15 House Republicans Join The Democrats To Stand Up Against Encroachments By Big Brother

Do you remember what these 15 congresscritters have in common?

• Justin Amash (MI)
• Mo Brooks (AL)
• Mike Coffman (CO)
• Warren Davidson (OH)
• Jimmy Duncan (TN)
• John Faso (NY)
• Garret Graves (LA)
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)
• Walter Jones (NC)
• Tom McClintock (CA)
• Dave Reichert (WA)
• Mark Sanford (SC)
• Elise Stefanik (NY)
• Kevin Yoder (KS)
• Lee Zeldin (NY)

Yes, they are all Republicans. Some are crazy right-wing lunatics from the Freedom Caucus like Mo Brooks and Warren Davidson; some are libertarians like Walter Jones, Jimmy Duncan and Justin Amash; some are relatively mainstream conservatives like John Faso snd Jaime Herrera Beutler. Because of the nature of their districts, some are in precariously vulnerable positions for reelection, like Mike Coffman, and some are set-for-life, like Garret Graves. But all 15 crossed the aisle on March 28 of thise year to vote with every single Democrat against Jeff Flake's Joint Resolution-- which has since been signed into law by Trump-- to allow Internet providers to sell our personal online data to the highest bidders without our permission and, in fact, without even informing us.

That was insane for the Republicans-- regardless of how many of them took massive bribes from the internet providers-- to do. The bill passed narrowly, 215-205 and it makes every Republican, other than those 15, vulnerable on an issue millions American voters care very much about regardless of partisan politics.

Matt Coffay is a leader of Our Revolution in western North Carolina. He's running for Congress, taking on Freedom Caucus chieftain Mark Meadows, one of the Republicans who voted to allow Internet providers to sell our personal information to whoever wants to buy it. Matt disagrees with that vote. This morning he told us, "My position on internet privacy is much like that of Senator Bernie Sanders: your internet history belongs to you, and not to corporations. This isn't complicated, or radical. How can Republicans in Congress claim that they want government to stay out of people's lives, and then vote for a bill that allows people's private browsing data to be sold to the highest corporate bidder? This bill is a violation of our right to privacy, plain and simple."

David Gill is the progressive candidate for the IL-13 seat currently held by knee-jerk Republican Rodney Davis, who, of course, backed giving the Internet providers the green light to sell our personal information. David wasn't amused by his decision. "This vote represents yet another betrayal of his constituents by Rodney Davis: he took $49,000 from the telecom industry, and then he voted to allow those companies to sell your web browsing history to marketers and other third parties-- so much for privacy! I support undoing Citizens United & reforming campaign finance laws. When we take those steps, we'll have representatives who stand up for their constituents, rather than reps who sell out their constituents."

Three years before Flake wrote his Joint Resolution, Michael Gurnow wrote The Ed Snowden Affair, a book that tackles many of the issues the GOP legislation starkly brings up for Americans. Even back then, he wrote that "data brokers take their information, organize it into precise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook."

This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over the counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail. Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s pos- sessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

The surveillance debate has intensified since June 5 and lent new perspectives upon the concept of the safety technol- ogy can provide. The underlying political issue is who has the right to particular varieties of information.

The public believes there are two types of conversations, public and private. The intelligence community doesn’t agree. In the Internet Age, a person can “Like” the activity of fishing enough to let the world know by making it public knowledge on one’s Facebook profile. The individual can also choose to obtain a vanity Facebook URL by confidentially submitting one’s telephone number to the social networking site. The phone number is used for authorization purposes to verify the request is coming from the Facebook account holder. Though it is not placed online, the number is nonetheless (questionably) stored on the company’s servers. David Omand, former head of GCHQ, has no problem with collecting the publicly-known fact Bob likes fishing along with his cell number via Facebook’s FISC order permitting the U.S. government access to the information. For the watchers, there is no line dividing what an individual puts on the Internet and what people have privately entrusted to another party, be it a website, bank, doctor or telephone company.


Government spies also scoff at the notion of intellectual property rights. Bought-and-sold politicians agree. If something is publicly or privately posted online, it automatically becomes the property of the website’s owner. (This is also why most businesses permit and encourage employees to use their company-issued phones and email accounts for personal communications-- the firms have legal license to review an employee’s private network and communications, because they own the devices and programs and therefore the data on them.) It is an absurd proposition analogous to stating an individual surrenders rightful ownership of a vehicle to a bank when it is parked on property whose tenant has yet to pay the mortgage in full. This policy refuses to acknowledge the resources and labor provided by the Facebook account holder, i.e., the computer used to access the social networking site, time it took to create a profile and mental ingenuity in deciding how and what to say about oneself. It is understood that the website has issued the venue which, in turn, makes the information available worldwide but the skewed exchange undermines the statement that profiles are “free.” No profit sharing is offered the user. Without account holders, social networking sites would be empty voids on lonely servers and not multinational corporate affairs.

In the surveillance communities’ opinion, everything is public domain and no one has the right to ask “Do you mind?” to someone eavesdropping on a conversation. Their argument is that if a person doesn’t want what is being said to be known (by whomever), the individual best not speak at all. In the cloak-and-dagger world of data mining, the person having a discussion cannot reasonably expect privacy, because the individual is voicing one’s thoughts, period. It does not matter whether they are spoken in confidence and directed to a particular person, much like an email is addressed “To: Bob” and not “To: Bob; Bcc: The NSA.” If the speaker is naïve enough to say something at a volume where a microphone can detect it, it is de facto public knowledge. Whereas government surveillance only exchanges the recorded conversation with its own kind, corporate surveillance broadcasts the discussion to anyone who is willing to pay to hear it. In the surveillance world, the only guarantee of privacy is dead silence.


The U.S. government knows the difference but deliberately ignores it. It does not want a distinction to be made, because it would restrict its power and the power of those who fund political campaigns: defense contractors, telecoms, Internet companies, corporate retailers, fast food enterprises and mul- timillion-dollar data mining firms. The last thing the U.S. government or private business wants is account holders to have control over their own information.

How Do You Like People Selling Your Social Security Number Online?

I read The Edward Snowden Affair by Michael Gurnow a couple of years ago and did a dozen or so posts about it since then. I keep it handy as an important reference book, not because of the Edward Snowden "gossip," or because for the narrative of his fascinating and important story, but because it's chock full of crucial information pertaining to civil liberties. As the clock ticks down to the Trump-- or Trump-Putin-- takeover of the American government, there are important lessons in Gurnow's book, every American should be aware of. Like this one from the Afterward:

Data brokers take their information, organize it into concise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook. This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over-the-counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail.

Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s possessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”



The surveillance debate has intensified since June 5 and lent new perspectives upon the concept of the safety technology can provide. The underlying political issue is who has the right to particular varieties of information.

The public believes there are two types of conversations, public and private. The intelligence community doesn’t agree.

In the Internet Age, a person can “Like” the activity of fishing enough to let the world know by making it public knowledge on one’s Facebook profile. The individual can also choose to obtain a vanity Facebook URL by confidentially submitting one’s telephone number to the social networking site. The phone number is used for authorization purposes to verify the request is coming from the Facebook account holder. Though it is not placed online, the number is nonetheless (questionably) stored on the company’s servers. David Omand, former head of GCHQ, has no problem with collecting the publicly-known fact Bob likes fishing along with his cell number via Facebook’s FISC order permitting the U.S. government access to the information. For the watchers, there is no line dividing what an individual puts on the Internet and what people have privately entrusted to another party, be it a website, bank, doctor or telephone company.

Government spies also scoff at the notion of intellectual property rights. Bought-and-sold politicians agree. If something is publicly or privately posted online, it automatically becomes the property of the website’s owner. (This is also why most businesses permit and encourage employees to use their company-issued phones and email accounts for personal communications-- the firms have legal license to review an employee’s private network and communications, because they own the devices and programs and therefore the data on them.) It is an absurd proposition analogous to stating an individual surrenders rightful ownership of a vehicle to a bank when it is parked on property whose tenant has yet to pay the mortgage in full. This policy refuses to acknowledge the resources and labor provided by the Facebook account holder, i.e., the computer used to access the social networking site, time it took to create a profile and mental ingenuity in deciding how and what to say about oneself. It is understood that the website has issued the venue which, in turn, makes the information available worldwide but the skewed exchange undermines the statement that profiles are “free.” No profit sharing is offered the user. Without account holders, social networking sites would be empty voids on lonely servers and not multinational corporate affairs.

In the surveillance communities’ opinion, everything is public domain and no one has the right to ask “Do you mind?” to someone eavesdropping on a conversation. Their argument is that if a person doesn’t want what is being said to be known (by whomever), the individual best not speak at all. In the cloak-and-dagger world of data mining, the person having a discussion cannot reasonably expect privacy, because the individual is voicing one’s thoughts, period. It does not matter whether they are spoken in confidence and directed to a particular person, much like an email is addressed “To: Bob” and not “To: Bob; Bcc: The NSA.” If the speaker is naïve enough to say something at a volume where a microphone can detect it, it is de facto public knowledge. Whereas government surveillance only exchanges the recorded conversation with its own kind, corporate surveillance broadcasts the discussion to anyone who is willing to pay to hear it. In the surveillance world, the only guarantee of privacy is dead silence.

Don't you think one of the congressmen interested in civil liberties-- say a Ted Lieu or Justin Amash-- ought to look into drafting a bill making it super-illegal to sell private data online, especially stuff like peoples' Social Security numbers?

Would The Government Spy On You And Your Family?

Tuesday, we were looking at some of the reasons Hillary is doing less well-- even in states trending her way like Florida is now-- than she could be doing. While I was writing the post, I got a note from Ted Lieu about the Yahoo revelations. And, the malaise of some millennials who are smart enough to know they're not voting for the narcissistic racist and psychopath but are reticent to commit to Hillary are just uncomfortable with her old school, conservative attitudes about issues around national security state surveillance-- or, as Lieu referred to the Yahoo revelations, "big brother on steroids." He said "it must be stopped." She should too, unless she wants to spend the rest of the campaign pining for those millennial voters. As Lieu said, a government "directive to Yahoo to write a software program and search all of its customers’ incoming emails for certain content is a gross abuse of federal power... Law enforcement and the NSA did not have warrants for the hundreds of millions of customers that had their privacy violated." Justin Amash (R-MI) was as disturbed by this as Lieu was. But you know who felt even stronger about the revelations? Yeah... Ed Snowden. He was tweeting up a storm as soon as the news broke:

His first reaction was to urge everyone with a Yahoo email account to close it. Sounds like an excellent idea to me. He also brought up that "With Verizon buying Yahoo, who was revealed today to be spying on all of their customers, this seems relevant." Very relevant. Did anyone think it was worth mentioning at the VP debate a few hours later?

In the Afterward to Michael Gurnow's 2014 book, The Edwards Snowden Affair, Gurnow wrote, "Somewhat predictably given Clapper’s adamant defense, the NSA hasn’t changed its policies; it has merely tightened its security. Instead of conducting surveillance in a manner that won’t plague an employee’s conscience and spur another Snowden to action, the agency instituted an information lockdown. Shortly after the disclosures stared appearing, a two-person data extraction rule was instituted.

Perhaps the greatest cultural signifier of Snowden’s impact is seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly after the world saw Snowden’s face for the first time, sales of the 64-year-old classic skyrocketed. It witnessed a 5,800% overnight increase in sales. The novel went from 7,397 to 125 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

...[T]he public has only heard of the questionable means Washington goes to acquire data directly from communication sources. What is not being talked about is the intelligence it obtains from civilian data mining enterprises. These businesses come in two flavors: Private data collection companies and corporate retailers. The latter consists of commercial retail and fast food establishments. Considering Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, Google, Sprint and Verizon’s relationship with the federal government, it is not unreasonable to assume the data these two types of businesses collect is also sequestered by Washington.

Target’s ability to determine a young woman was pregnant before she knew is the tip of the spying iceberg. For example, many cell phone owners forget wifi usage is a revolving door. Most give little thought to accessing and using a store’s wifi, not realizing the company’s systems may be programmed to exploit the Internet connection. Once a connection is made, customer data-- including gender, address, telephone number and a consumer’s personal interests (via Internet searches and an individual’s social network pages, which are frequently left open for convenience)-- are recorded. In retail outlets, a corporation’s programming may also be set to track a person’s movements throughout the building and catalog the individual’s browsing habits. For the customer, the result is customized advertisements and coupons; for the company, consumer analysis is completed at a fraction of the traditional cost. Sadly, advances in technology permit businesses to supersede any attempts at protecting one’s privacy. Much like the U.S. intelligence’s ability to stalk a phone that is turned off, corporations are now able to access phones even if they aren’t deliberately connected to a store’s wifi.

The other and much darker side of corporate surveillance is data mining companies. These include firms such as Acxiom, Datalogix, Euclid, Federated Media, Epsilon, Digital Advertising Alliance, BlueKai and Network Advertising Initiative. Acxiom, the leader in the industry, has over 190 million profiles on American adults.

These entities make it their business to collect every conceivable type of knowledge about U.S. citizens. They first scour the Internet for any information a person is willing to make known before proceeding to public records. Yet these techniques are time and labor-intensive. Both data mining companies and corporations have a surveillance tool which is much more thorough, revealing and, most importantly, automated. They hire software engineers to design and implement third-party cookies. Unlike a first-party cookie, which initiates a discussion between a user’s computer and a specific website, a third-party cookie is equivalent to someone eavesdropping on a person’s power lunch conversation and selling the transcript to a competitor. One method software designers use to hide third-party cookies is by embedding them in advertisements. When an individual enters a website with an ad, a third-person cookie is set. If the user moseys over to another website with an ad by the same company, a notice of the individual’s continued interest-- including the time, date and computer’s IP address-- is sent to the business. By this time, the third-party cookie is controlling a person’s computer. When someone looks at shoes on a retailer’s website and then checks the local news, only toeerily find an ad of the footwear in a sidebar, a third-party cookie is at work. Third-party cookies essentially track and stalk Internet users. Aside from the invasive privacy violations, there are drastic, long-term psychological effects which result from the repetition of third-party cookies’ advertising. Many were confused by Snowden’s objection to surveillance on grounds that it stifled creativity and free thought. When an ad is designed to reappear time and again, it is reinforcing an idea or brand image in a potential consumer’s mind. The Familiarity Principle states a person becomes more comfortable and accepting of an image the more frequently it is encountered. This is basic biology. Familiarity instills trust, often at a subconscious level. Though customers believe they are expressing freedom of choice by picking Brand X over Brand Y, they may be unaware they saw Brand X in a sidebar while browsing online recipes the week before. They purchase Brand X without realizing the subconscious motivations for doing so. They have literally been brainwashed.

Data brokers take their information, organize it into concise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook. This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over-the-counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail.

Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s possessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

The surveillance debate has intensified since June 5 and lent new perspectives upon the concept of the safety technology can provide. The underlying political issue is who has the right to particular varieties of information. The public believes there are two types of conversations, public and private. The intelligence community doesn’t agree.

In the Internet Age, a person can “Like” the activity of fishing enough to let the world know by making it public knowledge on one’s Facebook profile. The individual can also choose to obtain a vanity Facebook URL by confidentially submitting one’s telephone number to the social networking site. The phone number is used for authorization purposes to verify the request is coming from the Facebook account holder. Though it is not placed online, the number is nonetheless (questionably) stored on the company’s servers. David Omand, former head of GCHQ, has no problem with collecting the publicly-known fact Bob likes fishing along with his cell number via Facebook’s FISC order permitting the U.S. government access to the information.

For the watchers, there is no line dividing what an individual puts on the Internet and what people have privately entrusted to another party, be it a website, bank, doctor or telephone company. Government spies also scoff at the notion of intellectual property rights. Bought-and-sold politicians agree. If something is publicly or privately posted online, it automatically becomes the property of the website’s owner. (This is also why most businesses permit and encourage employees to use their company-issued phones and email accounts for personal communications-- the firms have legal license to review an employee’s private network and communications, because they own the devices and programs and therefore the data on them.) It is an absurd proposition analogous to stating an individual surrenders rightful ownership of a vehicle to a bank when it is parked on property whose tenant has yet to pay the mortgage in full. This policy refuses to acknowledge the resources and labor provided by the Facebook account holder, i.e., the computer used to access the social networking site, time it took to create a profile and mental ingenuity in deciding how and what to say about oneself. It is understood that the website has issued the venue which, in turn, makes the information available worldwide but the skewed exchange undermines the statement that profiles are “free.” No profit sharing is offered the user. Without account holders, social networking sites would be empty voids on lonely servers and not multinational corporate affairs.

In the surveillance communities’ opinion, everything is public domain and no one has the right to ask “Do you mind?” to someone eavesdropping on a conversation. Their argument is that if a person doesn’t want what is being said to be known (by whomever), the individual best not speak at all. In the cloak-and-dagger world of data mining, the person having a discussion cannot reasonably expect privacy, because the individual is voicing one’s thoughts, period. It does not matter whether they are spoken in confidence and directed to a particular person, much like an email is addressed “To: Bob” and not “To: Bob; Bcc: The NSA.” If the speaker is naïve enough to say something at a volume where a microphone can detect it, it is de facto public knowledge. Whereas government surveillance only exchanges the recorded conversation with its own kind, corporate surveillance broadcasts the discussion to anyone who is willing to pay to hear it. In the surveillance world, the only guarantee of privacy is dead silence.

The U.S. government knows the difference but deliberately ignores it. It does not want a distinction to be made, because it would restrict its power and the power of those who fund political campaigns: defense contractors, telecoms, Internet companies, corporate retailers, fast food enterprises and multimillion-dollar data mining firms. The last thing the U.S. government or private business wants is account holders to have control over their own information. Snowden’s skepticism of political solutions is understandable. The people who were hired to watch the watchmen did a poor job. American citizens were told their rights were being protected as a secret oversight court rubberstamped itself into extraneousness while never bothering to see what the NSA might be hiding. Regardless whether a new law is created or a task force is assigned, it can be expected that parties in possession of private information will continue to swear a consumer’s data is sacrosanct and they would never dream of violating a client’s privacy; all the while information is being steadily placed on the open market, swapped and surveilled. Every data mining opt-out form absolves itself by including the clause that the representative business cannot guarantee a person’s information will not conveniently fall into the company’s lap at a later date. If a causal web search produces an individual’s home address alongside the resident’s place of employment, a robber can look up the employer’s hours of operation and know when the house will likely be vacant. When situations like these are presented to those in power, the ball of accountability is bounced back and forth as witnessed when the U.S. government and telecoms pointed the finger of blame at one another after Greenwald exposed Verizon. No one is held accountable, violations continue and people are put at risk. Snowden was correct once again. Current surveillance practices make us less safe.

Regardless of how futile a circumstance may appear, it is instinct to try to defend oneself from perceived harm. Both businesses and private citizens reacted to the disclosures, some rather violently.

Someone Should Find Something Useful For Trey Gowdy To Investigate

Today, while Trey Gawdy's absurd and failing witch-hunt was playing out on TV-- all eleven gruesome hours of it-- Alan Grayson sent out a message to his supporters that says, in part

"I’m on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I’ve read every classified document regarding Benghazi. Take it from me: Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. This is the 'scandal' that never was. So it must be utterly mortifying to her to see the Republicans wasting taxpayer money to conduct this political vendetta against her.

"But there are some people who do deserve a heaping helping of blame. Like the three Democrats in the House today (among 188 of us) who voted for the Benghazi Committee show trial. Trey Gowdy referred to them in his opening statement today, pointing out that they had voted for his anti-Hillary witch-hunt.

"One of those three is my Senate Democratic primary in Florida, Patrick Murphy.

"He ignored warnings at the time, from everyone from Nancy Pelosi on down. He voted with the Republicans to authorize this evil farce. Because that’s what he really is: a Republican.

"And listen to Patrick Murphy’s incredible post hoc rationalization: He was sure that the Benghazi Committee-- run by a former GOP prosecutor-- would exonerate Hillary Clinton."

I don't think anyone who watched the televised hearings can possibly think anyone could be either so stupid or so naive as to think Try Gowdy had any intention of "exonerating" Hillary Clinton. The fact the Murphy-- along with the two other corrupt Blue Dogs who voted to authorize the witch hunt (Kyrsten Sinema and Collin Peterson)-- consistently voted with the Republicans and are always there so that right-wingers like Gowdy can  say, "but it was bipartisan," says a lot more about Murphy's motivations than his claims about vindication and exoneration.

If Congress needs a serious topic to investigate, rather than Gowdy's disgraceful partisan show trial, they should look into how the NSA skirts U.S. law-- the ones that prohibit U.S. intelligence agencies from spying on American citizens-- by paying the British-- the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), their version of "our" NSA-- to do it. This is from Michael Gurnow's book, The Edward Snowden Affair: Exposing the Politics and Media Behind the NSA Scandal:

The day Snowden was granted asylum, The Guardian celebrated with another exclusive: "NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ." It proudly proclaims “Secret payments revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden.” The article answers the question left from the June 21 Tempora report of which intelligence agency calls the shots.

Largely because Britain’s comparatively lax surveillance laws are a "selling point," the U.S. government started financially supporting many of GCHQ’s intelligence stations and programs after GCHQ suffered substantial domestic budget cuts. One such British spy project hopes to ultimately "exploit any phone, anywhere, any time." Having poured over 100 million pounds into contracted British intelligence services from 2010-2013, the NSA is allowed to prioritize surveillance affairs at some of Britain’s spy stations. Half the cost of GCHQ’s Cyprus station is paid by U.S. taxpayers. But Washington is not always happy with what it gets for its citizens’ money. Internal, classified documents comment, "GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight" because the U.S. government had "raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA’s minimum expectations." This is perhaps because 60 percent of Britain’s filtered data still comes from American intelligence. It is obvious a portion of the nine-figure paycheck, revealed in GCHQ’s "investment portfolios," was for foreign surveillance of U.S. citizens and subsequent data-swapping services. One classified review brags of how GCHQ made "unique contributions" to the NSA investigation of the American citizen behind the failed 2010 Times Square car bomb attack. The plot by Faizal Shahzad was foiled by a T-shirt vendor who noticed that a suspiciously parked car happened to be smoking.

A companion article titled,"GCHQ: inside the top secret world of Britain’s biggest spy agency," appeared the same day. Its focus is largely on the daily life within GCHQ, its history, but also its plans. The report admits, "Of all the highly classified documents about GCHQ revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, this has to be one of the least sensitive." The exposé discusses the nuances of working inside the world’s largest surveillance facility whose annual budget is one billion pounds. (The NSA’s yearly allotment is 17 times greater.) Employees have bake sales, annual in-house sporting events, team vacations and chat using an internal networking site sardonically named "SpySpace," a titular mockup of Facebook’s predecessor, MySpace.

But the article moves to more substantial matters by grabbing the loose thread of cellular phone surveillance that its bookend report left dangling. The British intelligence agency seeks to "[collect] voice and SMS and geo-locating phone" data and "intelligence from all the extra functionality that iPhones and BlackBerrys offer." A classified document recognizes the technological climate and sets the agenda: "Google Apps already has over 30 million users. This is good news. It allows us to exploit the mobile advantage." As with telecommunications providers’ government compliance, on February 8, 2011, it was noted that "Legal assurances [by cell phone manufacturers were] now believed to be good."

In its conclusion-- a review of GCHQ’s contribution to American intelligence-- the report states that the British intelligence agency "had given the NSA 36% of all the raw information the British had intercepted from computers the agency was monitoring. A confidential document declares new technological advances permit the British to "interchange 100% of GCHQ End Point Projects with NSA." Also on August 1, NGB expanded on British communication providers’ roles in government surveillance. It was another joint feature with Süddeutsche Zeitung, which would release "Snowden revealed names of spying telecom companies" the next day.

Together the news sources report that not two but seven major domestic telecoms, alongside their respective code names, provided GCHQ with access to their fiber-optic cables in 2010: Verizon Business ("Dacron"), British Telecommunications ("Remedy"), Vodafone Cable ("Gerontic"), Global Crossing ("Pinnage"), Level 3 ("Little"), Viatel ("Vitreous") and Interoute ("Streetcar"). The British spy agency used Tempora to hack the various data backbones across Europe. GCHQ has 102 "points of presence" over Europe, 15 of which are in Germany.

The British communication companies’ involvement with GCHQ is of particular interest to Germany, because Level 3 owns data centers in Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich. Global Crossing and Interoute are also major German communication distributors. For readers familiar with the American surveillance story, Viatel’s response was predictable as well as somewhat laughable: "We do not cooperate with the GCHQ or grant access to our infrastructure or customer data." The company representative continues, "Like all telecommunications providers in Europe, we are obliged to comply with European and national laws including those regarding privacy and data retention. From time to time, we receive inquiries from authorities, [which are] checked by our legal and security departments, and if they are legal, [they] will be processed accordingly." The reports also reveal that the Five Eyes, whose acronym is revealed as "FVEY," operate a "ring of satellite monitoring systems around the globe." The group project is code-named "Echelon."

How about if Sherlock Gowdy turn his investigative talents in that direction instead? And, please, take your little Florida pal, Patrick Murphy, along for the ride. As for keeping Murphy out of the U.S. Senate and sending him back to work with Daddy Murphy and Trump... you can do that right here on the Alan Grayson for Senate contribution page.

What Do The Liberty Caucus Extremists Want? Are We Certain They're All Nihilists? Justin Amash For Speaker!

The 40 or so far right-extremists and libertarians who topped Boehner and denied McCarthy the speakership and are now deciding Paul Ryan's fate, are easy targets because they are generally misogynistic, homophobic racists. Some are neo-Nazis and even more are Confederates. But does that mean they're always wrong about everything? And, more to the point, what does that say about the bottom-up congressional rebellion they're leading against the House leadership rules now? Forget for a moment ,if you can, that Mo Brooks (R-AL) is a crackpot racist who's basically never right on any policies. In the clip above, though, Lawrence O'Donnell talked with him about what the Liberty Caucus is getting at from their own perspective. (Hint: he didn't say it was seceding from the Union again.)

Probably the least objections member of the Liberty Caucus is Just Amash, a Michigan libertarian-- and the only Republican Blue America ever found preferable to a Democratic opponent, rancid conservaDem Steve Pestka, who Amash beat. Amash would make a much better Speaker than Ryan but no one has been tossing his name around. Yesterday, though, Politico's Jake Sherman featured him a big way in a major piece about the Liberty Caucus, which he referred to as the Freedom Caucus (although maybe they're separate groups with the same members and goals). Sherman marveled that Amash wanted to talk about process (rules) at a Grand Rapids town hall.

How he believes John Boehner didn't follow them, and how the chamber’s next leader needs to. Amash and his crew want a robust committee process. They would like more amendments and no more end runs to fast-track legislation to the House floor. If the next leader does those things, he or she might not have to constantly worry about the Freedom Caucus. Return to “regular order,” and the Republican Conference just might be able to return to normal.

“The problem isn’t that he isn’t conservative enough,” Amash told about 40 people here during a town hall meeting Wednesday evening, referring to John Boehner, who announced his resignation amid growing pressure from Amash’s group. “The problem is he doesn’t follow the process. He operated a top-down system, and still operates a top-down system because he hasn’t stepped down yet. Which means that he figures out what outcome he wants, and he goes to the individual members and attempts to compel and coerce us to vote for that outcome.”

Amash, a 35-year-old libertarian-minded Republican first elected in the tea party wave of 2010, is at the heart of a new power center in the House Republican Conference. With roughly 40 members, the Freedom Caucus has an outsized role in selecting the next speaker of the House. If its members vote as a bloc, which they say they intend to do, it essentially gives them veto power over the next speaker of the House.

Republican leaders see Freedom Caucus members as a bunch of bomb-throwing ideologues with little interest in finding solutions that can pass a divided government.

But that's a false reading of the group, Amash told his constituents. Their mission isn't to drag Republican leadership to the right, though many of them would certainly favor more conservative outcomes. It's simply to force them to follow the institution's procedures, Amash argued.

That means allowing legislation and amendments to flow through committees in a deliberative way, and giving individual members a chance to offer amendments and to have their ideas voted on on the House floor. Instead of waiting until right before the latest legislative crisis erupts, then twisting members’ arms for votes, they argue, leadership must empower the rank and file on the front end and let the process work its will.

“In some cases, conservative outcomes will succeed. In other cases, liberal outcomes will succeed. And that’s OK,” said Amash, who was reelected overwhelmingly last year after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce backed his Republican primary rival. “We can have a House where different coalitions get together on different bills and pass legislation. And then we present that to the Senate and we present it to the White House.

“The worst scenario,” Amash continued, “is where you have one person or a small group of people dictate to everyone else what the outcome is going to be in advance.”

And that reminded me of an amendment-- which started as a bill be co-wrote with progressive Democrat John Conyers in 2013 in an attempt to rein in the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans by NASA, the LIBERT-E Act. The bill attracted awesome progressive Democrats like Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Judy Chu (D-CA) as Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Amash, Thomas Massie (R-KY), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Tom McClintock, as well as crackpots from both parties, like Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Paul Broun (R-GA) and Ted Yoho (R-FL). It didn't attract anyone from Boehner's circle.

In the end it was introduced as an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill and was narrowly defeated 205-217 by Obama and Boehner. 111 Democrats and 94 Republicans voted in favor and they were edged out by 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats (mostly wretched Blue Dogs and New Dems like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jim Himes, Steve Israel, the same Kyrsten Sinema who claimed to be a co-sponsor, John Delaney, Jim Cooper, Ann Kuster, Sean Patrick Maloney, Lipinski, Hoyer, Cuellar, Costa... all the dreck) voting against.

Thinking about that amendment took me back to Michael Gurnow's 2014 book, The Edward Snowden Affair: Exposing the Politics and Media Behind the NSA Scandal, which talked about how Amash attempted to address the unconstitutional spying on Americans in the face of an unsympathetic Speaker (Boehner).

The LIBERT-E Act had over 50 sponsors. It was the product of two Michigan politicians. Amash, a Republican with Libertarian leanings and the sixth-youngest representative, had been joined by Conyers, a Democrat born in 1929 who was the second-longest serving incumbent on Capitol Hill now in his 48th year in Congress. But the two politicians knew the controversial law would not pass on its own. They judiciously took another approach. The decision wound up testing the moral fabric of democracy.

Unlike the Senate, where all members can force a vote, the House Speaker reigns supreme. If the speaker doesn’t deem a topic worthy of consideration, it isn’t put on the docket. Amash walked gingerly around Speaker Boehner, who had already decreed Snowden a traitor. He made his bill into an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014. Any lawmaker can propose an amendment to a bill so long as it can be proven to relate to the legislation it is trying to piggyback. The amendment’s relevance was obvious and irrefutable. It dealt with defense spending. Amash was calling to cancel the NSA’s authority to conduct blanket surveillance. There were two sides to the legislative coin. In theory, Amash’s proposal should have been agreeable to the fiscally conservative Republican-led House because it would cut costs. In reality, House Republicans strongly supported national defense, which the bill sought to limit. It was nonetheless Amash’s best bet for getting the law passed.

It was also a prime example of why politicians hate amend ment riders. Piggybacked legislation frequently puts them in a difficult position with their party, campaign donors and constituency. In the case of Amash’s proposal, a lose-lose scenario ensued. If the amendment was attached, a House member would be simultaneously voting for and against national defense, and the press and public rarely issued benefit of the doubt after final votes were cast. Because of this, leaders of the House started humoring the unthinkable. The amendment process was a liberty which assured all voices were heard. Talk about limiting the number of amendments to a bill began to circulate. Democracy remained intact for one reason. If an actual move toward blocking a vote on the amendment ensued, Amash’s legislation had enough support for the entire Defense bill to be held up. Republicans reluctantly consented. The amendment was ruled to be in order on Monday, July 22. It was then scheduled to be debated on Wednesday evening, July 24, before going up for a tentative vote the next day.

The White House was so nervous, it broke character. Carney publicly denounced the pending legislation during a press conference on Tuesday, “[ ... ] we [the White House] oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.” The White House chose to ignore the irony of the statement being made moments after another closed-door briefing had come to an end.

The Republicans had a right to be worried. After 15 minutes of debate the day before, Amash’s amendment was narrowly defeated 205-217 on Thursday. Ninety-four Republicans and 111 Democrats voted in favor, 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats had been against the legislation. Surprisingly, the author of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, voted has come to stop it.” Since a majority of Democrats supported the amendment, it would have likely passed in the Democrat-led Senate. Aside from what might have been said by Alexander, a look behind the campaign contribution curtain suggests Lon Snowden was right. The 217 “nay” voices received 122 percent more money from the intelligence and defense industries than the 205 “yea” voters.

The $594 billion Defense bill was passed with over 60 amendments by a vote of 315 to 109. The tab was five billion dollars below current spending and the White House threatened to veto it in order to continue to fund the Pentagon. Its emotional appeal was that the reduced budget would force compensatory cuts to other programs such as health research and education.

However, one of the amendments that did pass relates to U.S. government surveillance. It was put forth by Mike Pompeo of Kansas and declares that the NSA cannot use its budget to “acquire, monitor, or store the contents [ ... ] of any electronic communication” of a U.S. citizen. It passed by a vote of 409-12. The reason Pompeo’s law was met with little fanfare and passed by an overwhelming margin is because it is essentially flaccid. It prohibits what the NSA stated it was not doing and currently steering around. Pompeo’s legislation does not ban the bulk collection of metadata.

Boehner has something in his eye-- Justin Amash

The Patriot Act-- Back For Another Go-Round

The intrinsically embarrassing nature of the Patriot Act came front and center again with the appearance on the national scene of NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden. This is a mature democracy? And for Obama... how did he shift from a senator so eloquently critical of unconstitutional surveillance practices to a chief proponent of expanding them? In his book The Edward Snowden Affair, Michael Gurnow looked at how Obama was forced to make a fuss about the Patriot Act once Russia granted Snowden political asylum.

The first is "reforms to Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act" even though "[I]t does not allow the government to listen to any phone calls without a warrant. But given the scale of this program, I understand the concerns of those who would worry that it could be subject to abuse." Obama stated adjustments will be made to these two laws to ensure "greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints on the use of this authority."

He then proposed FISC oversight in the form of a legal representative being present to review request orders, because the court currently "only hears one side of the story, may tilt it too far in favor of security, may not pay enough attention to liberty." Obama, a Harvard lawyer, acknowledged a kangaroo court was in effect because no defense attorney was present to represent those whom the U.S. government was attempting to target.

...The impact of the international disclosures-- especially those pertaining to China, Germany and the EU-- was obvious during the conference. The president very gingerly acknowledged, "[ ... ] how these [surveillance] issues are viewed overseas [is important] because American leadership around the world depends upon the example of American democracy and American openness, because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation; it’s the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process." He went on to state, "[ ... ] to others around the world, I want to make clear once again that America is not interested in spying on ordinary people. "

By now you have surely heard of a new Senator from Arkansas by the name of Tom Cotton. He was a 37-year-old congressman who won the Senate seat formerly held by conservative Democrat Mark Pryor in 2014. Cotton took the Senate by storm penning one of the most embarrassing documents ever written by a sitting Senator and then getting the entire GOP Senate caucus to co-sign it-- the infamous Iran Letter.

Undaunted by this humiliation, the Republican Party has decided that Cotton is the man to lead them into the future on national security issues. And unfortunately, he's decided that his next mission will be to lead the Republican charge to extend certain provisions of the Patriot Act which are set to expire this June. They've even added some new powers for the NSA, just to make things interesting.

There was a lot of talk at one time about a new coalition of civil libertarian Republicans and civil libertarian Democrats coming together to reform these programs now that the nation is aware of what they're actually doing. Sadly, the number of civil libertarians in the Republican Party can fit in a small Smart Car and the civil libertarians in the Democratic Party are not a majority. And with über-hawk Tom Cotton waving the “national security” banner we can be sure the Republicans are intent upon squelching any thoughts of reform. This is why it's so important for Democrats to elect more real progressive civil libertarians to Congress. We cannot count on this tiny faction of libertarian Republicans, led by their hypocritical grandstanding leader Rand Paul, to ever provide the numbers required to roll back the surveillance state. Hawkish national security and authoritarian police policies are in the modern GOP's DNA.

This is going to require a majority progressive Democratic Party led by people like Congresswoman Donna Edwards, who is now running for the Maryland Senate seat currently held by retiring Senator Barbara Mikulski. Edwards has been consistent on these issues throughout her career in congress. For instance, in 2014 she voted against the USA Freedom Act, originally conceived as a reform measure, but which was later gutted by the Republicans in committee. She issued this statement at the time:

“After much deliberation I opposed the USA Freedom Act because I continue to believe it doesn’t strike the necessary balance between protecting our national security and protecting our 4th Amendment rights. Without question, national security issues are critically important, and I applaud all those who work at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and others for their dedication to duty and professionalism. We must provide them with the means to gather the information necessary to keep America safe. However, we cannot allow the pursuit of that goal to infringe on the civil liberties that we, as Americans, hold sacred and fought so hard to defend.”

She will bring that same principled clarity to the Senate.

Last week the House passed yet another Republican surveillance bill. Blue America's slate of progressive civil libertarians voted against, while all the usual suspects supported it.

Blue America primary candidate Alex Law, who is challenging New Jersey Congressman Donald Norcross, gave this statement:

Yet again we have a clear difference between myself and my opponent in the Democratic primary in NJ-01. Today, Donald Norcross voted in support of the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill that is a surveillance bill disguising itself as a cyber-security bill. This bill gives companies a significant expansion in their ability to monitor customers' online activities. It allows them to share vaguely defined 'cyber threat indicators,' which then automatically go to the NSA. The NSA is then authorized broad law enforcement rights that could stretch beyond cyber-security. This chain of events is a slippery slope. I totally disagree with the structure of this bill. We must stand up for individual privacy. What we have in this bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and if I were in Congress, I would have voted against it like other progressives such as Alan Grayson and Judy Chu.

The provisions of the Patriot Act which are set to expire in June should not be extended. We don't know for sure if they will. The USA Freedom Act ultimately died in the Senate when the Democrats who were in the majority at the time added a few safeguards and then couldn't overcome a filibuster. (Yes, the GOP ultimately filibustered the bill for being too weak ...) The Republicans are now in charge and Tom Cotton is working overtime to give the NSA every last item on their wish list. Perhaps we'll get lucky and gridlock will work in favor of freedom once again. But I wouldn't count on it.

There are simply not enough principled, progressive civil libertarians in Congress to stop these abuses. We must elect more of them. Please give what you can to stalwart civil libertarians like Donna Edwards and Alex Law.

Then, give your current representatives a call and tell them you want them to vote against any extension of the Patriot Act.

Just How Furious Is The US Surveillance State At Russia Over Ed Snowden's Asylum?

Early in the third season of House of Cards, Russian President Victor Petrov has the Russian security police arrest American gay rights activist Michael Corrigan in Moscow, which causes a disturbance in U.S. domestic politics (and international relations). It would have been far more complex for Beau Willimon to write Ed Snowden's sojourn to Russia into the series instead.

There are people who believe the CIA aggression in Ukraine was, at least in part, pay back for Putin's grant of asylum to Snowden. In his book, The Edward Snowden Affair, Michael Gurnow doesn't get into that specifically, only that "the fallout was catastrophic."

After declaring on July 19, “We [the White House] call on the Russian government to cease its campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption, and to ensure that the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of its citizens, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, are protected and respected,” Press Secretary Jay Carney produced the U.S. government’s first official response to Snowden’s asylum shortly after Russia granted the whistleblower his freedom. Washington’s fatigue and exasperation was obvious. Carney issued the subdued statement, “[ ... ] we are extremely disappointed by this decision by Russian authorities” before glibly inserting, “This move by the Russian government undermines a longstanding record of law enforcement cooperation.”

Various U.S. senators went on record. Charles Schumer announced, “Russia has stabbed us in the back.” Former presidential candidate John McCain proclaimed, “We cannot allow today’s action by Putin to stand without serious repercussions.” Lindsey Graham stood by his previous call to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, if Snowden wasn’t returned to the United States. The latter two congressmen also suggested ignoring America’s nuclear disarmament agreement with Russia. They called for the completion of the last phase of America’s European missile-defense program. In anticipation of Russia providing Snowden safe harbor, several politicians had already begun to pressure the president to cancel his meeting with Putin, which was scheduled to take place before the commencement of the G20 Summit in Moscow on September 5 in Saint Petersburg. Carney reported that the White House was now “evaluating the utility” of a pre-summit conversation.

Last House of Cards episode I watched-- #5-- UN Ambassador Claire Underwood had quietly moved from targeted financial sanctions against Russian officials to threatening to blow up planes and trucks and ships. The Obama Administration is still primarily sticking to sanctions-- even if their efficacy are still much-debated.

Economic sanctions, which most forecasts assume will continue this year, are having less impact that many in the West would like to believe. Sergei Tsukhlo of the Gaidar Institute estimates that the sanctions have affected only 6 percent of Russian industrial enterprises. "Their effect remains quite insignificant despite all that's being said about them," he wrote, noting that trade disruptions with Ukraine have been more important.

Granted, there's no avoiding a significant drop in Russians' living standards because of accelerating inflation. The economics ministry in Moscow predicts real wages will fall by 9 percent this year-- which, Aslund wrote, means that "for the first time after 15 years in power," Russian President Vladimir Putin "will have to face a majority of the Russian people experiencing a sharply declining standard of living." So far, though, Russians have taken the initial shock of devaluation and accompanying inflation largely in stride. The latest poll from the independent Levada Center, conducted between Feb. 20 and Feb. 23, actually shows an uptick in Putin's approval rating-- to 86 percent from 85 percent in January.

It's time to bury the expectation that Russia will fall apart economically under pressure from falling oil prices and economic sanctions, and that Russians, angered by a drop in their living standards, will rise up and sweep Putin out of office. Western powers face a tough choice: Settle for a lengthy siege and ratchet up the sanctions despite the progress in Ukraine, or start looking for ways to restart dialogue with Russia, a country that just won't go away.

Would You Hide Ed Snowden In Your Home?

Ever hear someone bitterly decrying "all Germans" as Nazis? I heard plenty of that growing up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn and later I heard plenty of it when I lived in Amsterdam. But there was always one response that could stop anyone going down that path in their tracks-- something about a family that took a Jew or a resistance fighter in and hid them from the Nazis in their home. The state of Israel has an honorific for such people: "Righteous Among the Nations." There are even rules and regulations governing who gets the term applied to them. For example, assistance has to be substantial and has to be given without any financial gain expected in return. The Righteous Among Nations get medals, a certificate of honor, honorary Israeli citizenship and, if they live in Israel, a pension and free health care for life. As of January 1 there were 25,271 such men and women from 45 different countries, including 553 from Germany. The largest numbers came from countries occupied by Germany: Poland (6,454), Holland (5,351), France (3,760), Ukraine (2,472) and Belgium (1,665). There was even one each in Japan (Sempo Sugihara), Vietnam (Paul Nguyen Cong Anh), Cuba (Amparo Pappo), Egypt (Mohamed Helmy) and El Salvador (Jose Arturo Castellanos).

Why bring this up? I was looking at the results of polling data that showed that today 50% of Germans view Ed Snowden as a hero and, more to the point, 35% of Germans would hide Snowden in their home to protect him from the U.S. This account of Laura Poitras showing the second Snowden interview comes from Michael Gurnow's book, The Edward Snowden Affair:

Though audiences were hard-pressed to believe the claim in June, Poitras lets Snowden repeat, “There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where communications can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed.” He lists the most important excised files as being, “The Verizon document,” because “it literally lays out they’re [members of the intelligence community] using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals and they’re applying it to the whole of society by basically subverting a corporate partnership through major telecommunications providers and they’re getting everyone’s calls, everyone’s call records and everyone’s internet traffic as well.” He then lists Boundless Informant. He pauses before labeling it “a global auditing system for the NSA’s intercept and collection system that lets us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress and to specific congressmen in response to previous inquiries about their surveillance activities.” He then adds PRISM, “which is a demonstration of how the U.S. government co-opts U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud [online storage sites], and even to just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”

Poitras has Snowden reiterate his motives for action before closing the interview: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can. Now I’ve watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy-driven way I could, which is to wait and allow [ ... ] our leadership, our figures, to sort of correct the excesses of government when we go too far. But as I’ve watched, I’ve seen that’s not occurring. In fact, we’re compounding the excesses of prior governments and making it worse and more invasive, and no one is really standing to stop it.”

The declaration that his motive was to take a personal stand and to set an example is one which the world had yet to hear. Snowden reveals that his initial goal was to clear his conscience and avoid hypocrisy by no longer supporting what he believed was unjustifiable. Snowden ceased being complicit in the mechanisms which he deemed were responsible for exploiting personal freedoms and removed himself from the advantages which that society offered.

Colorado Voters Are Making The CIA Domestic Spy Agents Very Happy-- Very, Very Happy

Getting control over congressional oversite was the biggest goal of the CIA and NSA in this election cycle. They’re actively infiltrating CIA agents into Congress itself. On the Democratic side, Steve Israel conspired with them to push forward several CIA candidates, including, among others, Kevin Strouse (PA-08) and Bobby McKenzie (MI-11). They were unable to gain any traction and were eventually abandoned by the DCCC to their own miserable fates. Both are expected to lose badly November 4. But don’t feel badly for the CIA.

The National Surveillance Establishment’s top goal of the election season is to replace their most fearless and relentless critic in the Senate, Mark Udall (D-CO)— to send a message to the rest of Congress that they can be taken out— with a slimy little right-wing worm who has shown a willingness to acquiesce to whatever the CIA and NSA want— so long as he can target women’s rights, equality and working families struggling to get a fair shake.

I bet the CIA would rather see Udall defeated— and will do anything and everything they can to get Cory Gardner in— than even catch Ed Snowden. In fact, let me turn, once again to Michael Gurnow’s book, The Edward Snowden Affair, for some insight into why the CIA is so freaked out about having someone as courageous as Mark Udall in Congress.

Snowden reiterates from his interview with Poitras that there are no technological limitations to what can be gathered and requested. Previewing a forthcoming disclosure, he states, “[T]he intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you would consider a ‘real’ warrant like a [p]olice department would have to, the ‘warrant’ is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.” Policy, which is subject to administrative whim, is the only restraint, but Snowden declares “policy protection is no protection— policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens and one very weak technical protection— a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the ‘widest allowable aperture,’ and can be stripped out at any time.” Like the NSA’s reminder to its analysts that accidental intercepts are “noth ing to worry about,” Britain’s system of checks and balances for query protocol is equally lax. “For at least GCHQ,” Snowden tells his audience, “the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.” It is worthy to note Menwith Hill is over— seen by a Royal Air Force officer.

Toward the end of the interview, Snowden overtly condemns America’s invasive surveillance policies and practices: “Journalists should ask a specific question: [S]ince these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source?” He assures his audience that regardless of what happens to him or how strict whistleblowing legislation becomes, gray hat leaking will not cease, because “[c]itizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.” He boldly proclaims, “Truth is coming, and it can- not be stopped.”

I wonder if the CIA and NSA agents were laughing when they read that— or just too busy trying to undermine Mark Udall to stop long enough to laugh. The latest poll— released by Quinnipiac yesterday— is bad news for America, bad news for Colorado… good news for the CIA and other agencies that are spying on Americans.

U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican challenger in the Colorado U.S. Senate race, leads U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent 47 - 41 percent among likely voters, with 8 percent for independent candidate Steve Shogan, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Another 4 percent are undecided… Colorado likely voters give Sen. Udall a negative 42 - 49 percent favorability rating, compared to Gardner's positive 47 - 41 percent rating. [Wait! An even more recent poll was released by the more accurate Mark Mellman and it shows Colorado voters coming to their senses and giving Udall a 44-41% lead over Gardner. This is going to be a nail-biter... for ordinary Americans as well as for the spy-masters of the CIA and NSA.]

How Close Is 1984 Today?

When I think back to high school and recall the books I read that have had the most impact on my thinking since then, certainly the dystopian novels 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley ranked high among them. Our world must never turn into the world’s created by Huxley and Orwell. This afternoon we looked at a reason to cast a vote to reelect Colorado Senator Mark Udall based on his role in preventing 1984 encroachment by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Military-Industrial-Intellegence Complex on our society and our democracy. Will Colorado voters appreciate how important this Udall ad is for them-- and for all of us?



After wrting it, I came across a summary of a Guardian investigation in the homeland of both Brave New World and 1984 that reveals that most telephone carriers automatically give all of their customers’ information to the police.

Most of the U.K.’s big mobile carriers give the police automated access to their customers’ metadata, the Guardian reported on Friday.

British data retention laws, notably the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), ensure that operators must hang onto call records so they can be queried without a warrant by the authorities-- but they don’t say the cops should get direct access. Nonetheless, that seems to be what EE, Vodafone and Three allow, with O2 being the only standout.

The Guardian compared this direct-access program with the Prism scheme in the U.S. Indeed, though Edward Snowden’s revelations have been wide-ranging, the first one to emerge was about the NSA accessing Verizon call records— more of a scandal in the U.S., which doesn’t have U.K.-style data retention laws.

RIPA has recently been implicated as a mechanism for the police to secretly figure out the identity of journalists’ sources. According to a separate Guardian report on Sunday, the government will alter the law so that any requests relating to journalistic sources must be approved by a judge.

As over half a million RIPA requests were made by UK public authorities in 2013 alone, it’s not hard to see why an automated system is preferable for efficiency reasons, though I’d argue that the fact it has to do with customer privacy means the practice is ethically questionable.

One of the things we found out from the Snowden revelations is that the US indeed did share the PRISM spy technology with the U.K. and that the U.K., like the NSA and CIA uses it to illegally spy on its own citizens. In fact, the two countries’ spy establishments work together— much more than anyone ever imagined. In his book, The Edward Snowden Affair, Michael Gurnow paints a frightening picture of how the spy establishments in the U.S. and U.K. trample their own laws to spy on everyone and everything always.

A week after Snowden had gone public and two days after the SCMP [South China Morning Post] went into greater, more incriminating detail about American surveillance in China, Ewen MacAskill led a team of Guardian journalists with “GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits.” Whereas the SCMP’s exposés only made reference to unseen, unverified directives and forms, The Guardian provided its readers with primary documentation. The article’s sources are a top secret January 20, 1999 briefing paper, various classified documents and confidential PowerPoint slides all provided by Snowden. The report debuted a day before the eight wealthiest countries— all of which were potential targets of the headline spying— were to meet in Ireland at the annual G8 Summit.

Started in 1999, the G20 Summit is the once biannual and now annual aggregation of 19 of the world’s top financial leaders with the European Union (EU) as the final member. They represent two-thirds of the world’s population and 80 percent of its gross product and trading. Its purpose is to discuss and examine international economic policy issues which lie outside the scope and capability of any one particular country or organization to address. Due to the growth of other world nations, in 2009 the G20 replaced the G8— started in 1975— as the main economic forum for wealthy nations.

MacAskill and Co. offer no quarter from the beginning: “Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by The Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using Internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.” GCHQ’s stated eavesdropping agenda was to learn each country’s negotiating position and leverage so Britain could have tactical advantage during the April and September 2009 meetings. However, Snowden’s documents make clear the confiscated user access data, i.e., user names and passwords, was intended to be used to continue spying on various nations’ officials after the summit ended: “[We] were able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after [the] conference has finished.” England’s specific targets were its allies South Africa and Turkey. South Africa was a crucial swing vote. With the latter, Britain’s ob- jective was to “establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and its “willingness (or not) to co- operate with the rest of the G20 nations.” The overriding concern was the various countries’ positions and attitudes regarding financial reform after the 2008 global banking meltdown.

British intelligence had already hacked into South Africa’s foreign affairs network in 2005. It had gathered information by “investigating” the country’s telephone lines and compromising diplomats’ user accounts. The mission was successful, because South Africa updated its systems shortly thereafter. GCHQ countered by immediately installing electronic backdoors “to increase reliability.”

Multiple delegates had been led into Internet cafes that had email filtration and keystroke logging software installed on the diners’ computers. For wireless communications, remote relays retrieved the politicians’ cell phone data, which was telecast almost live to 45 stand-by GCHQ analysts. The analysts would make their assessments then “provide timely information to UK ministers.” Keystroke logging is the recording of what is being typed as it is being typed. This permits the viewer to see the content of any document as it appears on the screen as well as login information, including passwords and phrases, as it is being entered. Over 20 new email “selectors” were obtained by GCHQ.

The Guardian highlights that the covert directives originated at the senior level during then-prime minister Gordon Brown’s time in office. Once finalized, orders were issued to various ministers. They were therefore sanctioned by the British government. Like the NSA’s data intercepts within Hong Kong and mainland China, none of the G20 targets were under any suspicion of wrongdoing by GCHQ. Britain legally justified its eavesdropping with the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which states clandestine foreign intelligence is “in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Island.” Britain had given itself permission to spy if not doing so risked financial loss or inhibited economic growth.

As disclosed in a classified report titled, “Russian Leadership Communications in support of President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London— Intercept at Menwith Hill station,” the NSA intercepted and decrypted then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s telephone calls as they dispatched through satellite links to Moscow starting the day he arrived at the first summit, April 1. Menwith Hill is an NSA outpost located in Harrogate, North Yorkshire in England. Until 2013, it was believed to be the largest intelligence facility in the world. Menwith Hill occupies 560 acres.


Without having to lend a word to the topic, MacAskill made demonstrably clear the United States was in espionage cahoots with England. As Gellman had reported, the NSA had given Britain PRISM and was in possession of classified GCHQ documents. Like Greenwald, MacAskill left the reader to discover that Menwith Hill had been in operation since 1966, is leased to America and suspiciously staffed with both American and British intelligence agents. As of March 2012, there is a one-to-three mix of British to American Menwith employees: 400 to 1,200. Menwith Hill is so productive it was given the NSA’s “Station of the Year” award in 1991. The obvious question remained: Why wouldn’t Britain be concerned with more powerful attendees’ data, such as its former colony, Australia, or America’s neighbor, Canada? The answer was coming.

Turkey flipped out and today we’re seeing the results in their refusal to cooperate with the West’s strategy against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. “Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, reports Gurnow, “specifically cited the BBC as sustaining and advocating civil unrest in Turkey amid nationwide demonstrations and violent protests.” China and Russia noted the behavior against them as well. Rest assured. Doesn't Ron Paul look young in this clip from the House floor?