said Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former general counsel at the NSA.

Other officials, who declined to speak on the record about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way, they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift.

Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.

“People must communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”

According to senior intelligence officials, two uncertainties feed their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China managed to take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.

In a previous assignment, Snowden taught U.S. intelligence personnel how to operate securely in a “high-threat digital environment,” using a training scenario in which China was the designated threat. He declined to discuss the whereabouts of the files, but he said that he is confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong. And he said he did not bring them to Russia.

“There’s nothing on it,” he said, turning his laptop screen toward his visitor. “My hard drive is completely blank.”

The other big question is how many documents Snowden took. The NSA’s incoming deputy director, Rick Ledgett, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the number may approach 1.7 million, a huge and unexplained spike over previous estimates. Ledgett said he would favor trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in exchange for “assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured.”

Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, later dismissed the possibility.

“The government knows where to find us if they want to have a productive conversation about resolutions that don’t involve Edward Snowden behind bars,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner, the central figure on Snowden’s legal team.

Some news accounts have quoted U.S. government officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive documents if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that, beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk.

If Snowden were fool enough to rig a “dead man’s switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents to kill him.

Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”

‘It’s not about me’

By temperament and circumstance, Snowden is a reticent man, reluctant to discuss details about his personal life.

Over two days his guard never dropped, but he allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an “ascetic,” he said. He lives off ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and many of them bring books. The books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless library and a window on the progress of his cause.

“It has always been really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see, people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented, you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”

In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored attacks on himself.

“Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s not about me.”

Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other “defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.

But Snowden knows his presence here is easy ammunition for critics. He did not choose refuge in Moscow as a final destination. He said that once the U.S. government voided his passport as he tried to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no other choice.

It would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye on him, but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no one else nearby. Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that his visitor do so. He has had continuous Internet access and has talked to his attorneys and to journalists daily, from his first day in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo airport.

“There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United States,” he said. “I have no relationship with the Russian government. I have not entered into any agreements with them.”

“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html?wpmk=MK0000200
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Dutch newspaper reports NSA infected more than 50,000 networks with malware globally

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:28:00 +0000

NSA spreading malware to further goals for more power

By Steve Ragan
CSO Online
November 25, 2013

Over the weekend, NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper, reported that the NSA has infected more than 50,000 networks with malware globally. This report was followed by one in the New York Times, detailing the lengths the NSA is willing to go to in order to obtain more power.

On Saturday, the NRC published a heavily redacted slide, taken from information released by Edward Snowden, that shows the scope of the NSA's Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) efforts. According to slide, more than 50,000 networks worldwide are infected with the agency's malware. However, given that the slide dates to 2012, it's possible that the numbers are actually higher.

Additional proof that the data in the slide is legitimate, the NRC said, comes from the reports earlier this summer when Belgacom announced that the GCHQ (the British partner of the NSA) has infected their network and installed malware. The GCHQ was able to do this by infecting the systems used by employees as they visited a fake LinkedIn page.

According to the NRC report, supporting claims from the Washington Post as well as reports from Foreign Policy, the NSA's malware campaign was assigned to TAO (Tailored Access Operations), a department within the agency that employs more than 1,000 hackers. According to the Washington Post, CNE-operations such as the ones recently confirmed have been going on since 1998.

The NSA declined to comment on the NRC's story, or questions related to the redacted slide. Experts who have speculated on the story say that based on the numbers and the data within the slide, it appears that the NSA is targeting Telcos, banks, and ISPs.

As news of the NSA's malware operations spread, the New York Times published a report outlining the NSA's plans to expand its authority with a rapid pace. Like the slides published by NRC, the data in the Times' report comes form 2012, and detail a four-year plan to update and increase their intelligence gathering operations by intercepting foreign and domestic communications.

According to the document, the NSA plans to defeat the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from "anyone, anytime, anywhere."

Days before the story broke in the Times, the Center for Democracy & Technology, delivered a letter to Congress that called for reforms to U.S. intelligence surveillance practices. The letter, signed by organizations representing a wide range of stakeholders, noted that both the civil society and tech companies have come together to oppose bulk collection of private communications and data.

"Recent disclosures regarding intelligence surveillance activity raise important concerns about the privacy and security of communications. This surveillance has already eroded trust that is essential to the free flow of information and to the exercise of human rights and civil liberties both in the United States and around the world," the letter said.

Source:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/743710/nsa-spreading-malware-to-further-goals-for-more-power

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Who are the Real Terrorists?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 02:26:00 +0000

Latest Snowden leak reveals NSA’s goal to continually expand surveillance abilities

Russian Times
November 23, 2013

In a mission statement last year the US National Security Agency described how it would continue to expand its power and assert itself as the global leader in clandestine surveillance, according to a new report based on the Edward Snowden leaks.

The five-page document brought to light Friday by the New York Times reveals the intelligence agency’s intention to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.” The spy agency sought the ability to trace “anyone, anywhere, anytime,” according to its 2012 mission statement.

Dated February 2012, the memo was written after PRISM and many of the other programs that have since outraged the public were implemented. It describes a four-year plan to push the NSA past its current status and into “the golden age of SIGINT,” code for signals intelligence.

“The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on NSA’s mission.”

The document, given the name “SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016,” falls short of explaining exactly how it would go about assuming more power, but does make clear that the so-called “culture of compliance” would not give up any concessions. The paper indicates NSA leaders communicated the need for more power in order to effectively carry out its duties.

NSA officials did note their plan to subvert cyber-security techniques so intelligence analysts are able to extract information on “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” Using both technical and human intelligence gathering methods, the mission statement sought to “revolutionize” data collection by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships” with more foreign partners.

This memo surfaces as a number of US lawmakers have announced their support for bills that would curb the NSA’s power and possibly grant the agency less funding. Amid allegations that the NSA monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, the international community has decried the NSA’s activity, with a number of nations vowing to reconsider their relations with the US.

Yet senior intelligence officials who spoke to the Times about the mission statement said its goals were plain and reasonable. One source pointed to the legal stipulation requiring the NSA, if it had been monitoring a terrorism suspect overseas, to seek legal approval in order to continue surveillance if that suspect enters the US.

“NSA’s SIGINT strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities,” the agency said in a statement released in response to the mission statement’s publication. “In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, NSA tries to get in front of the issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the US government.”

To meet such requirements, the NSA notes that it hopes to rely less on installing so-called back door policies on messaging services like Google and Facebook. Instead, one of its goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.”

Instead of tapering off, as the public and some lawmakers have hoped, intelligence officials make it clear they intended to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communication services.”

Source:
http://on.rt.com/6cf2x0
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Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 01:16:00 +0000

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), branded as a trade agreement and negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, is actually an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.

As of December 2012, eleven countries were involved—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States—with the possibility of more joining in the future due to inclusion of an unusual “docking agreement.”

While the public, US Congress, and the press are locked out, 600 corporate advisors are meeting with officials of signatory governments behind closed doors to complete text for the world’s biggest multinational trade agreement, which aims to penalize countries that protect their workers, consumers, or environment.

Leaked text from the thirty-chapter agreement has revealed that negotiators have already agreed to many radical terms, granting expansive new rights and privileges for foreign investors and their enforcement through extrajudicial “investor-state” tribunals. Through these, corporations would be given special authority to dispute laws, regulations, and court decisions. Foreign firms could extract unlimited amounts of taxpayer money as compensation for “financial damages” to “expected future profits” caused by efforts to protect domestic finance, health, labor, environment, land use, and other laws they claim undermine their new TPP privileges.

There is almost no progressive movement or campaign whose goals are not threatened, as vast swaths of public-interest policy achieved through decades of struggle are targeted. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, reported that once this top-secret TPP is agreed to, its rules will be set in stone. No rule can be changed without all countries’ consent to amend the agreement. People of the world will be locked into corporate domination.

Sources:
Kevin Zeese, “Obama’s ‘Employment Creation’ Program: Massive Outsourcing of American Jobs,” Global Research, September 10, 2012,http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-employment-creation-program-massive-outsourcing-of-american-jobs/5304005.

Lori Wallach, “Breaking ’08 Pledge, Leaked Trade Doc Shows Obama Wants to Help Corporations Avoid Regulations,” Democracy Now!, June 14, 2012,http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/14/breaking_08_pledge_leaked_trade_doc.

Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: This Is What Corporate Governance Looks Like,” Truthout, November 20, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/12857-the-trans-pacific-partnership-this-is-what-corporate-governance-looks-like.

Lori Wallach, “Can a ‘Dracula Strategy’ Bring Trans-Pacific Partnership into the Sunlight?,” Yes! Magazine, November 21, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/can-dracula-strategy-bring-trans-pacific-partnership-into-sunlight.

Student Researcher: Kyndace Safa (College of Marin)
Community Researcher: Tricia Boreta
Faculty Evaluators: Susan Rahman (College of Marin); Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)

http://www.projectcensored.org/3-trans-pacific-partnership-threatens-regime-corporate-global-governance/
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:13:00 +0000

Why the US needs Electric Cars: Saudi Arabia threatens Pivot away from US

by Juan Cole

Informed Comment
10/23/2013

The royal family of Saudi Arabiaa, an absolute monarchy with no constitution and no elected legislature, is in a snit about US foreign policy. King Abdullah doesn’t like even the mild American criticism of the Sunni Bahrain monarchy’s brutal crackdown on the majority Shiite community in that country. He is furious that President Obama went with the Russian plan to sequester Syria’s chemical weapons rather than bombing Damascus. He is petrified of a breakthrough in American and Iranian relations that might permit Iran to keep its nuclear enrichment program and allow Tehran to retain a nuclear breakout capacity, which would deter any outside overthrow of the Iranian regime. Those are the stated discontents leaked by Saudi uber-hawk Bandar Bin Sultan.

Behind the scenes, another Saudi concern is that the US likes democracy too much. Washington ultimately backed the Arab upheavals that led to the fall of presidents for life in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Saudi Arabia hated this outbreak of popular politics and parliamentary competition. It connived with Egypt’s generals to roll back gains in Egypt in favor of more authoritarian rule. It has just cut off Yemen because the post-Saleh situation there isn’t developing its way. Only in Syria do the Saudis want regime change, and there it is because they want to weaken Iran and depose a Shiite ruling clique in favor of a fundamentalist Sunni one.

The Saudi royal family is looking for a different model of politics in the world, one where absolute monarchy and hard line Wahhabi fundamentalism wouldn’t look out of place. America is not it. They have been toying in Riyadh with a pivot to China. An unelected Communist Party that has taken the capitalist road and desperately needs Saudi petroleum has started to look good to the king. Beijing would make no annoying demands to open up Saudi politics. And if a Riyadh-Beijing axis could be established, Iran’s favored position with the Chinese might be cut back. Saudi Arabia is after all a much bigger oil producer and much less problematic as a trading partner.

Why should the US care if Saudi Arabia wants to abandon its special relationship with America? Oil.

The world produces about 90 million barrels of petroleum a day. Saudi Arabia produces about ten percent of that amount. And, it exports most of what it produces (unlike the US, which produces a similar amount but uses it all and half again as much). While there are small differences in the spot price of oil in various world markets, on the whole and by and large, petroleum is a single global market. Imagine several people in a hot tub filled with oil. If someone allows the oil to drain, the level will go down for everyone. Tub attendants with small canisters of oil could not refill it fast enough to stop the level from going down rapidly. But someone with a lot of oil who could dump it into the tub expeditiously could keep the level high. That someone is the Saudis. Because they are such a large exporter, they are a swing producer and have great influence on pricing.

The United States uses roughly 18.7 million barrels of oil a day, mainly for transportation. It now produces 12 million barrels a day of oil, ethanol and liquid hydrocarbons. That means it has to import a whopping 6.7 million barrels a day of oil this year. While US production has surged in recent years because of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), it is very far from being self-sufficient in fuel, and there is little early prospect of it being a net exporter of oil. Many fracked fields are thought to be shallow and might run out pretty quickly, and the enormous water use and environmental damage involved in the process has caused many countries, including France, to ban it. It would be foolish to bet the future of the United States on this flash in a pan. Not to mention that burning oil causes global warming and threatens to destabilize our climate and submerge cities like Miami.

Moreover, since oil is a single world market, it doesn’t really matter for security or economics solely that the US produces a lot of it. It also doesn’t matter that America gets relatively little oil directly from the Middle East any more. What matters is the world price, which is determined by global supply and demand. Note that when the US was only producing 8 million barrels a day of oil and other fuel liquids, a few years ago, the price of a barrel of oil was $33. Now it is around $100. Despite the surge in US production, the price is at a historic high, because China, India and other Asian countries are rapidly increasing their demand as they turn to having automobiles rather than riding bicycles. If there were another major supply interruption, the US would be as vulnerable today as in the 1970s– we would feel the shortages and higher prices just as would our allies, whom we would want to protect. Using petroleum as a fuel source, even if you produce a lot of it yourself, makes you dependent on other countries in myriad ways.

So if the Saudis were to start doing proprietary deals with China, locking in a 30 year supply at a particular price range, and if world demand went up (as it will) markedly, the US could end up being like the player in a game of musical chairs, who ends up without a chair. Despite its large domestic production, it still needs millions of barrels a day of imports. If the US economy starts roaring again, the need for imports would likely increase.

US energy security cannot be secured by fracking, which is polluting, dirty, and contributes to climate change (itself a challenge to American security), quite apart from its present inability actually to supply our fuel needs.

If the US wants to avoid being hostage to Saudi pique, and wants to avoid losing the game of musical chairs while China sits pretty, it needs to move quickly to electric cars fueled by solar panels and wind.

Most people don’t drive long distances every day. Even now, there is no reason for every middle class American who wants a new car not to get a Chevy Volt. The car is not expensive for what it is (it is a high-end sedan), and is positively cheap if you put solar panels on your roof and run it off the sun. Many other car makers are also introducing plug-in hybrids. We don’t have to deal with the Saudis and we don’t need dirty hydrocarbons or destructive fracking. Everyone with a Chevy Volt should proudly put an American flag bumper sticker on it. There is no more patriotic car on the road today.

With regard to global warming, at the moment, if you run your electric car for more than three years and if your electricity mix is no more than 40% coal, you would be carbon neutral in the fourth year. This takes into account carbon used to construct the car. Silly articles about electric cars that tell you how green they are by how much coal your utility uses in your state or country don’t take account of individual consumers’ ability to put solar panels on their homes. Likewise, how much carbon is used to build the car will change as factories themselves come to be fueled by wind and solar (something already happening in e.g. California). Another reason to buy a volt is to encourage Chevrolet to do more research and development and invest in EVs more, to ensure better batteries and to ease the transition in the next decade. The batteries are being eyed after the car’s natural life as a way to store solar energy for utilities, in which case its carbon footprint will go way down.

But with regard to national security, you’d be fuel-independent, i.e. Saudi-independent, from the moment you drove it off the lot.

Two big reasons to go rapidly to electric vehicles and solar and wind and wave power.

Source:
http://www.juancole.com/2013/10/electric-arabia-threatens.html

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:25:00 +0000

NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users

• Top-secret documents detail repeated efforts to crack Tor
• US-funded tool relied upon by dissidents and activists • Core security of network remains intact but NSA has some success attacking users' computers
• Bruce Schneier: the NSA's attacks must be made public
• Attacking Tor: the technical details
• 'Peeling back the layers with Egotistical Giraffe' – document
• 'Tor Stinks' presentation – full document
• Tor: 'The king of high-secure, low-latency anonymity'

By James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
October 4, 201

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity".

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government.

To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.

Despite Tor's importance to dissidents and human rights organizations, however, the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have devoted considerable efforts to attacking the service, which law enforcement agencies say is also used by people engaged in terrorism, the trade of child abuse images, and on line drug dealing.

Privacy and human rights groups have been concerned about the security of Tor following revelations in the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica about widespread NSA efforts to undermine privacy and security software. A report by Brazilian newspaper Globo also contained hints that the agencies had capabilities against the network.

While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale on line surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps.

One such technique is based on trying to spot patterns in the signals entering and leaving the Tor network, to try to de-anonymise its users. The effort was based on a long-discussed theoretical weakness of the network: that if one agency controlled a large number of the "exits" from the Tor network, they could identify a large amount of the traffic passing through it.

The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated in the documents would rely on the NSA's cable-tapping operation, and the agency secretly operating computers, or 'nodes', in the Tor system. However, one presentation stated that the success of this technique was "negligible" because the NSA has "access to very few nodes" and that it is "difficult to combine meaningfully with passive Sigint".

While the documents confirm the NSA does indeed operate and collect traffic from some nodes in the Tor network, they contain no detail as to how many, and there are no indications that the proposed de-anonymization technique was ever implemented.

Other efforts mounted by the agencies include attempting to direct traffic toward NSA-operated servers, or attacking other software used by Tor users.

One presentation, titled 'Tor: Overview of Existing Techniques', also refers to making efforts to "shape", or influence, the future development of Tor, in conjunction with GCHQ.

Another effort involves measuring the timings of messages going in and out of the network to try to identify users. A third attempts to degrade or disrupt the Tor service, forcing users to abandon the anonymity protection.

Such efforts to target or undermine Tor are likely to raise legal and policy concerns for the intelligence agencies.

Foremost among those concerns is whether the NSA has acted, deliberately or inadvertently, against internet users in the US when attacking Tor. One of the functions of the anonymity service is to hide the country of all of its users, meaning any attack could be hitting members of Tor's substantial US user base.

Several attacks result in implanting malicious code on the computer of Tor users who visit particular websites. The agencies say they are targeting terrorists or organized criminals visiting particular discussion boards, but these attacks could also hit journalists, researchers, or those who accidentally stumble upon a targeted site.

The efforts could also raise concerns in the State Department and other US government agencies that provide funding to increase Tor's security – as part of the Obama administration's internet freedom agenda to help citizens of repressive regimes – circumvent online restrictions.

Material published online for a discussion event held by the State Department, for example, described the importance of tools such as Tor.

"The technologies of internet repression, monitoring and control continue to advance and spread as the tools that oppressive governments use to restrict internet access and to track citizen online activities grow more sophisticated. Sophisticated, secure, and scalable technologies are needed to continue to advance internet freedom."

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency whose mission is to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy" through networks such as Voice of America, also supported Tor's development until October 2012 to ensure that people in countries such as Iran and China could access BBG content. Tor continues to receive federal funds through Radio Free Asia, which is funded by a federal grant from BBG.

The governments of both these countries have attempted to curtail Tor's use: China has tried on multiple occasions to block Tor entirely, while one of the motives behind Iranian efforts to create a "national internet" entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of those controls.

The NSA's own documents acknowledge the service's wide use in countries where the internet is routinely surveilled or censored. One presentation notes that among uses of Tor for "general privacy" and "non-attribution", it can be used for "circumvention of nation state internet policies" – and is used by "dissidents" in "Iran, China, etc".

Yet GCHQ documents show a disparaging attitude towards Tor users. One presentation acknowledges Tor was "created by the US government" and is "now maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)", a US freedom of expression group. In reality, Tor is maintained by an independent foundation, though has in the past received funding from the EFF.

The presentation continues by noting that "EFF will tell you there are many pseudo-legitimate uses for Tor", but says "we're interested as bad people use Tor". Another presentation remarks: "Very naughty people use Tor".

The technique developed by the NSA to attack Tor users through vulnerable software on their computers has the codename EgotisticalGiraffe, the documents show. It involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs, designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. Among these is a version of the Firefox web browser.

The trick, detailed in a top-secret presentation titled 'Peeling back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe', identified website visitors who were using the protective software and only executed its attack – which took advantage of vulnerabilities in an older version of Firefox – against those people. Under this approach, the NSA does not attack the Tor system directly. Rather, targets are identified as Tor users and then the NSA attacks their browsers.

According to the documents provided by Snowden, the particular vulnerabilities used in this type of attack were inadvertently fixed by Mozilla Corporation in Firefox 17, released in November 2012 – a fix the NSA had not circumvented by January 2013 when the documents were written.

The older exploits would, however, still be usable against many Tor users who had not kept their software up to date.

A similar but less complex exploit against the Tor network was revealed by security researchers in July this year. Details of the exploit, including its purpose and which servers it passed on victims' details to, led to speculation it had been built by the FBI or another US agency.

At the time, the FBI refused to comment on whether it was behind the attack, but subsequently admitted in a hearing in an Irish court that it had operated the malware to target an alleged host of images of child abuse – though the attack did also hit numerous unconnected services on the Tor network.

Roger Dingledine, the president of the Tor project, said the NSA's efforts serve as a reminder that using Tor on its own is not sufficient to guarantee anonymity against intelligence agencies – but showed it was also a great aid in combating mass surveillance.

"The good news is that they went for a browser exploit, meaning there's no indication they can break the Tor protocol or do traffic analysis on the Tor network," Dingledine said. "Infecting the laptop, phone, or desktop is still the easiest way to learn about the human behind the keyboard.

"Tor still helps here: you can target individuals with browser exploits, but if you attack too many users, somebody's going to notice. So even if the NSA aims to surveil everyone, everywhere, they have to be a lot more selective about which Tor users they spy on."

But he added: "Just using Tor isn't enough to keep you safe in all cases. Browser exploits, large-scale surveillance, and general user security are all challenging topics for the average internet user. These attacks make it clear that we, the broader internet community, need to keep working on better security for browsers and other internet-facing applications."

The Guardian asked the NSA how it justified attacking a service funded by the US government, how it ensured that its attacks did not interfere with the secure browsing of law-abiding US users such as activists and journalists, and whether the agency was involved in the decision to fund Tor or efforts to "shape" its development.

The agency did not directly address those questions, instead providing a statement.

It read: "In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, NSA collects only those communications that it is authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes, regardless of the technical means used by those targets or the means by which they may attempt to conceal their communications. NSA has unmatched technical capabilities to accomplish its lawful mission.

"As such, it should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets' use of technologies to hide their communications. Throughout history, nations have used various methods to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others use technology to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that."

• This article was amended on 4 October after the Broadcasting Board of Governors pointed out that its support of Tor ended in October 2012.

• Bruce Schneier is an unpaid member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's board of directors. He has not been involved in any discussions on funding.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 23:35:00 +0000

New Zealand dismisses major Internet companies’ disputes with new spying law

RT.com
October 14, 2013

The New Zealand government has rejected a plea from four of the internet’s largest companies to be excluded from broad requirements within the country’s new electronic spying law.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo wrote earlier this month to Communications Minister Amy Adams to voice their trepidations about demands they must comply with in the Telecommunications Interception Capability and Security Bill, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The bill demands the companies and other network operators must allow New Zealand spy agencies a certain path to monitor user communications. The law’s provisions require the head of national intelligence agencies to have interception capabilities of “over the top” providers like the four companies that offer services openly online.

These interception abilities "would present serious legal conflicts for companies headquartered in other countries,” the four wrote to Adams.

In addition, the companies said the surveillance models in the new legislation, a companion to the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) Act, were inconsistent with those of the other four countries in the “Five Eyes” spying network - Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

The companies said the eavesdropping capabilities of the new legislation are redundant given current international law allows New Zealand access to the information it wants. They encouraged New Zealand to consider an “alternative approach” to the new law, by engaging US counterparts for information and by setting up a “single point of contact” for information requests of overseas companies.

Minister Adams responded saying “a proper administrative process” was in place for the overseas companies that would ease the burden of interception and ensure legal conflicts between New Zealand and their home countries would be addressed.

She went on to say the bill would not put onerous legal burdens on the companies and that the alternate path the companies suggested would not suffice “to achieve the objectives of the bill.”

Though Adams did announce the removal of Clause 39 in the legislation, which allows the government to block an overseas-based company from offering services in New Zealand should they not comply with the bill’s interception demands in a way that imperils national security.

Source:
http://rt.com/news/new-zealand-internet-spying-194/A
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 23:27:00 +0000

The Golden Dawn Murder Case
Larry Summers and the New Fascism

By Greg Palast for Truthout
Monday, 7 October 2013
On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece.

Larry Summers has an air-tight alibi. But I don't believe it.

Larry didn’t hold the knife: The confessed killer is some twisted member of Golden Dawn, a political party made up of skin-head freaks, anti-immigrant fear-mongers, anti-Muslim/ anti-Semitic/ anti-Albanian sociopaths and ultra-patriot fruitcakes. Think of it as the Tea Party goes Greek.

Following Fyssas’ killing, other groups of dangerous psychopathic misfits, namely the European Union and Greece’s governing coalition, moved to ban Golden Dawn.

Over the weekend, Greece’s rulers arrested six members of Parliament who belong to Golden Dawn. Apparently, Greece’s political leaders prefer democracy as defined by Egypt’s General Sisi to the precepts of Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson.

To my friends on the Greek Left: It’s sickening to watch you cheer the arrest of Golden Dawn parliamentarians. Mark my words: You are next.

Listen up:

My investigation reveals that behind the banning of Golden Dawn, besides the usual European distaste for democracy, is something far more sinister: the ruling parties are distracting the public from their own involvement in the crime.

The rise in violence and hate-crimes is no surprise. The official unemployment rate in Greece is 28%, and over 60% among young men. No wonder desperate youths are wrapping batons in Greek flags and beating immigrants: When people are pressed to the wall, they hunt for their tormentors –– and too often find their fellow victims to blame.

Economic devastation breeds fascism. In the 1930s, the hungry and angry sought relief in hyper-patriotism, racism and pogroms. In the 1980s Reagan Recession in the USA, when factories shut down in the Midwest, the hopeless unemployed joined right-wing skinhead cults and went on a killing rampage –– beginning with the murder of Jewish journalist Alan Berg and ending with the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

Vultures Over Athens

Golden Dawn is a symptom of the nation's illness, not its cause. Unfortunately, the Brown-shirts go after easy targets –– Pakistanis, Gypsies, Africans, whoever is different and easy to whack. It's a lot easier to stab a hip-hop rapper than it is to go after a hedge-fund shark.

The real culprits behind the suffering are well camouflaged. So let me name some: In Greece, we begin with billionaires Kenneth Dart and Paul “The Vulture” Singer.

Dart and Singer bought up Greek government bonds for pennies on the dollar. While the holders of 97% of Greek bonds agreed to accept a loss of 75% of their value, Dart and Singer demanded several hundred percent more than they paid. Then Dart and Singer threatened the dead-broke Greek government. If Greece did not pay this ransom, Dart and Singer would declare Greek bonds in default. Every bank in Europe holding these government debts as reserve funds would face technical bankruptcy; the value of government bonds worldwide would implode in value and the entire hemisphere would face a new financial collapse.

It was financial terrorism, and the Greek government gave in. It paid the full ransom demanded. Dart grabbed over half a billion dollars ($513 million) from the Greek treasury –– and only the gods know how much Singer has pocketed.

How was this vulture food paid for? With “austerity” — tightening a belt that’s already not much bigger than its buckle. To pay Singer and Dart, the Greek government announced it would fire 15,000 workers.

What’s sick is that the ruling coalition (or misruling coalition) does not say this is to cover the payoffs to the vultures. Rather, the government says it is the just punishment Greeks deserve for their "laziness and greed."  The victims’ punishment is called, “austerity.”

The Austerity Fairy Tale

My children often ask me, “Daddy, where does ‘austerity’ come from?” And I tell them:

Once upon a time, there was a good fairy named John Maynard Keynes. He wanted to stop depressions, financial crises and suffering, so he conceived of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He said, When a nation’s foreign exchange earnings drop (say, if the price of oil rises or Greek tourism falls because its currency is over-valued), the countries taking the poor nations’ money, rich countries like Germany and the USA, would lend it back via the IMF.

By this rule, the rich lending to the poor, the world prospered and lived happily ever after … until the 1980s, when a wicked witch, known as the Iron Lady, and America’s gaga grandpa, Reagan of the Rich, insisted that the IMF and the World Bank beat poor nations with a stick called, “structural adjustment.”

Nations facing destitution because of higher oil costs, currency imbalance or predatory interest rate demands were “structurally adjusted.” Structural adjustment is a cruel and debilitating potion of mass firings of public employees, cheap sell-offs of national assets and deregulation of corporate profiteering. This ripping the wings off the better angels of government is called, “austerity.”

The good fairy Keynes had warned about this evil potion, this snake oil called “austerity.” Cutting government spending during a recession, he said, will only make things worse.

And that’s what happened: In every single case, the “adjusted” nations’ economies were devastated.

Structural adjustment reached its cruel apotheosis in the early 1990s under the guidance of the World Bank’s Chief Economist, one Larry Summers.

But then, in 1997, Summers’ post was taken by Prof. Joseph Stiglitz.

In 2001, I met Stiglitz whom I’d heard was quietly expressing grave doubts about austerity and structural adjustment à la Summers. He agreed to go public. Over several hours of discussion, which I recorded for BBC TV, Stiglitz charged that IMF-imposed austerity was “ a little like the Middle Ages, when the patient died they would say well, we stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.”

Stiglitz detailed for me the ill effects of the “structural adjustment” demands, including “free” trade, which he likened to the Opium Wars; bank deregulation, which he found ludicrously dangerous; privatization, which Stiglitz called “briberization”; and budget-cutting austerity.

The budget cuts and free-market nostrums, Stiglitz told me, were as cruel as they were stupid. And he said of those who profited off these IMF diktats, “They don’t care if people live or die.”

Stiglitz went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for his skepticism of Markets über Alles.

So how, a decade after austerity, briberization and all their cruelties exposed and discredited, did Greece (and Spain and Portugal and too many others) end up under austerity’s bloody grip?

To begin with, in 2000, Larry Summers, as US Treasury Secretary, successfully demanded the World Bank fire Stiglitz and purged the Bank and IMF of austerity apostasy.

Why? Austerity may fail the public, but it’s damn profitable for those on the inside.

All you need is a riot and a few dead bodies.

The IMF Riots

Among Stiglitz’ stunning revelations to me was his description of “the IMF riot.” I showed him confidential World Bank and IMF plans for the nation of Ecuador. These included what seemed to be a warning to that nation’s finance minister that austerity could lead to violence in the streets, “social unrest” — which the World Bank recommended be crushed with “resolve”. In Ecuador, “resolve” meant tanks.

Did the IMF really write the riots into the plans?
Yes, Stiglitz said, matter-of-factly. “We had a name for it ‘The IMF Riot’”.

When a nation is “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole caldron blows up”.

And that’s what we’re seeing in Greece. It began in May 2010, when some sick, misguided berserker set fire to a bank in Athens and killed four bank employees. The killings did the trick: the Left’s protests against insane austerity and banker gangsterism came to a halt.

Still, people could see that the austerity medicine was making Greece ill. So, they put their hopes in a new party, Syriza, which, from nowhere, became the second highest vote-getter in Greece by promising to oppose austerity. Once in office, the faux-Left Syriza completely sold out its positions.

That leaves Golden Dawn, although diseased by racism and violently bent, it is the only one of Greece’s top four parties to stand firm against rabid austerity and the economy being chained like a beaten dog to Germany’s currency.

In 2010, the bank burning was used to discredit protests by the Left. Today, once again, the Greek government, dancing on its hind legs, begging for a biscuit from German bankers, has used a murder as an excuse to outlaw the only major party dissenting from the austerity suicide pact.

I wish I could say that the reason Golden Dawn is being banned is because of the violent bend of its racist followers. But that’s just not what’s going on here.

Dimitris Kazakis, the leader of Greece’s true progressive party, the United People’s Front (EPAM), has spoken out against Golden Dawn’s racist violence — and the greater danger of the bogus charges created to arrest members of Parliament. He scolds Greeks, reminding them that this is how the military dictatorship seized power in 1967.

So, who are the real Fascists?

Fascism, as defined since the days of Il Duce, is the official combine of government and corporate big business.

By that definition, Golden Dawn is the only non-Fascist party among Greece’s top four. And that is why Golden Dawn has been targeted for elimination.

I hope my fellow progressives will excuse me for not applauding.

Source:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19213-the-golden-dawn-murder-case-larry-summers-and-the-new-fascism
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 01:17:00 +0000

Corroding Our Democracy: Canada Silences Scientists, Targets Environmentalists in Tar Sands Push

Democracy Now
Sept 24, 2013

Five years ago this month, the firm TransCanada submitted a permit request to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would bring tar sands oil from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The project has sparked one of the nation’s most contentious environmental battles in decades. The Obama administration initially appeared ready to approve Keystone XL, but an unprecedented wave of activism from environmentalists and residents of the states along its path has forced several delays. Among those pressuring Obama for Keystone XL’s approval is the Canadian government, which recently offered a greater pledge of reduced carbon emissions if the pipeline is built.

We’re joined by one of Canada’s leading environmental activists, Tzeporah Berman, who has campaigned for two decades around clean energy, and is the former co-director of Greenpeace International’s Climate Unit. She is now focused on stopping tar sands extraction as a member of the steering committee for the Tar Sands Solutions Network. Berman is also the co-founder of ForestEthics and is the author of the book "This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge." Berman discusses how the Canadian government is muzzling scientists speaking out on global warming, quickly changing environmental laws, and why she believes the push for tar sands extraction has created a "perfect storm" of grassroots activism bring together environmentalists, indigenous communities and rural landowners.

TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Five years ago this month, the firm TransCanada submitted a permit request to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would bring tar Sands oil from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The project has sparked one of the nation’s most contentious environmental battles in decades. The Obama administration initially appeared ready to approve Keystone XL, but an unprecedented wave of activism from environmentalists and residents of the states along its path has forced several delays. In the summer 2011, 1200 people were arrested outside the White House. Well, on Saturday, protests were held once again around the country in a national day of action urging President Obama to reject Keystone’s construction. President Obama also faces continued pressure from backers of the Keystone XL.

In their latest push for the project, House Republicans have announced plans to tie the pipeline’s construction to the upcoming vote on raising the nation’s debt ceiling. Well, on Monday, delegates at the 2013 International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit held in Sufferin, New York called on Obama to reject the Keystone XL, saying, "There is no single project in North America that is more significant than Keystone XL in terms of the carbon emissions it would unleash... As women who are already seeing the tragic impacts of climate change on families on indigenous peoples, and on entire countries, we urge you to choose a better future by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline." At the conference, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation, described the impact that massive oil and gas extraction has had on her family and its traditional land in northern Alberta.

MELINA LABOUCAN-MASSIMO: I come from a small northern community, it’s Cree, Nēhiyaw, is, in our language, what we call it. There is nothing on — that compares with the destruction going on there. If there were a global prize for unsustainable development, the tar sands would be a clear winner. Not that there’s a competition going on or by any means, but, I just think that world-renowned people, experts are really seeing this as one of the major issues and that is why it is one of the biggest — you know, the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and why Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol.

So, this is what it looks like. very viscous. It’s, you know, not fluid, so it takes a lot more energy a lot more water, produces a lot more byproduct. So, it’s equaling to — why it is such a big area, it’s 141,000 square kilometers — equal to that of destroying, you know, England and Wales combined, or the state of Florida for American folks. The mines that we’re dealing with are bigger than entire cities. So, there’s about six, seven right now, could be up to nine. And this is — Imperial Oil, for example, will be bigger than Washington, D.C. alone. So, that’s just a mine. And this is some of the biggest dump trucks in the world. A lot of the issues of toxicity we’re talking from the air, so these are some of the biggest dump trucks in the world. And a lot of the issues for toxicity that we’re dealing with is, and which relates to the water, are these huge tailing ponds; they’re called ponds, but they’re actually big toxic sludge lakes.

They currently spend 180 square kilometers just of toxic sludge that’s sitting on the landscape. So, every day one million leaders are leaching into the Athabasca Watershed, which is, you know, where our families drink from. I’m from the Peace Region, but it connects to the Athabasca and it goes up into the Arctic Basin, so that is where all the Northern folks will be getting these toxins, and these contain cyanide, mercury, lead, polyaromatic hydrocarbin nythetic acids. So, there are a lot of issues that we’re dealing with healthwise.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Melina Laboucan-Massimo, member of the lLubicon Cree First Nation in northern Alberta. All of this comes as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently sent President Obama letter, offering a greater pledge of reduced carbon emissions of the Keystone Pipeline is built to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the United States. Well, for more I’m joined by one of Canada’s leading environmental activists, Tzeporah Berman. She’s campaigned for decades around clean energy and is the former Co-director of Greenpeace International’s Climate [Unit]. She is now focused on stopping tar sands extraction as a member of the steering committee for the Tar Sands Solutions Network. Tzeporah Berman is also the Co-founder of Forest Ethics and the author of the book, "This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge." Welcome to Democracy Now! it’s great to have you with us Tzeporah.

TZEPORAH BERMAN: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what tar sands means for you in Canada and how it has affected your whole country.

TZEPORAH BERMAN: The tar sands are the single largest industrial project on earth. The scale is almost incomprehensible, if you’ve never been there. They are not only the single reason that Canada’s climate pollution is going up, that we will not meet even the weak targets, even the weak targets, that have been set, but they’re also the most toxic project in the country; they’re polluting our water and air.

The tar sands produces 300 million liters of toxic sludge a day that is just pumped into open pit lakes that now stretch about 170 kilometers across Canada. And, you know, one of the important things about what is happening in Canada right now is that Canadian policy on climate change, on environment, on many issues is being held hostage to the goal that this federal government, the Harper government and the oil industry have, of expanding the tar sands no matter what the cost.

Oil corrodes, it is corroding our pipelines and leading to spills and leaks that are threatening our communities, but it is also corroding our democracy. What we’re seeing in Canada is, the, literally, the elimination of 40 years of environmental laws in the last two years in order to make way for quick expansion of tar sands and pipelines. I mean, the Keystone is not the only pipeline this industry is proposing. It is a spider of pipelines across North America so that they can try and expand this dirty oil as quickly as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And why is it so dirty?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: It’s really dirty because it’s — the oil is mixed with sand. So, in order to get that oil out, they have to use natural gas. More natural gas is used in the tar sands than all homes in Canada. It’s — so, they use natural gas and freshwater to actually remove the oil from the sand, and the result is that each barrel of oil from the tar sands has three to four times more emissions, more climate pollution than conventional oil.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how this pipeline would traverse Canada and the United States and where it goes, what it is for. Does the U.S. benefit from the oil going through the pipeline?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: No, this is an export pipeline. What the industry wants is, they want to get this oil off the continent because they’ll get a better price. And so, all of the pipelines that are currently being proposed are in order so that the industry can export the oil. So, the Keystone, for example, will go all the way from Alberta straight down through the United States and out to the Gulf, and it’s not for U.S. consumption. The majority of that oil is destined to — the U.S. is really just in the Canadian oil industry’s way. The result is that this is a pipeline that is — presents enormous risk to the American people as a result of the terrible records of oil spills and leaks. And not a lot of benefit.

AMY GOODMAN: Tzeporah, you have been meeting with a number of scientists. This week in the New York Times had an interesting editorial called, "Silencing Scientists" and it said "Over the last few years, the government of Canada — led by Stephen Harper — has made it harder and harder for publicly financed scientists to communicate with the public and with other scientists." What is going on?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: First of all, the government has shut down the majority of scientific research in the country that had to deal with climate change. This is a government in denial and they do not want to talk about climate change. So, last year they shut down the atmospheric research station, which was one of the most important places in the world to get climate data. They shut down the National Round Table on Environment and Economy, they fired hundreds of scientists, and the ones that are left are being told that they can’t release the research to us, even though it is a tax payer’s funded research. They’re also being told they can’t speak to the press unless they have a handler and it’s an approved interview; they have to have a handler from the prime minister’s office.

So, the scientists that I’ve talked to, they’re embarrassed, they’re frustrated, they’re protesting. Last week in Canada we had hundreds of scientists hit the streets in their lab coats protesting the federal government because they can’t speak. They are being muzzled. To the extent that the, quiet eminent, journal Nature, last year, published an editorial saying it is time for Canada to set its scientists free.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is an amazing story. We know that in the United States, under the Bush Administration, you had James Hansen who was Head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA who had a handler who hadn’t graduated from college, he was — I think his credential was that he been active on the Bush campaign committee, re-election campaign committee, and James Hansen had to go through him to deal with the media.

TZEPORAH BERMAN: Right, well — but, and James Hansen’s still got to speak deal with — to speak to the media. Most of the scientists that I’m talking to in Canada can’t speak to the media at all. And if they want to talk about climate change, they’re definitely not going to get those interviews approved. But, it is not just the scientists that are being muzzled and the climate research that’s being shut down and people that are being fired, we have also seen an unprecedented attack on charitable organizations that deal with environmental research.

The Canadian Government has the majority of environmental organizations under Canadian revenue audit, and so, the result is you have the majority of the country’s environmental leaders not able to be a watchdog on what the government is doing. And secret documents revealed through freedom of information this year showed that the government eliminated all these environmental laws in Canada at the request of the oil industry because the environmental laws were in their way.

The Embridge Northern Gateway Pipeline crosses 1000 streams and that would normally trigger in of environmental assessment process. Well, when you have no laws, you have no environmental assessment, so when they eradicated all the environmental laws 3000 environmental assessments for major industrial projects in Canada were canceled. Now those projects are just approved without environmental assessment.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean, the activism for you and Canada in the United States, when clearly President Obama has been forced to delay the decision, the Keystone XL because of the massive protest against it?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: I think that what we’re seeing, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, is an unprecedented climate movement. I think that, you know, these pipelines have provided a tangible focus for communities on the ground, and the oil industry and the government have, in a sense, created their own perfect storm. Because, while before it might have been people who were concerned about climate change that would get involved in tar sands or pipeline issues, now it is people worried about their groundwater, it’s first nations and indigenous people across North America who are protesting their rights. It’s land owners. So, now you have this perfect storm.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the legendary Canadian musician, Neil Young, spoke out against the extraction of tar sands oil in Canada and its export to the U.S. through the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. He was speaking to a National Farmers Union rally and Washington, D.C. Neil Young described his recent visit to a tar sands community in Alberta, Canada.

NEIL YOUNG: The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the Native peoples are dying. The fuel’s all over, there’s fumes everywhere. You can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town, and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the legendary musician Neil Young. I don’t know how many people here in the U.S. know that he is Canadian, but, he is. The significance of him coming, and also what did the climatologist, the scientist, James Hansen, call the tar sands?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: Dr. Hansen has referred to the Keystone XL Pipeline as the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet. And he says that his studies are showing that if we allow the tar sands to expand at the rates that the government and industry want it to expand, then it’s game over for the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Tzeporah Berman, I saw you at the International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit in Sufferin and you talked about your son having to respond to a question of his. We only have a minute, but explain.

TZEPORAH BERMAN: One night at dinner my son, who was eight at the time, turned to me and said, mommy, why does the government think you are a terrorist? Which is not really the conversation you want to have with your son. Because he had heard on the radio, that on the Senate floor, the Harper government was proposing that we change the definition of the term "domestic terrorism" in Canada to include environmentalism.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what does that mean for you and what does that mean for environmental activists? Where are you headed now? What are you going to do around tar sands?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: Canadians who care about these issues are under attack by our own government, and we are being told that if we — that what we do is not in the national interest unless we support the oil industry’s agenda. But, I think this government has overreached and we are now finding — our phones are ringing off the hook. People are joining the campaign and stepping up. And let’s be clear, Canadians want clean energy. Canadians, many of them, are very embarrassed about what our government is doing internationally, so our movement is growing, and so far, we have slowed down all of these pipelines and the expansion.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the alternative?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: Well, the alternative for Canada is not only clean energy, renewable energy, which now we can build at scale, we know that, but it’s also supporting other aspects of our economy, because when you support only one aspect of your economy, the most capital-intensive sector in the country, then it starts to destroy your manufacturing base, your service industry, your tourism industry. We need a diversified economy in Canada, and that’s not — and that’s entirely possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Tzeporah Berman, I want to thank you for being with us; leading environmental activist in Canada. She’s campaigned for decades around clean energy; former Co-director of Greenpeace International’s Climate Unit, now focused on stopping tar sands extraction.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Source:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/24/corroding_our_democracy_canada_silences_scientists
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:07:00 +0000

Dianne Feinstein trying to eliminate protections for alternative media with amended 'Free Flow of Information Act'

by Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
September 14, 2013
[emphasis added]

In response to growing public dissent against the federal occupying powers, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has sponsored a bill known as S. 987, or the Free Flow of Information Act of 2013, which will purportedly protect news reporters from being harassed or otherwise maliciously compelled by the federal government to disclose information about their private sources -- this is, after all, how honest media outlets are able to keep the government in check and act as whistleblowers when necessary to shine the light on corruption.

But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has successfully added an amendment to this Trojan Horse bill that strips these protections from the alternative media and others she deems as not being "real reporters."

The online free speech and privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notified the world about Sen. Feinstein's initial attempts to shred the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it pertains to honest media members back in August. In a report entitled "Why Sen. Feinstein Is Wrong About Who's a 'Real Reporter,'" EFF explained how Feinstein was pushing for an amendment to S. 987 that would limit freedom of the press protections only to "regular" journalists, at the exclusion of independent journalists, citizen journalists and others who do not meet her accepted criteria.

"Her amendment ... not only retains the problematic requirement that a person 'regularly' engage in journalism to enjoy shield law protections, but moreover adds new requirements that would make it especially difficult for self-publishers such as independent bloggers and citizen journalists to be protected under the law," writes Morgan Weiland for EFF. "Indeed, her new requirements for being either salaried or at least affiliated with a news 'entity' seem to purposefully target these self-publishers."

Feinstein's legacy of treason against America is extensive and perpetual

This is hardly surprising, as the targets of Feinstein's discrimination are among the only legitimate journalists, at least in the U.S., still willing to call her and other traitors out for their treasonous actions against American citizens.

Feinstein, after all, is the same tenured senator who has repeatedly pushed to confiscate people's firearms and put unconstitutional restrictions on ammunition purchases, for instance, not to mention her ongoing role as co-conspirator in destroying American patriot and hero Edward Snowden.

It is no wonder, in light of all this, that Feinstein is now aggressively working towards censoring those who have enough gall to actually call her out publicly for her longstanding legacy of violating her oath of office and betraying the American people, even when doing so could get them labeled as a dissenter or even a "terrorist." And Feinstein is further showing her true colors right now by trying to stamp out the only beacon of truth that remains -- independent journalism.

"Feinstein's amendment effectively advances a traditional vision of journalism through the three definitions of journalist that it provides, each of which requires that a person be affiliated with a journalistic 'entity' or institution (including news websites and other digital news services, and other periodicals distributed digitally)," adds Weiland, noting that none of the vague terms in Feinstein's amendment are properly defined.

"The very fact that developing a crisp, clear definition of journalist is difficult should signal to Congress that it might not be equipped to wade into the uncharted waters of deciding who is a journalist. But it's a problem that Congress can easily avoid by linking shield law protectionsto the act of journalism, not the definition of who is a journalist," concludes Weiland.

Be sure to read the entire EFF analysis of Feinstein's egregious amendment here:
www.eff.org

The Dissenter has also put together a more recent analysis of the newly-amended S. 987, which explains why this so-called "shield" law is a recipe for disaster:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com

Sources for this article include:
www.eff.org
http://www.govtrack.us
http://www.blacklistednews.com
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com

Source:
http://www.naturalnews.com/042061_Free_Flow_of_Information_Act_alternative_media_censorship.html
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It is the routine pattern of the rise and fall of all republics that become empires. It is what happened to Rome and Spain and Britain: Success, over-reach, hubris, bankruptcy and decline.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 15:06:00 +0000

Exceptional And Unexceptional America

The Daily Dish
The Atlantic Monthly
March 30, 2011
[emphasis added]

Glenn Greenwald, in that way he has, asks the toughest question about American exceptionalism. Yes, it's clear Obama believes in the unique role of the US in global politics, and world history, despite the Big Lie from Romney et al. But do we all mean the same thing when we talk of this idea? And is this more than mere national solipsism and myth?

It's easy to see where Romney, for example, gets his belief. Mormonism is the only all-American religion, placing Jesus in America itself ("I just got crucified, you guys"). But for Christians, the notion of God preferring one land-mass or population, apart from the Jewish people from whom the Messiah came, is obviously heretical. As a Catholic, I see no divine blessing for any country, and the notion that God would make such worldly distinctions strikes me as surreal as it did when I first wrapped my head around the phrase "Church of England".

If God is God, one island on one planet in a minor galaxy is surely the same as any other, and the truth about our universe surely cannot be reduced to one country's patriotism. Yes, we can ask, as Lincoln did, for God's blessing. But seeking God's blessing is not the same as being God's country - with all the hubristic aggression that can lead to.

Some Straussians see Lincoln as the Second Founder and the abolition of slavery as the return of the West to natural rights. And it certainly seems true that in Lincoln's words and America's example, key ideas about human equality and dignity gained momentum - and you can hear those ideas today in the mouths of a new Arab generation, in a culture so alien to our own it is close to impossible to understand in its complexity. What deeper proof that these ideas are universal and true?

But this also reveals the limits of American exceptionalism. If America's ideals are universal, they cannot be reduced to the ownership of one country. And that country's actual history - as opposed to Bachmannite mythology - is as flawed as many others.

Why, after all, did America need a Second Founding under Lincoln - almost a century after it was born? Which other advanced country remained so devoted to slavery until the late nineteenth century? Which other one subsequently replaced slavery with a form of grinding apartheid for another century?

Besides, much of the thought that gave us the American constitution can be traced back to European thinkers, whether in Locke or Montesquieu or the Enlightenment in general. Seeing America as the sole pioneer of human freedom is to erase Britain's unique history, without which America would not exist. It is to erase the revolutionary ideas of the French republics. It's historically false.

But was the discovery of America some kind of divine Providence?

The Puritans certainly thought so. And the blessing of a vast continental land mass with huge resources is certainly rare in human history.

But, of course, that land mass was available so easily because of the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived there - which takes the edge off the divine bit, don't you think? Call me crazy (and they do) but my concept of God does not allow for God's blessing of genocide as a means for one country's hegemony over the earth.

This is not to say that America doesn't remain, by virtue of its astonishing Constitution, a unique sanctuary for human freedom. We are freer here in terms of speech than in most other advanced countries, cowed by p.c. laws and restrictions. We are freer here in labor and capital than most other countries. To feel pride in this is natural. It is why I love this place and yearn to be one of its citizens.

And the vast wealth of an entire continent, unleashed by freedom's flourishing, gave this land of liberty real and awesome global power, which it used to vanquish the two great evils of the last century - Nazism and Communism. This is the noble legacy so many now seek to perpetuate, with good intentions and benign hearts, despite the disastrous and costly interventions of the last decade.

But as the 20th Century wore on, this kind of power had its usual effect, and the establishment of a massive global military machine, as Eisenhower so presciently noted, created the risk of a permanent warfare sustained by domestic interests. Throw into the mix a bevy of intellectuals busy constructing rationales for a uni-polar world - on the neocon right and the neoliberal left - and we slowly became, at best, the indispensable nation and at worst, a benign imperial bully.

In other words, America's ideals are not unique to America, and America's success led it to the same temptations of great powers since ancient times. America's exceptional freedom and exceptional wealth did not exempt it from unexceptional human nature or the unexceptional laws of history. To believe anything else is to engage in nationalist idolatry.

In retrospect, Vietnam was a form of madness brought on by paranoia.

In Iraq, America actually presided over 100,000 civilian deaths as it failed to perform even minimal due diligence in invading and occupying another country (while barely a few years later, we invoked - with no irony or even memory - the risk of mass murder as a reason to invade another country).

And US forces are still there - and the same alliance that gave us the Libya campaign will surely soon be arguing for extending their presence as the Potemkin democracy slowly collapses.

In Afghanistan, the graveyard of so many empires, we are busy sending drones to hit targets with inevitable civilian casualties in a war that has no end, no discernible goal, and has now lasted longer than any war in the country's history.

When America finds itself in wars where it can accidentally kill nine children gathering firewood, it seems somewhat abstract to talk uncritically of America's moral superiority. And when America has also crossed the line into legalized torture, and refuses to acknowledge or account for it, let alone hold the war criminals responsible, it has lost the moral standing to dictate human rights to the rest of the world.

Obama had a chance to turn this around.

He did end the active torture of prisoners of war. He promised to end the war in Iraq, to close Gitmo and to reframe America's relationship to the world.

But he refused to bring the torturers of the last administration to justice, thereby effectively withdrawing from the Geneva Conventions.

We remain in Iraq, we have much more aggressive war in Afghanistan, and Gitmo is still open.

The kind of humiliations we once inflicted on prisoners of war are now inflicted on American citizens in custody, as in the case of Bradley Manning.

And with all this still on our plate, Obama has just - unilaterally - committed America to an intervention in a third civil war in a third Muslim country, with the grave risk of our taking responsibility for another effort at nation-building abroad, when nation-fixing at home was the reason he was elected.

America is exceptional in so many ways.

But when we use that exceptionalism to violate our own values, and to meddle in places we have no business or interest meddling in, then, in some ways, we are attacking that very exceptionalism, and ignoring its real power - the power of example and restraint, the belief that freedom can only be won by the people seeking it - not by those seeking to impose their ideals onto a recalcitrant world.

The glib hubris of the Libyan intervention is a sign that the change we hoped for really has morphed into the wet military dreams of neoconservatism and the utopian notion of the US as the rescuer of all those subjected to tyranny we believe we can opportunistically save - for a few days or weeks.

What I see here is far from exceptional.

It is the routine pattern of the rise and fall of all republics that become empires. It is what happened to Rome and Spain and Britain: Success, over-reach, hubris, bankruptcy and decline.

And the withering of the sinews of a republic's body - as in the supine, divided, incompetent Congress, and a court so deferent to the emperor's unrestricted power in waging war wherever he pleases.

In this, especially with this Libya clusterfuck, Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain.

One appreciates the difficulty of this and the horrible moral dilemma of Benghazi; and I still hope for success - beause I see no sane alternative to Obama anywhere and no one can hope that the monster Qaddafi stays in power. But the Libya decision was a deep break with the essential argument for the Obama presidency - and that break is one that the Obamaites seemed not to grasp in their insular, secret and arrogant decision-making process. I fear it has already profoundly weakened the president's credibility and strength - and will become as big a burden to him as Iraq was to Bush. He now appears not only more distant from his campaign promises - but also more incoherent. More important, it is impossible to sustain the image of this president as the antidote to Bush when, in picking another Muslim civil war to intervene in - however differently frame - he seems to be Bush-lite.

For those of us who wanted him - and still want him - to succeed, it is a crushing disappointment.

Even if success emerges, this capitulation to the very strains that took the US into the ditch of 2008 is a form of pragmatism too far.

[We all know now what has happened and what will now happen in Syria.]

This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2011/03/exceptional-and-unexceptional-america/173607/

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
__________________

"EVERYTHING goes into the US-based spy cloud," Kim Dotcom tells Ars.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:14:00 +0000

New Zealand appears to have used NSA spy network to target Kim Dotcom

by Cyrus Farivar
Ars Technica
Aug 23, 2013
[emphasis added]

A new examination of previously published affidavits from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)—the New Zealand equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA)—appears to suggest that the GCSB used the “Five Eyes” international surveillance network to capture the communications of Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload.

The new analysis was posted by New Zealand journalist Keith Ng in a Thursday blog post.

If the link proves to be true, it would seem that the NSA’s vast international surveillance capability can be turned against individuals unrelated to the NSA’s stated mission to aid military, counterintelligence, or counterterrorism objectives.

Kim Dotcom has been charged in the United States with copyright infringement rather than terrorism or any other violent crime. The German-born entrepreneur is currently fighting extradition from New Zealand to the United States. Separately, he has launched a civil suit in New Zealand against the GCSB for what the New Zealand government has already admitted was unlawful surveillance.

REL TO NZL, FVEY

On Page 21 of the GCSB’s Affadavit of Disclosure (PDF), in an internal e-mail dated February 17, 2012, the document is marked:

"TOP SECRET//COMINT//REL TO NZL, FVEY."

The last section of that classification (REL TO NZL, FVEY)—“Relevant to New Zealand, Five Eyes”—refers to the vast intelligence and data sharing program between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, known as “Five Eyes.”

Given new disclosures about the capabilities of PRISM and XKeyscore as a result of the documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, a close examination of this affidavit seems to suggest that the Five Eyes infrastructure was used in Dotcom’s case. (In a slide published last month by The Guardian, XKeyscore is clearly shown to have a presence in New Zealand.)

The affadavit also provides a redacted list of “selectors” for Kim Dotcom, his wife Monica Dotcom, and Bram Van Der Kolk, one of Dotcom’s co-defendants.

“We intercepted [REDACTED] from the first two selectors on the list," the document states. "Obviously only a small fraction of them were used in the reports that were generated. We had no [REDACTED] collection on Dotcom, and I’m advised we saw a little [REDACTED] none of which was used in reporting.”

“All Five Eyes partners have access [to the NSA's systems], including GCSB,” Dotcom told Ars. “GCSB doesn’t even operate their own spy cloud. Everything goes into the US-based spy cloud. Including all the surveillance they have done on me. They typed in the selector and got access to everything the Five Eyes spy cloud had on me. Then the GCSB started real-time surveillance of all my communications, IP, mobile, etc. and was feeding that into the spy cloud.”

Neither the GCSB nor a spokesperson for the Embassy of New Zealand in the United States immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. In June 2013, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key evaded answering whether the GCSB uses or has access to the NSA’s PRISM system.

"I can't tell you how the United States gather all of their information, what techniques they use, I just simply don't know,” Key told TV3’s Firstline. “But if the question is do we use the United States or one of our other partners to circumvent New Zealand law then the answer is categorically no. We do exchange—and it's well known—information with our partners. We do do that. How they gather that information and whether they use techniques or systems like PRISM, I can't comment on that.''

"What was done was illegal"

As we reported in March 2013, a New Zealand appeals court ruled (PDF) that Kim Dotcom has the right to sue the government of New Zealand for illegal surveillance.

As we reported further last year, the NZ government admitted after the fact that Dotcom should not have been subjected to government surveillance due to his having obtained permanent resident status.

According to new documents acquired earlier this year by a New Zealand TV channel, the GCSB already had information as of December 16, 2011 (before the January 2012 raid) showing that Dotcom was a permanent resident of New Zealand and that the agency knew Dotcom should not have been targeted at all. Interestingly, the documents also show Dotcom’s government code name: “Billy Big Steps.”

Still, Ira Rothken, Dotcom’s California-based attorney, seemed to be a bit more cautious about drawing any new implications from the NZ affidavit.

“We’re in the process of litigating a civil case that implicates the New Zealand government for their illegal spying,” he told Ars. “At this point, while we have a healthy appreciation for whatever informal analysis is being done, our goal in this case is to actually get the information directly from New Zealand government sources. I don’t want to prejudge the very thing that we’re litigating now.”

Still, Rothken seemed to indicate that it was within the realm of possibility that Five Eyes was turned against Dotcom illegally.

“I think it’s axiomatic that New Zealand has access to the Five Eyes infrastructure because it’s a member of Five Eyes and it has network points in New Zealand, including a large installation in New Zealand,” he added. “I think that that’s common knowledge. We know that the spy machinery was misused because what was done was illegal. The interesting thing about this case is that it shows how not having sufficient checks and balances against the spy machinery can come back to hurt and impact the rights of innocent residents. Here, the Prime Minister has already apologized and admitted that what happened was illegal. We are litigating for what damages and remedies should be provided.”

Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that it wasn’t clear how much New Zealand authorities obtained via the NSA.

“It would all be dependent on New Zealand law,” he told Ars. “There’s nothing in here that looks like a slam dunk. It doesn't seem like it’s outside the realm of possibility, but if everything is based on a single classification, it seems possible.”

Meanwhile, NZ expands GCSB spying domestically

At the time of the surveillance against Dotcom, the GCSB was only allowed to engage in surveillance of non-resident foreigners. However, earlier this week, the New Zealand parliament voted 61-59 to expand the GCSB’s powers to encompass citizens and legal residents.

"This is not, and never will be, about wholesale spying on New Zealanders," Prime Minister John Key told parliament on Thursday. "There are threats our government needs to protect New Zealanders from. Those threats are real and ever-present, and we underestimate them at our peril."

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/new-zealand-appears-to-have-used-nsa-spy-network-to-target-kim-dotcom/
________________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 11:51:00 +0000

German security chief: Ditch Google and Facebook if you’re afraid of spying

By Zach Epstein
BGR.com
Jul 4, 201

Germany continued its campaign to stir up outrage this week over recent revelations that the NSA spies on Internet communications. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Wednesday said that any Internet users afraid that their private information might be exposed to NSA snooping have a simple way to protect their data: Stop using U.S. services like Google and Facebook.

“Whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers,” Friedrich said, according to theAssociated Press. He also said that a delegation of German officials will fly to the U.S. next week to discuss recent claims that the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are spying on European citizens.

Source:
http://bgr.com/2013/07/04/nsa-spying-advice-germany/
________________

NEWS2U Politics, Finance & Resources

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Informed Comment10/23/2013

It is the routine pattern of the rise and fall of all republics that become empires. It is what happened to Rome and Spain and Britain: Success, over-reach, hubris, bankruptcy and decline.

"EVERYTHING goes into the US-based spy cloud," Kim Dotcom tells Ars.

REL TO NZL, FVEY

"What was done was illegal"

Meanwhile, NZ expands GCSB spying domestically

Informed Comment
10/23/2013