U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.
The trove, which includes documents from the NSA, Department of Justice, and Defense Intelligence Agency, confirms long-standing suspicions that the bulk of U.S. foreign surveillance operations are governed not by acts of Congress, but by a 33-year-old executive order issued unilaterally by President Ronald Reagan.
The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, and they detail the extent of the order — which is extraordinarily broad and until recently largely obscure — and which underpins expansive U.S. surveillance programs, like siphoning internet traffic from Google and Yahoo’s overseas data centers, recording every call in the Bahamas, and gathering billions of records on cellphone locations around the world.
They also point to a gap in the public reaction to Ed Snowden’s revelations about those programs. Despite that fact that most of the NSA’s spying relies on Reagan’s directive, Executive Order 12333, the vast majority of reform efforts have concentrated on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other legislative fixes. “Congress’s reform efforts have not addressed the executive order,” notes Alex Abdo of the ACLU, “and the bulk of the government’s disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA’s extensive mandate under EO 12333.”
The documents assert that mandate baldly. A legal factsheet from the NSA, dated June 2013, states that the FISA, which requires judicial oversight over spying on Americans, “only regulates a subset of the NSA’s signals intelligence activities. NSA conducts the majority of its SIGINT activities solely pursuant to the authority provided by Executive Order 12333.”
Often referred to as “twelve triple three” or EO 12333, the executive order came into being in 1981 under Reagan. Much of the post-Snowden debate, particularly with respect to the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, has focused on the interlocking legal authorities of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. But, the ACLU notes, “because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts.” The documents describe procedures for safeguarding the rights of Americans whose information might be “incidentally” collected under 12333, but those procedures are overseen by the director of national intelligence or the attorney general.
Numerous passages in the newly released documents from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel are redacted, and dozens of pages are withheld in full. The few sentences left, for instance, in a 2001 memo by Bush counsel John Yoo are all assertions of the president’s inherent power to conduct surveillance to “protect the national security.” (Once such sentence—”intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures”—substantially aligns with King George III’s position on the matter.) The majority of the FBI documents obtained by the ACLU are similarly censored.
Among the stand-out revelations in the documents:
- The Defense Intelligence Agency permits collection on U.S. persons, a category which includes not just human American citizens, but also American companies, lawful permanent residents of the U.S., and more — so long as the information collected falls into one of 16 broad categories, which include “[c]ommerical organizations believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” and “[p]otential sources of assistance to intelligence activities.”
- The order, which was established long before the era of social media, permits collection of “publicly available” information on Americans, opening the door for massive data-mining operations.
- The Pentagon draws a distinction between information that is “gathered” and information that is “collected.” According to a 2004 DIA intelligence handbook, information is first “gathered” but is not “collected” until “an affirmative act” has been taken “in the direction of use or retention of that information.” In other words, information is not collected until it has been officially retained in a database, a report or elsewhere. “We see that ‘collection of information’ for DoD…purposes is more than ‘gathering’ —it could be described as ‘gathering, plus,’” the handbook reads.
- The materials also confirm that EO 12333 information on Americans that has been “incidentally” collected can be passed to other agencies if the collector has reason to believe the information points to evidence of a crime or may contain information pertinent to understanding foreign intelligence. In August, an Intercept investigation revealed extensive information sharing between federal law enforcement and in the intelligence community—including DEA, FBI, CIA and the DIA—through a Google-like search engine known as ICREACH.
A review group appointed by Obama recommended last December that the government should be more cautious with the American data gathered under 12333. Those proposals were rejected, The New York Times recently reported. In July, John Napier Tye, a departing section chief for internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, came forward to publicly to raise concerns about the government’s reliance on 12333.
“Public debate about the bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ data by the NSA has focused largely on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, through which the government obtains court orders to compel American telecommunications companies to turn over phone data,” Tye wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “But Section 215 is a small part of the picture and does not include the universe of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons authorized under Executive Order 12333.”
“I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215,” Tye added.
Explore the documents in full here.
Photo of former President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the same year Executive Order 12333 went into effect. Express/Getty Images.
Thomas Drake from his Sam Adams Awards speech), January 4, 2012:
Are we becoming the national security state under surveillance always, the N.S.S.U.S.A.? Is secret government the new fig leaf for a quaint and outmoded Constitution? Orwell’s 1984 is real, and now already, I repeat, already screamingly relevant. Only the government can create a police state. No one else can. And our technology can now make that happen. There is a long list, a long list of both private industry and government actions that are ripping away our privacy and our Fourth Amendment rights as we speak and our ability to speak freely about it. I challenge you, I challenge you all to demand accountability, to update our protections in the internet age, to insist upon adherence to the Constitution, conservative and liberal and independent like. Even in the open press we know enough about what both the industry and government are doing.
Do you care? What will you do about it? What country do we want to keep?
Do we want to continue to have a burgeoning military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-surveillance-cybersecurity-media complex? For whom does it benefit? Do we want to concede the eroding of basic human rights? Why? Because we fear enemies and that creates a need for security, and are then persuaded that human rights are ignored because of the primacy of the national security state beyond legitimate protections and identifying those who would actually do us harm, both abroad and domestically, as a unifying cause for obsessing over national security and the use of fear by the government to control the public and private agenda? What country do we really want to keep?
So I leave you with this as I channel Frederick Douglass. On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a West India Emancipation speech. At Canandaigua, New York, on the 23rd anniversary of the event, he said, quote (please listen very carefully): “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” Let me translate into today’s language. Power and those in control concede nothing, I repeat, concede nothing without a demand. They never have and they never will. Every one of us, every one of us in this room and beyond this room, each and every one of us must keep demanding, must keep fighting, must keep thundering, must keep plowing, must keep on keeping things struggling, must speak out, and must speak up until justice is served, because where there is no justice there can be no peace.
What country do we want to truly keep? Consider what actions you will take when you leave this evening. After all, it is our country. So take the necessary action to conserve the very best of who we are and can be for this generation, as well as future generations to come.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7755
It is quite amazing, and really quite shocking also,to understand, from facts presented by whistle blowers, that we all now live in a state that is far worse than the ‘Stasi’ of East Germany’ were capable of creating. Poor Orwell would not be able to even imagine the technical prowess that has allowed for this kind of absolute intrusion into public privacy! I look at all of the things around me, everywhere, and realize that now these things are silently recording, and watching, every move I make. It is going to change the way I operate from day to day.Quite the challenge to privacy.
It appears a comment I posted a few days ago disappeared, after the comment was up for a few days. How and why did that happen?
I posted the comment in response to a comment and link made by “a nurse” (close to the beginning of this discussion). I’m just wondering what happened to it, as the phenomenon of people — especially whistle-blowers, activists and dissidents — reporting being followed (stalked) by multiple people and/or having their homes and property vandalized is too large in scope not to be orchestrated by the government and is extremely relevant to any discussion regarding domestic surveillance. As a matter of fact, it represents how extreme our domestic surveillance really is (the ACLU’s state-by-state spy map just begins to scratch the surface and desperately needs to be updated).
The gist of my comment was that the media — even truly independent, solid investigative journalists — appears to be quite reluctant to write about what is commonly referred to online by many names, including “gang stalking,” “organized stalking,” and “vigilante stalking,” which are all very bad misnomers for what is essentially an overt surveillance and harassment program that appears to have many of its roots in COINTELPRO and also appears to employ techniques very similar to East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (commonly known as the Stasi).
I think one of the main reasons this topic is so consistently avoided is because of a large, rather elaborate disinformation campaign — and all of the subsequent misinformation — that has successfully conflated this program of overt surveillance and harassment WITH exotic, non-lethal weapons. In fact, the two distinctly different phenomena are so intertwined online there is rarely a discussion of “organized stalking” without a massive flood of comments regarding “electronic harassment” from electromagnetic and other exotic weapons.
And there are tons (maybe hundreds?) of websites and even support groups (mostly sketchy ones) that are solely devoted to both “gang stalking and electronic harassment.”
But the bottom line is there are many people, with no history of mental illness, who are indeed being overtly followed (stalked) and harassed by multiple people; but they DO NOT claim that they are also being tortured by some exotic weapon or that they have been secretly bio-chipped! And considering our government has a very long and well-documented history of targeting, disrupting, dividing, delaying, discrediting, and ultimately destroying activists, whistle-blowers, journalists, dissidents and any groups considered to be “subversive,” it shouldn’t be that much of a leap to accept and to understand that certain people are indeed being overtly surveilled and harassed, by a “trickle down surveillance” system that starts with our government.
Perhaps, like I speculated in my earlier, “disappeared” comment, the first targets are the easy targets: the loners, the disenfranchised, the poor, the homeless, (or any “undesirable” without the resources to expose their “targeting”). This would explain why well-known personalities are seemingly not experiencing the more blatant forms of surveillance and harassment. Perhaps much of the “on the street” organizing and implementing is being outsourced (I know I’ve been running into a lot of guys who look and act like squeaky-clean, former college football players and also a shit-ton of the opposite extreme: drunks/crack/meth heads/junkies).
Here are 2 leads to start with and things I’d love you to answer for me: 1) Besides performing in drills, what do “surveillance role players” actually do, and why are defense/intelligence contractors hiring hundreds of them? & 2) Are people being recruited to become extra-special informants (like American Stasi) from 12-step programs and are some people getting “deals” to get out of trouble, like records expunged, for instance (I do understand how ludicrous this may sound, but I heard some talk about this out of San Jose, CA. And something about “gang stalkers” getting paid in — hard to trace — gift cards from Target, Ross, Safeway, etc.)?
I understand that journalists, and especially their editors, cherish documents, and I “get it.” But I also know that journalists also have “connections,” many of whom took an oath that they’ve been betraying for far too long. I keep hoping that someone with the goods on what is essentially COINTELPRO 2.0 is going to spill the beans, any day now.
And for the record, I have read a lot about most of the staff here and know that many of you have gone through Hell and back to find and to share the truth.
Mad Props.
But the key has been turned.
“ItCan’tHappenHere” wrote, “I keep hoping that someone with the goods on what is essentially COINTELPRO 2.0 is going to spill the beans, any day now.”
As do I. As do many others.
“ItCan’tHappenHere” closed with, “But the key has been turned.”
It has indeed.
I was once one of the many naive… I believed that it couldn’t happen here. No more.
Pulling the following out, so that it’s in plain sight:
“ItCan’tHappenHere” wrote, “Here are 2 leads to start with and things I’d love you to answer for me: 1) Besides performing in drills, what do “surveillance role players” actually do, and why are defense/intelligence contractors hiring hundreds of them? & 2) Are people being recruited to become extra-special informants (like American Stasi) from 12-step programs and are some people getting “deals” to get out of trouble, like records expunged, for instance (I do understand how ludicrous this may sound, but I heard some talk about this out of San Jose, CA. And something about “gang stalkers” getting paid in — hard to trace — gift cards from Target, Ross, Safeway, etc.)?”
There you have it. It’s in your lap.
A bunch of criminals just out of prison (check the tattoos), various drug addicts working with clean cut guys, who look like they play football…do they have military haircuts? What does that tell you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon
By the way, the money is not so hard to trace. Who bought the card? Not so difficult to trace. We have numerous agencies and that is their job. We pay them for that job with our taxes. Does the money come from religious charities or super pacs, think tanks or student cultural exchanges. I have an idea where the money comes from…but it’s not my job.
Update: EO 12333 at the archives is suddenly back online!
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html
Ronald Reagan passed away a long time ago .. hence the title of this article “THE GHOST OF RONALD REAGAN AUTHORIZES MOST NSA SPYING”. The statement contained in this title is debatable. There is no real provision in the US Constitution that allows any president the authority to circumvent the constitutional rights of all by an executive order. A formal declaration of war might give way to authority that is this extreme, but to my understanding, war was not declared at the time EO 12333 was born. It is interesting that EO 12333 is currently not available for view by the public via the archive: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html ….. Check for yourself.
Reagan was not particularly well educated. He was also a Democrat first and a Republican later. He was also not a “constitutional professor”. We have a president right now who could exercise his unconstitutional, fake authority and overturn EO 12333 by an EO of his own thereby at least playing politics to eradicate an unconstitutional executive order put in place by a dead person. This, like so many other situations today appears to be based upon several logical loops, plausible deniability, national security, disinformation and corruption at the highest levels of government worldwide.
I think it is important to note a constitutional provision which is real: Article Two, Section 3, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution: “Caring for the faithful execution of the law”. A quote from Wikipedia: “This clause is meant to ensure that a law is faithfully executed by the President, even if he disagrees with the purpose of that law”. A president with little regard for the law is impotent and will likely not inspire others to follow the law. This appears to be the case today and will continue to be the case until the people do something about it. The US Congress certainly is not doing anything meaningful about these problems.
IMHO, since the passing of the USAPATRIOT Act by absentee ballot by a US Congress that largely never read it, the charter between the US Public and the US Government is null. This law coupled with the actions, cowardice and corruption of all involved has essentially caused the US to cease to exist. We will have to start over now in order to go anywhere credible in the future. Starting over soon is probably a good idea.
This article is partisan hackery at its worst. Google didn’t even exist when Reagan signed this executive order; he is hardly the person responsible for the fact the NSA uses it to assume the authority to collect all Google’s records on the basis they contain information about a legitimately targeted foreign suspect. It is the NSA who has allocated to itself the power to collect everything.
The administration has claimed that all actions by the NSA are within the restraints imposed by the Constitution. I suppose the next Intercept article will blame everything on Thomas Jefferson. People should stop this blame assignation game and learn to take some responsibility. The current system exists because people support it, or at least are too indifferent to oppose it. Blaming a bad decision made by someone long dead is just a method to reinforce ‘learned helplessness’, the false belief that people have no self-agency and are dependent on decisions made by others. The liberal loves to wallow in this self created helplessness, falsely believing that his own impotence is a form of moral superiority and trying to escape responsibility by virtue of being a victim.
Reagan, were he alive today, would look at the bloated self serving bureaucracy which is today’s NSA and fire all 60,000 of them on the spot.
Google’s a red herring argument but you can’t apologize for a criminal president any better than that.
Btw; “How’s [rapey, depressed and anti-social] Ayn Rand even still a thing?” ~ John Oliver Last Week Tonight
The quote reflects Oliver’s belief that everyone has been securely shackled and freedom (i.e. the right to be anti-social) is no longer on the agenda. However, he may be a bit overconfident on that score. That he has always been wrong before does not prove he is wrong this time. But it suggests it would be prudent to retain that possibility for further consideration. I would also add that anyone who looks at the current US government and does not feel depressed must be on Prozac. And rapey is just a made up word that liberals like to smear people with, because it can’t be defined and therefore can’t be refuted.
Hat trick!
Sorry, that was a bit rude even compared to my first reply. However, not only did you ignore my first 2 actual criticisms of your initial comment – but my agreeing with Oliver’s conclusions apparently made your head explode with defensiveness. So, 3-0…
I can easily demolish your first two criticisms as well, although you will then no doubt characterize that as being overly defensive.
My initial argument was not related specifically to Google, but to the fact that the huge repositories of data which now exist in Facebook, Skype and many others were not even envisaged when 12333 was signed. Therefore it is the NSA itself which has chosen to collect it all – this approach was not inherent in the EO and for that reason cannot be blamed on Reagan – much as many would love to do so. This argument may be disputed, but you cannot dismiss it simply by saying that Google is a red herring.
This is not an apology for someone you claim to be a ‘criminal president’. People should only be found guilty of offenses they actually committed. However, most people prefer to take the lazy approach of designating someone as a ‘criminal’ and then finding them automatically guilty of everything.
Yeah, whatever…
Not so funny, the last time I remember Congress actually trying to de-fund and stop military activities the Executive had unilaterally authorized was also during the first Reagan administration, and that was the Boland Amendments (’82-’84). Guess what directly produced the Iran-Contra crimes…
Someone send Sam and Dean to burn casper’s bones…
I know the American public must find it hard to believe that we are that stupid, but it must be so because we keel electing Democrats & Republicans time & time again, maybe it is time for a real change & elect Independent Candidates. Enough of this insanity !
If we take away their money & power then we can take away their toys. Elect those who have your interest in mind & not the self serving interest of the Democratic & Republic parties or that of Corporate America. We don’t need the worst POLITICIANS money can buy we need politicians money can’t buy.
REMEMBER: POLITICIANS, BUREAUCRATS AND DIAPERS SHOULD BE
CHANGED OFTEN AND FOR THE SAME REASON.
Some word of true Patriots are as follows, as opposed to the words of false flag patriotism of today.
.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and
subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate
government.
James Madison
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of
tyranny at home.
James Madison
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
James Madison
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
James Madison
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
James Madison
In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.
James Madison
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
James Madison
A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
James Madison
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
Patrick Henry
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
Patrick Henry
I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.
Patrick Henry
For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.
Patrick Henry
If this be treason, make the most of it!
Patrick Henry
We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature has placed in our power… the battle, sir, is not to the strong alone it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.
Patrick Henry
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
Abraham Lincoln
Disclaimer: Be advised it is possible, that this communication is being monitored by the
National Security Agency or GCHQ. I neither condone or support any such policy, by any
Government authority that does not comply, as stipulated by the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
According to this U.S. government list Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, 6 members of the 9/11 Commission and (everyone feel free to add to this list) would now be considered as “extremists/potential terrorists”:
http://investmentwatchblog.com/a-no-social-media-list-for-extremists-and-potential-terrorists/
This is where we are in the United States of America. MANY if not MOST of the citizens are now considered to be “extremists” and “potential terrorists”.
I posted a comment several hours ago that apparently didn’t pass muster with the censors. Funny, I thought that it added to the discussion…, but apparently not.
Can anyone now doubt what has long been obvious to many? Obama is a Reagan Republican.
I believe the Senate needs to open an investigation into the Bonzo family, with its secret ties to foreigners on the “Dark Continent”.
“Can anyone now doubt what has long been obvious to many? Obama is a Reagan Republican.”
That ship sailed decades ago. For all intents and purposes, at the national level there really are no more “Republicans” or “Democrats,” only “Corporatists” who govern on behalf of the plutocrats lobbyists, thus making any congressional inquiry moot, as well.
“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
“How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.” – Wendell Berry
According to this recent study at Princeton/Northwestern the United States is not a “democracy” but an “oligarchy”:
http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4
“Obama is a Reagan Republican.”
Obama is a 100% coward who sold us out to NSA blackmail. He’s a Cheney puppet.
Clearly we now know that we have 12333 to worry about. That and maybe the fact that some of it is just done under no authority at all. That is what happens when they all say don’t worry be happy. “Its classified” 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. It turns out the Tinfoil Hat brigade was correct. I can see all of these agencies are scrambling because they see the deconstruction coming their way. This is what happens when there is no accountability for a long time. I am sure there are massive amounts of due process violations as well as public servants having access to information they have no right to have. This type of asymmetrical knowledge gives those in power a powerful way to concentrate their power and control.
As much as I despise Reagan and the evils he (and his chums) loosed on the country and the world, I’d cut him some slack here. He isn’t responsible for this.
To put it differently, what president would dare curtail these agencies? Even if a hypothetical President Steelspine ordered the NSA, DIA, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, etc. to stop betraying the Constitution and their oaths to the Constitution, why would they?
These agencies — agents and administrators — act with impunity. Was anyone charged for lying to Congress? Was anyone charged for spying on the Senate? Was anyone charged for torture?
They are the wolves and everyone not a part of their wolfpack are the prey.
By blaming that lackwit Reagan for these policies, the current set of gestapo wannabes get yet another pass. They don’t feel constrained by politicians, judges or principles. Their only allegiance is to themselves and an America they exclusively define.
Reagan is dead.
Blame the current malefactors.
Man, I can barely remember Ronald Reagun, and what I do remember is not a very pretty picture. *Iran/contra, trickle-down economics, voodoo in the White House and astrology in the Rose garden … it’s all coming back to me now.
Do you happen to know a.) who says EO12333 foreign intelligence activities are not subject FISA jurisdiction and b.) which ‘Congressional intelligence committees’ do have ‘oversight’ responsibilities for EO12333?
To answer your questions Bah, no and no.
Arcane directives “allowing” such and such feels like a distraction. Everyone seems to be pleasing their “higher-ups” yet those authorities seem to vanish — except in rare instances when their lies cannot be ignored — like Clapper or Hayden confronted with Snowden’s evidence.
Nothing changes. If EO12333 disappeared forever, if anyone referring to it as justification for whatever action they direct were immediately fired, or even if EO12333 never existed, do you think one bloody thing would change? There would be an ambiguous clause buried in legislation, a different EO, a twisted legal interpretation of very clear Constitutional prohibitions or simply an order without a name attached and — voila — it “magically” happens,
Maybe the State lost its legal integrity during the administration of that senile dumbshit Reagan. Maybe before that, maybe with the assassination of Kennedy.or with the machinations of Nixon. Maybe afterwards, maybe once the Supreme Court obtain a majority of partisan hacks. Maybe it happened when the Republicans impeached Clinton without much of an outcry or maybe when Bush was installed as president because his father’s cronies made sure to twist and torture “legal reasoning”.
Somewhere along the line the State lost its integrity.
I don’t see how we can regain it.
So EO12333 — who cares?
We might as well make Glenn Beck or Ted Kaczynski a dictator for life for all the difference it would make to this so-called “democracy”.
Can we go ahead and blame Obama while we can. Shed doubt on the Peace Prize winner. They’ve taken away Olympic medals, can we ask for the Nobel back? Seriously, systemic or whatever, ONLY THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN SAVE THE WORLD FROM OUR GOVERNMENT
Out of control, I have no words at this point. Question is, can we use the two up coming elections to root out and disturb the status quo.
Pirate Party Reality Party It’s now time people, use the system or tear it down???
I happen to be in Southern California and thanks to our new “Top Two” primary all third party candidates have been banished from the November election.
So now I am stuck between voting for Ted Lieu the “Going Along To Get Along” Democrat or Elan Carr the AIPAC board member/prosecutor.
I will be writing “NO CONFIDENCE” on my absentee ballot this November.
i seriously considered not voting for the first time in my life as a protest that would not be noticed…
then i decided, well, i will vote, but i’m writing in Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, etc for ALL OFFICES…
what would you bet that if ‘none of the above’ were on ALL ballots, ‘none of the above’ would win by a landslide ? ? ?
(EXACTLY why ‘none of the above’ is NOT on the ballots)
Ronald Reagan: Spying on people is as easy as 1-2-3…3….3
Donald Regan: That’s OK Ronnie, counting to 3 is good enough.
http://rt.com/usa/191692-stealthgenie-ceo-indicted-conspiracy/
Looks like NSA technology is up for sale. Wonder why only RT is reporting this.
RT is not the only outlet covering this story.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/make-of-app-used-for-spying-indicted-in-virginia/2014/09/29/816b45b8-4805-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html
Thinking that *this* EO12333 is of an order of magnitude more important than many of the Patriot Act/FISA debacles.
Is there data on how much business the tech giants lost as a result of Snowden’s revelations? And did NSA compensate them for the losses?
Yes(and no). Not knowing someone’s thoughts makes it impossible to be sure why a sale or contract was either denied or accepted. General assumptions can be made by looking at past performance and projecting future revenues. And then you have shareholders to consider when decrying the lost business. If the impact was great, you don’t want shareholders running for the door, so you under estimate. If you’re complaining to the government(behind closed doors of course), you inflate the damages. Somewhere in all of that is the truth.
“And did NSA compensate them for the losses?”
Well, from past revelations, we were told that the government paid some of the tech companies for access to data, and going forward do you think that wouldn’t be classified? And General, you could have been asking rhetorically, in that case , never mind.
A mad world when Obama and the other four Anglo nations defiantly spy on everyone. The German or Soviet secret police have nothing on The Five Eyes. Way easier to intercept personal communications now, when the phone and especially the mail used to be 99% secure. Our files (held by gov’ts and cos.) used to be filed in cabinets all over the country. Now they’re often an open book
Hi-tech corporate snitches (especially American) need to be called out way harder than so far. Microsoft’s behaviour was abhorrent.
I’m re-posting my comment that I posted in the comments thread of Glenn’s most recent article because this article is co-authored by Ryan Devareaux, so that makes the link appropriate for posting here.
Radio Dispatch Live
I’m posting this live show link of John and Molly Knefel’s ‘Radio Dispatch’ especially because their two guests on this show are Ryan Devareaux and Jeremy Scahill. So if you have not been familiar with their program before, you might enjoy taking the opportunity to familiarize yourself by listening to this show which features two guests who are both affiliated with The Intercept. Their live shows, which are recorded with a studio audience, or, more accurately, a bar audience is usually a once monthly affair. They record their podcast programs five days a week.
Blaming Reagan is missing the point here. What existed at the time, and what Reagan authorized, is the ability to listen in on both sides of international phone calls. This, in and of itself, is, in my opinion, reasonable. There was no internet, there was no social media, etc.
The people to blame here are those that extended 12333 to cover the internet. Those that strong armed the definitions of “public available” to mean “obtainable by a warrant” (e.g. private facebook pages) [something anyone else would be convicted with under hacking laws]. Those that through court orders and NSA black boxes on the backbone can divert someone’s internet traffic out of the country and back to enable them to read it so information can be “gathered” even when the endpoints are Americans. And those that redefined foreign communications to mean yahoo/google synchronizing it’s world wide database. These are the villains – and there are plenty of them to go around.
Let’s reserve that blame where it is so richly deserved – the Clinton (a lot of the forerunners to these programs started under him – Echelon, etc), Bush 43 and Obama administrations.
Reagan just signed something that was perfectly reasonable *at the time*.
The intelligence agencies fall under the executive branch of government. Therefore it is quite proper to delineate their organization and responsibilities using an Executive Order. Although The Intercept quite properly stokes partisan fury by posting a picture of Ronald Reagan.
I grant the NSA interpretation of their authorities is quite broad – but what agency would practice so great a degree of self discipline as to limit their own authority? If a legitimate, properly authorized target uses Skype, Google and Facebook, the NSA deems under 12333 that it may collect all records from those services. The records not pertaining to the target are deemed to be ‘incidental collection'; that is, they are additional records collected as part of a legitimate investigation. They may be legally retained and passed to a law enforcement for searching.
Could the NSA retrieve fewer records to collect information about their legitimate target? Perhaps, but it would require all those services to index their data in such a way as to facilitate retrieving only the relevant records. Could the NSA restrict its use of incidentally collected information? Perhaps, but it no doubt considers it will only use that information responsibly.
So just as no one considers that acts they perform in the main square should be considered private, they must also recognize that using any of these internet services is a public act and behave accordingly. All that is necessary is to use services which do not retain your data – but to monetize these services it will be necessary to pay a fee. This may seem unfair, but it is also unfair that homeless people sleeping in the street have no privacy.
This solves the problem under Twelve Triple Three, but of course, collection is also possible by intercepting internet traffic in real time. To solve that problem requires encryption. An analogy is to protect privacy by passing laws that no one look into a window; or alternatively, to simply draw the blinds.
quote”An analogy is to protect privacy by passing laws that no one look into a window; or alternatively, to simply draw the blinds.”unquote
Says the peeping Tom as he laughs at the thought while being envious of the NSA’s power to turn on children’s computer cams in their bedrooms.
Your fantasies are interesting, but I’ll simply tape over my web cam. I sometimes wonder if government has been too successful and whether destroying all personal initiative was actually a good idea. It seems more time is spent telling people what to do than in the old days. Perhaps Fascism is a victim of its own success.
“We see that ‘collection of information’ for DoD…purposes is more than ‘gathering’ —it could be described as ‘gathering, plus,’” the handbook reads.
Wittgensteinian word games.
The Executive Order does not specifically allow “assembly” of this data, so it remains outside of the order and without a defense under this order. The fight would be classification of the processes as defined. And of course, someone to bring the fight over these word games.
Anyway, a means of bringing a public, kicking, screaming, and in denial, to the discussion of the EO’s “private language”. And then to confrontation, education, and declaring “assembly” to be “a bridge too far” and subject to prosecution.
Followed by death of a culture through the babble of “private language”.
Reagan, like Obama and others, demonstrated a subservience to the elite that revealed to the thoughtful how little power presidents now actually have.
(This doesn’t excuse their cowardice or lying, however.)
Here’s Merrill-Lynch’s Don Regan rather obviously telling the POTUS what to do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIA8MyOy8BU
And “turn the bull loose” they did — in any number of ways. Thanks for the clip, Cindy.
yes, i remember clearly learning of this in Civics 101 in high school: the invisible constitution provides that ‘executives’ can make any law they want without any oversight or pesky ‘checks and balances’, as long as it’s, you know, ‘executive’, and, um, an ‘order’…
otherwise, one might think this was all just total bullshit that is 100% antithetical to EVERY PRINCIPLE of the law/constitution…
obviously, this is secretly provided for in the invisible constitution, so i don’t know why any red-blooded amerikan would have any issues with this…
secret men, secret laws, secret juries, secret convictions, secret torture and secret prisioners…
now *there’s* the very embodiment of the American Way ! ! !
i STILL can not get past this AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE: secret executive orders which mean whatever the fuck they want them to mean, and the opposite tomorrow, if it suits their purposes… as far as i’m concerned, this is prima facie evidence of being a traitor to the constitution, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO LOOK AT IT…
Ronald Reagan…the “Aw shucks” fascist.
Seems like the government has everyone chasing their tails. We got ‘um just where they want us. In emails with my congressmen(yes they’re all men in my case), I get the strong impression that they are aware that by just going after section 215, they can placate the masses. “See, we’re doing something to protect you from well meaning and patriotic, but never the less over zealous spies”. Divide and conquer. Watch the left hand and ignore the right. While we’re all in an uproar over NSA abuses, the DIA, CIA, FBI, and probably some without letters are getting away with much worse abuses. By the way, why do we even need many of these organizations. We have the Defence Intelligence gency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Director of National Intelligence, all with multi-multi-billion dollar budgets. With all that expensive intelligence we should have a surplus by now and all the bad guys have surely been droned. People need to wake up.
“By the way, why do we even need many of these organizations.”
My understanding is this:
DIA = military intelligence
CIA = overseas civilian intelligence
FBI = domestic civilian intelligence
NSA = signals intelligence
The position of Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to coordinate the work of all these agencies and make sure they communicated with each other.
Do we need all these agencies? Probably not. We got along perfectly well without them prior to WW1. But once we resolved to become an Empire, such capabilities became a necessity. You can’t have an Empire without a secret police to quash threats to its rule. The Red Scares and the Cold War had us afraid of commies under our beds waiting to kill us all; when they went away, it became terrorists under our beds waiting to kill us all.
The existence of these agencies doesn’t bother me as much as the fact they are allowed to operate under a cloak of almost total secrecy. They have lost all credibility for their claims to be protecting our rights as citizens. The only way to restore that trust is to find some middle ground between complete real-time openness and the total secrecy they insist is necessary for them to do their work. Grudgingly releasing heavily-redacted documents is not the way to go about that task. The fact that they continue to do that sort of thing convinces me that they are not serious about finding that middle ground; so I think they should all be disbanded and we should start over from scratch.
I appreciate your reply. I guess, because I type as I think, that my subtle reasoning would come through. The questions were more rhetorical than enquiring. I did learn something by the way you laid out the different responsibilities of the similarly named agencies. As a point of fact, the DIA and CIA are somewhat redundant and only diverged as the agencies grew and evolved. As a point of history the CIA was preceded by the OSS(office of strategic services) which was a function of the United States Armed Forces during WWII. A not so ancillary function of the OSS was in propaganda, subversion, and post war planning. A major thrust of my comment was how much of our tax dollars are spent on these mainly secret orgs. This much secrecy in a democracy(democratic republic) cannot peacefully coexist. With billions up for grabs by each of these agencies and departments, is it any wonder why there are multiple perpetual purported dangers lurking around every corner which justify these enormous budgets? Once again, I appreciate when people reply. Our country is circling the drain and most people are stupified. I’m angry, and misery loves company, so I come here to rant.
As an EO, this could have been changed or discarded entirely by any of the presidents following Reagan, nicht? So, any lip service given to civil rights, especially by the current one (who’s retiring AG is being lauded for his actions to uphold civil rights) is, once again, demonstrated to be pure bulls**t.
So, Ronald Reagan gets credit both for bringing down the Berlin Wall AND the creation of the US-Stasi secret police state of the future? Ve-ery interesting.
I wonder what would have happened if Gorbachev had come to power in the USSR during Carter’s Presidency???
Check out http://FightGangStalking.com for a partial view of what some Americans are already experiencing at the hands of the state. There’s a Stasi-like apparatus that’s currently operating from sea to shining sea, but those who are seeking assistance and relief are promptly dismissed as “delusional.” And so it continues…
I would guess that its exposure might result in a Pulitzer for some news outlet, but most will continue to ignore it. As an up-and-coming blogger noted the other day, “You would think this stuff would be at least mildly interesting to “The Intercept”, but apparently, it would need to come to them in the form of an official smoking gun gov’t document with a ribbon on it, dropped into their lap by a whistleblower who had already appeared on Democracy Now! several times, etc.
The Intercept may well continue to ignore it but, eventually, someone will do what’s required and the rest will be history… In the meantime, a lot of good people are being sacrificed on the altar of “national security.”
Earlier there were two comments that followed this one. Both are are now gone. One of them mentioned the FBI’s COINTELPRO, in its current iteration. The first of them, by “ItCan’tHappenHere”, contained nothing that should have been objectionable to anyone. Why were they approved and then later deleted?
What follows is the comment that was approved and later deleted. Why? (Let’s hope that there isn’t someone like Ken D. working for The Intercept.)
“ItCan’tHappenHere ”
30 Sep 2014 at 7:46 pm
I think one of the reasons, if not the main reason, the domestic counterintelligence program often referred to as “gang stalking” or “organized stalking” has been almost completely ignored by competent investigative journalists is because of the rather elaborate disinformation campaign that has successfully conflated this program of overt surveillance and harassment with exotic, non-lethal weapons. In fact, the two distinctly different phenomena are so intertwined online that there is rarely a discussion of “gang or organized stalking” without a discussion of “electronic harassment” from exotic weapons (often referred to as “GS & EH”), which has successfully discredited and discolored anyone who talks about being overtly stalked by organized goons.
While the existence of all types of scary “non-lethal” weapons cannot be denied – and I would not be surprised if the government did indeed test them on unwitting subjects – the current “organized stalking” program, which appears to be a continuation of COINTELPRO (version 2.0), exists completely separate from these weapons. The immense effort to continue to present “organized stalking” and “electronic weapons” as one phenomenon is orchestrated by many paid government propagandists or sock puppets.
I also wonder if one of the ways COINTELPRO 2.0 has remained largely off the media’s radar, even the independent media, is by generally avoiding any targets that may have the resources or the ability to expose it. I’m just speculating here. For instance, are any of the journalists at The Intercept being blatantly followed around? Or, are any of their homes or their cars repeatedly broken into, with only small items being stolen or other possessions vandalized or moved around (gaslighted)?
What a sick country. Jefferson et al must be turning in their graves.
So the ghost of Ronald Reagan is stronger than the ghost of Thomas Jefferson?