nsa whistleblower e snowden
 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/s...204241311.html


i wonder how far all this will go? hopefully to the point that the patriot act is repealed.
it needs to join the dustheap that contains the alien and sedition act.

also, there is a white house petition that's calling for the repeal of the patriot act, please go and sign it. if enough signatures are received, it will receive white house attention. perhaps more importantly, it needs enough signatures to get media attention.
and i will be contacting all my congressmen and women to ask for repeal.

I'm just waiting for this to degenerate down to the typical false Right - Left paradigm.
You know - "well, it would be worser if the Republicans were in charge" or "See, I told you Obama is a Fascist" all the while ignoring the fact that there is no difference between either of them.

How pray tell, would they (Republicans AND Democrats) ever give up the control they empowered themselves with by repealing the "Patriot" Act?

When you see Barbara Feinstein(D) and Mike Rogers(R) arm in arm on ABC's This Week, extolling the virtues of PRISM, you know that it ain't going nowhere.

Because someone signed an online petition? Does anyone with a brain in their head not believe that these *petitions* are nothing but self signed, anti-govt confessions? you want to get on their terrorist list? Easy - sign a petition to repeat PRISM and the Patriot Act.

Sheep don't care; as long as they aren't doing anything wrong, why should they care that the govt can spy on them?

I just enjoy being told how I "threw away my vote" by voting for the Libertarian party, which would have abolished all of this nonsense day 1, but I digress.

From the article:

<"Snowden said he decided to leave his family, girlfriend and a comfortable, $200,000-a-year salary behind, and flew to Hong Kong on May 20. He said he chose China because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.">

Saywhatcomeagain?

That's pretty funny, but considering he is dependant upon China not extraditing him, may not have been a bad idea.

Excellent point. I guess the number of nations not afraid to refuse to extradite to the US is probably pretty small.

er....yeah

Let's first worry about that smarmy treasonous Bradley Manning as a president for what this non-military piece of shiat is facing?

Not sure the piece of shiat that was the private contractor can be held to the same standards as a sworn in military person?

But I'm good with firing squad for Manning for sure.

Bradley Manning as a president? You've outdone yourself yet again.

so, it's your assertion that snowden is a 'piece of shiat'?!

'At the same time, legal experts saw differences between the two cases, namely that Manning's secret-spilling was more scattershot, while Snowden appeared more selective.

"I'm not awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom here," Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, said of Snowden. "I'm just saying you could say it is something more akin to educating the American public about sensitive surveillance issues that have some level of First Amendment concern attached to them."'

i am glad that snowden let the public know, by going to the post, about what was going on. he didn't turn over a bunch of classified info, he just let out that the phone records were being checked en masse. and i'm glad he did so.

lol

president, precedent...what's the difference? ;)

Five tall blondes, ie Miller Genuine Drafts

Drinkin on a Monday ? Not a good sign, just sayin.

From one of the Balloon-juice front-pagers, soonergrunt, who is a veteran (three guesses as to where he lives. ;) ):

<Most of the recent revelations’ good AND bad regarding our government’s covert activities’ legal or not, good or bad, have come to us via “impure vessels.”

Bradley Manning isn’t anyone’s idea of a good Soldier. This other guy has some issues too, or so it seems. The conduits through which these men choose to act are themselves less than ideal. Julian Assange is a con man who strung his most lucrative source along for months and then left him high and dry, not even willing to make good on his half-assed pledge to donate money for PART of Manning’s defense fund. Greenwald is a prickly sanctimonious blow-hard frequently more dedicated to self-promotion than the accuracy of his work.

In other words, they are imperfect vessels. And while it is right to look at their specific claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, let’s not lose sight of the fact that these men have brought up subjects that we should be discussing. This **** is important, as my dad would say.

A lot of important things we take for granted came about because of imperfect vessels. I’m pretty sure no one would give up the right to be informed of the charges against them, and their rights at arrest, even though Miranda was a violent psychopath. I doubt Clarence Gideon would make many short lists for dinner invitations, but I’m damn glad for the protections that came from his case.

So let’s have those discussions, and not in Mitt Romney’s quiet rooms out in the open, loudly and honestly, the way Americans are supposed to do. Manning, by his own admission, should be in jail. So should this other guy, probably. But like Gideon and Miranda, the rest of us do owe them a debt of sorts, and we would do well to remember that.>>

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/06...lic-discourse/

Monday is my Sunday, golf courses are far less crowded and I always have a few while playin. Thanks for your concern though.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/i...164742798.html


i'd recommend watching the video first, before reading the article. always interesting to see someone lie, under oath, to congress. the article is just the esteemed mr. clapper trying to explain how he was just being as ably untruthful as possible....

ah, what a tangled web......

What's the delay in indicting Snowden?

Or did Washington not get the news or not believe his admission and we are still looking for the source of the leak? Perhaps Holder is busy investigating himself?

Per MSNBC

Susan Rice seems to have that same quality the President looks for and come to think of it so does Jay Carney. :zz:

http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news...s-records?lite

The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

“Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We’ve gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It’s incredibly sweeping.”

In contrast to standard grand jury subpoenas, material obtained under both Section 215 orders and national security letters must be turned over under so-called “gag orders” that forbid the business or institution that receives the order from notifying its customers or publicly referring to the matter.

From the earliest days of the Patriot Act, Section 215 was among the most hotly disputed of its provisions. Critics charged the language – “tangible things” -- was so broad that it would even permit the FBI to obtain library and bookstore records to inspect what citizens were reading.



“There should be no room for secret law,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, adding that disclosure of the FISC rulings is essential if the debate Obama called for is to take place. “The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government’s surveillance authority, and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy.”



i agree.


and obama says he 'welcomes the debate'. yeah, me too. only thing is, when will he be available to debate this??


now, not to make light of 9/11 by any means....but more people die in a month from car wrecks in this country than have died in the last 12 years, including 9/11, from terrorist attacks. do we really want to have secret courts, secret orders, no public info on subpoenas, changes to amendments in the constitution, sweeping new govt powers, all of which is supposedly to 'make us safer'?! safer from whom???
those who say 'well, if you have nothing to hide...'. define nothing. who decides what's nefarious? how far will this go? drones killing u.s. citizens??? oh, wait, that's already happened-to hell with due process, right?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/...sugc_container

Is Edward Snowden a hero or traitor?

The Post's Dana Milbank thinks the U.S. government has no one to blame but itself:

It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can’t be controlled.

Snowden, Milbank adds, "did the honorable thing in revealing his identity; it would be more honorable if he would turn himself in and face the consequences for his law-breaking. But there is little honor in the way administration officials and lawmakers have avoided responsibility."
..

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...veillance.html


If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think AgainBy Danah Boyd
|
Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2013, at 11:14 AM

read this, if you are one of those saying 'i have nothing to hide, why worry'.

^^^ :tro::tro:

#5..did the 'do not call' list expire?...haven't rec'd many spam calls past few years but had two this morn...one calling to tell me my computer had malware and a virus and was gonna crash...caller sounded like she was from
Nairobi, could barely understand her...told her i didn't have a computer and hung up...2nd call even worse, could barely hear her and hung up...:zz:

Here's a shocker - the Govt not exactly being truthful about how NSA saved us from a terrorist plot:


>>> WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration declassified a handful of details Tuesday that credited its PRISM Internet spying program with intercepting a key email that unraveled a 2009 terrorist plot in New York.

The details, declassified by the director of national intelligence, were circulated on Capitol Hill as part of government efforts to tamp down criticism of two recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Najibullah Zazi's foiled plot to bomb the New York subways has become the centerpiece of that effort. It remains the most serious al-Qaida plot inside the United States since the 9/11 terror attacks.

In the rush to defend the surveillance programs, however, government officials have changed their stories and misstated key facts of the Zazi plot. And they've left out one important detail: The email that disrupted the plan could easily have been intercepted without PRISM.<<<


http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/1...tle-little.htm

as colbert explained, with less freedom, terrorists won't want to attack us any more. a win win situation when you look at it that way!! ;)

i think the world has turned upside down. people are actually cheering the aclu because of the suit they filed yesterday, and that doesn't happen often. lefties screaming for obama's head, righties cheering his admins encroachments on our liberties.

drones killing us citizens with no due process.
irs using their power politically
phones, emails, etc being gathered en masse, with no individualized suspicion-that'll come later.

feinstein and boehner on the same side! crazy stuff.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...4.html?ml=po_r


“Trust me” is President Barack Obama’s preferred mode of action in times of crisis — and his go-to comment to nervous staffers has always been some version of “Relax, I got this.”

But that message is an increasingly hard sell for Obama in his second term, following revelations that the man who once railed against the Bush administration over civil liberties abuses has himself surreptitiously quarterbacked the greatest expansion of electronic surveillance in U.S. history.



“I’m not sure people are confident that the administration has this totally under control,” he told POLITICO. “It seems that there’s something new every day — the IRS, this — and that’s giving people lack of confidence in government. … This is the kind of stuff people used to only see in the movies, that the government can listen to everybody’s calls.”



Obama is both a constitutional law professor and a commander in chief, and those dueling identities seem to be arm-wrestling since a pair of bombshell reports that he had OK’d the collection of nearly all the country’s cell phone data and that he expanded a Bush-era program that trawled the Internet for foreign-linked terrorist activity

i like the saying...


'trust, but verify'. mr president, it's time to explain yourself.

Our Forefathers warned us explicitly about this, but when children are brought up for generations in public schools where the Constitution no longer even taught, it is hard to fault the younger people for being blind.

In just 8 short years, we will have college grads that have never known life before the Patriot act - it is all they grew up with, so they have no idea what our liberties were like before it.

Meanwhile, you still have the hawks continuing to draw us into even more conflicts - McCain visit to Syria for example - I saw him interviewed upon his return and was sickened by the same, tired saber-rattling ... For a guy that spent time in a tiger box as a POW he surely has never seen a war he didn't like.

Another Colbert brainstorm:D..love it..
and even that SC sissy on board with Obama's moves..:zz:

The Feds have no business in our business.

'But, increasingly, Obama’s determination to solve the surveillance puzzle himself reflects his growing allegiance to the office he occupies and a determination, shared with his immediate predecessor, not to cede executive power to the other branches.'


doug, your post cracked me up, and i'd have been both surprised and disappointed had you said you would spy on anyone other than hot chicks. :D

it is a shame that schools ignore certain things-just saw a sixth grade class teacher showed 'saw', good move teach! i always made sure to have books, etc, and talk to my kids about things that school couldn't teach. my three are seething just like i am about all this. we're all history nuts...and many aren't. but, history can teach us so much, such as if people had paid attention years ago when i said 'remember the alien and sedition acts?' and got funny looks.

and mccain and his visit-what a joke!!

You can't compare Hong Kong to mainland China. There is obviously no free speech in China. Hong Kong is totally different. There is free speech in Hong Kong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/wo...anted=all&_r=0


most likely would be extradited from HK.

Except he didn't say "Hong Kong," he said, "China." And it's not as free as you think:

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/f...2012/hong-kong

eh, china...hong kong...what's the difference? :D

http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-cartoo...140004286.html


oh. great. getting mocked by china. that's heartwarming.

'The Chinese media are gleefully reporting recent leaks about widespread US surveillance programs, while a prominent Chinese dissident is expressing dismay that the US is "behaving like China."'

and others:

'Mr. Snowden’s journey has been covered by news outlets from Spain to Saudi Arabia, with headlines like “Obama Isn’t Bush, But He’s Like Him,” “Edward Snowden, Freedom Fighter,” “NSA surveillance: The US is behaving like China,” and "Dangers of blowing the whistle in the digital age" slapped on front pages and websites.'


"For months, Washington has been accusing China of cyberespionage, but it turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the government," The China Daily quoted Li Haidong from China Foreign Affairs University.

A cartoon in the paper’s opinion section depicts a US emblem of freedom – The Statue of Liberty – trailed by a shadowy spy wearing headphones and carrying recording devices.



sigh