Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features soul singer James Carr. Enjoy!
James Carr - Pouring Water on A Drowning Man
"We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy."
-- Henry Miller
News and Opinion
[Editor's Note: Joe is on vacation this week and we'll be bringing the news section from the What's Happenin' series to Evening Blues while he's gone. Hope everyone is doing well this evening. -- joanneleon ]
Fantastic news.
Stop-and-Frisk Practice Violated Rights, Judge Rules
In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.
In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would appeal the ruling, angrily accusing the judge of deliberately not giving the city “a fair trial.”
[...]
The stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, according to the 195-page decision.
[...]
The Supreme Court had long ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were constitutionally permissible under certain conditions, and Judge Scheindlin stressed that she was “not ordering an end to the practice.” But she said that changes were needed to ensure that the street stops were carried out in a manner that “protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much needed police protection.”
Q. & A.: Edward Snowden Speaks to Peter Maass
In the course of reporting his profile of Laura Poitras, Peter Maass conducted an encrypted question-and-answer session, for which Poitras served as intermediary, with Edward J. Snowden. Below is a full transcript of that conversation.
Peter Maass: Why did you seek out Laura and Glenn, rather than journalists from major American news outlets (N.Y.T., W.P., W.S.J. etc.)? In particular, why Laura, a documentary filmmaker?
Edward Snowden: After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power — the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government — for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.
Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the faceof withering personal criticism, and resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious choice.
NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens' emails and phone calls
Exclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans' communications
The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), [...] The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as "incidental collection" in surveillance parlance.
But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals' communications.
[...]
Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, has obliquely warned for months that the NSA's retention of Americans' communications incidentally collected and its ability to search through it has been far more extensive than intelligence officials have stated publicly. Speaking this week, Wyden told the Guardian it amounts to a "backdoor search" through Americans' communications data.
Adam Gabbatt goes through the president's statements over the past eight weeks.
'Nobody is listening to your calls': Obama's evolution on NSA surveillance
A brief history of the president's position on NSA reforms since first commenting on the surveillance revelations in June
Friday 7 June
In his first remarks since the Guardian and the Washington Post's revelations, Obama gave a frank rebuttal to privacy concerns. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president said when asked about the NSA. [...]
Monday 17 June
[...] "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not," Obama said. [...]
Tuesday 6 August
[...] "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful." [...]
Among the "four specific steps" that Pres. Obama announced last Friday " designed to ensure that the American people can trust that our efforts are in line with our interests and our values." Note the things that are bolded.
Remarks by the President in a Press Conference (August 9, 2013)
Fourth, we’re forming a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies. We need new thinking for a new era. We now have to unravel terrorist plots by finding a needle in the haystack of global telecommunications. And meanwhile, technology has given governments -- including our own -- unprecedented capability to monitor communications.
So I am tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities -- particularly our surveillance technologies. And they’ll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy -- particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public. And they will provide an interim report in 60 days and a final report by the end of this year, so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy, and our foreign policy.
[Emphasis added]
emptywheel picks up on the the fact that the words "outside" and "independent" have disappeared from the order to create this review board, and in Clapper's announcement that he will create this group. Everything about this review group goes through Clapper.
This Independent Technical Review Group Brought to You By the Booz Allen Hamilton Director of National Intelligence™
In the memo Obama just released ordering James Clapper to form such a committee, those words “outside” and “independent” disappear entirely.
The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013. [my emphasis]
And neither Obama nor the Intelligence Committees get to hear from this Group themselves. It all goes through James Clapper.
Will Wheaton has 2.3 million followers on Twitter.
Yesterday, we saw the statements from Rep. Amash and Sensenbrenner about how bogus the intelligence briefings are. On Friday, the Obama administration released a 22-page white paper on "the legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act" as promised in his press conference. emptywheel analyzed that white paper and said that a key part of their claim that the dragnet is legal is that Congress was notified. But it turns out that the House Intelligence committee did not notify most of the freshman Congress members elected in 2010.
65 2010 House Freshmen Re-Authorized PATRIOT with No Notice of Section 215 Dragnet
The Administration claims it informed Congress about the dragnet. But whether acting on his own or at the behest of the Administration, Mike Rogers left a sufficiently large group in the dark so as to negate the validity of that claim. - See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/...
Spencer Ackerman has an article on the subject too, so Amash is speaking out to the press. I'm just really taken back by the rebellion against the Republican party leadership. I'm not surprised at the rebellion against the White House. So Amash speaks out, and Rush Holt, on the Democratic side, backs him up.
Intelligence committee withheld key file before critical NSA vote, Amash claims
Republican who led Congress revolt against surveillance insists members did not see document before 2011 Patriot Act vote
"We believe that making this document available to all members of Congress, as we did with a similar document in December 2009, is an effective way to inform the legislative debate about the reauthorization of Section 215," assistant attorney general Ronald Weich wrote to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House intelligence committee on February 2 2011. The hundreds of members of Congress who did not serve on the intelligence committee were to be told they could read the document in a secured facility.
But Amash claimed on his Facebook page that never happened.
"I can now confirm that the House permanent select committee on intelligence did not, in fact, make the 2011 document available to representatives in Congress," Amash wrote late Sunday, "meaning that the large class of representatives elected in 2010 did not receive either of the now declassified documents detailing these programs."
[...]
Amash speculated that congressional leaders and intelligence committee leaders were "concerned the Patriot Act would not pass" if the newer class of legislators knew about the NSA's bulk phone records collection. "In fact, the first time it was brought up, it was brought up under suspension, and it did not pass," Amash said.
Philip Bump of Atlantic Wire rips Chuck Todd while ranking the quality of the questions asked at Friday's press conference, and ranks his question last. He notes that one of the biggest honors a journalist can get is to be called on by the president during a big press conference on national TV.
The Obama Press Conference Questions, Ranked
Chuck Todd, man.
Chuck Todd got the second question at this presser and used it to ask if Obama and Putin can still work together if they aren't friends. Todd realizes, we assume, that the president is a grown human being and the leader of a nation and therefore probably is somewhat adept at working with people and / or resolving differences. Hey, Obama, can you get "stuff" done with Putin even if you aren't BFFs? This was question number two.
But that was the good part of the question. Chuck Todd, a person paid to ask incisive questions, asked the trolliest question perhaps in the history of White House questions: Is Edward Snowden a patriot?
What the fuck do you think the president is going to say? Of course the president will not say he thinks Edward Snowden, resident of Russia, is a patriot. Which Todd of course knew, and of course knew would get lots of pick-up among the media. And sure enough, everyone tweeted Obama's response, and now Chuck Todd gets to go on NBC News and tell everyone that, no, Obama doesn't think Snowden is a patriot and was know this because he, Chuck Todd, thought to ask. Had Obama, perhaps suffering from some impairment, said Snowden was a patriot, Todd would have been on every nightly news cast from now until the Sochi Olympics. There should be a name for this kind of trolly, reporter-can't-lose question, and it should not be named after Chuck Todd, since he'd only enjoy it.
Recent polling shows support for Snowden.
Edward Snowden is a patriot
While the administration certainly doesn’t believe Snowden is patriotic, Americans do. A Quinnipiac poll conducted this month found people agreed, 55 percent to 34 percent, that he is a whistleblower — a large margin that crossed party, gender and age lines. A recent Reuters poll showed only 31 percent of the public thought he should be prosecuted.
This is Bruce Schneier with a message to tech companies warning them that they will be ruined by this and the government will throw them under the bus, and already are doing that by not allowing them to explain themselves and continuing to gag them.
The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet
Technology companies have to fight for their users, or they'll eventually lose them.
I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.
It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they'll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they're sloppy. They'll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn't have a copy, the next whistleblower will.
[...]
Already companies are taking their data and communications out of the US.
[...]
But they can fight. You, an executive in one of those companies, can fight. You'll probably lose, but you need to take the stand. And you might win. It's time we called the government's actions what it really is: commandeering. Commandeering is a practice we're used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it's happening in peacetime. Vast swaths of the Internet are being commandeered to support this surveillance state.
[...]
So while I'm sure it's cool to have a secret White House meeting with President Obama -- I'm talking to you, Google, Apple, AT&T, and whoever else was in the room -- resist. Attend the meeting, but fight the secrecy. Whose side are you on?
The NSA isn't going to remain above the law forever. Already public opinion is changing, against the government and their corporate collaborators. If you want to keep your users' trust, demonstrate that you were on their side.
I think this is kind of naive because Big Tech execs are now in the club. If you doubt that, look at Google founder Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates and the think tanks they're involved with now. But still, it's worth a try. Because it is going to slowly wreck their businesses and that's something that just might get through to them.
We need Big Tech to protect us from Big Brother
Users have a right to expect technology firms to safeguard their privacy from state spying. Fixes like encryption are not enough
Technology companies: now is the moment when you must answer for us, your users, whether you are collaborators in the US government's efforts to "collect it all" – our every move on the internet – or whether you, too, are victims of its overreach.
[...]
We now know, thanks to Snowden, of at least three tiers of technology companies enmeshed in the NSA's hoovering of our net activity (we don't yet know whether the NSA has co-opted companies from the financial, retail, data services, and other industries):
(1) Internet platforms
[...]
(2) Communications brands
[...]
(3) Bandwidth providers
Schneiderman also owes the country an apology because he promised the country that if the task force turned out to be bogus he'd walk away and he'd talk about it. And he didn't. And look who caught them... those meddlesome investigative journalists again.
Eric Holder Owes the American People an Apology
We're not talking small differences here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 -- or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.
The government restated the statistics because it got caught red-handed by a couple of nosy reporters. Last October, two days after Holder first publicized the numbers, Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg of Bloomberg News broke the story that some of the cases included in the Justice Department's tally occurred before the initiative began in October 2011. At least one was filed more than two years before President Barack Obama took office.
[...]
This was the second time, mind you, that Holder's Justice Department had pulled a stunt like this. In December 2010, Holder held a press conference to tout a supposed sweep by the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called "Operation Broken Trust." (The mortgage-fraud program was part of the same task force.) As with the mortgage-fraud initiative, Broken Trust wasn’t actually a sweep. All the Justice Department did was lump together a bunch of small-fry, penny-ante fraud cases that had nothing to do with one another. Then it held a press gathering.
This is from Kimberly Dvorak, the journalist in San Diego who has been following up on the Michael Hastings case. Hastings' wife said he was working on a book about John Brennan before he died and that she is going to publish an article for her husband in Rolling Stone, soon.
In Dvorak's news report, the CIA confirms that Hastings was working on a story about Brennan. It was a "cordial working relationship", the spokesman said by phone (two prompt email responses and a phone call). A professor used video to calculate the speed of Hastings' car before the crash and said it was 35 mph, which contradicts what witnesses said. That is a drastic difference from the high speeds that were reported before.
There are a lot of details in this article and a video news report is included. Dvorak seems credible but I have one reservation. I'm cautious about Dvorak because Sgt. Joe Biggs posted something on Twitter about how she had misquoted him about the cremation story. He said that he had not told her that the family didn't request cremation but instead said that he wasn't sure if that was their request. I don't know if Dvorak ever corrected that.
CIA DIRECTOR BRENNAN CONFIRMED AS REPORTER MICHAEL HASTINGS NEXT TARGET
Last month a source provided San Diego 6 News with an alarming email hacked from super secret CIA contractor Stratfor’s President Fred Burton. The email (link here) was posted on WikiLeaks and alleged that then Obama counter-terrorism Czar Brennan, was in charge of the government's continued crackdown or witch-hunt on investigative journalists.
After providing the Stratfor email to the CIA for comment, the spymaster's spokesperson responded in lightning speed. Two emails were received; one acknowledging Hastings was working on a CIA story and the other said, “Without commenting on information disseminated by WikiLeaks, any suggestion that Director Brennan has ever attempted to infringe on constitutionally-protected press freedoms is offensive and baseless.”
This is the Stratfor email that Dvorak referred to (email dated September, 2010; posted on the Wikileaks site in September, 2012). She reported that one of Hastings' former colleagues at Project PM gave this to her.
Obama Leak Investigations (internal use only - pls do not forward)
Released on 2012-09-10 00:00 GMT
Email-ID 1210665
Date 2010-09-21 21:38:37
Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning
information from inside the beltway sources.
Note -- There is specific tasker from the WH to go after anyone printing
materials negative to the Obama agenda (oh my.) Even the FBI is
shocked. The Wonder Boys must be in meltdown mode...
The Evening Greens
UK urban meadows hope to help pollinators get buzzing
The project set out to investigate:
How does the pollinator biodiversity in urban areas compare with that of nature reserves and farmland?
Where are the hotspots of pollinator biodiversity in urban areas?
What can be done to improve pollinator diversity and abundance in urban areas?
"We can use that information to inform land managers and garden owners about what they could potentially plant," Dr Baldock told BBC News.
Obama Falls Short in Blunting Mountaintop Removal
Over the past several decades, coal companies have destroyed forests, brought down more than 500 mountains, polluted water, jeopardized public health and disrupted scores of communities through so-called mountain top removal. Environmentalists who have studied the geological carnage left by all this blasting and earth removal refer to it as “surface mining on steroids.”
[...]
Environmentalists once had high hopes the Obama administration would sharply curb or stop mountaintop removal. But administration victories have been few and far between.
And environmental groups that have battled the coal industry’s worst mining and reclamation practices for years are dubious Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency can do much more than slow the issuance of surface mining permits by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and state agencies.
Forest fragmentation leading to higher extinction rates
The world's species are in worse trouble than widely-assumed, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which reevaluates how scientists estimate extinction rates. The new model takes into account the impact of forest fragmentation on extinction rates for the first time, filling in a gap in past estimates. Much of the world's tropical forests, which house the bulk of the world's species, have been whittled down to fragments: small forest islands that no longer connect to larger habitat. According to the paper, species confined to fragments have a higher likelihood of vanishing.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
A Little Night Music
James Carr - She's Better Than You
James Carr - At the dark end of the street
James Carr - These Ain't Raindrops
James Carr - You got my mind Messed Up
James Carr I Don't Want To Be Hurt
James Carr - Freedom Train
James Carr - Search Your Heart
Stronger Than Love - James Carr
James Carr - Lovable Girl
James Carr - These Arms Of Mine
James Carr - I'm Gonna Send You Back To Georgia
James Carr - Dixie Belle
James Carr - Love Attack
James Carr-A Losing Game
Where's Waldo Joe?
On the Hudson River?
At a Lighthouse on the Hudson?
Gathering information?
Somewhere underground?
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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