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Bart Gellman published a huge story in the Washington Post about how the NSA is tracking the location of cell phones. This includes mobile phones of Americans, but since it's illegal to collect location data deliberately, they collect it "incidentally". We'll see that word a lot in the near future. We've seen it a lot in the past, including from Clapper in his infamous question and answer segment with Wyden. Our government has the ability to legally retain and use data collected "incidentally". But what if "incidentally" actually means "purposely"?
The article says that location data is tracked on "at least hundreds of millions of devices". Are there hundreds of millions of terrorists? What's going on? It also looks like Keith Alexander lied, really big time, to Congress about location data. I don't see how he stays in that job after these latest revelations. I fully expect that he'll resign soon.
New documents have been published and new codenames for NSA programs revealed.
NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
[...]
Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”
The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate.
[...]
Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit describes the challenges of tracking customers who use two different mobile networks, saying it would be hard to correlate a user on the T-Mobile network with one on Verizon. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus. There is no evidence that either company cooperates with the NSA, and both declined to comment.
[...]
A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations.
Companion story.
The NSA says it ‘obviously’ can track locations without a warrant. That’s not so obvious.
"It's incredibly rich data, which is why they want it so bad," says Richardson. Because everyone was using landlines when Smith v. Maryland was decided, getting metadata didn't mean getting information about whenever a cellphone connected to which tower or transmitted GPS coordinates to a provider. So back then, location tracking was a much more onerous affair, requiring so many resources it was only used for the most serious investigations. Given these new capabilities, Richardson calls Smith v. Maryland "way out of date," adding "it was before cellphones, before the Internet, before services that collect intensely personal information."
And there's some reason to believe that a majority of the current Supreme Court justices might agree with her on the location data aspect of metadata. The most recent Supreme Court case involving location tracking, United States v. Jones was settled on narrow trespassing grounds in 2012. But five Supreme Court justices signed on to concurring opinions that questioned whether Smith v. Maryland holds up in the face of modern technology. An opinion concurring in judgment with the Jones decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan specifically noted the prevalence of smartphones and argued that "the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy."
A separate concurring opinion from a fifth justice, Sonia Sotomayor made many of the same arguments, saying "fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties" -- and even went further by arguing that "awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms."
Marcy Wheeler.
Why NSA Can’t Count How Many Americans’ Cell Location They Collect
One thing the NSA has learned through experience with John Bates and FISC is that if you claim you don’t know you’ve collected US person data, a judge will not declare it legal. But if you admit you’ve collected US person data, then that same judge may threaten you with sanctions or force you to purge your data.
So there’s a very good reason why it’s “awkward” for NSA “to try to provide any specific numbers.” Doing so would probably make the collection illegal.
MP: "You and I were both born outside this country but I love this country. Do you love this country?"
It's the British equivalent of the House UnAmerican Activities committee.
Rusbridger grilled by MPs
OMG OMG the 99% and populism is "
disastrous". How much more clueless and tone deaf can these guys get? What, your Third Way (or perhaps the snarky and a bit juvenile "Turd Way" is spot on in this case) propaganda campaign for the past five years failed miserably and now you're coming out from behind the curtain with threats and warnings after you and your policies left the D party in a steaming pile of wreckage, having a little freak out? And you know, these third way guys sound really familiar. They sound exactly like some of the most vicious "pragmatic" progressives I've encountered here for years. I guess they've been drinking that Third Way koolaid. Or something.
Disastrous? Disastrous for whom? The craziest thing about this is that it's not even disastrous for billionaires. Well it might be disastrous for a few of them if they are prosecuted for even a tiny fraction of the crimes they've committed and the catastrophic damage they've done to so many people. Here's another way in which the influence of the Occupy movement persists. As we now know, most of these guys are bankers or magnates in the FIRE industry, lurking behind the curtains of power in the establishment Democratic party, pretending to be the party of the people. It's a clever game that they play. They're about as Democratic as Lloyd Blankfein, the guy who does "God's work" and who offers his sage advice to the world. At this point, the good will and the credibility of the party of FDR has been used up by the poseurs and crooks. Nobody thinks it's the party of the working person anymore. The working person has been crippled, the unions are in a shambles, a huge percentage of the good jobs have outsourced, anything that isn't nailed down is in the process of being stolen or outsourced or offshored. The income inequality has continued to grow under the faux populist president indebted to the 1% and they've become so brazen about it that they spent more than $1.5 billion to keep him in office to continue to serve them. The hilarious thing is that right after this op-ed damning populist policies, their man went out and gave a populist speech! Did they get their synchronization messed up or something. Was the speech supposed to come before the op-ed? Or is the faux populist president trying to break away from his bankrollers and they're using the media to put pressure on him? It's hard to know. The theater of pretenders gets more and more complicated, I suspect.
These guys depend on that curtain though. One of the most critical things for the security and success of the 1% is to keep the two corporate parties in place and under their control. They have gained so much power and control over the past decade that they had become brazen, almost reckless, in their naked display of power. They really seemed to think that they had things wrapped up. But, like the Saudis, for instance, they are seriously paranoid. The de Blasios and the Warrens, the Amash-Conyers coalitions, the Occupy movement who made people hate the poor banker criminals and who just wont' go away even after you crush them and paint them as terrorists, this damned internet and new media thing that can't be kept down quickly enough for them to buy it all up and control it, and these game changer Snowden files and whistleblowers who will risk their lives -- is making them seriously uncomfortable.
Third Way Warns Democrats That Running On Popular Economic Positions Would Be 'Disastrous'
Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of the supposed think tank Third Way have taken to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal Tuesday to offer the nation another dose of the hyper-timid incrementalist nonsense for which they're best known. Their case this time involves income inequality, and how trying to ameliorate it is a crazy-dangerous thing for an elected politician to attempt.
At issue here is the fact that New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both Democrats, recently won elections rather handily -- and Warren herself is popular enough nationally to give her "2016 election buzz." These Third Way super-geniuses have assayed the electoral success of these two figures and concluded that their overall message is "bad" for Democrats, because it's based on a "we can have it all fantasy."
[...]
But hey, do you want to expand Social Security? According to Cowan and Kessler, you might as well shoot yourself in your very own face, because it's "exhibit A of this populist political and economic fantasy."
The deadline for the post shutdown zombie Catfood Committee approaches and we've heard almost nothing about what their plan is. I find that disconcerting. The whole world was focused on the budget process here and the shutdown when the president, the political establishment and the corporate media decided it was something that required 24/7 coverage. And then after it was resolved by postponement, it disappeared from the news. It was apocalyptic, apparently, while the news coverage and all the politicians were focused on it. And then, even though nothing was resolved, it disappeared from the news, and it has stayed disappeared. We're now one week and one day away from the new Catfood Committee deadline and hardly anyone is even talking about it and when they do talk about it, they're frantically reassuring the public (and the activist groups) that it won't be a Grand Bargain, a term that's now so toxic that politicians panic whenever it's mentioned.
One of the goals of the austerity agenda is to lower the corporate tax rate as part of a major tax reform overhaul, simplifying and flattening the tax code. The latter is a decades old goal of the conservatives. In these times, it's just mind blowing that they are considering lowering corporate tax rates. Some significant number of the largest corps end up paying no taxes at all. And lowering corp tax rates is not stimulus. This study lays it down in black and white. Another staple in the austerity mongers diet is gone, just like the bogus R&R spreadsheet analysis.
Lower Corporate Taxes Do Not Equal More Jobs
There is more evidence today that in the real world, lower corporate taxes don’t lead to higher job creation.
In fact, most of the “job creators” in today’s economy are paying some of the highest corporate taxes, while the companies that are paying little or nothing in corporate taxes are the ones that are slashing their payrolls.
That’s the core finding of a report released today by the Center for Effective Government, “The Corporate Tax Rate Debate: Lower Taxes on Corporate Profits Not Linked to Job Creation.”
The numbers are clear. In an examination of 60 large, profitable U.S. corporations, 22 out of 30 companies that paid corporate tax rates of 30 percent or more created almost 200,000 jobs between 2008 and 2012. Thirty corporations that paid little or nothing in taxes during that period showed a net loss of more than 51,000 jobs.
What the conservatives are saying about a potential deal by the Dec. 13 deadline:
Optimism Persists for Budget Deal. Is It Real?
Under the current strategy being discussed, if the 29 conferees agree on a path forward—and a majority of representatives on the panel from both parties would have to approve it—Congress could pass a budget “blueprint” in the form of a “conference report.” That agreement does not have to be signed by the president, but it will be pitched as Congress having reached a deal to avoid another government shutdown on Jan. 15.
But that isn’t the whole story. Over the Christmas break, appropriators from both chambers will devise their spending bills—either as separate measures or a larger, omnibus bill—for anticipated passage when Congress reconvenes in early January. That would also be the vehicle for undoing the next round of sequester cuts.
It is likely that a second bill will also be devised laying out new fees or fee hikes to replace the sequester spending reductions. The concern is that some lawmakers who approved of the budget “blueprint” may not support separate legislation increasing fees, particularly those that hit certain favored constituencies, leaving appropriators without the funds to carry out the larger budget agreement.
Lori Montgomery at WaPo. Grain of salt. But with unemployment extensions hanging out there, well, remember the fiscal cliff and the excuses made by Democrats about the unemployment extensions? Just once, I'd like to see them call the Republicans' bluff on things like this and let them get the blowback. They've proven that calling their bluff works, with the shutdown, and the Dems declared victory and said the R party was left in a smoldering heap after that move. This article has the feel of preparing the public for a cave.
Congressional GOP may be willing to let emergency unemployment benefits lapse
The conference panel, headed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), was closing in on a deal to avoid another government shutdown in January and ease the sharp spending cuts known as the sequester, according to senior aides in both parties.
The potential agreement still faces significant hurdles, including continued requests by Republicans for cuts to Medicaid, Democrats said. But if the plan comes together, senior Republicans said it would provide at least $45 billion in fresh funds to the Pentagon and other agencies in the current fiscal year and push the spending cap for all agencies over $1.015 trillion in fiscal 2015.
In theory, the cost of those increases would be more than covered by raising a variety of fees and trimming contributions to retirement benefits for federal workers. Aides said that negotiators were still struggling to lock down details, but that House leaders were pressing for a deal by the end of this week.
Paul Ryan, Patty Murray closer to small-scale budget deal, plus more Tuesday reads
Leaders of the congressional budget conference are considering a small-scale deal to set spending levels and replace “sequester” cuts for the next two years, Politico reports. Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, and Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, are eyeing a plan that would replace automatic cuts to some of the programs most burdened by the sequester with savings in other areas.
Politico.
Paul Ryan’s bipartisan budget moment?
It's amazing how the Ds, Rs and the beltway media is going to great lengths to say how "paltry" "unimpressive" and small this deal will be, presumably because "grand bargain" is such a toxic term now and because they're all worried about their approval numbers, with an election within a year from now. But with unemployment benefits, the Medicare doc fix and a shutdown hanging out there, not included in the deal, who knows what could happen on Christmas or New Year's Eve (again). But they seem to be really concerned about their image at the moment. Ryan is going for cuts to federal employee retirement benefits and at least for the moment, we seem to have convinced them that their grand bargain idea is toxic. We'll see. We've also heard recently that the Fix the Debt and austerity crowd is still getting significant funding for their lobbying.
In a sign of just how paltry this deal will be, it will almost certainly leave aside an extension of unemployment benefits, a fix to the formula by which doctors get reimbursed for treating Medicare patients and a boost in the federal minimum wage — three issues that members of both parties would like to see resolved before Congress adjourns for the year.
[...]
“The big grand bargain is not going to happen. We’re going to take this with baby steps if we get anything and explain how we’re slowly solving the problem,” said Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of the Ryan-Murray budget conference committee. “In a football season, there’s Hail Marys and then you got four yards and a cloud of dust. It’s not as exciting, and it sure does score touchdowns eventually.”
One senior Senate aide close to the negotiations said, “Democrats won’t get revenue through closing tax loopholes and Republicans won’t get spending cuts through Medicare and Social Security cuts. So, [the deal is being crafted around] basically a bunch of fee increases and other assorted stuff.”
If these is an accurate assessment, the sudden change toward the Saudis and Israelis on Iran and Syria makes a lot more sense.
Will China's Rise Lead To War?
Mearsheimer does not think that China wants war but he believes that some kind of armed conflict will arise because some smaller state, likely then backed by the Unites States, will provoke a crisis. This he believes will happen sooner rather than later because China is still growing and taking it on while it is relatively weaker now is easier and less risky:
[T]here is no way that China can avoid scaring its neighbors and the US as it gets very powerful, just because it will be so big and will have so much military capability. When states look at other states and try to determine how threatening they are, they invariably focus on their capabilities, not their intentions, because you cannot know intentions. Nobody can know what China's intentions will be in the decades ahead. But the mere fact that China is getting increasingly powerful and may someday become even more powerful than the US is naturally going to scare all the neighbors and the US.
Mearsheimer thinks that the very militarized U.S. "pivot to Asia" will be bigger than many envision for now.
Yeah, and maybe this has something to do with that sudden change of heart. Bravo, all you Libyan "humanitarian interventionists". Bravo!
Libyan assembly votes to follow Islamic law
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya's national assembly voted on Wednesday to make sharia, Islamic law, the basis of all legislation and for state institutions in a decision that may impact banking, criminal and financial laws.
Libyan cities face blackouts soon due to protests -state media Reuters
Two years after the NATO-backed uprising that ousted Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is still in messy transition with no new constitution and its temporary assembly caught in deadlock between an Islamist party and political rivals.
More from Moon of Alabama who has been amazingly accurate on the Syria story, for more than a year now.
Syria: Instead Of Courting Islamist White House Should Talk With Assad
U.S. officials are talking with commanders of new Islamic Front in Syria pretending that it is now the "moderate" alternative to Al-Qaeda [...]
This is of [course] pure nonsense. The main groups that formed the Islamic Front are Liwa al-Tawhid and Ahrar al-Sham both of which are regularly sharing resources and cooperating with the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al- Nusra and the Islamic State of of Iraq and the Sham. They have the same roots and were formed before the early protests in Syria started. Both have also been implicated in several pogroms against Syrians people who do not agree with their Sharia driven program.
Wow, even the NYT is coming around. Of course it can be a convenient narrative similar to DiFi's and Mike Rogers' recent statements about the rise of terrorism too. And I'm pretty sure that second paragraph I've excerpted is saying that we might start attacking some of the jihadists. Now would that put us in a situation where we're fighting with AQ groups fighting us with our own weapons and/or weapons that we or our allies put in their hands or that got into their hands via other "rebel" groups? Isn't this exactly what those who warned against arming the Syrian rebels were worried about?
Crazy. A couple of months ago we were going to bomb Assad in order to change the balance of power in favor of the rebels and jihadist groups. Now we're considering attacking the jihadist groups. Maybe the "Al Qaeda's Air Force" criticisms sunk in.
Ryan Crocker is making sense but Moon of A says the O Team is still not listening to him. And just to clarify, though I suspect you know this already, I'm shaking my head at these developments but that's because of the past craziness and the fact that the changes are so sudden. I'd love to know whose policy advice has been scrapped and whose is now being respected and I think these are positive developments, though I'm sure a lot of face saving consultants are working overtime.
Jihadist Groups Gain in Turmoil Across Middle East
WASHINGTON — Intensifying sectarian and clan violence has presented new opportunities for jihadist groups across the Middle East and raised concerns among American intelligence and counterterrorism officials that militants aligned with Al Qaeda could establish a base in Syria capable of threatening Israel and Europe.
[...]
Some analysts and American officials say the chaos there could force the Obama administration to take a more active role to stave off potential threats among the opposition groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But striking at jihadist groups in Syria would pose formidable political, military and legal obstacles, and could come at the cost of some kind of accommodation — even if only temporary or tactical — with Mr. Assad’s brutal but secular government, analysts say.
[...]
“We need to start talking to the Assad regime again” about counterterrorism and other issues of shared concern, said Ryan C. Crocker, a veteran diplomat who has served in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.”
Forgot to mention this yesterday. I had forgotten that Bernstein scolded Greenwald on the cable news shows back in the summer. He's showing support for Rusbridger an The Guardian now, which is really important, I think, because it reminds the world that Woodward and Bernstein were whistleblowers too. Same goes for Ellsberg and perhaps even more so since he was pursued by the state who prosecuted him.
An open letter from Carl Bernstein to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger
Watergate scandal journalist's letter comes as Guardian editor prepares to appear before MPs over Edward Snowden leaks
Indeed, generally speaking, the record of journalists, in Britain and the United States in handling genuine national security information since World War II, without causing harm to our democracies or giving up genuine secrets to real enemies, is far more responsible than the over-classification, disingenuousness, and (sometimes) outright lying by a series of governments, prime ministers and presidents when it comes to information that rightly ought to be known and debated in a free society. Especially in recent years
[...]
As we have learned following the recent disclosures initiated by Mr Snowden, intelligence agencies – especially the NSA in the United States – have assiduously tried to avoid and get around such oversight, been deliberately unforthcoming and oftentimes disingenuous with even the highest government authorities that are supposed to supervise their activities and prevent abuse.
That is the subject of the rightful and necessary public debate that is now taking place in the US, the UK and elsewhere.
As you know, I'm leery of the NSFW crew nowadays, given the sleezy way they've targeted Greenwald and Omidyar. They are now part of Pando Daily. David Sirota seems like a misfit there and he has done an article that focuses on Greenwald and Gellman, in order to illustrate how much the media world has changed and how the balance of power between the content producer and the media establishment has changed. It's a good read.
The journalist who hacked the old system
As a labor-management equation, all of this colluded to give the oligopolies’ owners enormous leverage over content producers. Simply put, because information’s newsworthiness and reach was disproportionately based on the perceived significance of its publisher, any journalist hoping for his big scoop to reach the audience it deserved was nonetheless at the mercy of the oligopolies’ shortcomings and agendas. In hypothetical Watergate terms, if for ideological reasons, the oligopoly didn’t want to mess with Richard Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein would have had few alternative routes to breaking their blockbuster story in such a powerful way.
[...]
At the same time as all of this was happening, oligopolies’ hidden agendas meant that major scoops were withheld in ideological deference to the very government officials those oligopolies claimed to be objectively covering. Ultimately, it all created an anti-meritocratic dynamic in journalism that probably hurt news quality in ways we will never fully know (how many Watergates were never reported?).
[...]
Thus, when from outside the oligopoly, a swashbuckling muckraker like Greenwald drops huge stories in multiple outlets, and those stories keep going global without the involvement of the gatekeeping oligopoly, these players go apeshit on him. They see him not merely as an intrepid journalist, but even more as a kind of Teddy Roosevelt-esque trust-buster representing the end of oligopoly and the beginning of a new reality. And that scares the crap out of the old order.
[...]
That said, as someone whose multi-outlet success proves that content producers in the digital age can now have some modicum of leverage over individual media investors/owners, Greenwald’s assertion that he and his team will have editorial independence should be taken seriously. It shouldn’t be trusted without verification — but it shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed either.
A very good article on the Privacy SOS blog by @onekade. As I was saying in joe shikspack's
Evening Blues diary last night, a conversation with my college-aged son last night has left me worried about the millennials' llack of concern about the surveillance state. I'm hoping that they give some more consideration to the evidence that a broad behavioral happens to populations who know they're being watched.
The captive mind and the new American authoritarianism
Those of us who are concerned about these Terror-related developments inside the 'western' democracies would do well to revisit mid-20th century literature about the cancerous effect authoritarianism has on the individual, her intellectual and artistic production, and her society. Lithuanian-Polish poet and author Czeslaw Milosz' famous book about humanity under the influence of authoritarianism, 'The Captive Mind', is a great place to start.
[...]
"I was considering researching a book about civil defense preparedness during the Cold War: what were the expectations on the part of Americans and the government? What would have happened if a nuclear conflagration had taken place? What contingency plans did the government have? How did the pall of imminent disaster affect Americans? But as a result of recent articles about the NSA, I decided to put the idea aside because, after all, what would be the perception if I Googled ‘nuclear blast,’ ‘bomb shelters,’ ‘radiation,’ ‘secret plans,’ ‘weaponry,’ and so on? And are librarians required to report requests for materials about fallout and national emergencies and so on? I don’t know."
"I feel that increased government surveillance has had a chilling effect on my research, most of which I do on the Internet. This includes research on issues such as the drug wars and mass incarceration, which people don’t think about as much as they think about foreign terrorism, but is just as pertinent."
The MIT surveillance video used against Aaron Swartz is now public
Thanks to the diligence of Wired editor Kevin Poulsen, new information about the criminal investigation against 26-year-old activist Aaron Swartz has been released to the public. The files, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include an MIT video of Swartz that was used as evidence in the case against him.
The Secret Service spearheaded an investigation against Swartz in 2011 that led to computer hacking and wire fraud charges. Two years later, financially ruined and still facing the possibility of many years behind bars, Swartz hanged himself in his New York apartment.
Poulsen’s original FOIA request to the U.S. government was filed in February, just over a month after Swartz’s death. The Secret Service refused Poulsen’s initial request, but he stuck to his guns and filed an administrative appeal.
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.
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