The Latest Smear-Snowden Lie Is Another Lie

In case it's not obvious, which it should have been from the first sentence of the London Sunday Times piece.

Digby:

It's entirely possible that some kind of breach happened that revealed the names of some British agents. As Greenwald says, there's been a whole lot of hacking going on. And I suppose its predictable that they would blame any breaches on Snowden but the fact that they got important facts wrong is a sign that they're just throwing this out there and the press isn't bothering to check the facts they have at hand. One would have at least thought they'd question why the Russians waited for two years before checking Snowden's invisible laptop. But that's just how they roll.

The British have turned into monsters when it comes to this surveillance and spying stuff. It brings into sharp focus why the Americans decided to write down a Bill of Rights when their revolution succeeded. They knew better than to leave anything to "trust". Even themselves.

"My greatest responsibility is the safety of the American people."

No, Mr. President.  Your greatest - your sole - responsibility is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You know, the one that says nothing about the safety of the American people.  The one that does have something quite specific to say about the right of the American people to be free from government spying.

Let the Patriot Act die. Give us back our Fourth Amendment Constitutional Rights.



Full transcript here.

Do Only Criminals Have the Right to Privacy?

The worst part today is the smug cynics who shrug off the fascist invasion of our privacy by saying of course the government knows everything we do; get used to it.

That's the attitude of the hordes bowing under communist regimes. It doesn't get much more un-American.

David Cole at The Nation:

Defenders of the new surveillance typically argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. This familiar claim ignores the fact that privacy is valuable not just to criminals, but to all of us. We all close the doors to our bedrooms and our homes, whether or not we are engaged in criminal conduct. We all use password protection for our personal computers, regardless of whether we are doing anything wrong. Privacy serves a multitude of ends other than protecting criminals; if that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have protected it in the first place.

How Dick Pix Can Stop NSA Spying

If you're not watching John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on HBO, you're missing the best news show on television.  Not the best fake news show; the best news show.

Oliver isn't a comedian; he's a TV journalist with the greatest staff of researchers and writers in history.  With a comedian's sense of humor.

"Penis-based objections to the NSA's spying" is not a joke.  It's pure genius, and the only thing that will work.

It's 35 minutes, and worth every second.

QOTD: Terrorism Fear-Mongering

Charlie Pierce:

We are back in the hands of the spooks again. In all of our institutions, secrecy and the magical thinking of the intelligence priesthood inflitrates itself like foul water after a storm, bringing rot we cannot see until it brings everything down. Then the members of the priesthood put on their most glittering robes and blame the heretics out there who did not believe, the infrastructure of disbelief that the priesthood's own mendacity constructed within the incense-clouded cathedral it has made of our fears.

Rand Paul Votes to Let the NSA Take Naked Pictures of You

We have a variation on the old Stupid or Evil question: Does the Tribble-Toupeed One not even realize he is contradicting himself? Or does he think repug primary voters are too stupid to notice all of his weather-vaning and flip-flopping?

Scott Lemiuex at LGM:

Now, yes, yes, unlike most of his Republican colleagues, Paul ostensibly opposed the bill because it wasn’t robust enough. But this makes about as much sense as most heighten-the-contradictions arguments (i.e. none.) This was, to be clear, far from a great bill. But it’s also quite clearly better than anything that’s going to be passed by the next Congress.

SNIP

McConnell strongly opposed this legislation as doing too much to rein in the NSA, and especially with Udall losing the chances of a better bill emerging next year can be safely estimated at 0%. So Paul’s motives for opposing the legislation are irrelevant; he’s a cat’s paw for the Mukasey/Hayden team when the rubber hits the road, and all the showoff filibusters in the world won’t change the fact that he voted for this one too.

Get Off Facebook; Stay Off Facebook

It's worse than the NSA hovering up every detail of your life and storing it for the day it can be used against you.

Zandar:

Reminder for folks out there: big social media companies like Facebook and Twitter pretty much completely own any data you enter into the system, and they can do whatever they want with it.

Facebook the corporation is actually fucking with what you see on your page in order to manipulate your emotions.

If it can do that, it can manipulate into buying more shit you can't afford. Or voting for people who will let corporations get away with it.

Barr, Rogers, Whitfield vote to let the NSA keep illegally spying on you.

Teabagging Tommy Massie sponsored the legislation to stop the NSA, and Brett Guthrie joined John Yarmuth in the bipartisan vote, so voters in Kentucky's Sixth, Fifth and First Districts might want to look a little harder at the ballot come November.

Down with Tyranny:

The success of Massie's amendment limiting NSA domestic spying-- and it was a big success, having passed 293-123-- came as a surprise. It's not exactly the bill Glenn Greenwald would have written but if it ever becomes law-- I can't imagine Dianne Feinstein allowing it to get through the Senate-- it will block intelligence agencies from conducting warrantless and “backdoor” searches of U.S. communications. The amendment prohibits the search of government databases for information on U.S. citizens without a warrant and cuts off funding for the CIA and NSA to build security vulnerabilities, or "backdoors," into domestic tech products or services for surveillance purposes. Massie: "The American people are sick of being spied on."

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That Old Macho Obsession

Steve M on the criminal waste of time and money that is the NSA:

It's a macho thing. It's analogous to what we did with torture. Obviously, torture had to be the right thing to do, because it was so badass. Never mind assessing whether the torture would be effective (much less whether it would be consistent with our laws and professed values) -- we were cranking it up to eleven, and every real man knows deep in his groin that louder, more, harder, angrier, bigger is always better.

That's what we're doing with surveillance. Who cares if the program isn't actually preventing terrorist attacks? Who cares if we're collecting more data than we can process intelligently? Bigger is better! The amount of information we collect is huge! That complex in Utah we built to store all the data is massive! Isn't that all you need to know?

Best Pulitzer Since Seymour Hersch on My Lai, Or Why We Need Real Newspapers And Fearless WhistleBlowers

I admit: As late as yesterday, I would have bet large sums of money that this would never, ever happen. I do not have the words to describe how happy I am to have been so very, very wrong.

Charles Pierce:

Hello? What's this?

Awarded to The Washington Post for its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security...Awarded to The Guardian US for its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.

Precisely correct. It never has been about the who. It always has been about the what, and the how, and especially the why, which latter never has been adequately explained by the all-too-human, but curiously error-prone people who thought they'd never have to explain anything to anybody.

QOTD: Digby

On why we can't reform the NSA:

Someday we might even be able to truly "reform" these programs in a radical way (such as the opening up of government secrets proposed by the Moynihan Commission.) That would require a president committed to doing it along with a majority in congress that would support him or her. I wish I could see that happening some time soon, but I'm afraid that's just not possible in our current environment --- or maybe ever as long as we're a military empire determined to organize ourselves by a need to meet some existential threat (no matter how ludicrous.)

QOTD: Charlie Pierce

On the justifications for President Obama's toothless and insulting NSA "reforms":

Wait a minute. "Advocates of civil liberties" -- which, damn it, ought to be all of us, including the president -- have to be "placated" but not at the expense of risking a "backlash" against the president from "national security agencies" which, ostensibly, work for him on our dime. The whole debate is backwards.

Myths of the NSA, Debunked

All 10 are great, but it's the last three that get to the heart of how thoroughly the terrist hysterics have bamboozled us:

Peter Van Buren at The Nation:

The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding—quite literally—Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.

It’s time to face these arguments directly. So here are ten myths about NSA surveillance that need debunking. Let’s sort them out.

SNIP

8) Terrorists are everywhere and dangerous.

From 1776 to 2001 the United States did not experience a terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11; the worst terror attack against the United States as of 9/10, the Oklahoma City bombing, claimed 168 lives compared to some 3,000 at the Twin Towers. Since 9/11 we have not had a comparable mass-scale terror attack. No dirty bombs at the Super Bowl, no biochemical nightmares, no suicide bombers in our shopping malls or theme parks. There have been only about twenty domestic terror-related deaths since 9/11. Your chances as an American of being killed by a terrorist (the figures are for the world, not just inside the US) are about 1 in 20 million. The inevitable comparison shows the odds of being struck by lightning at 1 in 5.5 million. You are, in other words, about four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist. Most of the “terrorists” arrested in this country post-9/11 have been tragicomic fabrications of the FBI. 9/11 was a one-off, an aberration, so unique that its “success” stunned even Osama bin Laden. It was a single morning of disaster and cannot be the justification for everything the government wishes to do forever after.

9) We’ve stayed safe. Doesn’t that just prove all the government efforts have worked?

No, that’s called false causality. There simply is no evidence that it’s true, and much to the contrary. It’s the same as believing government efforts have prevented Martian attacks or wild lions in our bedrooms. For one thing, we already know that more NSA spying would not have stopped 9/11; most of the needed information was already held by the US government and was simply not properly shared or acted upon. 9/11 was a policy failure, not a matter of too-little snooping. Today, however, it remains a straw-man justification for whatever the NSA wants to do, a way of scaring you into accepting anything from the desecration of the Fourth Amendment to taking off our shoes at airport security. But the government uses this argument endlessly to promote what it wants to do. Even the NSA’s talking points recommend their own people say: “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”

At the same time, despite all this intrusion into our lives and the obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment, the system completely missed the Boston bombers, two of the dumbest, least sophisticated bro terrorists on the planet. Since 9/11, we have seen some 364,000 deaths in our schools, workplaces and homes caused by privately owned firearms, and none of the spying or surveillance identified any of the killers in advance.

Maybe we should simply stop thinking about all this surveillance as a matter of stopping terrorists and start thinking more about what it means to have a metastasized global surveillance system aimed at spying on us all, using a fake argument about the need for 100 percent security in return for ever more minimal privacy. So much has been justified in these years—torture, indefinite detention, the Guantánamo penal colony, drone killings, wars and the use of Special Operations forces as global assassination teams—by some version of the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. It’s worth getting it through our heads: there has never been an actual ticking time bomb scenario. The bogeyman isn’t real. There’s no monster hiding under your bed.

10) But doesn’t protecting America come first—before anything?

What exactly are we protecting from what? If, instead of spending trillions of dollars on spying and domestic surveillance, we had spent that same money on repairing our infrastructure and improving our schools, wouldn’t we now have a safer, stronger America? Remember that famously absurd Vietnam War quote from an American officer talking about brutal attack on Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”? How can anyone say we are protecting our liberty and freedom by taking it away?

AynRandy Doesn't Know the Difference Between Felony Lying to Congress and Telling the Truth About Government Malfeasance

Talking Points Memo:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Sunday suggested that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should share a prison cell in the U.S.

"Maybe if they served in a prison cell together, we'd become further enlightened as a country over what we should and shouldn't do," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Paul said that he does not believe Snowden deserves harsh punishment for his leaks, but believes that both Snowden and Clapper broke the law.

Wrong, and wow is he stupid.

AynRandy Attacks Surveillance Abomination with Popgun

If only there were some group of people, maybe chosen by their fellow citizens, who had the authority to vote on proposals that would have the force of law ....

But teabagger morons like the Tribble-Toupeed One think the U.S. Senate is for grandstanding, not lawmaking.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said Friday night he is planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s (NSA) collection of data through domestic surveillance programs.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared Smirky/Darth's "terrorist" roundup and detention program unconstitutional, and not only did Shrub ignore the ruling, Obama still ignores it to this day.

You want the NSA stopped, Senator Paul? Then propose legislation to that effect and persuade your fellow members of Congress to pass it with veto-proof majorities.  That's what the taxpayers are paying you to do.

But that won't rev up the mouth-breathers in Iowa like yelling "I sued their asses!"

New "National Security" Tools to Shut Down Dissent

Of course it's always been done, which is exactly why the Constitution specifically declares protections against it.


Digby:

The point is that governments, to a greater or lesser extent, always try to shut down dissent, whether it's through social pressure, legal means or something else. Even the good ones do it. Allowing them to have even more tools and even more power to do this is a recipe for abuse. You can already see it happening with the ridiculously long sentences for hacking. It is highly likely that at some point a US government is going to believe its justified in using the massive spying capacity it's building to quell what it quite logically believes is a threat. It's so fully baked into the cake of human nature and government power that our founders wrote a whole list of individual rights out on paper telling them they weren't allowed to do it.

Permanent, Ubiquitous Surveillance Is Not Security

The battle against fascism never ends, because fascism is death to democracy.

Digby:

... this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that.

this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that..

Unconstitutional Domestic Spying Accomplishes Nothing. Again. As Always.

And of course because the NSA budget is classified secret, we have no idea how many billions of dollars have been wasted on this liberty-destroying, democracy-killing stupidity.

TPM:

Two weeks after Edward Snowden's first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. "We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany," Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. "So lives have been saved."

In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.

SNIP

But there's no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.

SNIP

It's impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified.

Officials have openly discussed only a few of the cases (see below), and the agency has identified only one -- involving a San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support the militant group Al Shabab -- in which NSA surveillance played a dominant role.

"We've heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted" by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. "That's plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs."