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Rest in peace, Michael Hastings. If that's not possible, haunt the heck out of them and help the truth come out. Thanks for everything you have done and for the example you have set for other young journalists.
"Michael Mahon Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, writer and reporter for BuzzFeed.
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Hastings died in a single-vehicle automobile crash in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in the early morning of June 18, 2013."
Rick Perlsteing is having another pity party and has joined the club of people who discredit themselves while trying to discredit Glenn Greenwald. This time, he's upset that @therealpriceman called him out on Twitter. He says that all of this is having no emotional effect on him and then proceeds to write an interminably long article about himself and the people who are mean to him.
On Glenn Greenwald and His Fans
Luckily, for whatever reason, stuff like this has next to no emotional effect on me. The way I look at it, the work I’m blessed to be able to do affords me a cascade of privileges—attention, respect and a middle-class income; all that for safe, dry, indoor work; the grace of spending my days honoring the wellsprings of creativity churning inside me; near-constant affectionate avowals from strangers who trust that the things I tap out on my laptop have afforded them some measure of meaning, pleasure or understanding; that the small quantum of stupid stuff that comes my way never much penetrates. Thanks to this thick skin, I read all my comments.
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If that’s good enough for Glenn, well, then, fine. Me, I’d rather not see him discredit himself. And that’s what’s happening. It’s happening even among those who want to be his supporters. As one of them wrote on Facebook, “Here’s the thing: I suspect Perlstein, Charles Pierce, Dave Niewert and I—to mention the commenters here I’ve actually met—could have a spirited exchange about these issues, maybe even change each others’ minds somewhat. That can’t happen with Greenwald, whom I’ve never met, becuase the FIRST thing he does out of the box is accuse anyody who disagrees with him of bad faith. That not only makes him a poor advocate, it weakens one’s trust in his reporting.”
He’s losing friends. Soon, his friends, and his luck, may run out.
What was the terrible abuse that @therealpriceman threw at Rick?
“NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants cnet.co/1agOFCy via @CNET What say you, @RickPerlstein ?”
Oh the humanity!
From the evil, increasingly obscure and friendless Glenn Greenwald. Oh, and I watched a lot of this hearing yesterday. One of the biggest things I took away from it was this: there is no individual warrant when an NSA analyst decides to do a query into the surveillance data on a particular person. There is a broad warrant signed ahead of time by the FISA court. The analyst decides if the query meets the standards set in the FISA warrant. The queries are supposedly documented. Then the audits of the NSA are done by the NSA and the DoJ. The FISA court finds out at the end of the month how many queries were done, but are given no specifics. And FISA court is secret. This is the "probable cause" and warrant your president is telling you about.
Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process
Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise
Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA's massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders – beginning with President Obama - have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is "fully overseen" by "the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". Obama told Charlie Rose last night:
"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause."
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The specific guidelines submitted by the NSA to the Fisa court in July 2009 – marked Top Secret and signed by Attorney General Eric Holder – state that "NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person." It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination – including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases.
NSA surveillance is an attack on American citizens, says Noam Chomsky
Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population, says critic
"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population," he told the Guardian.
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"This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it," he said. "They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich."
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He praised the Guardian's revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency, and the whistleblower Ed Snowden, who has been taking refuge in Hong Kong. "We need this kind [of journalism]," he said. "We ought to know about it."
Amy Goodman mentions that Greenwald is back in Brazil.
Glenn Greenwald: As Obama Makes "False" Spy Claims, Snowden Risks Life to Spark NSA Debate
A product of Carol Rosenburg's determination.
FOIA suit reveals Guantánamo’s ‘indefinite detainees’
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Obama administration Monday lifted a veil of secrecy surrounding the status of the detainees at Guantánamo, for the first time publicly naming the four dozen captives it defined as indefinite detainees — men too dangerous to transfer but who cannot be tried in a court of law.
The names had been a closely held secret since a multi-agency task force sifted through the files of the Guantánamo detainees in 2009 trying to achieve President Barack Obama’s executive order to close the detention center. In January 2010, the task force revealed that it classified 48 Guantánamo captives as dangerous but ineligible for trial because of a lack of evidence, or because the evidence was too tainted.
They became so-called “indefinite detainees,” a form of war prisoner held under Congress’ 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.”
Heavy Violence Rains Down on Turkish Protesters
'The fear threshold has been broken'
The Turkish government launched violent raids, mass arrests, and torrents of tear gas and water cannon fire across the country Tuesday in an effort to quell the widespread uprisings against the ruling AKP party, now well into their third week.
Police are shooting water cannons filled with damaging chemicals, say Turkish protesters on a Wikileaks Forum showing photographs of demonstrators with burns across their legs and backs.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Tuesday that the crackdown will only grow from here, and his administration has declared the uprisings illegal.
Non-Violent Keystone XL Protestors Labeled 'Terrorists'
Don’t Worry MSNBC, Cable News Ratings Will Soon Be Irrelevant
The metric of the future will be web traffic, and the sooner the cable news networks realize it, the better.
As a younger demographic increasingly customizes its media consumption — moving away from TV and onto the internet — they will expect live news video to be streaming on their laptops and mobile devices, or else. And as that happens, the four-way cable news wars will continue to give way to a much broader competition on the web, pitting CNN against the Washington Post, Fox News against Breitbart, MSNBC against ThinkProgress, and so on.
All three of the biggest cable news networks are seeing growth online but they’re preparing in very different ways for web traffic’s inevitable rise as the Holy Grail of audience metrics.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
Crowd-Fund a Court Stenographer for Bradley Manning's Trial
The trial of Bradley Manning will have an enormous impact on press freedom and the rights of future whistleblowers. Help us crowd-fund enough donations so we can hire a court stenographer to take transcripts of the trial. The government refuses to make its transcripts available to the public.
Your donation to this project will be tax-deductible. You can also donate by check.
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