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Such sad news.
Greenwald.
This week in press freedoms and privacy rights
The travesty calling itself "the Bradley Manning court-martial", the kangaroo tribunal calling itself "the FISA court", and the emptiness of what the Obama DOJ calls "your constitutional rights"
At this point, that seems to be the feature, not a bug. Anyone looking for much more serious leaks than the one that Manning produced which ended up attracting the interest of bin Laden should be looking here. The Obama White House yesterday told Russia that it must not persecute "individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption" - as Bradley Manning faces life in prison for alerting the world to the war abuses and other profound acts of wrongdoing he discovered and as the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers rolls on. That lecture to Russia came in the context of White House threats to cancel a long-planned meeting over the Russian government's refusal to hand over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US to face espionage charges.
(2) The kangaroo tribunal calling itself "the FISA court" yesterday approved another government request (please excuse the redundancy of that phrase: "the FISA court approved the government's request").
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(3) In response to our NSA reporting, several groups, including the ACLU and EFF, filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the US government's spying programs. A federal court yesterday heard arguments in the suit brought by the ACLU, and the Obama DOJ asked the court to dismiss it on several grounds, including that it "cannot be challenged in a court of law".
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(4) Speaking of the Obama DOJ attempting to block judicial adjudication of the legality of its actions: a different federal judge heard a lawsuit yesterday challenging the constitutionality of Obama's extra-judicial killings by drones of three American citizens, including the 16-year-old American-born Abdulrahaman Awlaki [...] Re-read that last line, as it's the Obama administration in a nutshell: of course you have those pretty rights, dear citizens. It's just that nobody can enforce them or do anything to us when we violate them. But you do have them, and they're really, really important, and we do value them so very highly, and President Obama will deliver another really majestic speech soon in front of the Constitution about how cherished and valued they are.
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Court Tells Reporter to Testify in Case of Leaked C.I.A. Data
WASHINGTON — In a major ruling on press freedoms, a divided federal appeals court on Friday ruled that James Risen, an author and a reporter for The New York Times, must testify in the criminal trial of a former Central Intelligence Agency official charged with providing him with classified information.
In a 118-page set of opinions, two members of a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., ruled that the First Amendment does not protect reporters who receive unauthorized leaks from being forced to testify against the people suspected of leaking to them. A district court judge who had ruled in Mr. Risen’s case had said that it did.
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Mr. Risen has vowed to go to prison rather than testify about his sources and to carry any appeal as far as the Supreme Court. But some legal specialists said an appeal to the full appeals court was a likely first step. Mr. Risen referred a request to comment to his lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, who wrote in an e-mail: “We are disappointed by and disagree with the court’s decision. We are currently evaluating our next steps.”
Judge Roger Gregory, the third member of the panel, filed a vigorous dissent, portraying his colleagues’ decision as “sad” and a serious threat to investigative journalism.
Kind of bizarre to see the people of Cairo at a dance party with their military. Seeing things like this make me also think about why the Obama admin. felt they had to destroy the Occupy movement and the public squares where they assembled -- squares where everyone knew where to go to assemble.
Dance Party in Tahrir Square
Even I know enough not to put that data on any computer with a connection to the net, and I don't know that much about the cyber security industry. I'm surprised that so called experts in the IC are spreading this rumor about the Chinese and Russians hacking Snowden's computers. Assange, if I remember correctly, sent out an encrypted torrent file and thousands of people around the world had/have it but do not have the key to open it. It's just silly to think that Snowden is sitting there connected to the net with that data on a hackable computer. If it were me, I'd also have it on servers around the world and it would require some kind of signal from me to stay hidden, otherwise a script would kick in and send the files to hundreds of people and media organizations if I did not show up and give the signal for some period of time. Maybe that's what a dead man's switch is, I'm not sure of the meaning of that term.
What If Snowden's Laptops Hold No Secrets?
The NSA leaker insists he'll never give classified data to the Russians. He may be telling the truth.
But there's a third possibility: that Snowden is telling the truth. That there really is no way for him to give up any more information, other than the stuff in his head. Snowden may have left the United States with "four computers that enabled him to gain access to some of the U.S. government's most highly-classified secrets," as the Guardian put it. But he may not have those secrets now. The laptops could very well be empty -- and the secrets could be somewhere else.
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Of course, the best way to keep that information from being compromised is not to have it at all.
The closer you look at the "four laptops" story, the more it seems like a ruse designed to keep spies in Washington and Moscow guessing. Why would Snowden need four computers to carry the NSA data when a portable hard drive the size of a hand can carry terabytes of information? [...]
The smarter play would be to give someone else that leverage -- to let one of Snowden's interlocutors, like Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras, hold on to the data. Or to split it up among a dozen different players. Snowden's team says they've already engineered a kind of digital dead man's switch, which can release a torrent of sensitive information in case the United States engages in "extremely rogue behavior," as Greenwald puts it. The metaphorical switch is designed to be flipped in Snowden's absence, not his presence.
If you didn't already feel like you were in the Twilight Zone...
NSA Phone Snooping Cannot Be Challenged in Court, Feds Say
The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the “public interest,” does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.
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The New York federal district court lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a federal judge immediately halt the spy program the civil rights group labeled as “one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government.”
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“… the alleged metadata program is fully consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Most fundamentally, the program does not involve “searches” of plaintiffs’ persons or effects, because the collection of telephony metadata from the business records of a third-party telephone service provider, without collecting the contents of plaintiffs’ communications, implicates no ‘legitimate expectation of privacy’ that is protected by the Constitution,” (.pdf) David S. Jones, an assistant United States attorney, wrote U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley in a Thursday filing.
Because the Fourth Amendment is not breached, it follows that the First Amendment is not violated either, Jones wrote.
This really is a big dose of reality. Both Jay and Hedges agree that this massive surveillance state is a preparation for the inevitable backlash of the 99%, rising up. This is part of a longer interview with Hedges, who is a scary dude, and what he says makes too much sense to dismiss him, but so many people do.
Chris Hedges: "America is a Tinderbox"
On Reality Asserts Itself, Paul Jay asks Chris Hedges if the American Left bears responsibility for the weakness of the mass movement; Hedges says the gravest mistake of the left is not articulating a viable vision of socialism - Pt. 4 of 7
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