In a breathtaking reversal, the U.S. position in the extradition hearing of Julian Assange has changed. Its previous position had been that they can extradite Assange because Assange is not a journalist and therefore his acts aren't protected the way journalists' acts are protected.
That position was failing in the court, so after a short (Covid-related) break, the U.S. rolled out a new assertion. All journalists are liable to prosecution under the 2017 Espionage Act if they publish classified information.
The reversal occurred on Day 10 of the extradition hearing. Here's the summary from Craig Murray, who is attending and reporting on the trial:
The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act. The US Government even surmised in court that such an Espionage Act prosecution of the New York Times may have been successful.
The Rosen case involved the prosecution of two lobbyists with no connection to the government for espionage under the Act for revealing classified information. From the Kansas Law Review (emphasis added):
In dicta, the Supreme Court has suggested that such a prosecution would be constitutional,5 and building on that premise, in August 2006, the Eastern District of Virginia found in United States v. Rosen6 that prosecuting two lobbyists under the Act did not violate the lobbyists' right of free speech.7 While prosecuting a lobbyist is obviously not the same as prosecuting a newspaper or a television station, Rosen is nevertheless significant because it demonstrates the courts' willingness to enforce the Act against "those not in a position of trust with the government."8 In prior cases, such as United States v. Morison,9 the government had only targeted individuals it had authorized to access the information and who subsequently leaked it.'10 The defendant in Morison, for example, worked at the Naval Intelligence Support Center and had a security clearance of "Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information."'11 The lobbyists in Rosen, in contrast, had no clearance and arguably no responsibility to the government to keep the information private.12
Nevertheless, the court in Rosen concluded that "both common sense and the relevant precedent point persuasively to the conclusion that the government can punish those outside of the government for the unauthorized receipt and deliberate retransmission of information relating to the national defense."'13 The "relevant precedent" to which the court referred was New York Times Co. v. United States,'14 the "Pentagon Papers" case, and specifically the dicta therein that specified the Act could impose liability on media outlets for publishing national security-related information.'15
This new government assertion leads to several conclusions.
First, as my headline suggests, that the government has issued a public threat to prosecute journalists for collecting and publishing classified information. Rosen specifically mentions the publication of the Pentagon Papers as an example of an act it could prosecute — just the kind of defiance that most citizens expect from journalists.
Second, that Julian Assange will be extradited. Immunizing journalists and then asserting that Assange wasn't one, was a loser for the U.S. position. Its new position will, I predict, be a winner.
The hearing judge, Vanessa Baraister has already shown herself to be a kind of "hanging judge" — when she asked Assange if he had understood events in court, he replied, “Not really. I
can’t think properly. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I
can’t access my writings" (see also here, or in fact, anywhere in Murray's detailed description of the proceedings).
According to murray, Judge (actually Magistrate) Baraitser is "but a puppet, being supervised by Chief Magistrate Lady Arbuthnot, a woman so enmeshed in the defense and security service establishment I can conceive of no way in which her involvement in this
case could be more corrupt" and who has a massive conflict of interest of her own. It's reasonable to conclude that there's no way this extradition will be thwarted.
When he reaches U.S. shores, Assange will face "up to 175 years in prison [on] hacking
charges and 17 counts of violating the World War I-era Espionage Act." If indicted, of course, he'll surely be convicted and sentenced, unless he dies of neglect first. His conviction and/or death will be sweet revenge for the military-industrial state he has stripped naked — and for a certain 2016 presidential loser who reportedly wanted him "droned."
Finally, we should conclude that the U.S. press doesn't care if this establishes a precedent unfavorable to their business, which offers to be publication of the news. We know this because none of them is covering this story in any detail or with any urgency — none of them.
The US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the USA are not in court to hear it and do not report it, because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored.
He then asks, "Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?" His answer is Yes, they really are so stupid.
My answer is No, they're not stupid at all. Because they know they're specifically not next.
The U.S. press understand the situation completely that this new application of the Espionage Act is a law "made for thee and not for me" — thee being "enemies of the state" like Assange and others who publish unapproved damaging leaks; and me being the Establishment press, the state's best friend and collaborator, who will make certain to stay "in bounds" now that they know where the new boundaries are drawn.
Their lack of concern or fear, in fact, signals their full intention to comply and collaborate, just they have (mostly) done in the past. The state has declared New Rules. The press, by its silence, accepts them.
Welcome to the next phase of the actual descent to autocracy, the one not related at all to which president holds power.
Perfect Storm-Ularity: Simultaneous Tipping Of Climate, Pandemic, Economy & Politics
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Wrong Rice? Close enough
If an American civilization survives the next decade, perhaps it will infer numerological significance from the fact that each of the tipping points, which is discussed below, probably became inevitable on or around February 20, 2020, which was the 20th day of the 2nd month of the 20th year of the 20-numbered century, i.e., my birthday. I. The “Climate-ularity” tipping point hardly needs belaboring, beyond reminding readers that pandemics like this month’s are likely to become more numerous-- even in the unlikely event that global temperatures can be re-stabilized only slightly higher than those of recent millennia. II. The “Pence-ularity” tipping point will be the day when Vice President Pence, recently assigned to communicate daily on pandemic response with heads of all executive departments, realizes that:
• a clear majority of the heads of those departments, and Mr. Pence, all simultaneously understand and discuss the fact that • the feedback loops, between collapses of public health, financial markets, medical and other supply chains, other economic activity, public (and intra-governmental) confidence and order, • have redefined their personal paths, of least risk, towards cabinet removal of President Trump on 25th Amendment grounds of unfitness, • despite subsequent President Pence’s re-election being near-impossible after likely defection of Trump-loyalist voters.
III. The “Spook-ularity” tipping point will be the day when a majority of Democratic Party powerbrokers decide to publicly formalize the Democratic Party’s merger with the National Security State, as follows: A.“Going Big” is safer than going small when ceasing to disguise the fact that the Democratic establishment’s early March consolidation, behind Presidential candidacy of Joe Biden:
• sought solely to prevent nomination of Bernie Sanders, and • never sought to make fast-ailing Biden face the challenges of a general election and of governing.
B. In order to justify a bait-and-switch of the Presidential ticket nomination, the most effective campaign message will be “Repel Russian Invasions”-- which has been the increasingly dominant political theme, since mid-2016, of both the Democratic Party establishment and the Intelligence Community. C.The Democratic Party is the only vehicle available for the Intelligence Community to continue its recent increases in direct electoral involvement, because “Agreement Incapability” caused Trump:
• first to reject, or not understand, the Intelligence Community’s 2016-2017 attempt to “make him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” and • second to recruit the Republican Party’s propaganda organs, voter base, and consequently most of its elected officials, into demonizing and (more importantly) demanding transparency from the Intelligence Community.
D. The Presidential nominee most suited to “Repel Russian Invasions” will be a decorated military combat and leadership veteran with bipartisan name recognition and academic credentials, of which the most obvious choice is David Petraeus:
• whose one year heading the CIA is Goldilocksian (just long enough to understand its structure and some of its culture, but not long enough to have a spooky image); and • who has been acting very much like a potential candidate, having:
(i) Petraeus’s post-government roles with mega-contractor KKR being an awkward target for the MIC-loving and petrodollar-loving Trump-Kushner clan, and (ii) Petraeus’s “leaks to paramour” scandal being mitigated by how mild this scandal now looks in contrast with Trump-era duelling leaks, and by his paramour’s own background in military intelligence (which actually gives Petreaus the option of hinting that he was “set up” by rogue agents of Obama, who was widely suspected of viewing Petraeus as a Presidential challenger).
E. The Vice-Presidential nominee most suited to be Petraeus’s running mate, in light of establishment rhetoric and turnout-related perspectives, would obviously be a minority woman, of which the most obvious choice is Condaleeza (“Condi”) Rice:
• whose positives include:
(i) Condi’s age (66 on Nov 14 2020 and 73 before the 2028 primaries) which is old enough to minimize jealousy/resistance from the next generation of “her turn” hopefuls such as Harris, Abrams, Klobuchar, Warren and Gillibrand, not to mention “his turn” hopefuls such as Buttigieg, Booker, Newsom, Cuomo, Rep. Castro and Mayor Castro; and (ii) Condi’s “Russia expert” profile, which enables the anti-Trump ticket to double down on arguments that: (a) Trump is Putin blackmailee (and Trump delaying arms to Ukraine was strategically huge); (b) Bernie was a Putin dupe (and Tulsi was somewhere between Bernie and Trump on Putin association scale); (c) complaints about the Democratic Presidential (and Congressional) nomination process are Putin-sowed divisiveness; and (d) Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley (not to mention Pence and Trump himself) know comparatively little about pre-Trump foreign affairs.
• whose main negatives have become positives:
(i) Rice’s association with 9/11 and Iraq invasion would fit a largely completed pivot, from passive to active, of the de facto Democratic establishment position that “no more apologies are needed for what we now call an error in the intelligence on Iraq WMD”, and (ii) Rice’s association with the Bush dynasty would reinforce the Democratic campaigning and fund-raising pitches that “all knowledgeable people are unified against the crazy ignoramus Trump, not to mention against the twin extremes of Pence and Bernie.”
F. The above reasons for nominating General Petraeus will be magnified if, as seems likely, the mood of the times requires a leader “respected by the military,” because, for example, federal troops are widely deployed:
• to prevent pandemic-panicked individuals-cum-mobs from overrunning or at least disrupting hospitals and other infrastructure; and/or • to minimize warlike group clashes involving over-armed Trump-loyalists, and/or other resistance to a perceived (perhaps correctly) one-way transition towards a super-national, or other fully non-democratic, governmental structure.
The Future of Surveillance: 500,000 AI Facial Scans Per Month in China
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An abandoned panopticon prison in Cuba (source). Being publicly observed, or the knowledge that they may be being observed at any one time, keeps prisoners under control.
by Thomas Neuburger
All regimes with an overriding need to control their populations — including the U.S. and China — depend on public surveillance as a key element in their control mechanism. "Public surveillance" has two senses, and both of them apply.
"Public surveillance" means surveillance of the public, of course, but it also means publicly-acknowledged surveillance of the public. That is, the observed know they are being observed, or they might be being observed, whether or not they see the observer. The act of acknowledged observing is itself the instrument of control. (The state police, the Stasi, of East Germany accomplished this with an extensive network of citizen-spies. Everyone knew their neighbors were observing them; no one knew when a neighbor would betray them to the state.)
As Ed Walker observed some years ago: "In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about the way discipline is enforced. He uses the image of the Panopticon, a prison invented by Jeremy Bentham. ... The prison cells are arranged in a circle, and a guard tower stands in the center. Bentham suggested that the guards should be shielded from the view of the prisoners, so they wouldn’t know when they were being observed, but would know that they might be observed at any moment. He also suggested that it didn’t matter who was looking at the prisoners, as long as someone was looking."
I would add that if the observation tower is shielded by a one-way mirror, it doesn't even matter if the tower is populated, so long as prisoners think it could be.
Surveillance of citizens is rampant in China, of course, but also in the West. It's impossible to watch any British mystery or police drama, for example, without some propagandistic reference to evidence from CCTV footage, as though mass surveillance were not only not unusual, but a benefit to society.
And it's hard not to imagine that every word spoken into a U.S. telephone, typed into a U.S. email message, or sent via Skype or any other U.S.-based electronic services is not either observed or collected for later observation by the modern NSA — the eyes and ears of the U.S. security state — whose motto, after all, is "Collect it all."
There's no question that close observation of U.S. citizens is great and that it will increase. The only question is how it will increase and how quickly.
What's the future of U.S. security surveillance? For that, we look to China. Via Paul Mozur writing at SFGate:
One month, 500,000 face scans: How China is using AI to profile a minority
The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as 1 million of them in detention camps.
Now, documents and interviews show that authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.
The technology and its use to keep tabs on China’s 11 million Uighurs were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems, who requested anonymity because they feared retribution. The New York Times also reviewed databases used by the police, government procurement documents and advertising materials distributed by the companies that make the systems.
Lest you think this is just a story about the use of AI (artificial intelligence) to perpetuate the evils of racial bias, think again.
Close and aggressive policing in the U.S. is not just for black neighborhoods, even though that's where it most often occurs. Here's what happens to white people, for example, when they too cross the line drawn by the state:
Agents of the national security state pepper-spraying the faces of submissive Occupy protesters at UC Davis
As this technology becomes more refined, it can be used to identify anyone
anywhere they can be observed, and each observation will then be added to the
ever-growing database file kept on that person. To what purpose? Any purpose the U.S. national security state wishes to put it to.
The future of mass surveillance may be in China, but it won't stay there for long.
Will the U.S. National Security State Work to Defeat Jeremy Corbyn?
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The implementation of Israel's one-state solution is nearly complete (discussion here)
by Thomas Neuburger
I've been writing both publicly and privately about regime change and the U.S. national security state lately, most recently here. Bottom line: They do it and they like doing it. It seems no country is immune from being targeted — according to Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, even the UK.
This find stems from a leaked recording of a conversation Pompeo had with British Jewish leaders who are worried about Corbyn's supposed "antisemitism" — in reality, Corbyn's even-handedness when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which represents a break from the U.S.-UK position of always siding with Israel and against the Palestinian people, despite stories like this: "Annexation: Israel Already Controls More Than Half of the West Bank."
Here's Telesur's version of Pompeo's leaked remarks:
US Will ‘Do Its Best’ To Stop Corbyn From Being Elected as Prime Minister: Pompeo
In the most recent showcase of United States (U.S.) meddling in foreign governments, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledged, in a leaked conversation with British Jewish leaders, that his country will “push-back” against Labour’s party leader Jeremy Corbyn's bid to get elected as Prime Minister.
“It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected,” Pompeo is heard saying. “It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
The recording was leaked to The Washington Post and revealed on Sunday after sustained accusations of antisemitism within the party. These allegations have mainly being driven by mainstream media and certain pro-Israeli groups against Labour’s leadership.
Corbyn has long been a campaigner against Israeli occupation and supporter of Palestinian rights, which many journalists have labeled as anti-semitic.
Note that Telesur quotes the Washington Post, which broke the story, but which also interpreted the remarks differently. Here's the Post's Pompeo-friendly headline: "Pompeo pledges not to wait for Britain’s elections to ‘push back’ against Corbyn and anti-Semitism." No hint of a threat of regime change or election interference is suggested.
Here's the Post's version of Pompeo's remarks with context:
During his meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Pompeo was asked if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?”
In response, Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,” he said to fervent applause from attendees.
“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened,” he said.
Was Mike Pompeo promising to interfere in the coming UK election to make sure Corbyn was defeated? Or promising just to protect "Jews in the UK" if life becomes "difficult" for them (whatever that means) after Corbyn takes office?
Pompeo's quoted comment contains a tell: "You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back." He, Corbyn, can't "do those things" — make life difficult for Jews in the UK — until after he's Prime Minister. What would "push back" mean prior to Corbyn taking office? What "things" would there be, what actions could Corbyn possibly take prior to his election — that could be pushed back against, except the election itself?
Stay tuned. If Pompeo makes good on his promise and the U.S. security state is caught meddling — Russia-style or worse — in the election of the UK prime minister, the consequences will be varied and great on both sides of the ocean.
At that point, things could get very interesting indeed. Look for UK heads to swivel in outrage and anger, whether Corbyn is elected or not. And look for U.S. heads to divert attention from the obvious and recent contradictions.
The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.
“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”
“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.
The reason always given for the government suppressing a national security story is, of course, that lives will be put in danger, even when they won't. The following is Risen, as reported by Norton, talking about this arrangement between Times editors and the government, an arrangement he once went along with, but then grew to distrust:
Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” ... There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”
“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported [sic] said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.
“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.
This practice applied not only after 9/11 and the Iraq War, but long afterward as well:
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”
The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”
“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”
We now know, if there was any doubt, that those heroes of the #Resistance at the New York Times, by their own admission, have been fully folded into the government's media "information" project. Good to know.
Ignoring the Elected President
Side note: It's understandable, in a way, that in the current panicky environment, administration employees are treating the president, their boss, as someone to withhold information from, as they did in the case of the U.S. military's cyber-intrusion into the Russian power grid. Again, according to the New York Times (emphasis added):
Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials[.]
Is this a precedent, though, we want to cheer or set? The act of cementing in place an American Praetorian Guard with a publicly sanctioned veto over decisions of an elected head of state, once done, won't be undone easily.
Is this what we want our next constitution to become, a state in which it's OK for elected officials to be publicly frustrated by their unelected subordinates? One must consider the future before radically altering the present.
I've said this before, but consider: If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...
...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?
How much would be kept from him by "his" administration? How many who work for him would openly block his agenda, using the security state's propaganda resources (such as the New York Times) to defend their actions?
How much of the future are we willing to sacrifice in order to fix the present? After all, if Establishment leaders really want to be rid of President Trump, there's a fully constitutional method for doing it — impeachment. Instead they seem to be choosing these anti-constitutional methods.
This is a plan that will backfire. Once a nation opens the door to rule by its security elite, as the U.S. has increasingly done, the guardians and beneficiaries of that door almost never let it be closed.
2017 has been an such unusual year in so many ways that its unusuality has masked the ways in which it has been a very usual year, a very more-of-the-same series of months.
For one thing, "The Resistance" has gone from being a meaningful idea to something almost seems like it could be added to anything to indicate added value — "Dove soap, now with #Resistance." I've seen "resistance" claims from those who fought to keep the oligarchy in check during the primary, and from those who fight today to enhance the oligarchy's grip after it (I could mention some fervently pro-corporate Democrats I get incessant mailings from).
Almost like the phrase "fake news," which was immediately so overused it became meaningless less than four days after it was created, "The Resistance" hides a disturbing fact — that while we may be witnessing an enhanced and crueler version of your daddy's Republicans, we are not witnessing an enlightened, more "woke" set of mainstream Democrats.
The only thing that's "woke" about those who (still) hold power in the Party ... is the new coat of branding that asks you to think they are.
Trump may himself be new, in that he took the election by running as Bernie Sanders — a candidate the entire Democratic Party seemed united to destroy during the primary. But the only thing new about the response to Trump, to these eyes, is the unified ad campaign — by the Democratic Party establishment, the national security establishment, and the press — to (a) unseat Trump; and (b) restore an acceptable Establishment candidate to power.
That "acceptable Establishment candidate," by the way, may well be Mike Pence, at least in the eyes of two of the three establishments listed above. Sorry Democrats. Letting the CIA bed you doesn't guarantee you girlfriend status in the morning. Nice try, though.
The Story of 2017
All of this is intro to the following list of my favorite "GP" posts of 2017, my sideways view of the melange of battles we witnessed during the year, including:
• The mainstream Democratic Party's only occasional "resistance," and their attempt to restore their own worst elements to power while pretending to have "woke."
• The Republican Party's attempt to use the Trump presidency to "win absolutely," end the New Deal forever, destroy all government-mandated environmentalism and dismantle entirely the Roosevelt regulatory state. In short, their hard and constant push to deliver the wettest of wet dreams to the billionaire octogenarians they serve.
• The national security establishment's increasingly obvious attempt to rid itself of the occasionally heterodox ("Who needs NATO?") elected president it pretends to serve and report to.
• The country's (so far failed) attempt to say to its ruling establishments, "Please please please, won't someone serve our needs?" A cry so far unheard.
• The maybe-fatal implications of all the above.
• Oh ... and the almost certain, easily witnessable birth of the New Old Stone Age thanks to the can both parties are kicking down the road, if not crushing under foot as they resolutely march toward the cliff. I mean, of course, a real response to the coming, almost certain, easily witnessable worldwide climate disaster.
The List that Tells the Story (Part 1)
So, without further ado, part one of the story of 2017, at least as witnessed by the writer in the chair by the window. (Part two will appear next time.)
What they failed to do, of course, is to use the power they briefly had to undo Merrick Garland's Supreme Court appointment. Yes, they could have done it. Do you wonder why they didn't?
The Party considers Obama a saint and a savior. It's the greatest triumph of branding since Bill Clinton. Clinton's brand seems to be teetering though. Will Obama's similarly wobble, or will he enter his own sunset years un-reexamined?
Yet another chance for mainstream Democrats, let by Obama himself, to show where they stand, to choose between controlling the Party or serving the nation. Do they think the nation's independent voters aren't watching? (Yes, they do think that.)
A starting point for a theme we came back to. This political generation thinks it can kick the climate can down to the next one, then die with a feeling of righteousness. It can't. It will die in defiance or shame, watching the mess that it itself made unfold around it.
An examination of one of the ways those who control the Republican Party are trying to "win absolutely" — by dismantling absolutely the U.S. regulatory state. This looks at the Supreme Court rulings it wants to overturn, and why.
Thanks to the Democratic Party's unwillingness to unseat Merrick Garland on January 3, the Republicans may well succeed. What can any reasonable person think the outcome of that will be?
A first look at another theme we returned to several more times — the relationship between money creation, private debt, and government enslavement to the financial sector. Because of that combination, most Americans have seen no recovery almost a decade after the last crash. This almost guarantees the next one — and the messy civil war that may well follow.
If you're counting, this will be the second cause of the "rolling civil war" we're already starting to see. I can think of three more we haven't gotten to yet.
At the heart of this particular problem lies a key: Government creates money and gives it to billionaires whenever it wants to (think of the Iraq War as a $3 trillion gift of newly created dollars to the owners of the corporate military state). If it wanted to, it could create money for other, better purposes — mortgage and student debt relief, free colleges, Medicare for All. If it wanted to.
Making sure you don't see that as a choice is their goal. Making sure you do see that as a choice is ours. This is our first foray of the year in that direction, and not the last.
A few of my guesses were wrong — a prosecutor was indeed appointed, though no one knows if he will be allowed to remain. But the conclusion is certainly valid:
"This country has had a constitutional crisis every 70 years, after which the government restructured itself. In effect, we have been ruled by three Constitutions, not just one, each producing, in practice, very different governments and societies. We're rapidly producing a crisis that will produce a fourth."
This is also true:
"Whatever happens next, whether Trump is impeached or not, I think we've
already been changed as a nation forever by what's already led us to
this moment. After all, in 2016 the nation wanted someone like Sanders
to be president, wanted an agent of change, and look what it got. This
is in fact our second failed attempt this century at change that makes
our lives better.
"I don't think that point's been lost on anyone. We're in transition no
matter what happens to Trump. Transition to what, we'll have to find out
later."
This is an appropriate place to end for now, with a look at where the failed citizen's revolt of 2016 leaves us going forward. The rest of our story of 2017 next time.
How Police Use Military Technology to Secretly & Persistently Track You
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Persistent Surveillance Systems, used for "pre-event forensics, tracking targets in real time, and post-event forensics." Pre-event forensics? This isn't just about parades and demonstrations. It means constantly taping large areas of a city just in case an unplanned event (explosion, a murder) should occur.
by Gaius Publius
We could make some grand statement about the nature of surveillance in 21st Century America — there's certainly a grand and frightening statement to be made — but that would obscure the detail. (Do note, though, when you watch the videos, how much the American need for extreme Public Safety — "Daddy, keep us safe" — is invoked in justifying these intrusions.)
That said, from a recent Rolling Stonereport on surveillance in Baltimore, here is just the detail, how Americans are being watched by cops of all stripes.
▪ Large urban areas are constantly photographed from 10,000 feet. Using multiple cameras in a plane flying at 10,000 feet and computer-driven "image stitching" software, police can photograph all open traffic and human interactions in five-mile square urban area for hours — and archive everything for later use.
This creates a storable, searchable, time-lapse wide-area "movie" of all street movement. Watch the video above to see it in action. Note that only at the end of the video are privacy issues even mentioned. Note also that the "events" discussed aren't just planned events, like parades and demonstration, but also events not announced ahead of time, like murders. "Pre-event forensics" assumes constant "just in case" surveillance.
This kind of surveillance is happening now in at least one American city, Baltimore. Benjamin Powers, writing at Rolling Stone (emphasis mine):
Eyes Over Baltimore: How Police Use Military Technology to Secretly Track You
"They view people as enemy combatants," says activist, as cops adopt surveillance, tracking, facial recognition programs designed for war zones
When protesters took to the street after police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, they were greeted by law enforcement in full body armor, flanked by armored vehicles. In the two and a half years and countless shootings since, militarized police have become an all too familiar sight. In response, citizens have overwhelmingly begun to film these interactions on their smartphones, making the technology the eyes of our nation. But as we watch the police, they also watch us – only they don't use an iPhone. Often, they use military grade surveillance equipment that gives them a much broader view than simple cell phone cameras ever could.
The city of Baltimore has, in many ways, become ground zero for the military surveillance technology that is slowly making its way from the battlefields into the hands of police departments across the country. From January to October of last year, police monitored Baltimore's citizens using a Cessna airplane outfitted with military grade surveillance technologies multiple times, without their knowledge, that were developed for overseas war zones. The Baltimore Police Department has used surveillance technology such as large-scale aerial surveillance, advanced cell phone tracking and facial recognition technology on Baltimore's citizens, yet these technologies have had little to no oversight from city government, and most have a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Examined together, these surveillance technologies demonstrate an extended record of secret surveillance by the Baltimore Police Department. In August of 2016, the Department of Justice reported that the BPD needed greater oversight and transparency.
Yet police using military surveillance technology is increasingly common.
There's much more about these cameras, and who is financing their use, in the article. But cameras are just the start.
▪ Hardware and software tracks faces and captures cell phone communication. Hardware that mimics cell phone towers and facial recognition software have also been used to "oversee" Baltimore:
While PSS is the most recent example, Baltimore's citizens have also faced police armed with military technology to track cellphones and identify faces that was implemented and honed overseas. Both of these create very real problems for everyday people.
Since 2010, and potentially prior, Baltimore has been subjected to a technology developed for overseas battlefields called Stingray, otherwise know as a cell site simulator. The technology mimics a cellphone tower, causing nearby phones to connect to it. In the pinging back and forth once connected, a Stingray knows not only what cell phones are in the area, but also where they are, the calls they've made, and, importantly, the conversations themselves.
This data capture isn't just limited to the individual that police might be looking to track, but also all the other phones on the network.
About facial recognition surveillance, consider this, from the four-year-old NY Times report by Charlie Savage linked above:
Facial Scanning Is Making Gains in Surveillance
The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used. ...
The automated matching of close-up photographs has improved greatly in recent years, and companies like Facebook have experimented with it using still pictures.
...[R]esearchers on the project say they made progress, and independent specialists say it is virtually inevitable that someone will make the broader concept work as camera and computer power continue to improve.
“I would say we’re at least five years off, but it all depends on what kind of goals they have in mind” for such a system, said Anil Jain, a specialist in computer vision and biometrics engineering at Michigan State University who was not involved in the BOSS project.
"Five years off" from 2013 is 2018, and who knows how good they've gotten already? Is it deployed yet. The RS article suggests it's already deployed in Baltimore.
▪ Location-based social media monitoring and tracking has grown frighteningly sophisticated. This one is even scarier. To get a full sense of this system's power, watch the short marketing video below:
Amazingly powerful as a monitoring and tracking tool. But you knew this had to be possible, right? It just needed someone wealthy enough and authoritarian enough to get it implemented (looking at you, Deep State).
Note the stated goal, announced in the first sentence of the video: "To uncover actionable social media content." Again, this is a marketing video, selling its features to potential customers.
As the video shows, any content can be tracked using sophisticated filters. And who defines what "actionable" means? The FBI? Militarized urban cops? Attorney General J. Beauregard Sessions? Donald Trump during one of his night-sweat sessions?
And who defines what "actions" might follow such tracking? Obviously, the user, depending on their goal. Which opens wide the field of possibilities. Anyone with access to this system can use it for any purpose they wish. This includes hired, or rogue, mercenary forces like Blackwater (or whatever they're calling themselves these days). This includes anyone who can buy it. I imagine the range of who could do what to who with this stuff is endless.
But don't let your mind wander too far into that field of possibilities; you'll scare yourself.
Archived live performance; music credits at the link. Original recorded version here.
And you wouldn't want to do that. The world has already grown scary enough as it is, all on its own.
Who’s Blackmailing the President & Why Aren't Democrats Upset About It?
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Deep State to Trump: "You know what you have to hide. So do we. Are you feeling lucky?"
by Gaius Publius
Until now, getting into the news and reports about Russia and Trump meant getting into some rather dense weeds (PDF of declassified report here), but with the recent release by Buzzfeed of the full 35-page dossier on Trump and Russia (the explosive one, with the women peeing on Obama's former hotel room bed), which was distilled into a two-page appendix in the classified version of the report, the road to clarity just presented itself.
So I offer the text of three tweets (mine), a longer discussion of those main points, and comments by Glenn Greenwald on the latest Trump-Russia-intel community contretemps. Everything else, as I now see it, is detail, a gloss on these three points.
First, the tweets, a bullet-point capsule of all the main points up to now:
1) It certainly looks like our Security State is using Russian blackmail material against Trump to blackmail him for their own purposes.
This hits, I think, the main elements to watch in tightly compressed form. Read on for the long version of these three points. Click here to jump ahead to Greenwald's take on all this.
Blackmailing the U.S. President
As I said above, there only three elements to "get" to get this story. First, there's the blackmail element. According to the 35-page dossier, Russia (supposedly) prepared blackmail material on Trump but isn't using it.
But it's clear that American intelligence services certainly are using it, or using the threat of using it, and doing so very publicly (per CNN, quoted here, my emphasis):
One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.
"For your information, sir"? Or "Careful; you don't know what all us intel types know about you ... sir"? Again, Trump was presented with just a two-page summary of the full dossier. The actual information, which we have thanks to the later publication of the 35-page dossier, was reportedly not presented to him, perhaps to leave to his imagination what it contained.
Now the detail: According to an ex-MI6 (the British CIA) agent, whose dossier, I understand from talking with journalists, was shopped around to a number of publications and rejected as unreliable before it seems to have found a home on David Corn's desk — according to this ex-agent, Russia had assembled a fair amount of blackmail material on Donald Trump, including his sexual practices while staying at first-class hotels in Russia. But Russia, we're told, isn't using the material against him since Trump is in sync with their goals anyway.
American sources, however, have published this material since it came to them as well from the same ex-MI6 agent. In other words, the 35-page dossier was available both to American intel services and the U.S. press because its author had been shopping it around broadly for publication. But almost without exception, the American press considered it unreliable and wouldn't touch it.
Yet a summary of this widely-considered-unreliable dossier appeared in the classified briefing the U.S. intel chiefs presented to Donald Trump. Why? The obvious answer is to blackmail Trump for their own purposes.
We can speculate on what those purposes are. My best guess is to keep alive the new cold war with Russia; others like Corey Robin think maybe just agency revenge. But using unreliable information to frighten Trump is an obvious shot across his bow. It says, "We're the we-know-everything National Security State. There's more where this came from. You're vulnerable to anyone who knows this stuff. Think that through ... sir."
The Security Services, the Political Process, and the Democratic Party
Second, there's the element of multiple intrusions into the political process. Russia certainly attempted to tilt the election their way, but they were not alone in that effort. For example, the present use of blackmail material by U.S. intel chiefs, or the threat of its use, is itself an intrusion of the U.S. security services (what Greenwald calls the "deep state") into the 2016-2017 political process.
But even this is not unique. Consider the James Comey affair. Prior to the election, there were many hands meddling to tilt the political outcome as well. For example, Comey's "no charge" charges against Clinton count as one attempt to intrude. As I viewed the evidence against her (see here), a Comey recommendation to indict would have been justifiable. (Remember, the FBI doesn't indict; that's left to Loretta Lynch and the Dept. of Justice, a duty she couldn't credibly perform after her secret tarmac meeting Bill Clinton was revealed.)
Or barring a recommendation to indict, Comey could have just stood down, recommended not to indict — and then kept his mouth shut. Had he done that, it might have been a political act since Comey is a careerist serving a Democratic president and a Democratic Attorney General. (Again, there was ample cause to turn what he correctly called "gross negligence" into a recommendation to pursue the investigation to the grand jury level. After all, the same statute has been wielded by Obama many times to punish less-well-placed individuals for far less negligence than running a secret, private, wide-open server through which all her government communications were passed, whether classified or not.)
But caught between an Obama administration that signaled clearly it wanted no indictment — political interference on their part — and a group of right-wing agents who clearly wanted one, Comey tried to have it both ways and failed to please anyone at all. The speech in which he indicted without indicting was certainly a political act in both senses of the phrase. He tried to get the political outcome of a recommendation to indict without recommending to indict, and in the office politics sense, he tried to please both his bosses and his employees to preserve his standing and his job.
Unfortunately, his bosses and his employees wanted opposite things. Many of the FBI agents involved in the server investigation clearly wanted an indictment, and when one wasn't forthcoming, started leaking what they knew — or what they wanted people to think they knew — to the press. This represented political interference as well, not only by agents of the FBI, but also by investigators in the NY Police Dept, which had control of Anthony Wiener's laptop, and who were also leaking to the press.
The Democrats at this point, I think rightly, felt heavy "cop hands" on the scale of this election (without at all acknowledging the president's own hand, or that of Loretta Lynch), and said so — loudly.
But Comey was not alone. The CIA and NSA (the largest part of the "national security state") were intruding politically in the other direction, by endorsing Clinton and demonizing Trump (my emphasis):
For months, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it.
Now Trump is president and the pro-war national security forces are at it again, leaning again on Trump in yet another intrusion into the political process.
So who again tried to tilt the field for or against Clinton or Trump? Including Russia, the administration, Comey, agents of the FBI and NY police, the CIA and national security forces, I count five groups. This is a lot of political intrusion, regardless of which candidate you favored — all within the last year — and we're still not done. I'm sure we're only halfway through this extended drama.
The Selective Blindness of the Democratic Party
Third, with all this political interference, where are the Democrats? Do they condemn it all, praise it all, or pick and choose?
Bottom line: They see what they want to see, not what's in front of us all and in plain sight. Which is not only unprincipled, it's dangerous ... for them as well as us.
Again, they did not see Obama's original declarations of Clinton's innocence as political intrusion. But they did see Comey's eventual "won't indict, but will condemn" speech, and his and other investigators' pre-election actions, as political intrusion. They did not see the "pro-war" security apparatus' endorsement of Clinton and trashing of Trump as intrusions. But they do see Russian interference as intrusion. And they absolutely don't see the security services' present blackmail threats against a duly elected president as political interference.
They see what they want to see, what they think helps them politically and electorally, and they're blind to the rest. This is highly unprincipled. And again, it's dangerous as well.
After all, one reason the institutional Democratic Party nearly lost to Sanders, a highly principled man — and did lose to Trump, a man who pretended to be principled — is that plenty of voters in key states were just tired of being taken for a ride by "say one thing, do another" Democrats. Tired, in other words, of unprincipled Democrats — tired of job-promising, job-killing trade deals pushed hard by both Democratic presidents, tired of the bank bailout that made every banker whole but rescued almost no mortgagees, tired of their reduced lives, their mountain of personal debt, tired of the overly complex, profit-infected, still-unsolved medical care system — tired of what 16 years of Democrats had done to them, not for them.
If Democrats want to start winning again, not just the White House, but Congress and state houses, they can't continue to be these Democrats — unprincipled and self-serving. They must be those Democrats, Sanders Democrats, principled Democrats instead.
Does the above litany of complaint about political interference when it suits them, and non-complaint when it doesn't, look like principled behavior to you?
Which brings me to the end of this part of the discussion. If some people see this party behavior as self-serving hypocrisy, you can bet others do as well. Democrats can only turn this decade-long collapse around by not being who they appeared to be in the last three election cycles. They have to attract the Sanders voters who stood aside in the general election and see them very negatively. Yes, Democrats will continue to get votes — some people will always vote Democratic. But in the post-Sanders, post-Trump era, will they get enough votes to turn the current tide, which runs heavily against them?
I'm not alone in thinking, not a chance.
But this is the long form of what I wanted to say. For the elevator speech version, just read the three tweets at the top. I think they capture the main points very nicely.
Glenn Greenwald: "The Deep State Goes to War with the President-Elect, and Democrats Cheer"
Greenwald's take is very similar to mine, and there's much more research in his excellent piece. Writing at The Intercept, he says (emphasis in original):
The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer
In January, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.
This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”
Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.
You can see where this is going. The "deep state," the CIA, NSA and the rest of the unelected national security apparatus of the U.S., is going to war with an elected president even before he takes office, and Democrats are so eager for a win that they're siding with them.
Did Russia attempt to interfere in the U.S. election? Of course, and Democrats condemned it. Did the agents of the FBI et al attempt to interfere in the U.S. election? Of course, and Democrats condemned it. Is the national security state today interfering in the outcome of a U.S. election, by trying to destabilize and force its will on the incoming administration? Of course, and Democrats are cheering it.
As horrible and as monstrous as this incoming administration is — and it will prove to be the worst in American history — who would aid the national security apparatus in undermining it?
Apparently, the Democratic Party. Greenwald continues:
The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.
But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.
And Greenwald agrees that this tactic is not just craven; it's also dangerous:
Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?
All of this, don't forget, rests on the one document mentioned above, the material summarized in an appendix to the classified version of the security services' report on Russia (emphasis mine):
the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts and salacious private conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.
I'll send you to the Greenwald piece for much more of this detail. As I said above, this story has seemed muddy until now, but it just came clear.
A Coup in the Making
This is not a game, even at the electoral level. It has nation-changing, anti-democratic consequences. Democratic voters fear a coup, or a kind of coup, led by the Trump administration, and for good reason. But there's another coup in the making as well, and Democrats are cheering it.
If a Republican elected official had publicly warned Obama to not oppose a policy the Republicans and the CIA/NSA favored because "they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you," what would — what should — our response to that be? Mine would be horror and shock that a Republican had dared make that threat, followed by fear that he, and the agencies behind him, will make good on it. At which point, it's farewell democracy, likely for a long long time.
Yet the following actually did happen (Greenwald again, my emphasis): "Just last week, Chuck Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being 'really dumb' by challenging the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare to stand up to them." And yet there was no shock or fear, at least from Maddow or her viewers.
And Schumer really did use the phrase "they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." The video is embedded here. Is that how Democrats plan to defeat Trump? Is it better, more comforting, if a Democrat makes that threat and appears to side with the security agencies' (the deep state's) strong-arm tactics?
A coup in the making — not the one we fear, which may also occur — but a coup nonetheless. This really is not a game, and both sides are playing for keeps.
Best Buy National Repair Techs Routinely Search Customer Devices, Act as "Paid Informers" for FBI
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The Stasi was the "secret police" of communist East Germany. In 1989, about 1% of the population was used as "informers" (source).
by Gaius Publius
Did you know that Best Buy's central computer repair facility — their so-called "Geek Squad" — contains at least three employees who are also regular informers for the FBI? And that these employees routinely search through computers and other devices that Best Buy customers send in for repair? And when they find something they think the FBI would be interested in, they turn over the information for rewards of up to $500?
That's a sideline business you probably didn't imagine existed — outside of the old Soviet Union or communist East Germany.
I want to look briefly at two aspects of this — first, the story itself (it's chilling) and second, its implications.
The Story — Best Buy Repair Techs Routinely Inform on Their Computer Repair Customers to the FBI
Let's look first at the story via the OC Weekly in Orange County, California. Note, as you read, the use of phrases like "FBI informant" and "paid FBI informant." We'll also look at other versions of this story. In all versions, Best Buy repair employees routinely search customers' computers for information they can sell to the FBI, and get paid if the FBI wants the info.
In the FBI-centered versions, the Best Buy employees act on their own and get paid as "honest citizens," as it were, merely offering tips, even though this practice seems to be routine. For the FBI, the fact that the same employees frequently offer tips for which they get paid doesn't make them "paid informers" in the sense that a regular street snitch regularly sells tips to cops.
For the Best Buy customer in question, that's a distinction without a difference. But you'll see that distinction made in articles about this incident, depending on whose side the writer seems to favor.
[Dr. Mark A.] Rettenmaier is a prominent Orange County physician and surgeon who had no idea that a Nov. 1, 2011, trip to a Mission Viejo Best Buy would jeopardize his freedom and eventually raise concerns about, at a minimum, FBI competency or, at worst, corruption. Unable to boot his HP Pavilion desktop computer, he sought the assistance of the store's Geek Squad. At the time, nobody knew the company's repair technicians routinely searched customers' devices for files that could earn them $500 windfalls as FBI informants. This case produced that national revelation.
According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally [sic] located on Rettenmaier's computer an image of "a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck." Westphal notified his boss, Justin Meade, also an FBI informant, who alerted colleague Randall Ratliff, another FBI informant at Best Buy, as well as the FBI. Claiming the image met the definition of child pornography and was tied to a series of illicit pictures known as the "Jenny" shots, agent Tracey Riley seized the hard drive.
The story goes on to detail rights violations committed by the FBI on its own, such as these:
Setting aside the issue of whether the search of Rettenmaier's computer constituted an illegal search by private individuals acting as government agents, the FBI undertook a series of dishonest measures in hopes of building a case, according to James D. Riddet, Rettenmaier's San Clemente-based defense attorney. Riddet says agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records.
To convict someone of child-pornography charges, the government must prove the suspect knowingly possessed the image. But in Rettenmaier's case, the alleged "Jenny" image was found on unallocated "trash" space, meaning it could only be retrieved by "carving" with costly, highly sophisticated forensics tools. In other words, it's arguable a computer's owner wouldn't know of its existence. (For example, malware can secretly implant files.) Worse for the FBI, a federal appellate court unequivocally declared in February 2011 (USA v. Andrew Flyer) that pictures found on unallocated space did not constitute knowing possession because it is impossible to determine when, why or who downloaded them.
The doctor's lawyer, of course, is contesting all of this, and the article's main point is that these discoveries have the FBI on the defensive. From the article's lead paragraph:
[A]n unusual child-pornography-possession case has placed officials on the defensive for nearly 26 months. Questions linger about law-enforcement honesty, unconstitutional searches, underhanded use of informants and twisted logic. Given that a judge recently ruled against government demands to derail a defense lawyer's dogged inquiry into the mess, United States of America v. Mark A. Rettenmaier is likely to produce additional courthouse embarrassments in 2017.
I want to ignore the wrangling between the court, the FBI and the attorneys for this piece and focus on the practices of Best Buy's employees and the government's defense of those practices. After discussing attempts to manipulate the court by withholding information in order to get authorization for a raid, the author notes:
Assistant U.S. Attorney M. Anthony Brown ... believes the "Jenny" image shouldn't be suppressed because it's only "wild speculation" that the Geek Squad performed searches at FBI instigation. To him, the defense is pushing a "flawed" theory slyly shifting focus to innocent FBI agents; he maintains that Rettenmaier—who is smart enough to have taught medicine at USC and UCLA—was dumb enough to seek Best Buy recovery of all of his computer files after knowingly storing child porn there.
Reading this, it's easy to see that the issue of what constitutes a "paid informant" is being obscured. After all, what counts as "FBI instigation"? If someone pays you regularly for something that she never directly asks for, is that "innocent" behavior or caused behavior ("instigation")?
Yes, Best Buy Did This Regularly
The article answers the questions above:
But the biggest issue remains whether Geek Squad technicians acted as secret law-enforcement agents and, thus, violated Fourth Amendment prohibitions against warrantless government searches. Riddet [the defendant's lawyer] claims records show "FBI and Best Buy made sure that during the period from 2007 to the present, there was always at least one supervisor who was an active informant." He also said, "The FBI appears to be able to access data at [Best Buy's main repair facility in Brooks, Kentucky] whenever they want." Calling the relationship between the agency and the Geek Squad relevant to pretrial motions, [Judge] Carney approved Riddet's request to question agents under oath.
The writer goes on to discuss the ins and outs of this particular case. But consider just what's above:
Best Buy routinely takes in customer computers for repair.
Those computers are, at least frequently, sent to a Best Buy's national repair facility in Kentucky.
Multiple people at that facility appear to be regular FBI informants.
From 2007 on, at least one supervisor on duty at any time was "an active informant" for the FBI.
And finally, from the article's lead:
Informing like for the FBI pays at least $500 each incident.
The LA Times handles this question similarly in a piece when the case first broke (my emphasis):
An employee at Best Buy's nationwide computer repair center served as a paid FBI informant who for years tipped off agents to illicit material found on customers' hard drives, according to the lawyer for a Newport Beach doctor facing child pornography charges as a result of information from the employee.
Federal authorities deny they directed the man to actively look for illegal activity. But the attorney alleges the FBI essentially used the employee to perform warrantless searches on electronics that passed through the massive maintenance facility outside Louisville, Ky., where technicians known as Geek Squad agents work on devices from across the country.
And note:
The Geek Squad had to use specialized technical tools to recover the photos because they were either damaged or had been deleted, according to court papers.
This contrasts with the Best Buy assertion that "Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally located [the image] on Rettenmaier's computer".
The Times thinks this case could turn into a constitutional issue, regardless of whether the doctor is guilty or innocent. (For the record, I'll note that the later (perhaps illegal as well) search of the doctor's other devices turned up what is asserted to be more incriminating pictures, mere possession of which is a "sex crime" in the U.S.)
The Implications
First point — This is an eager prosecutorial society; we really are a punishing bunch, we Americans. We've never left the world of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. So we give our police great latitude, allowing them to shoot and kill almost anyone for almost any reason, so long as the stated reason is in the form "I was afraid for my safety." Our prosecutors have great latitude in putting as many of our fellows in prison as possible. Our judges routinely clear their court calendars using plea-bargained guilty verdicts sans trial. This is the American judicial system, and it looks nothing like Law and Order, which is mainly propaganda.
And we, the spectators, are happy as clams to see the guilty (and the innocent) tortured and punished — witness our entertainment and the many popular programs that vilify the unworthy, from Judge Judy and her ilk, to Jerry Springer knockoffs, to all of those Lockup-type programs (extremely popular, by the way) on MSNBC. We love to see the "wicked" get it, in media and in life, much more so than people in many other first-world countries do. Witness our incarceration rate, the highest in the world.
Thus we give our "law enforcement" personnel — cops of all stripes, prosecutors, courts of all stripes (including the secret ones) — great latitude in finding people to punish and then making them truly miserable for as long as possible. We have been like this as a society for some time, all done with most people's permission.
Second point — With a Democrat in the White House, we're inclined to think this setup is mainly well-managed (even when it obviously isn't). Thus it has our blessing, more or less — or at least it has the blessing of middle class and working class white people — the bulk of people who vote.
Third point — We therefore fail to ask the most obvious questions. For example, about this Best Buy case, we ought to be asking this:
How common is the practice of paid FBI informants spying on fellow citizens in the ordinary performance of their jobs?
Are other computer repair companies and facilities similarly infected (infiltrated) by government agents?
Are other businesses also infiltrated to this degree?
Are "sex crimes" the only activity paid FBI informers watch for?
Is political activity subject to this kind of spying?
How much will this practice widen under AG Beauregard Sessions and President Trump?
Much to think about. I don't see the practice ending soon. I do see this as the tip of what could be a very large iceberg.
