Sunday night marked the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority since the terror attacks in 2001 set off a dystopian explosion in the government’s ability to spy on people inside and outside its borders.
But it was not so much a glorious moment of constitutional rebalancing for the legislative branch as it was parliamentary farce as usual. Faced with the long-planned expiration at midnight of three contentious provisions of the Patriot Act, the Republican-controlled Senate was simply unable to get it together and vote to renew the surveillance powers.
That failure to act was consequential. One of the three provisions had been used — improperly, it turns out — as legal justification for a National Security Agency program that collected phone records on millions of Americans without a warrant or any probable cause, along with other business records.
So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.
Of course, it wasn’t until two years ago, when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden released a trove of top-secret documents to journalists, that Americans even knew this was happening.
The domestic bulk-collection program, which quickly emerged as an outlier among the programs Snowden revealed, rested on a legal interpretation of a statute that redefined the word “relevant” as meaning “everything.” It was ostensibly authorized by the Patriot Act despite the fact that the law’s author, who didn’t know it was being used that way, vociferously objected as soon as he found out. It has repeatedly been determined to be illegal, not only by legal experts and blue-ribbon panels, but just last month by a federal appellate court. It has had no documented positive impact on national security. And it represented a wildly unprecedented leap into domestic spying by an agency whose mandate has historically been foreign.
Its end was inevitable ever since milquetoast compromise reform legislation, called the USA Freedom Act, passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote on May 13. That bill puts in place a replacement program that leaves phone records in the possession of the telecom companies until the NSA comes with a specific request. It also reauthorizes two other expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, one of which makes it easier to track suspects who frequently change phones; the other, which has never actually been used, allows the government to begin surveillance on individuals without asserting a connection to a specific terrorist group.
In a reflection of how viscerally opposed hardliner Senate Republicans are to doing anything that would officially vindicate Snowden, however, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell engaged in epic legislative theatrics right up to the eve of the sunset, even going so far as bringing the Senate back early from its Memorial Day recess for an extraordinary Sunday night session, with the goal of somehow reinstating the program in full.
But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
McConnell finally caved to reality with just hours to go, dropping his opposition to the USA Freedom Act, and allowing a vote on whether to proceed with it. That vote was 77-17.
By that point, however, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was on a tear, his opposition to Fourth Amendment violations supercharged by a need to call attention to his flagging presidential campaign.
Paul prevented the Freedom Act from passing before the midnight deadline — but with the cloture vote a done deal, a final vote is expected mid-week.
Some privacy advocates celebrated the rollback, even briefly, of the three provisions in their entirety.
The Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future and progressive nonprofits CREDO and Demand Progress declared in a joint statement: “The expiration of key Patriot Act provisions — even if only temporary — is a victory for the countless civil liberties activists in every congressional district in the country who, since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on government surveillance, have fought for real reform. It demonstrates that the public can win battles in Congress that just a few years ago we were barely able to fight at all.”
The groups said the “fake-reform” Freedom Act is “an attack on civil liberties and codifies some of the worst mass surveillance abuses of the Patriot Act.”
By contrast, the White House, which saw the Freedom Act as “a reasonable compromise balancing security and privacy,” called on the Senate “to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., split the difference. “Tonight the collection of phone records of millions of innocent Americans will end,” he said in a statement. “The demise of this dragnet surveillance is a victory for the principle that Americans do not need to sacrifice liberty to have security.”
Now, he added, Congress “has the opportunity to build on this victory by making meaningful and lasting reforms” by passing the Freedom Act.
Leading Democratic surveillance hawk Dianne Feinstein was hyperbolic. “The need for investigators to collect intelligence on known or suspected terrorists can’t be overstated,” she said in a statement that exaggerated the impact of the provisions. “Our national security — not to mention the safety of all Americans — is at stake.”
Sunday night featured open warfare between Paul and the current leaders of his party, particularly McConnell and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
“We shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive, and we certainly should not be doing so based on a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of Edward Snowden,” McConnell said.
Paul may have burned some bridges when he said of his critics: “Some of them I think secretly want there to be an attack so they can blame it on me.”
Stanford legal scholar Jennifer Granick wrote before Sunday’s vote that the Senate shouldn’t rush to pass the Freedom Act as is. It “was negotiated at a time when straight reauthorization was a real danger” and before the appellate court decided bulk collection is illegal. The bill is “now rather anemic,” she wrote.
And, she noted, “there’s a clear and present danger that if [the Freedom Act] passes, everyone will pat themselves on the back for a job well done … and it’ll be suspicionless spying as usual until the next big surveillance provision, section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act sunsets at the end of 2017, and we’re in the same position again.”
Her proposal: “Let’s have hearings, really understand all the spying being done in our name, how the information is being used. Let’s set up real, comprehensive, robust checks and balances, starting with declassifying interpretations of law and changing the role of the FISA judges.”
More likely, however: McConnell will try to water it down some more before a final vote.
Photo: C-SPAN
Re: “Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was on a tear, his opposition to Fourth Amendment violations supercharged by a need to call attention to his flagging presidential campaign.”
Dan, that is lame. The comment can be turned around on _any_ grandstander who sticks his neck out.
E.g. “Dan Froomkin of The Intercept, his opposition to Rand Paul supercharged by a need to call attention to First Look’s flagging readership (and Matt Taibbi’s mysterious departure),” etcetera, ad nauseum.
It tells us NOTHING aside from conducting shitstirring talk-radio bullet-points available in every other Village receptacle. Wake up.
…and there it is. Codified Big Brother, fully legalised.
Congratulations, American government, for finally and completely enslaving the world.
To say that we are ‘disarming unilaterally’ is an outright lie on McConnell’s part. If anything, our MIC is growing at an alarming rate while the infrastructure of our nation crumbles from neglect and a lack of funding. The cost of 1 new F-35 spent instead on building schools, or hospitals, or repairing bridges and highways, would go along way here at home. But instead, these political idiots are spending us into recession, and an almost endless cycle of economic horrors being perpetrated on the American public because they love war, and man’s inhumanity to man more than they do their own country. War is addicting to this kind of mind that must have power, and knows only the fear of the other. These people are insane!
I was thinking the same thing recently. The F-35 seems like overkill for ISIS or Afghanistan and useless against a real opponent like Russia or China. Also, big ther is a lot of big money going to submarines which likewise seems useless against ISIS and Afghanistan.
The Republicans a using deceitful budgeting gimmicks by loading extra military spending into overseas contingency operations in order to circumvent the sequester spending caps. It’s probably the world’s third or fourth largest slush fund.
In a way it is kind of funny. They are “Structuring” military account transfers to avoid legal spending caps and public scrutiny. Basically, the crime for which Dennis Hastert has been charged.
The story has some assertions that are not true.
The bulk collection program was know to whomever in the public that cared long before Snowy’s “revelations”.
This is not “the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority since the terror attacks in 2001…” The bulk collection actually began without the Patriot Act. In fact the Patriot act was the first time the “executive branch’s surveillance authority” for bulk phone record collection was limited by creating Congressional oversight, and the FISA courts. The authority has also since been modified to attempt to ‘balance’ right to privacy and national security.
What has happened is simply political grandstanding around some weird national paranoia. Now the program will be replaced by another program where the phone records, still available to NSA, CIA or FBI are kept by the phone companies instead of the NSA with essentially no difference in how it affects Americans and a possible national security risk that now the target phone numbers of foreign terrorists that the agencies search are gonna be revealed to the phone companies possibly ‘tipping off’ the enemy. Also, the taxpayers will pay a little bit more money to the phone companies for the searches. I’m sure, however, they have thought of ways around these problems.
But don’t worry. America is a big country and if security is compromised and something bad happens, you still have a better chance of being killed in a car accident than by a terrorist.
There are certain phases of commitment during the progression of any relationship and it seems that the NSA has fulfilled the mandatory initial phase,
“once known” as the domestic bulk-collection program. So meta-analysis of the collected information might be the second phase of the commitment before initiation of the selected targeting program. And as we already know;
“…….providing any details even to confirm or deny that any information exists could assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation which would undermine the safeguarding of national security.”-Met
“…….providing any details even to confirm or deny that any information exists could assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation which would undermine the safeguarding of national security.”
Authors of shit like that simply want to avoid seeing their free country embarrassed.
Will the new law address the government’s use of Demonstrative Surveillance and Group Stalking? Perhaps the section that requires the government to require the disclosure of any novel interpretations by the FISA courts will force this practice to either end or be publicly disclosed?
Fat chance, but nice that you brought up this more serious topic (than bulk cell phone metadata collection).
It seems some of TI journos’ naivety is still no match for nat-sec-state cynicism. They have such a long way to go.
They are not necessarily separate topics (you imply that Group Stalking and Demonstrative surveillance is a more serious topic than Bulk Collection). They are two sides of the same coin. These programs are real life examples of the US government acting abusively with the information it has collected. The reason our founding fathers put the 4th amendment into the constitution was to prevent abuses for the government by preventing the government from obtaining your private information in the first place. If the information is never collected to begin with, it cannot be abused. The information has been illegally collected in violation of the 4th amendment (through the FISA courts awful interpretation of the Patriot Act) and it has been abused by the US government’s use of Demonstrative Surveillance and Group Stalking. My question is how does this new law potentially affect this abuse that is occurring in the US government?
I don’t disagree with you; I know they are related. America’s stalking community needs that metadata to get on with the job. Otherwise, employers must increase headcount in order physically follow and observe targets during the prep phase… before the real fun begins: the skits and stalking, the delivering of threats, and best of all, the torture.
Still, I say these related crimes: group stalking, financial & medical interference, and outright torture, are far more serious topics than bulk metadata collection. And because it is commonly known the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are just scraps of paper, I have to assume your question is as sarcastic as it is relevant and important.
Thanks again for bringing the topic to others’ attention.
They are also related because the US government has used Demonstrative Surveillance and Group Stalking to go after former government employees and contractors (it wasn’t just Edward Snowden who had a problem with the government’s unconstitutional actions) who objected to the government’s use of bulk surveillance – which the courts ruled have now ruled was illegal. My question is will this new bill, which requires disclosure of novel interpretations of law by the FISA courts, result in the declassification of the government’s use of Demonstrative Surveillance and Group Stalking?
Another reason they are related is because the techniques, Group Stalking and Demonstrative Surveillance, are used by the US government to try to go after people who complain after Bulk Surveillance has resulted in them being wrongly investigated. No one ever talks about the potentially enormous number of false positives that have resulted from the Bulk Surveillance programs because to discuss the huge numbers of false positives would result in exposure of the Bulk Surveillance programs themselves.
And one more parting thought “Stan”. Agents of the government are not supposed to spew misinformation on political forums. It is a violation of the laws that came out of the Church Committee preventing the secret agencies of the government from interefering with the political process. This forum is discussing the political process. And agents of the government are not permitted to interfere with the 1st amendment right of Americans in this forum.
“America’s stalking community needs that metadata to get on with the job. Otherwise, employers must increase headcount in order physically follow and observe targets during the prep phase… before the real fun begins: the skits and stalking, the delivering of threats, and best of all, the torture.
Still, I say these related crimes: group stalking, financial & medical interference, and outright torture, are far more serious topics than bulk metadata collection. And because it is commonly known the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are just scraps of paper, I have to assume your question is as sarcastic as it is relevant and important”
@Person 02 Jun 2015 at 2:29 pm
Right, my name is not Stan, and I am not informed about group stalking because I do not have more than a dozen years of experience as a U.S. stalking & torture subject.
…And the Bill of Rights is not soiled toilet paper.
It doesn’t quite work that way. The Patriot act allowed the bulk copying (not really collection) of phone records that are really collected saved by the phone companies, the FISA courts provided the warrants for the records to actually be “looked at”. The FISA courts will still exist and issue warrants and the phone records will still exist.
Collected or copied… Not important.
It’s the stalking and torture, stupid.
Stan, the namecalling only hurts your cause.
This is from an article about the bill in the New York Times today:
But Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and one of the House bill’s chief architects, called the blocking of declassification “obnoxious to an extreme” and a violation of one of the bill’s central goals, to end the “secret body of law” that has operated since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“You can’t have a body of secret law and stay with the constitutional process,” said Mr. Nadler, who said the House would not “even consider” that change if approved by the Senate.
And what about the experimentation of ‘electronic warfare’ on the domestic population? The new ICWatch (intelligence community watch) being managed by Wikileaks lists 33,628 individuals as being skilled in ‘electronic warfare,’ and none of my neighbors are listed so that means there are many more perps skilled in this field out there. I could give you 20 legitimate links to individuals and groups tracking this abuse.
https://icwatch.wikileaks.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=electronic+warfare
I heard Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now yesterday talking about PA developments in the Senate … and the ‘new & improved’ Freedom Act.
Wrt The Freedom Act, if I recall correctly, Mr. Greenwald took the ACLU line saying he ‘thought’ it was a ‘step forward’ … divided by two steps sideways multiplied by open to legal interpretation = he don’t know squat neither. And he’s a trained lawyer … well, he used to be anyway.
*and the fact he and Jameel and most sane folks are still trying to suss-it out … is meaningful.
Well, those lawyer types do want to respond to the letter of the law, as well as the intent/spirit of the law. And, by the time our elected, er, commercially marketed representatives get done (by commission or omission) getting all the letters and spirits into that law it’s a wonder if the law has any meaning at all.
When they figure out precisely who is to be “master,” I’m sure Glenn and Jameel will know exactly what the letters and spirits signify.
It was congress that created this security state and it is not surprising that they are not willing to take responsibility.
Good News!
Even better news:
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/243624-facebook-to-encrypt-email-notifications
Is there any way The Intercept could get access to the overall power distribution records for regions with key NSA facilities? I understand their budget is secret, any reauthorization under executive order or transfer of activities to another program is definitely secret, but I’m not sure the U.S. has so many habits of a closed society that they’ve learned to conceal the overall power consumption by a city. In theory, if the NSA program were terminated, so many computers would have gone idle that you could actually see a surplus of power on a plot of the total hour-by-hour consumption.
“So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.” – Dan Froomkin
Mr. Froomkin, with all respect to you: If you believe this you’re a fucking idiot.
Love,
CA
Captain you could be a little more respectful than that – Super Heroes don’t swear at the people they’re saving. Mr. Froomkin was obviously talking about the publicly acknowledged law being used to justify the hoovering of all U.S. citizen phone records which has, expired.
He obviously wasn’t saying whether he thinks the President has already used his “Hot Standby” Presidential Authority (whatever is being used to justify dragnetting all U.S. citizen IP traffic) to keep those telephone records coming (which is what I’d bet on too). However this is important and it (temporarily) knocks another legal leg out from under an important section of this whole unconstitutional surveillance state.
“Where is Edward Snowden Now” video report from The Bangkok Post :
http://www.bangkokpost.com/vdo/world/580051/where-is-edward-snowden-now
Interesting to post comments beneath the video, in the readers comments section supporting Edward for revealing the illegal activities of the NSA.
It isn’t just Snowden. Others are also suffering.
https://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/whistle-blower_john_kiriakou_to_robert_scheer_ive_lost_20150529
Poll: Americans support Rand Paul’s NSA position over Mitch McConnell’s
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/poll-americans-support-rand-pauls-nsa-position-over-mitch-mcconnells-118511.html#ixzz3breLH6j6
If anyone actually believes that this will have any impact on NSA operations, you must be out of your mind. Between the DoJ and FISC, do you not think that the administration has found another legal rationale for the programs to continue? This “victory” is illusory.
@ Dan Froomkin
Not sure who wrote the headline for this piece, but in the interest of accuracy “Congress did not check the security state.” In fact, unless and until someone can offer documentable proof that the NSA or any of the other alphabet agencies have stopped doing precisely what they were doing before Sunday, my default position is that they haven’t been “checked” and they most certainly have not been proved to have “stopped” any particular activity they were engaged in previously.
Talk is cheap, particularly any talk/speech that comes out of Rand Paul’s mouth. And the only reason anything is different between Sunday and today, is the fact that legislation previously enacted has, in part, and only as a technical matter–lapsed.
That has absolutely zero to do with what any given government agency, particularly a “surveillance state” agency is doing in the field. And until I see a copy of a letter from the office of the President or DNI or Sec. of Defense directed to all those agencies that from “X date forward Y activity is to be discontinued” then everybody is fooling themselves if they think anything meaningful has in fact happened with regard to the “surveillance state” either legally or politically.
VERY well said, Mr. or Ms. Heard! You are EXACTLY correct. I’ve been saying for days that all of the celebrating is premature; and headlines like the one for this article are quite misleading, getting people to believe that, as you said, something has “ended” that we have no evidence or proof has been ended. It’s akin to the “rationale” that, even though “Barack ‘Odrona'” has been proven to have lied about virtually everything he promised during his campaign, and done the exact reverse as some of the most egregious acts of his presidency, and been proven without doubt to be a mass-murderer through the drone campaign and through other things like Libya and the so-called assassination of “bin Laden”, etc., and a habitual perpetrator of human rights violations, crimes against humanity and war crimes, he’s (supposedly) still a “good” and/or “okay” president. Thus, because a Constitution-violating mass-spying-on-the-American-people program in obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment has supposedly been ended, even though there is no clear evidence of that, it is okay that this bulk surveillance is still, in-truth, going on, and will probably go on in our now lawless government even if a toothless “new” version of the “USA ‘PATRIOT’ Act” is passed into further unconstitutional “law” that has no true reforms of the constitutional violations. And that is only a few examples, of the worst, of “Odrona’s” many treasonous and impeachable crimes. On top of all that, he’s violated the Constitution right and left, not to mention international law(s), with flagrant disregard; and done so as a so-called “constitutional law” and “Nobel Peace Prize” president. Why aren’t we completely appalled and sought his impeachment? Because, if a U.S. president who is a so-called “Democrat” (in “Odrona’s” case, more like a dictator and/or a member of the “Fascist Party”) undermines, violates, contravenes and abrogates the Constitution and Bill of Rights, etc., it’s supposedly “okay”. “May God bless (‘Amerika’).”
Anyone who was actually paying attention knew that this was happening. There were rumors in the late 70s that the government had dropped charges against the Weather Underground in 1973 to avoid disclosing intercepts by “No-Such Agency”. “The Puzzle Palace” by James Bamford came out in 1983. We’ve known about ECHELON and the Five Eyes since at least 1988. And so on.
It’s still happening. The NSA is a military organizatrion, and does not consider itself to be subject to US law. The dogs are loose, and we are at their mercy. Play safe, my friends.
If the military is not subject to U.S. laws, to whom or what does it answer? We are fucked if we can’t get control of them. Though we should not be surprised that a country that spends $610 billion dollars annually — more than the next seven countries combined — would be obsessed and adept at being a warrior country. Think of what else we could do with that money other than create ways to kill, destroy, maim, poison, track, brainwash, manipulate, torture people and the planet.
I suspect that it answers to the highest bidder. But truly I have no clue.
The Obama administration won’t review the charges against Edward Snowden, so that puts them in alignment with Mitch McConnell’s view. Lede:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/charges-against-edward-snowden-stand-despite-telephone-surveillance-ban
This cursory offering by THE//INTERCEPT (writer and editors) falls very short of being the product of basic informed reporting, let alone the vigorous investigative content Firstlook was founded upon. It reads like the petty gossip of an inflated social media feed, one designed to propagate petty ideological argument seasoned with the typical mainstream political memes and ahistorical talking points common to corporate media word-speak.
Froomkin declares, referring to the NSA, in pertinent part:
In order to make such a specious statement, one would have to be willfully ignorant of the historical intent behind both the formation and practice of such secret government activities, specifically designed to circumvent the prohibition of illegal domestic spying; practices that have been “historically” occurring and evolving for over six decades.
Has THE//INTERCEPT now taken the position that the government’s ECHELON & FIVE-EYES surveillance programs were not designed and intended to facilitate unlawful domestic spying? If so, why?
“Work is love made visible.” KG
As Usual,
EA
@EA
You are misinformed. The NSA was established as part of the DoD, and not as an independent agency. As such, it was constitutionally prohibited from operations on American soil, just as the military is.
The fact of the matter is that prior to being disassociated from the DoD, the NSA was primarily if not entirely focused on foreign operations. What exceptions did exist involved the collection and decoding of communications signals (COMINT) from foreign embassies and consulates on US soil.
If you have evidence of the contrary, I am sure The Intercept would love to see it.
LMAO! The us military is ” prohibited from operations on American soil”? What’s that even supposed to mean? How’s the military going to ‘defend america’ if the they can’t operate in america? Of course, one of the US military purposes is to murder people abroad and invade as much countries as possible, BUT it also obviously ‘operates’ inside the US.
Its easy, it means no offensive operations against American Citizens on U.S. soil. Now we’ve been chipping away at that, bit by bit (drug war etc.) – but 24b4Jeff is correct, the NSA was focused on foreign targets only….this has all radically changed over the last several decades when they decided they should capture all communications of everyone (including U.S. citizens).
Re: 24b4Jeff – Jun 1 @ 7:25 PM
You portend:
1) Nowhere did I claim that the NSA was established as an independent agency and not a part of the DOD from its inception. However, your claim that the NSA has been “disassociated from the DOD” is, indeed, misinformed. The NSA, to this day, remains within the DOD, is commanded by an active duty general officer, and is funded by the DOD budget.
2) What I alluded to is that the ECHELON/FIVE-EYES secret surveillance programs, operated by the DOD/NSA, were designed to circumvent the Constitutional prohibitions against domestic military/intelligence operations.
Your claim that,
“What exceptions did exist involved the collection and decoding of communications signals (COMINT) from foreign embassies and consulates on US soil.”
has been debunked for several decades; which even a cursory search of the subject will reveal.
3) I suspect that several of the writers and editors at THE//INTERCEPT, along with the likes of credible writers like Risen, Bamford, Parry, Chalmers Johnson, and many others are well aware of not only the existence of these violations of law, but the legislative and administrative betrayals of public trust that brought them into existence and continue to promulgate their current practice.
As Usual,
EA
http://www.juancole.com/2015/05/illegal-domestic-spying.html
Ethan ol’ chappy..
Tis’ only now that thoust’ has been enlightened to the trivialness that emanates from the // intersap?
“Look man, I aint fallin’ for no banana in my talepipe..” -sf
Till Then,
dong`
..
December, 2014
‘Chestnuts & Peepers’
Long before Jim Messina became a trusted aide to President Barack Obama and one of the most powerful men in Washington, he was just a simple boy from Boise. Now, after working in politics for just over a decade, he lives in a lavish D.C. estate. How this happened is a classic Washington Cinderella story.
Raised in Idaho by a single mother, Messina moved to Washington in 1995, in his mid-20s, to take a job as a legislative aide for Max Baucus, the conservative Democratic senator from Montana (now ambassador to China). Baucus supported George W. Bush-era personal and corporate tax cuts, and other policies favored by the Wall Street firms, pharmaceutical companies, and lobbyists, from whom he raised so much money.
Up until 2002, Messina was still largely unknown. But that year, when managing Baucus’s Senate re-election campaign, he released one of the more homophobic ads of modern political times. It featured footage from a 20-year-old TV ad for a hair salon run by Baucus’s opponent, Mike Taylor –who at the time was 20 points behind in the polls and had no chance of winning –who was seen massaging a man’s face while wearing an open-front shirt, and hence was obviously supposed to be gay.
The ad, set to a porn soundtrack, caused Taylor to drop out of the race. When he announced two weeks later that he was resuming a limited campaign aimed largely at “getting the slander out of Montana politics,” Messina issued a public letter that asked Taylor to sign a “clean campaign pledge” for the remainder of the race, saying, “We take you at your word that you want to turn over a new leaf and run a positive campaign.”
This sort of scumminess put Messina on the map in Democratic circles. He also became known as a world class asshole who kept an “enemies” list on an Excel spreadsheet. “Everybody was a douchebag,” says a person who knew him then. “He kept score.”….
It’s all pretty astonishing, even by Washington standards. “No one here is a virgin, but this is pretty flagrant,” one Democratic Party insider told me. (Disclosure: He doesn’t like Messina and might be jealous.)
A Politico story in February detailed much of Messina’s money-grubbing, but said there was little evidence that he had “splurged in the year or so since he started reeling in private-sector paydays.” Politico reported Messina had recently “sold for $425,000 a modest Maryland home that he had owned for about seven years.”
But about three months later, Messina did splurge, though it looks like he did his best to keep it out of the news. Public records I found suggested that last May he had purchased a $1.9 million home in one of Washington’s swankiest neighborhoods. “High quality finishes in a tremendous location,”says this Zillow item. “Five bedroom, 4.5 bath Brick home can flow from formal to casual with ease. Walkout of the Master Suite to your private balcony. Sun room leads you to backyard that is a private oasis.”
I said “suggested” because the property was not bought in Messina’s name. The house is owned through an anonymous trust, but various clues point back to Messina. For example, Messina’s old pal, Democratic operative Crounse, represents the trust that was used to purchase the house.
We knocked on the door of the house and, ‘to our great happiness’ and surprise, Messina opened it. It was a short conversation.
“I saw from public records that you owned this house and just wanted to make sure,” I said.
“OK,” he said. He was smiling but didn’t look happy.
It’s a long way from Idaho, Jim, but congratulations. You found your place in D.C.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/23/how-jim-messina-moved-from-idaho-to-2-million-dollar-washington-estate/
This Shadow Government Agency Is Scarier Than the NSA:
http://phasezero.gawker.com/this-shadow-government-agency-is-scarier-than-the-nsa-1707179377
No, it isn’t.
I wish the press would report on the abuses of the “perception warfare,” “spiritual warfare,” and “no touch torture” weapons. They are using these on our own people domestically. Can’t make this stuff up.
I’ve been literally begging reporters to investigate this abuse for 18 months. I think the response has been a big yawn but I can’t be sure because phone calls to me are blocked and rerouted.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ozc3gpg
JakeRake, can you elaborate? Can you also visit more often as I have been trying to inform people of these abuses but they shrug it off as lunacy.
Now that Section 215 has expired, wouldn’t it be better to forget about the so-called USA Freedom Act as well? Before 215 expired, it would have restricted government powers somewhat. Now, however, it would expand them.
You ever play Three-card Monte…? Keep your eye on the Queen…
Exactly.
It looks like any legit reforms that take place are reforms that the NSA already recomended but for different reasons — one of which is saving nsa analysts time.
(from the document “Is there a Sustainable ops Temp in S2? How Can Analysts Deal with the Flood of Collection? –An Interview with (blocked out)
linked to from the Intercept article “Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance”)
“Strong selectors — like phone numbers — will become a thing of the past. It used to be that if you had a targets number, you could follow it for most of your career. Not anymore. My daughter doesn’t even make phone calls, and many targets do the same. Also the commercial market demands privacy, and this will drive our targets to go encrypted, maybe in the unexploitable realms. Our nation needs us to look for patterns surrounding a particular spot on Earth and make the connections — who can do that if not us? And we can’t do it using traditional methods.”
Phone info is old hat. What’s also mentioned in that document is with a new less restrictive understanding of their role in protecting the 4th amendment, they can hand off information to customers and other intelligence agencies much quicker than before, which presumably will give nsa analysts more time to explore non traditional methods that only they can manage whatever that is.
Also curious about how profit and speed of obtaining information are connected.
They occupied Snowdens world and he took it back.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU EDWARD SNOWDEN, GLEN GREENWALD, LAURA POITRAS, & RAND PAUL!!!
Agreed, however, that large building somewhere out there in Utah will not send all of the snoops home nor will they turn the building into another obscene shopping mall. Behind the line, what are the personal data gathering folks conjuring up?? As Yogi said, “it ain’t over, ’til its over. Short term win for the “good legislators”.
I had a term for that in Little Weed where she pops out of the ground. “It would be to graceful to say she bloomed it was more like a bulge.” That’s for you Dan Froomkin cause you are mean and not where you should be on Rand Paul. He is the best thing yet for Freedom of Speech and you batterize him. As in turn him
into a robot for your crusade against all speaking congressmen. For HEAVEN”S SAKE even though there isn’t one get some freaking somebody you believe in and give a good review this is the biggest bunch of whiners of all time except for Liliana and Lee.
While the dialogue that has been forced by Ed Snowden and picked up by Rand Paul is important, it is also a smoke screen. Read Ronald Reagan era Executive Order 12333 and understand that nothing has changed.
I heard that today on an NPR program! “On the Media” I think. I was only able to catch the second half but their analysis seemed to lead to the executive order you’re mentioning and because of it the “sunset” of these key Patriot Act components is irrelevant.
what security? failure to connect the dots continues to this very date. They lie to you to tell you how safe you are – shooting – drugs (C.I.A. started under Reagan/Bush admin)). There is not one word of truth – secret deals (T.P.P) covered by Congress. They passed a law where it is illegal to give aid to a country after a “coup” BUT restated aid to EGYPT? Oh foreign is only .o1 % of the GDP. DO YOU BELIEVE THAT?? Roads and bridges crumbling ! Whose being stupid?.?.?.?
The WTC collapsed – SADLY the people at the top had no way out ( so why? are we building more (death traps)) with no new fire escapes???
HOW MANY MORE LIES DO YOU NEED BEFORE YOU WAKE UP?? Vote the garbage in Washington OUT
Since watching the same movies that were on last month, actually several months, just wasn’t appealing, C-Span2 took the honor last night. Wasn’t much different than watching a movie for the umpteenth time, insanely expecting to be surprised. The vaguely worded Freedom Act will get passed later this week, and everyone can say to their constituents that they fought the good fight, no matter which side of the argument they supported. Although watching the Senate is like watching bad theatre, at least some(very little) of the dialogue changes from time to time. It’s little wonder so many are cynical of our government, when we see how much press, and effort went into trying to pass a toothless piece of legislation such as the Freedom Act. I’m almost ready to say “to hell with it” except that would be letting the bastards win.
I’d like to think that the bloggers here have a superior take on the what we are told. I must say that in my opinion to read investigative journalism along with TI you have to either buy books or go to your local library to get the real train of thought on the pulse of the world. Many investigative journalists do not have a voice in todays media and they either articulate a different slant on Democracy Now, Counter Punch or they can be found writing their own slant in form of a book, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, ( disclaimer here) not to be taken as gospel. Forget about the tv media, (sorry C-Span). There is no cred in media news, including the venerable Gray Lady, the NYT.
Agreed. And of course they have “6 months” to “wind it all down”. Odds that it’ll actually “wind down”? Right. Good luck with that one.
Every little loss will probably give the forces behind all of this a bigger win. Look to CISPA and the new ‘cyber’ laws as evidence of that. If it doesn’t go through that just means they need to do a bit more marketing and experimentation with language — and then we’ll get a monster even worse than the previous hydra.
Forgive my cynicism.
(The cynicism of course exists because they have yet to admit any wrongdoing, for any of it. There’s no real sincerity. There never was.)
The Snowden documents revealed that some 17,000 request were being received/processed daily by the NSA for information including internet and phone contact meta data. The critical point in all of this is that only 15% of these requests claimed any connection to terrorism. That leaves some 14,000 a day that must be targeted at commercial interests or individuals that are under either legal investigation for foreign or domestic activities, -or illegal investigation for whatever concerns those in power may have.
But this little fact that is ever so illustrative of what has been going on, and a clear indication that the vast majority of the information was being used domestically for non-terrorism matters appears to have fallen off the radar. Why? I and I think most would have this aspect as the top priority for examination and review. -It certainly is the most dangerous; ….But not a word about it. It’s all about terrorism when the malfeasance of these security interests is at issue.
Stuart, can you link to source delineating these figures? It should be an outrage that 85 percent of searches were not terror-related. More and more, I’m starting to wonder about that 9/11 ‘inside job’ theory.
I also recall reading about similar figures somewhere, just don’t recall exactly where at the moment.
In Robert Scheer’s recent book, They Know Everything About You, he mentions NSA and Loveint:
LOVEINT: Between 2011 to 2012, according to an NSA self-audit, NSA employees illegally spied on 2,776 persons they knew and were curious about!
Here’s what I want to know: if the “USA Freedom Act” passes, is all this stored data available for routine subpoenas from any court for any reason, and if so, isn’t that a very substantial worsening of the status quo in regard to the individual person who could face prosecution, whether for what he said or who he talked to or some other trumped-up theory regarding his whereabouts?
Might you be referring to this?
Parallel Construction Revealed: How The DEA Is Trained To Launder Classified Surveillance Info
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info.shtml
‘Parallel construction’ may already be a big use of the spying program, but the DEA is not going to do parallel construction every time you download a pirated movie or make a ‘reckless’ general threat in a political chat forum. Whereas… if the private companies are holding the records, even a small company with few political connections would seem able to get ahold of them by subpoena. This would seem to be many orders of magnitude worse, unless there’s some paper barrier I don’t know about, and it really holds.
The American Terrorist Community does not care about scraps of paper with expiry dates; it will continue being well compensated for patriotic contributions to society. But for some dissidents it is a small symbolic step in the right direction because the ATC is losing a portion of its fan base, and given the ATC’s record of zero tolerance for dissent from a single individual, it’s reasonable to assume that having to watch this in real time on their target monitoring systems is agonizing. (… is Beethoven’s Ninth blaring from someone’s desktop speakers? …) But it’s just one little battle, ATC. Buck up. Losing some fawning admirers is nothing compared to being assaulted by your rent-a-patriots in a medical lab. Relax, voters will always make sure all branches of the government are stuffed with your pets. That’s what they do.
A trivial thing was hypothetically taken from you for a few days. No one took that sacred cow — your right to torture with impunity — away from you. You can sleep easy tonight.
“So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.” – Dan Froomkin/The Intercept
Are you being facetious?
Because if your not, then this statement makes no sense in the world shadowed by the vast complex in Utah owned and operated under the Umbrella of NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. The Utah Data Center holds the intelligence for ALL intelligences agency each with different security clearances within the bigger whole. Each with different mandate.
This complex built after 911 and the passing into law the Patriot Act, was built to utilize those very laws to the nth degree.
If you think they will actually give up that kind of powernow….ahaha…too funny.
Those super large computers are capable of handling file in excess of exabytes; and are more than likely the Data center has been under estimated and it is closer to petabytes.
Do realize they are capable at present of monitoring/recording all the phone calls on Planet Walmart…daily.
Oh but the law sez they cannot do that anymore without warrant…I dont think so.
Exactly so! When the FBI was questioned publicly on Carnivore, they simply changed the name to DCS 100 or DCS 1000 (forget the exact designation). That’s the way it always goes in the Wall Street owned corporate fascist state.
Well said.
All I want to know is when the DOJ will be issuing arrest warrants for Mr.Clapper and Mr. Alexander for lying to Congress.
Answer that question for me, Mr. Wyden.
Unfortunately, Wyden is not the attorney general. The country would be a better place if he were.
Trust me, as a lifelong Oregonian, one of Sen. Wyden’s constituents and a way bigger liberal than Sen. Wyden will ever be, you would not want the political coward Ron Wyden as the attorney general of anything. He came to speak at Lewis and Clark Law School my second year and the students roasted on him but bad to the point he slinked out of an hour long grilling with his tail between his legs.
The fact anyone thinks Ron Wyden stands for “liberals” at all just demonstrates how ultimately captured almost every member of Congress is by the borderline right wing fascism that has taken hold in this nation.
Ron Wyden is a guy who is a full throated supporter of TPA and TPP despite the fact most of his constituents have written him, including me, and repeatedly, that if he doesn’t change his position on TPP, and quickly we are working against him in his next re-election campaign. Being right for the wrong reasons doesn’t make someone of pillar of integrity anymore than a stopped clock is. Ron Wyden is real good when it comes to the low hanging political fruit and social issues, but trust me he ain’t all that and a bag of chips. Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer in the House are more liberal and consistent than he’ll ever be, and Sen. Merkley is well on his way in the Senate to being more liberal and consistent than Wyden ever was or will be.
I understand what you’re saying rrheard – Mr. Wyden would be measured as a Republican on most things 15 years ago…and the TPP is something I am directly contacting my constituents about as well.
However, its important to consider, Mr. Wyden is the only person left on the Senate Intelligence Committee that is a privacy advocate and actively trying to fight the Surveillance State – everyone else there is a rubber stamp (as his replacement is likely to be). He has been very helpful after the Snowden revelations. The NSA and FBI hate him and want him out of office.
“So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.”
You are so naive. Do you really think it stops? Do you really believe that some administration lawyer somewhere isn’t drafting a signing statement for the President that will justify mass domestic spying to continue? Enjoy your delusion of privacy for a day and then get back on the reality wagon tomorrow, AND DON’T put away your encryption tools yet, Dan the Man. I’m sure everyone at the Intercept is being wiretapped. And when did any law stop our government’s illegal activity? I can assure you that technology is not about to be wheeled into the basement in Greenbelt, Maryland to collect dust.
All it changed was the ability of the NSA to go to its own database when running a query instead of asking for the information from somebody else. The information has been collected by the telecoms since the dawn of telecom time. So if you actually believe that nobody with an interest in your private information can get to it since section 215 expired, you’re sadly deluded. All the call metadata is still in a database and can still be accessed. The NSA just stops having their very own copy.
It’s absurdly critical that the lawyers get the fuck out of this debate and hand it over to people who want to design and build a system that satisfies all the interests involved with the proper safeguards. As long as we keep getting presented with headlines and explosive news articles asserting some kind of binary on-off spigot exists with regard to the personal data a person sheds while using telecommunications of any form, the argument is going to miss the point. And the point is:
1) what are you doing with my data (and specifically, what lists are you putting my name on)?
2) when does what you do go away if I’m not really very interesting (likewise, when does my name leave the list)?
This problem started with respect to metadata in the 1990s, and it started with private companies — spec. the cable company consortia. The NSA had what is called the Patriot Act ready before the events of September 11th, because from their point of view the data they had accessed — legally — before the advent of fiberoptic cable couldn’t be accessed afterward without some new permissions. Add in the internet packet switching and that’s where they decided they needed to gather anything and everything and construct a cyberspace model out of it.
So this isn’t going away no matter what Rand Paul does, no matter what the NSA does, and no matter what’s in Snowden’s files, unless there is a true change of thinking about data and about connectivity and about how and what our society chooses to pay for and to produce. This train left the station decades ago, the lawyers and civil libertarians weren’t that interested at the time, and I have a hard time believing they’re truly interested in a solution now.
What’s absurdly critical is that you’ve popped up from whatever know-it-all hidey hole you’ve been hunkered down in for the last couple of years to spout your usual nonsense about how it’s all the lawyers faults. Truly the only person that could ever change anything ever is the Omnipotent Ondelette and cross training in EMT and computer science.
Aaaackkkkkkkkk it is all about teh “minimization”.
Here’s a newsflash–a lot of us agree with you that nobody, private or governmental, should be able to accumulate monumental databases comprised of our reading habits, internet searches, shopping preferences, banking transactions, physical location, text messages, e-mail metadata etc. etc. etc.
Some of us, even us stupid lawyers, realize that there will need to be a sea change in both public perception and the law as it affects both the government and the private sector as far as “privacy” goes. And some of us even agree that it is wildly problematic that the private sector is allowed to collect so much data on us as individuals when the default position of the private sector should be–no data can be collected or stored on anybody about any transaction they have with an individual (unless it’s a regulated transaction) unless that individual specifically “opts in” to having that data collected or stored–not as a condition of a sales transaction, not for purposes of customer support and sure as shit not for purposes of more “effective marketing”.
It really was the lawyers who didn’t listen when we asked them to, it really was the lawyers (among others) who reduced everything to simplistic choices about privacy and data. And I have not “popped up from whatever know it all hidey hole,” and your impromptu list of my credentials is not accurate.
So why don’t we just agree to agree then, if you agree with what I said?
The thing is, I’m not so sure you do. You regard this all as being a public perception and a legal debate. I don’t. I think the way we compute and the way networks and communications work in the digital world need to be changed. And as for a solution that uncollects all the data, that climate tipped that tipping point a long time ago, and tipping points don’t untip. Unlike the “truth” about backdoors, that tipping point thing is a theorem, it has a proof, and it is not really open to debate in the real world.
Who is “we” as in “when we asked them to” and specifically which lawyers as in “the lawyers didn’t listen” and “who reduced everything to simplistic choices”? Oh yeah, I remember how this goes, your need for anonymity makes it impossible for you to ever be specific about who did or said what to you because that might reveal your identity so there is no way to ever establish the veracity of anything you claim.
As far as agreeing with you, I do as indicated. I don’t agree it is simply a matter of “public perception and a legal debate.” It is a matter of the intersection between peoples’ perception and/or values regarding “personal privacy”, legal rights and technological capacity. And despite your assertions that “it is the lawyers’ fault” or that only if “the lawyers get the fuck out of the debate and hand it over to the designers to safeguard and balance all interests”, that’s laughable.
Nothing was stopping the “designers” and “system builders” from balancing and safeguarding those “interests” in the first instance had they actually valued them more than the lawyers who you claim don’t value them. Seems to me the “system designers and builders” care the least about how their “systems” are used given they don’t/haven’t historically designed them to function so as to protect people’s privacy of communications as the first priority. And it seems to me that’s for the very simple reason that most if not all of those systems were designed by people who did not value “balance” or “safeguards” for “privacy” in the first instance, they valued PROFIT. And that’s not really open to debate in the real world as you said. So it follows I most certainly will not look to the same system designers and builders to rectify a problem they created in the interests of, or pursuant to, their preeminent “value” of profit seeking. Self-restraint, ethics, morals or human values has never been high on the “system builders and designer’s” radar historically speaking. Science and technology make advances because they can and usually in pursuit of profit. Historically and rarely, except in medicine to one degree or another, are any ethical or moral values ever even considered in the first instance when it comes to advancing any particular technological capacity or its use. It is only the “law” that seeks to limit them. System designer and builder’s commitment to “values”, or “interests” has never stopped them from developing certain sorts of weapons systems which are the creations of “builders and designers of systems” by definition. So again, forgive me if I don’t trust them to limit themselves in any way. It is only the law that will retard their ambitions.
And I don’t think I ever claimed data already collected could be “uncollected” although I don’t see why it couldn’t, as a technological matter, be “uncollected” as in deleted. And just because technology has “tipped” or there is a “way we compute and the way networks and communications work” currently, doesn’t mean the law can’t be changed to prohibit the collection and retention of certain types of data going forward (i.e. prevention of the application or use of any given technological capacity under any given set of circumstances). Because unless I’m mistaken, human beings still control machines and/or the use of any given technological capacity. That means humans continue to have the capacity to pick and choose which capacities, applications, hardware or software are employed, run or used under any given set of circumstances. And that’s a question of “legality” as much as it is one of “technological capacity”. Unless you’re arguing that because a particular “technology” exists it must necessarily be used, or will be used, independent of human choices about its use, which I don’t believe is the case and there are many examples of legal limits placed on the use of any given “technology” from weapons systems to bio technology.
As far as my impromptu recitation of your CV, if Salon’s search and archiving functions were working a little more smoothly (at least they weren’t when I just tried them) I think I could establish my general point about your past claims to EMT (or disaster preparedness or something to that effect) and computer science training, unless of course I have you confused with another Ondelette or another commenter entirely–which I’ll concede is entirely possible, although I don’t think my memory is that bad.
It should be enough obvious from what I wrote that it was people concerned with metadata back before you knew what the word meant. And that’s enough to interpret what I wrote. Yes it’s true that I do need my anonymity, I will continue to need it probably for a long time hence as far as I can tell, and you are a big advertiser of how brave you’ve been using your real name. I’m not interested in continuing that debate, so get out of your timewarp. Or didn’t you read what the Special Rapporteur wrote about not just encryption but anonymity?
If and when the lawyers are interested in the truth, and not in recruiting selective truths to their arguments, and if and when they stop pretending that they are numerate, when they’ve many times over shown they are not, then it might be laughable. What messed up the debate the first time on metadata was everyone taking orders from the patent lawyers, what messed it up the second time was lawyers and politicians with their journalists in tow pretending to understand the balance between privacy and security, and what’s messing it up this time is that we have a dysfunctional congress (as Froomkin noted above, in case you read it), brought to us by the people advocating, among other things, not voting.
Actually, since I was there for both designs, what seems to you isn’t at all what happened. Not to mention that the abilities to surveil people that the NSA wanted in 2001 were abilities they had previously had for decades, so your notion of privacy isn’t what had been in place when the designers of communications technology did their designing — meaning the structure of the internet on this one. Once again, the lawyer recruits arguments to a point of view rather than digging for the truth. The truth is that the internet was designed with a lot smaller tech world in mind, and that it was designed above all to be reliable, almost nothing else mattered. And the designers of the information gathering aspects had in mind that there needed to be a way to access what was becoming too much data to find anything. It was only once the people interested in instant profit showed up that everything became profit and all became advertising. The first startup I worked for was quite different from what people come here expecting nowadays. The founders drove around in old beater cars constantly husting our latest stuff in search of enough money to keep us out of burnrate, while we stayed up all night over and over trying to change the world. So no, you’re very wrong about how we didn’t do a good job in the first place because of profit and how we need you lawyers to be concerned for privacy and civil liberties because we weren’t able to be. We were concerned with those things when we worked on metadata, the people pushing the intrusiveness, if you want to know, happened to be academics paid for by non-technical businesses such as journalism and media, and the lawyers could only be found if there was a smell of money.
Thanks for explaining that to me. You don’t understand science and technology or medicine for that matter, so we can discount the first point. As for the second, it seems to me that it was the lawyers at our companies who were better paid, and their time was spent finding creative ways to make money gaming one system or another. When we needed data (and yes, that would be all that stuff you find amoral, unethical, and all that, if not collected properly) they handed that problem to the lawyers. The lawyers rewrote everyone out there’s privacy rules and took what they wanted and put it on our desks the next day. Oh, and then subjected us to big speeches on our lousy morals (I’m not making this up, I sat and listened to a huge speech about Christian values and what an abhorrent person I was for doing the project I was doing. The meeting was mandatory, I had no choice but to listen to the company legal counsel until he was done).
Great! Thank you for proving two things: 1) you don’t understand tipping points, and, 2) people who don’t understand shit are always better at providing an example of how to not understand shit than people who do. Thank you for proving my point.
And here’s the clincher. Homework problem: If this is true, then how come the atmosphere is filling up with greenhouse gasses? And if your lawyers approach (shit is bad, let’s ban it) was applied to that tipping point problem, how many people would starve?
Proving, of course, that your lawyer’s sense of dig dirt on the opposing party as the first line of argument is completely at odds with real privacy. Yup, you’re right. Salon it is said never gives up her dead when the trolls of Glenn Greenwald come trawling, to paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot. I did disclose some information about my training there, but you’re purpose wasn’t to make use of that, it was to disparage that. Well, for the record, and so you won’t feel the need to try get as close as you can possibly cleave to doxxing while promoting yourself as a self-styled privacy advocate, the EMT part is correct, the computer science is wrong, it’s mathematics, as is the theorem about complexity. But don’t let that stop you, go ahead and dive in and make all sorts of changes, and see whether you get the intended consequences. You won’t. But being a lawyer, you’ll be sure you did the right thing and everyone else had lousy morals.
I think you are being unnecessarily skewing Mr. Paul and his intentions. You seem to have him in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t position.
You seem to simultaneously hold it against him that the Freedom Act was not passed and that he can not stop the Freedom Act from passing. You downplay his Senate behavior as merely “procedural”. You seem to hold it against him he is also running for president.
I don’t understand this complaint of Paul: that somehow because he is running for president therefore none of his actions are genuine.
Paul (and his father) have been speaking out against the PATRIOT Act since long before Rand decided to run for president. It is a topic he has felt strongly about for years. And even if he were “grandstanding” the issue — so what? We NEED someone to grand stand these issues so that voters can actually be aware of them … What is the better alternative, to lead a vapid and meaningless campaign like Obama did before 2008? A tight-lip campaign like Hillary today? “grandstanding” is not quoting you, but it is a popular term being used against Paul today by the mainstream media.)
Damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. I would much rather have a presidential candidate who will “exploit” the “War on Terror” to [try to] end surveillance rather than expand it.
I wish simply to second everything said here. Thanks and well said, luda.
I’ll try to leave this again as the first time didn’t ‘take.’ While The Intercept does much good to point out the ongoing hypocrisies and injustices of our government, sometimes it disappoints as in these snide take-downs of Paul. Another way it fails is in its indifference/ignoring of the worst abuses going on in America, while bolstering commenters who attack people reporting these abuses. These blind spots make one pause and give some weight to those who claim this site was intended as a ‘limited hangout’ of sorts.
“So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.” If you really believe that, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you, for a great price!
“So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.”
Yes cwradio, I share your pessimism.
In question now is whether the administration will use a separate section of the Patriot Act, Section 224, to continue operating the now-defunct programs in the interim. That section, the grandfather clause, allows active investigations begun prior to the expiration of the provisions to continue. The White House has said in recent days that it will not continue the bulk data collection program under that grandfather provision, but it has not clarified what it will do with the other programs.
Eliminating the bulk collection of phone data, even temporarily, does nothing to protect the privacy of e-mail, text, video messages, bank, medical and tax records from the NSA snoops. The domestic collection of data continues as invasion of the personal rights without warrant or probable cause. Ask Mrs. Clinton why she choose an off-campus server to protect her correspondence as Secretary of State. She knew nothing was secure from many other government intercepts. And, it worked well for six years.
I’m another of those people that actually give her cadre *more* credit for running a private mail server instead of disparaging it. Only the watchers are above the law — certainly being a politician makes you a target (internally and externally).
The purpose of the whole program was to Terroize the public. I have been biting my lips when talking to my friends here in USA and Abroad while on the phone. They wanted to extent the provisions that expired they only needed one ISIS beheading video and one FBI sting operation. They already own the media circus. It is election year. I wont call it a victory. Unless people who miss used the said law are prosecuted. Otherwise it is just a game.
Greenwald
You really need to ask Ed if the NSA can simply “turn off” PRISM and KEYSTONE
These programs are running not just to intercept the communications of the United States but also the communications of the entire world. How is even technically fessible that these programs could even discern between the two. In fact this was the original argument the NSA made that they were simply capturing americans private information as a inadvertent consequent of capturing those dirty foreigners private information.
This is a pyrrhic victory, like after the Church commission the NSA will continue to intercept private communications. They’ll do it illegally and it’ll be a major challenge to the government because at the end of the day does the dog wag the tail or does the tail wag the dog.
Who is really running the government?
I suspect that some NSA employees actually believe the bogus legal opinions and manage to twist their minds into thinking that what they are doing is lawful. Removing one of the facades of legal justification may force them to engage in deliberately criminal behavior. You are right that this will not stop them, but morale will sag. Hopefully, this will bring forth more Eric Snowdens.
Well, since the majority of personnel at the most sensitve of government departments, the Treausury, come from either JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs, and since the majority of the attorneys at Justice come frome white shoe shyster firms which represent those two and the super-rich, it is a good bet that whomever owns Chase and Goldman Sachs, owns the government.
Historically, JPMorgan was bought up by Chase, the Rockefeller family bank.
Historically, there has always been a member of the Walker-Bush family (as in those two previous presidents, and that Jeb fellow now running for another presidency) at Goldman Sachs, and since historically the Walker money originated from working at Buckeye Ball Bearings of Ohio, and that company was owned by the Rockfeller family (specifically Frank Rockefeller, the younger brother of John D.) I suspect old money may just be involved.
But who can tell today when everything is owned through cross-stock ownership, which is supposed to be illegal in the US of A!
“Who is really running the government?”
Money, corporations, and bloodlines.
Paul’s flagging campaign?Sheesh.like all the toads and traitors against him are zooming up the polls.Shillary is last months toast also.
Yes, that line is disingenuous. Recent poll showed he had strongest showing in race against Hillary. Don’t know where the ‘flagging’ line is coming from except the media. And I would have thought The Intercept would have been careful to propogate that line of thinking against the staunchest supporter of our Constitution.
Froomkin does not like Rand Paul, so he is mischaracterizing him at times in his writing.
Other articles he has written for Intercept lately do this as well.
If The Intercept cannot see that Rand Paul is the sole hope for sanity returning to D.C., there is no hope. Wedge issues have no meaning at all without the right to privacy, the right to free speech, the right to congregate with whomever we choose. If reporters are unable to see this, we are lost.
Rand Paul is not the “sole hope” of anything except sales of stopped clocks. And he sure as shit isn’t the “sole hope” of a return to “sanity” in D.C. or anywhere else. Just like his racist father wasn’t either. That doesn’t mean he can’t serve some valuable function when, like a stopped clock or his father, those two times a day he is correct about something whether for the right or wrong reasons.
But don’t elevate Mr. Aqua Buddha to any sort of moral or intellectual status he hasn’t earned. If that guy was running the show America would be in way bigger trouble than it’s been for the last 50 + years and it wouldn’t be long before America looked like Honduras (not that it doesn’t now).
Ha, that’s funny and disputable that Paul
would shat on the Constitution the way these last two Presidents have. This is a sorry time in American history and historians will rightly excoriate these last POTUSES as razing our nation’s rule of law.
Claiming that McConnell is such a fierce NSA enabler because he doesn’t want Snowden te become a respected name is letting him off easy. I think he, and at least 20 other senators are deeply compromised by knowledge the NSA has about them and which could suddenly become public and destroy them. You can recognize the barely hidden panic in his eyes all the time. Same with Feinstein and McCain. They’re Owned!
I wonder who else is a target and if the targeting includes the highest levels.
I’d imagine there are very very few politicians without a proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging above their heads, and that every last one of them has been “vetted” to have at least one thing that can be used as a pressure point — whether or not they’re aware that it’s known, and whether or not it ever gets used being, of course, mostly irrelevant. Fear works wonders.
I think most Intercept readers recognize the vacuous political theater this is. Not one bit of data the NSA intends to “collect” will be lost and in fact the collection is increasing all while this absurdity goes on. A few secret memos and legal opinions maybe an Executive Order or two also secret and nothing changes. Those who believe the US is a democracy belong in close association with those who deny climate change.
Thank you!
Do you really believe they will stop collecting this data just because it is now “illegal”? When has that ever stopped lying, cheating, low-life thieves?
But that’s the punchline — it never *was* legal (and it most assuredly was never legal in the way they were using it). The minute creative loopholes and definitional wordplay became a part of the “debate without a debate” we never had a chance.
Dan,
You say: “Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority since the terror attacks in 2001,” but is the expiration of those three provisions going to actually make any effectual difference in how the intelligence agencies operate?
“All three of the expired laws contained a so-called grandfather clause that permits their authority to continue indefinitely for any investigation that had begun before June 1.
Law enforcement officials have made it clear that the F.B.I. has long-running, open-ended “enterprise” investigations into groups that pose a threat to public safety, like Al Qaeda. A senior intelligence official recently told The New York Times that the administration was open to invoking the grandfather clause to get the records if a need arose during any lapse.”
www. nytimes.com/2015/06/01/us/a-gap-in-surveillance-but-ways-around-it.html
After Clapper lied to Congress and is still not charged, what is there to believe that the intelligence agencies will not keep using the powers?
If slavery is freedom, I guess you can fake everyone out and call it the Freedom Act. My cartoon on this issue:
http://tomthumbsgallery.com/2014/12/24/the-freedom-act-or-how-can-i-get-rid-of-these-critics-of-mass-surveillances/
Dan, can you or someone at The Intercept write an essay imploring people to call their Congressmembers this week to force/shame them to vote against renewing the Patriot Act? I have not seen anyone in media direct the public to take this small but important action. Everyone who cares about liberty should call their representatives this week and tell them to not renew Patriot Act or bulk collection in any form. And thanks Senator Paul!
Thank you Ed, I love you man!