AG Barr: "We must have zero tolerance for resisting police."

Watch these clips in order. The tech is not just used for personalized advertising, but also "criminal investigation" (as defined by the state), which the second clip makes clear near the end.

by Thomas Neuburger

I've been meaning to write for a while about the many scattered reports of the coming increased domestic surveillance and clampdown in the U.S. — a clampdown that stretches from private companies like Facebook, which is planning to open a surveillance backdoor in WhatsApp, to the exponential growth of facial recognition technology and its use, to the Pentagon's interest in using marines to fight in "megacities," to the way climate change panic and chaos may well fuel domestic and global authoritarianism., to the Pentagon's high altitude surveillance balloons to "deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats," which now being tested over the Midwest.

But let's start here, with William Barr. In a speech before the Fraternal Order of Police, a national organization that lobbies for police and police officers and is, in general, the umbrella organization for both local cop labor unions and local cop non-union activist organizations.

You can imagine what side, for example, the FOP was on after the police surrounded and assaulted Rodney King in Los Angeles. Dewey Stokes, then-FOP president said, "You have to put things in proper perspective. [...] These are not common occurrences. They are the result of stress on the job, emphasis of the system on the criminal and not the victim, and the media's exploitation of the negatives of law enforcement." Statements like this are typical of the FOP and tell you all you need to know about where this organization stands and what it stands for — cop culture, in all its ugly brutalizing force.

In his speech, Attorney General Barr said there must be — ready? — "zero tolerance for resisting police" and added that public figures in the media and elsewhere should "underscore the need to 'comply first, and, if warranted, complain later.'"

"Those who resist must be prosecuted for that crime. We must have zero tolerance for resisting police."

This matters not because William Barr is the pro-Trump enemy du jour, but because this attitude of subservience to the police as agents of the state is widely and commonly shared in our bipartisan neoliberal world. Kamala Harris, for example, Alameda County and California former "tough cop," has just unveiled a program that responds to domestic terrorism by expanding the already criminal asset forfeiture program to the property those merely thought to be potential criminals.

The right of the state, and whoever controls the state, to aggressively enforce its dominance must not be questioned, and the police, from Ferguson, Missouri to the streets of Los Angeles, are its most brutal and atavastic representatives.

 Cops dealing with protesters in Ferguson, Missouri (source)

They are also its most cheered representatives. In the aggregate, we are a deeply prosecutorial country with a long and abiding love of aggressive punishment. Cops on TV are all "good apples," except for the few, easily identified, easily vilified bad apples, whom the good apples all work to defeat. "Law and order" as a rallying cry will always sell in America. Kamala Harris's aggressive "tough cop" reputation, even as she brutalized her own black community, may well be one of her strongest electoral assets.

Who but the Bernie Sanders of the world will resist the call that William Barr just issued — that there be "zero tolerance" (a classic American glory phrase, steeped in implied goodness) for resisting police aggression, that the first duty of a citizen is to "comply first, and if warranted, complain later." (Note the use of "complain," which infantilizes the protest against unprovoked and often-fatal brutality.)

No neoliberal candidate will dare resist that call.

As the U.S. moves toward greater and greater surveillance and oppression — bipartisan surveillance and aggressive oppression — it moves closer and closer to a rolling civil war, a conflict that will just get uglier and uglier as brutality meets resistance meets escalating force, a conflict that will make this country, in fact, entirely unlivable.

Given the news, I'm not optimistic.
 

ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications

Surveillance images from East German Stasi archives (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

This is yet another reminder that we live in a nation in which citizen surveillance is assumed, with our permission, to be a infinitely expandable right possessed by government.

Even ICE, the immigration control service, spies on Americans, and has done so since at least 2014 under President Obama.

This surveillance takes two forms. First, ICE contracts with a major private company to engage directly in wiretapping and other targeted surveillance. Second, ICE buys and collects data from private big data aggregators — like Thomson Reuters — to add to what it knows about its enemies. Yes, that Thomson Reuters, the news people. Seems they're part of the big-data spook-state industry as well.

From Privacy International (emphasis mine):

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the centre of carrying out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement and family separation, has for years been contracting a US surveillance company to intercept peoples’ communications across the United States.

The wide potential scope for the use of the powers raises concerns about their use for the real-time surveillance of people, families, and communities caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown, including in sanctuary cities that have otherwise limited the extent to which local law enforcement are allowed to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

In 2014, US-based surveillance and analytics company, JSI Telecom, signed a contract with ICE worth over $19.7 million for annual support, operation, and maintenance of its “Title III digital collection system”, according to US procurement records. The latest contract is due to end in January 2020.

The enforcement agency intercepts wire, oral, and electronic communications—which includes the contents of calls, text messages, and emails—pursuant to judicial orders issued under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Acts of 1968 and subsequent amendments.

A judge can issue such an order when there is probable cause to believe that particular people committed particular felony offenses. Since 2014, federal and state authorities have submitted 14,683 applications for wiretap orders to judges, who have granted all but three of them.

How broad is the scope of ICE's surveillance? Very broad:

Such a wide scope raises huge concerns that judges and authorities could use such orders to monitor and criminalise millions of Americans, including almost six million citizen children under the age of 18 living with a parent or family member who is undocumented. ICE has said it deported 256,000 people in 2018, a record amount, including 5,571 unaccompanied children. ICE is also known to be monitoring people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights, labelling them as “Anti-Trump” protestors. It was reported earlier this week that ICE is locking up thousands of people it has detained in solitary confinement by exploiting measures supposed to be used as a last resort.

JSI Telecom, a company you've likely never heard of, is a big deal in the government-corporate surveillance game:

JSI Telecom, which describes itself as a “leading provider of communications intercept collection solution”, is one of over 500 companies worldwide which profits from governments' demand for advanced surveillance tools. In addition to ICE, JSI has surveillance contracts with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has also received payments from the State Department for projects in Guatemala and Indonesia, part of a broader programme of US agencies using aid and other public money to empower foreign security agencies with surveillance capabilities.

ICE also buys big data datasets from major third-party data aggregators like the news organization Thomson Reuters:

Last year, media multinational Thomson Reuters defended its contracts with ICE after Privacy International highlighted the company had made nearly $50 million from selling the agency access to a “vast collection of public and proprietary records”. This includes phone records, consumer and credit bureau data, healthcare provider content, utilities data, DMV records, World-Check listings, business data, data from social networks and chatrooms, and “live access to more than 7 billion license plate detections”.

Big data and its abuse is not your friend. It's used by the powerful for the obvious purpose, to suppress and arrest their enemies. But it's also used for a more insidious purpose — to influence U.S. elections in their favor.

Yes, there are now several ways to buy elections. Directly purchasing candidates is just one of them. Pervasive, unnoticed, constant, soft propaganda, visited on the whole population to promote the candidates and causes of the wealthy, is another.

Welcome to the world that Americans continue to allow themselves to live within.
  

Blue Dogs And New Dems Team Up With The GOP To Permit Unwarranted Spying On American Citizens

Late Tuesday night, the House voted on an amendment offered by Justin Amash (R-MI) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) to an omnibus appropriations bill. The amendment failed 253-175. It was voted down by an institutionally conservative coalition that included 127 Republicans and 126 Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party— primarily New Dems, Blue Dogs and associated shitheads (like Steny Hoyer). Voting to pass the bill were almost every progressive in the House (110) of them + a motley crew of 65 Republicans. The rejected bill was meant to end unwarranted federal mass surveillance of phone calls, texts, and browsing histories of the American people (the stuff Ed Snowden exposed). Reason Magazine explained the amendment as seeking to forbid the use of any funds to submit a surveillance request under Section 702's guidelines unless the requesting organization— the National Security Agency (NSA)— certifies that the surveillance is not "to acquire the communications of a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States, any acquisition of a communication as to which no participant is a person who is targeted pursuant to the authorized acquisition, or any acquisition of a communication known to be entirely domestic."

Translation: The purpose of Section 702 of FISA is intended to authorize warrantless secret surveillance of foreign targets of interest in other countries who may be plotting against the United States. In practice, we know that the NSA has been collecting significant amounts of domestic communications of American citizens, without warrants, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. This was the surveillance that Edward Snowden helped expose, and we've been arguing over it ever since.

Despite repeatedly and loudly complaining that he and his aides had been illegally surveilled under FISA as a candidate, President Donald Trump has done nothing to actually restrain these surveillance powers. Last year, given the opportunity to rethink the limits of Section 702 when it was up for renewal, Congress and Trump instead expanded its authority to snoop on Americans.

So this year, Amash and Lofgren embarked on a new effort to stop the NSA from secretly collecting Americans' communications. Amash spoke passionately in defense of his amendment on the House floor [Tuesday] evening:

We can see what's wrong with Washington right here. We have Republicans for months saying "We're worried about FISA abuse. FISA's out of control!" Here we are trying to limit FISA and they're running against it. They're saying "No, we can't limit FISA!" Democrats say, "We want to hold the president in check. Executive power is out of control." We have an amendment to hold the president in check. This is our time to stand up for the American people. I'm sick of going home and telling them that neither side wanted to defend their rights.

But it was not to be. The amendment got all of 10 minutes of debate and was defeated.

So… which team would you want to be on? One one side you have Barbara Lee (D-CA), AOC (D-NY), Justin Amash (R-MI), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Pramila Payapal (D-WA), Katie Porter (D-CA), Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), Joe Neguse (D-CO), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), David Cicilline (D-RI), Deb Haaland (D-NM), Jamie Raskin (D-MA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY)… And on the other side you have Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Devin Nunes (R-CA),  Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Steve King (R-IA), Fred Upton (R-MI), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Sean Duffy (R-WI), Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL), David Scott (Blue Dog-GA), Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL), Ron Kind (new Dem-WI), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Tom O’Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), Jefferson Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ), Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)…

I reached out to some Democrats who firmly believe in the concept of privacy from unreasonable searches. Remember Tim Canova, a constitutional lawyer from Florida who made a couple of spirited runs against Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the New Dems who backs unwarranted spying on American citizens. Tim reminded me that he had “long opposed the federal government’s warrantless mass surveillance program… Wasserman Schultz has argued that federal agencies need these tools to protect us from terrorists, from those who would collude with foreign enemies, rig our elections, and destroy our system of government. It’s therefore ironic that Wasserman Schultz and her own electronic communications are now of interest to the U.S. Justice Department and various federal prosecutors. Most notable are investigations into the origins of the unverified and salacious Christopher Steele dossier and how it was used in 2016 to lie to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court to spy on the Trump campaign. It turns out that Wasserman Schultz had her Democratic National Committee (DNC) paid millions of dollars for the dirty dossier, with payments ultimately going to Steele, a former foreign Intelligence agent, and his sources inside Russian intelligence circles. As the New York Times reported, the Russians may have fed Steele the most outlandish lies about Trump as part of a Kremlin disinformation program to destabilize our political system. Paying foreigners to influence the U.S. presidential election are serious violations of federal campaign finance law. It also turns out that Wasserman Schultz laundered these payments to Steele and the others through Fusion GPS, a crony, and a high powered law firm, Perkins Coie. That’s money laundering to conceal the underlying felonies. Federal prosecutors likely have plenty of probable cause to obtain a FISA warrant to inspect Wasserman Schultz’s electronic communications from 2016. Meanwhile, Wasserman Schultz keeps voting in the House to allow federal mass surveillance without warrants. If there’s any karmic justice in this world, it won’t be warrantless mass surveillance that catches up with Wasserman Schultz, but a FISA warrant based on verified information and probable cause. RussiaGate conspiracy mongering has been great for cable TV ratings and has allowed criminal Democrats like Wasserman Schultz to distract attention from their own crimes. It is quickly proving to be a failing strategy against Donald Trump. All thanks to Dirty Debbie.”

Jon Hoadley is a state Rep running for the congressional seat held by Trump enabler Fred Upton. His position wasn’t much like Canova’s but wound up with a similar conclusion. “Voters in Southwest Michigan were disappointed to learn their 16-term congressman, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), once again landed on the wrong side of history by voting against the Lofgren-Amash amendment. This amendment would have closed the legal loopholes that enable mass government surveillance on private citizens. As a state representative, I've introduced legislation to ensure privacy for broadband users and worked to advance net neutrality. And when we turn Michigan's Sixth District blue next November, I'll vote to end mass government spying on citizens and to hold corporations accountable for abusing consumer data.

Dr. Michael Owens, a national security expert running for Congress against craven Blue Dog David Scott in a suburban district southwest of Atlanta told me that it’s unfortunate that Scott “again voted with Republicans and the Trump Administration to continue to allow the government to collect Americans' personal, private communications without a warrant. This is the second time that David Scott has voted for the warrantless collection of Americans' data that was installed hastily after 911 by President Bush as part of the overreaching Patriot Act. We must be clear, with David Scott's help, the Republicans in the House were successful in voting against the basic freedoms that every American is granted under the Fourth Amendment, he continues to be complicit in the government's mass collections of data that potentially puts  every American citizen at risk to cyber attacks and the potential exposure of any American citizen's most private information. Lastly, with this vote Congressman Scott continues to support Trump by allowing the biased targeting of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants… I support this amendment and would’ve stood with the many progressive and decisive Democrats who voted yes. Under this amendment the government would have basic safeguards to allow the government to continue using Section 702 for its stated purpose of gathering foreign intelligence. But just as important, it would’ve stopped the abuse of the Constitution's 4th amendment with the government’s warrantless collection of Americans’ communications under FISA. This amendment would’ve also helped to reduce the billions of pieces of information that are being collected, indexed and searched against the will of the American people.”

Another reactionary Blue Dog who opposed the bipartisan amendment was Tom O’Halleran (AZ), a “former” Republican. And, like Scott, he has a strong progressive primary opponent— Eva Putzova. “The U.S. government can continue to read its citizens’ emails and text messages and surveil their internet activity Russian-style, “ she told me after the vote. “This is a tactic used to control the citizenry by totalitarian regimes and I know that, because I grew up under one of those regimes. Selling out the freedom of our people is unacceptable whether it’s done on partisan basis or not. In this case, both Republicans and Democrats showed a total disregard for personal liberties and failed their constituents.”

Dary Rezvani is the Fresno-area progressive taking on Devin Nunes (R-CA), a huge proponent of illegal domestic surveillance, isn’t happy that his own congressman is leading this charge. “The topic of surveillance,” he told me, “especially as it relates to this topic has always fascinated me for multiple reasons. The first being that Republicans try to sell themselves as the anti-big government party yet they have continually fueled and proposed legislation that allows for government overreach. As a child of 9/11, I remember vividly the arguments over the Patriot Act. At the time I thought ‘if you aren't doing anything wrong, what is the difference?’ Now, being a bit older and a bit wiser, I realize that this has little to do with protecting the public and everything to do with monitoring citizens that might be a ‘problem’ for the status quo. Privacy is a hot topic especially lately. It took a minute but the general population is starting to realize how valuable data is, specifically personal data. As our privacy becomes less and less private, the ability to organize and collectively voice our opinions against injustice becomes more and more difficult. Look at countries like China and Russia, where besides the exception of a couple of cases, the ability to protest is almost impossible. Once again, there’s something wrong with the rhetoric here. America is supposed to be the land of the free. That is what I was taught in school, my mom was taught in school and so on. The problem once again comes back to America's inability to critically think for themselves and ultimately question the government. However, when has there been a time in our history that you could openly question the government without your patriotism coming into question? As Americans, our information should be ours and ours alone. If we have created a society that the government has to monitor every letter we type, we have failed so far beyond belief that no amount on monitoring that can save it.”

Wendy Reed ran against Kevin McCarthy twice, without any help from her own party either time. Yesterday she told me that she would have gladly voted for the amendment and that fact “that McCarthy voted against it shows why he is hated by progressives and Freedom Caucus alike; he is a sellout corporatist, owing his allegiance only to money.”

Discussing this vote with Florida Democrat Alan Grayson, he told me that "After the Snowden revelations, an independent study showed that mass spying had not caught a single terrorist– although it had allowed NSA agents to spy on their girlfriends. 1984 just came a few years late. Big Brother is, indeed, watching you." 

Setting a Perjury Trap for Trump

by Gaius Publius

A "perjury trap" is a prosecutorial maneuver and a form of entrapment in which "a prosecutor calls a witness to testify with the intent to base a perjury charge on their statements, not to indict them for a previous crime." If a prosecutor calls a witness for only that purpose, rather than to get information to further an investigation, the law is clear — it's forbidden.

Perjury traps are most easily executed when the prosecutor has prior knowledge of the matter about which the witness is questioned but doesn't reveal having that knowledge. In practice perjury traps can be executed while furthering an investigation and still be traps. A prosecutor can ask investigatory questions and set a perjury trap at the same time. Thus, since perjury traps are forbidden in law only in restricted circumstances, they are difficult to avoid.

If the questions leaked to the New York Times and presented as what Robert Mueller would ask Donald Trump in an official interview, are indeed Mueller's questions (regardless of who leaked them), Mueller may be setting a perjury trap for Trump.

Michael Flynn's Perjury Trap

Witness the situation of Michael Flynn, about which investigative reporter Robert Parry wrote just weeks before his death:

Russia-gate enthusiasts are thrilled over the guilty plea of President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador, but the case should alarm true civil libertarians.

What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency.

In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.

Seems like entrapment to me, regardless of what you think of Michael Flynn.

Bill Clinton's Perjury Trap

If you're not fond of Michael Flynn, consider Bill Clinton, of whom many have kinder thoughts. In 1998 Jeffrey Rosen wrote this in The New Yorker about Ken Starr's attempt to prove Bill Clinton perjured himself by denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky (emphasis added):

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has claimed that his 7-month investigation of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which seeks to prove that Clinton and Lewinsky lied under oath in the Paula Jones sexual harrassment case against Clinton, is about lies, not sex. But the public appears to recognize instinctively what the law has long acknowledged: that lies vary in degree and in kind, and that they should be treated accordingly. The President's aides fear that Starr will try to set a so-called perjury trap in order to catch the President in lies told directly to the grand jury. Perjury traps have become a popular tactic among independent counsels: if they can't prove the alleged crime they were appointed to investigate, they indict suspects for lying to investigators. But the traps are effective only because independent counsels have succeeded over the past few decades in expanding the lying laws far beyond their historical roots.

The U.S. is a prosecutorial nation, and has been for some time. How else do we explain the popularity of shows like Judge Judy, Jerry Springer and the many like them, shows in which the "unworthy" are subjected to public humiliation? How else do we explain our acceptance of having the largest prison population in the world?

How Will the Next "Rogue" President Be Taken Down?

Perhaps you're fine with this use of prosecutorial power. Perhaps, even though you'd hate it if these tactics were used against you, and hated it when they were used against Bill Clinton, you now love them when used against Trump and his team.

But whatever your view of either man, Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, keep this in mind:

     1. This is the way prosecutors regularly do business in our "in love with prosecution" state. 

     2. This is one way Mueller is trying to get rid of Donald Trump — this and the blackmail opportunity his investigation of Trump's finances will inevitably offer.

And thanks to Democrats, who opposed these tactics when used against Clinton's presidency, and now cheer their use against Trump's, we see that:

     3. These techniques have now been "blessed" (legitimized) by both parties and the mainstream press, and

     4. They can and will be used freely against any sitting president who falls seriously out of favor with our ruling Establishment.

Do you think a President Sanders would be any more loved, or any less hated, by the DC and press Establishment than Donald Trump is? Imagine a Sanders-like presidency. Remember MSNBC's behavior to Sanders during the 2016 primary. Remember the Party's behavior during that time. What do you think would be done to "delegitimize" him, or anyone like him, by both parties and the press, with both parties' consent?

What if he adopted a federal jobs guarantee proposal? Such a program, properly executed, would force wages to rise through the entire private sector and affect the bottom line of every corporation with employees in the U.S. What if he starts such a program under current executive power? Now imagine that the program has huge popular support, which means it represents a real legislative threat to our decades-old, comfortable, bipartisan neoliberal Establishment.

Would such a program be allowed by that Establishment to go forward? What if it could not be stopped in any other way than by bringing down ("delegitimizing") the Sanders presidency itself?

Anyone who attempts to overturn four decades of Establishment neoliberal rule would not be treated kindly by anyone in DC. The bipartisan takedown of a President Sanders would look different than the takedown of Trump, but all of the same actors would participate and all the same tools would be in play.

Please, as you cheer the takedown of President Trump (if you do), keep a president like Sanders in mind.

The NSA Already Knows the Answers to Mueller's Collusion Questions

Back to Mueller's questions for Donald Trump. The dirty little secret — which is only "secret" because everyone in the country is pretending it isn't so — is that the NSA already knows all or most of what Mueller reportedly wants to find out in his questions for Donald Trump.

Ex-intelligence officers Ray McGovern and William Binney wrote about this at Robert Parry's Consortium News (h/t email correspondent Kevin Fathi for the link; emphasis added):

Mueller does not need to send his team off on a “broad quest” with “open-ended” queries on an “exhaustive array of subjects.” If there were any tangible evidence of Trump campaign-Russia collusion, Mueller would almost certainly have known where to look and, in today’s world of blanket surveillance, would have found it by now. It beggars belief that he would have failed, in the course of his year-old investigation, to use all the levers at his disposal — the levers Edward Snowden called “turnkey tyranny” — to “get the goods” on Trump.

Here’s what the “mainstream” media keeps from most Americans: The National Security Agency (NSA) collects everything: all email, telephone calls, texts, faxes — everything, and stores it in giant databases. OK; we know that boggles the mind, but the technical capability is available, and the policy is to “collect it all.” All is collected and stored in vast warehouses.  (The tools to properly analyze/evaluate this flood of information do not match the miraculous state of the art of collection, so the haystack keeps growing and the needles get harder and harder to find.  But that is another story.)

How did collection go on steroids? You’ve heard it a thousand times — “After 9/11 everything changed.”  In short, when Vice President Dick Cheney told NSA Director and Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to disregard the Fourth Amendment, Hayden saluted sharply. [James Comey, hero of the #Resistance, saluted sharply too, except for that one little time when he asked for changed first.]

And so, after 9/11, NSA’s erstwhile super-strict First Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Collect Information on Americans Without a Court Warrant,” went the way of the Fourth Amendment. (When this became public, former NSA Director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman stated openly that Hayden violated the law, and former NSA Director Army Gen. William Odom said Hayden ought to be courtmartialed.  The timorous “mainstream” media suppressed what Inman and Odom said.)

And yes, the NSA does indeed spy on everyone, with the help and connivance of Barack Obama:

On January 17, 2014, when President Barack Obama directed the intelligence community to limit their warrantless data searches for analysis/evaluation to two “hops,” either he did not understand what he was authorizing or he was bowing, as was his custom, to what the intelligence community claimed was needed (lest anyone call him soft on terrorism).

Intelligence directors were quite happy with his decision because, basically, it authorized them to spy on anyone on the planet.

"Collect it all," NSA chief Keith Alexander famously said. And if whistle-blower Russell Tice is to be believed, the NSA's been doing just that since 2001, including getting wiretaps of Barack Obama in 2004, just as he was emerging onto the national political scene. Tice once claimed in an interview to have held those orders in his hand. He also claimed that similar orders applied to all important judges, including FISA judges, and all Pentagon officers of three-star rank and above. (For conspiracy fans, note that this would have included General Patraeus.)

Setting a Perjury Trap for Trump

To end where we began, here's what I think we're about to see next in the Mueller-Trump story. Mueller is attempting to bait Trump into giving an interview. Trump's former lawyer John Dowd quit recently, reportedly over Trump's interest in granting Mueller an interview, which Dowd strongly (and wisely) opposed. Trump recently hired Rudy Guilani, reportedly to negotiate a Trump-Mueller interview with clear boundaries and with it an end to the investigation.

It looks like Trump favors doing the interview. So what will happen if Trump sits down with Mueller? Will he stay on the script his lawyers prepared for him, or will he freelance?

If he freelances, will he lie?

It's impossible to imagine an undisciplined Trump not freelancing and not lying. If he lies, he will be charged with perjury and Mueller will have succeeded.

Whether that brings him down, however, is anyone's guess. (Mine is, it won't.) After all, the House would still have to impeach him, and even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is off the table (again).

Maybe it's all just one club after all.

GP
 

How to Turn Off Third-Party Data Access to Your Facebook Account

Is Facebook evil by design? (source)

by Gaius Publius

Note: To jump straight to the steps, click here.

Facebook has come under scrutiny lately for its role in passively giving data on 50 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, a company that uses Facebook-type data to target and change electoral outcomes worldwide. (There's more on the Cambridge Analytica story here and here. Note that Carole Cadwalladr is a co-author of both stories. Her reporting is one of the centers for information about this revelation.)

Cambridge Analytica got that Facebook data, not because Facebook gave it to them, but because Facebook's policy on info-sharing allowed them to harvest it. Here's how that was done (h/t Naked Capitalism; emphasis mine):

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Forget the Trump factor and consider simply the Cambridge Analytica app and how it operated.

People who agreed and were paid to use it gave up more information to the app than was disclosed to them. Part of what they unknowingly surrendered was information from the profiles of all of their Facebook friends. That's how harvesting the data from 270,000 people became a hack, via the app, of data on 50 million, who gave no approval for this transfer.

Note also that the means by which the original data was acquired was a ruse. The company's interest in its "personality test" — thisisyourdigitallife — was false. All they wanted was the data it extracted.

"Exactly How Facebook's Infrastructure Was Designed to Work"

This is not an aberration; this is how Facebook is designed to work and the source of the great wealth of its founders and investors. These Facebook apps (the games you play, the "tests" you take, and so on) are designed specifically as data transfers, to Facebook itself and to its customers.

When you play a game on Facebook or take part in a "quiz" to see which Roman emperor you most resemble (or whatever), you may think you're taking part in the "fun" of being on Facebook. In reality, you're being used by the app makers, and Facebook is making money selling you and your data to them.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) puts it this way (again, my emphasis):

Over the weekend, it became clear that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company, got access to more than 50 million Facebook users' data in 2014. The data was overwhelmingly collected, shared, and stored without user consent. The scale of this violation of user privacy reflects how Facebook's terms of service and API [Application Programming Interface] were structured at the time. Make no mistake: this was not a data breach. This was exactly how Facebook's infrastructure was designed to work.

The only way to fix this situation for yourself is to turn off the ability of Facebook's "platform API" to send out your data. That means to anyone. You also have to disable your ability to log into third-party sites using your Facebook account. That so-called "convenience" opens big holes.

Getting Between Zuckerberg and His Money

Below are the latest instructions for doing just that. But before we go there, pause to consider what Facebook is — a company that collects masses of data from billions of users, uses algorithms to analyze that data to get more information about its users, then (a) sells that data to third parties for any use they wish, generally manipulative ones; (b) sells access to its users and their data to third parties via games, apps and other means; and (c) uses that data for its own manipulative purposes if it so wishes.

This is where the money is, this is what Facebook was designed to do, and stopping or regulating it means using the government to get between Facebook's investors and a honking huge pile of money. In these neoliberal times, that's going to be a monster ask.

How To Turn Off Third-Party App Access to Your Data

Now the fix for your own account. You could, of course, just delete your Facebook account, but until Facebook is regulated, they're going to keep the data you've already given them anyway. #DeleteFacebook is a good personal solution to the problem going forward, but it's understandably not for everyone.

For those who choose not to do delete their Facebook account, here's how, as of this writing, to eliminate access to your Facebook data by third-party apps. This comes from the EFF article linked above, but has been modified to reflect changes Facebook has already made since the controversy (what a mild term) erupted.

As the EFF piece warns, "Keep in mind that this disables ALL platform apps (like Farmville, Twitter, or Instagram) and you will not be able to log into sites using your Facebook login."

Step 1. Click the pull-down arrow in the upper right corner of your Facebook page and select Settings. Then click Apps in the column on the left. (Or click here for a shortcut that takes you to the same place.)

Step 2. Remove your Facebook login from all apps currently using it by looking in the large blue box labeled "Logged in with Facebook," clicking on the check box below each app name, then clicking Remove.

Explanation: The first large box below "App Settings" is labeled "Logged in with Facebook". Listed are games, organizations and apps where your Facebook login is already your app login.

My suggestion, don't ever use your Facebook login as a third-party login. Instead create a login that's specific to that organization or app and tie nothing to your Facebook account.

When a game or other web-based app asks you to create an account or "sign in with Facebook or Twitter," you're handing over access to your account data if you choose the easier Facebook (or Twitter) option — just as those who took money from Cambridge Analytica did. Yes, you can limit this access to just certain types of data, but (a) most people don't do that, and (b) who knows if app or the organization behind it is doing just what Cambridge Analytica did?

Step 3. Now remove this permission generally. Under "Apps, Websites and Games" see if the setting is "turned on" or "turned off." If it's turned off, you're done.

If it's turned on, click the Edit button, then click Turn Off. You're done.

Explanation: As Facebook reminds you, if you turn off this setting:

• You won't be able to log into apps or websites using Facebook
• Apps and websites you've logged into with Facebook may delete your accounts and activity
• You won't be able to play some games on Facebook [Gameroom], and [some of] your gaming activity may be deleted
• Your posts, photos and videos on Facebook that apps and websites have published may be deleted
• You won't be able to interact with or share content from other apps and websites on Facebook using social plugins such as the Share and Like buttons

You may miss the use of Share and Like buttons on websites, but that's the price. As of this writing, they don't separate the permissions associated with Share and Like buttons from Facebook's Gameroom and third-party login permissions. You can always go to Facebook itself and Share or Like a web post.

Final Words

Just as the "business model of Wall Street is fraud" (Bernie Sanders), the business model of Facebook is "surveillance." As I said above, the reason third parties offer Facebook games, apps and login options is to harvest, monetize and use the data of people with Facebook accounts.

And the reason Facebook exists at all is to monetize the motherlode of data on its billions of users — or use that data in any other way they wish. Could Facebook itself swing elections? I think they think they can. Have they already tried? Who knows.

Facebook and its ilk are a problem, and as near as I can tell an entirely modern one. This situation does need a solution, but it may never get one until the modern neoliberal regime is overturned.

GP
 

More WikiLeaks-CIA News: Spying on the French Election, Taking Control of Your Smartphone

As you watch the Matrix, the Matrix watches you. Image © Kacper Pempel / Reuters (source)

by Gaius Publius

I want to offer three pieces of CIA news, all thanks to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly. Two of them expand on our earlier report ("Explosive WikiLeaks Release Exposes Massive, Aggressive CIA Cyber Spying, Hacking Capability"), while one is likely entirely new to you, since while it does have to do with spying on European elections, it doesn't have to do with Russia.

Let's start with the release of information about the most recent French election, the one in 2012.

CIA Espionage Orders for the 2012 French Election

WikiLeaks released this document in preparation for its release of the CIA "Vault 7" treasure trove. The underlying seven-page document details the information the CIA ordered its assets — including, one has to assume, its cyber-assets — to gather.

From the WikiLeaks press release (my emphasis):

CIA espionage orders for the last French presidential election

All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election. The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published today by WikiLeaks as context for its forth coming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan. [...]

About Sarkozy, they write, "Sarkozy's earlier self-identification as "Sarkozy the American" did not protect him from US espionage in the 2012 election or during his presidency."

For what purpose was this information gathered? WikiLeaks has two comments on that. First:

Significantly, two CIA opposition espionage tasks, "What policies do they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects?" and "What are their opinions on the German model of export-led growth?" resonate with a U.S. economic espionage order from the same year. That order requires obtaining details of every prospective French export contract or deal valued at $200m or more.

Information gathered via "economic espionage" has quite a few "customers", many of whom are in the so-called private sector. Airbus, for example, is a multinational aviation company based near Toulouse. Many of its export contracts surely surpass the "more than $200 million" bar. One of that company's chief competitors is Boeing, ostensibly a U.S. company.Is the CIA spying for people like the executives at Boeing? I'd call that likely.

Later in the press release, WikiLeaks offers a second motivation for spying on the French election:

The orders state that the collected information is to "support" the activities of the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)'s E.U section, and the U.S. State Department's Intelligence and Research Branch.

What "activities" are they supporting? Do those activities include attempting to influence the electoral outcome so that policies favorable to the U.S. and U.S. companies are rendered more likely? Asked another way, is it only the Russians who put their thumbs on European electoral scales? As the original Mayor Daley used to put it, "Youth wants to know."

Finally, so far the Vault 7 WikiLeaks material details CIA intent and capabilities from 2013 to 2016. To what extent is the CIA involved in the current round on European elections? Is the U.S. purpose information gathering only?

Taking Full Control of Your Android or Apple Phone

Now for more from the Vault 7 release. This comes from Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept (again my emphasis):

CIA Has an “Impressive List” of Ways to Hack Into Your Smartphone, WikiLeaks Files Indicate

A concerted effort by the CIA produced a library of software attacks to crack into Android smartphones and Apple iPhones, including some that could take full control of the devices, according to documents in a trove of files released by WikiLeaks Tuesday.

The attacks allow for varying levels of access — many powerful enough to allow the attacker to remotely take over the “kernel,” the heart of the operating system that controls the operation of the phone, or at least to have so-called “root” access, meaning extensive control over files and software processes on a device. These types of techniques would give access to information like geolocation, communications, contacts, and more. They would most likely be useful for targeted hacking, rather than mass surveillance. Indeed, one document describes a process by which a specific unit within the CIA “develops software exploits and implants for high priority target cellphones for intelligence collection.”

The WikiLeaks documents also include detailed charts concerning specific attacks the CIA can apparently perform on different types of cellphones and operating systems, including recent versions of iOS and Android — in addition to attacks the CIA has borrowed from other, public sources of malware. Some of the exploits, in addition to those purportedly developed by the CIA, were discovered and released by cybersecurity companies, hacker groups, and independent researchers, and purchased, downloaded, or otherwise acquired by the CIA, in some cases through other members of the intelligence community, including the FBI, NSA, and the NSA’s British counterpart GCHQ , the documents indicate.

One borrowed attack, Shamoon, is a notorious computer virus capable of stealing data and then completely destroying hardware. Persistence, a tool found by the CIA, allows the agency control over the device whenever it boots up again. Another acquired attack, SwampMonkey, allows CIA to get root privileges on undisclosed Android devices.

It's not just the CIA — the FBI has developed smartphone hacking capabilities:

In addition to the CIA’s efforts, an FBI hacking division, the Remote Operations Unit, has also been working to discover exploits in iPhones, one of the WikiLeaks documents, the iOS hacking chart, indicates.

And note this:

Last February, while investigating the perpetrator of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, the FBI attempted argued in court that Apple was obligated to give the FBI access to its phones by producing a weakened version of the device’s operating system. If the WikiLeaks documents are authentic, it would appear FBI and other elements of the intelligence community are already deeply involved in discovering their own way into iPhones. The compromise of the documents also calls into question government assurances in the San Bernardino case that any exploit developed by Apple to allow the FBI access to the killer’s phone would never be exposed to criminals or nation states.

I strongly suggest reading the hacking chart, linked here and above.

CIA Hides Device Vulnerabilities; Some Companies Appear Not to Mind

Our last news piece involves this: What has been the response of high tech companies to the information contained in the WikiLeaks material — in particular, the information about vulnerabilities in their own products? WikiLeaks contacted all of the companies involved. Some were more appreciative than others to learn what WikiLeaks has discovered.

Julian Assange provides an update to the first Vault 7 material in a tweet. It reads in part:

Update on CIA Vault7 "zero day" software vulnerabilities

Organizations such as Mozilla have exchanged letters with WikiLeaks and have been informed by WikiLeaks of some vulnerabilities. Google and some other companies have yet to respond other than to confirm receipt of our initial approach. The have not agreed, disagreed or questioned our industry standard responsible disclosure plan. Most of these lagging companies have conflicts of interest due to their classified work for U.S. government agencies.

Assange also adds this:

Should such companies choose not to secure their users against CIA or NSA attacks, users may prefer organizations such as Mozilla or European companies that prioritize their users over government contracts. Should these companies continue to drag their feet, we will create a league table comparing company responsiveness and government entanglements so users can decide for themselves. We will have more to say about this issue next week. –Julian Assange

The Obama administration made a commitment, as The Intercept points out, "to disclose serious software vulnerabilities to vendors to improve the security of their products. The administration developed a system called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process to allow various government entities to help determine when it’s better for national security to disclose unpatched vulnerabilities and when it’s better to take advantage of them to hunt targets." This promise, whatever it was worth, has been abrogated and nullified.

Remember, it may not be in the "national interest" at all to allow exploitable vulnerabilities in all of the nation's smartphones. Consider the damage that can be done by foreign governments and international criminal types, as they exploit the same vulnerabilities the CIA and FBI also exploit. Is that "keeping us safe?" Hardly.

Keeping its citizens weak and vulnerable to exploitation weakens the nation against all its enemies. So why do agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and certainly the NSA as well, do this? For the benefit of those individual agencies only, as they struggle for primacy and place in what I call "spook world." Our weakness is an important part of sustaining their strength.

Needless to say, we've long left the Founders' U.S.A., and this definitely isn't Kansas in any sense. Nicole Sander and I discussed that point, our entry into spook world, in this interview, including what might be motivating WikiLeaks. The discussion itself starts at the 16:13 mark. Enjoy.

Scheduling note: My comments here appear on Monday and Thursday.

GP
 

How Police Use Military Technology to Secretly & Persistently Track You

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 Stone report 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.

GP
 

NSA's Bulk Domestic Surveillance Ended Last Night? If You Believe That...

Officially, the NSA's "authorization" to to collect so-called "metadata" by a massive domestic surveillance program ended yesterday at midnight. And they say they stopped moments before the deadline. Do you believe them? They never actually had the authority to spy on American citizens and the "new program" that started at midnight... who knows how much less spying that will be doing anyway. Every single call was electronically monitored and no one knew-- until Ed Snowden, heroically, blew the whistle on the NSA. Instead of being rewarded for his service to the country, he's been hunted and forced to live in exile and under threat for his life.

This is what set in motion yesterday's "changes." The fascistic Patriot Act expired on June 1 of this year and the USA Freedom Act was meant to replace it with some changes, including the slight limitations on bulk collection of data on American citizens by the NSA. Actual mass surveillance of the content of Americans' communication doesn't-- even theoretically-- explore until 2017. "Littered with loopholes," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the House bill passed in 2014 and was rejected by the Senate. It was modified slightly and passed May 13 338-88 with 41 Democrats and 47 Republicans voting against it. Lots of really bad Democrats-- from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel, Donald Norcross, Jim Cooper, Steny Hoyer, Jim Costa, and Collin Peterson to Patrick Murphy, Kathleen Rice, Scott Peters and John Delaney voted for the flawed bill while most of the good Democrats-- Alan Grayson, Ted Lieu, Keith Ellison, Jan Schakowsky, Raul Grijalva, Barbara Lee, Mike Honda, Donna Edwards, Mark Pocan-- voted against it. (There were some good Democrats who felt it was the best deal they could get and voted with the Republicans for the bill.) Most of the Republicans who voted no were from the Freedom Caucus. A few weeks later, after lots of drama, it also passed the Senate 67-32, again with a bizarre combination of the best Democrats (Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin) joining with many of the worst of the Republicans, from nitwits like Joni Ernst, Pat Toomey, Rob Portman and Marco Rubio to the hardcore obstructionists like Tom Cotton, Jeff Sessions and Richard Burr. Obama signed it.

After it passed Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU said that the "bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision-the material-support provision-would represent a significant step backwards" and that "the disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform." Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at Stanford Law School, had been even even blunter and more direct when the legislation was proposed: "The Administration and the intelligence community believe they can do whatever they want, regardless of the laws Congress passes, so long they can convince one of the judges appointed to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to agree. This isn't the rule of law. This is a coup d'etat."

This week the corporate media is painting this charade as "a long-awaited victory for privacy advocates and tech companies wary of broad government surveillance at a time when national security concerns are heightened in the wake of the Paris attacks earlier this month." It isn't.

Under the Freedom Act, the NSA and law enforcement agencies can no longer collect telephone calling records in bulk in an effort to sniff out suspicious activity. Such records, known as "metadata," reveal which numbers Americans are calling and what time they place those calls, but not the content of the conversations.

Instead analysts must now get a court order to ask telecommunications companies like Verizon Communications to enable monitoring of call records of specific people or groups for up to six months.

"The act struck a reasonable compromise which allows us to continue to protect the country while implementing various reforms," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

Some Republican lawmakers want to preserve bulk collection until 2017, citing the Nov. 13 Paris attacks in which 130 people died. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the killings.

But any new surveillance measures are unlikely to become law ahead of the November 2016 presidential elections.

A presidential review committee concluded the surveillance regime did not lead to a single clear counter terrorism breakthrough that could be directly attributed to the program.

I asked Grayson, one of the handful of Democrats with the guts to vote against it. "It’s progress," he told me. "But I still question the need for the government to photograph every piece of mail, and the NSA needs to come clean regarding its monitoring of internet use and personal spending (if any, of course)."


UPDATE: Letter From Justin Amash (R-MI)

December 1, 2015
Stop Spying on U.S. Citizens: Vote “NO” on H.R. 4127

Dear Colleague:

This afternoon, the House will consider the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2016, which fails to address an expansive new authority recently granted to the intelligence community with virtually zero scrutiny or debate.

Last year, House and Senate leadership used the IAA to rush through a provision that permits the government to acquire, retain, and disseminate nonpublic telephone or electronic communications (i.e., content) of United States persons without the consent of the person or proper legal process. The section contemplates that those private communications of Americans, obtained without a court order, may be transferred to domestic law enforcement for criminal investigations.

The administration has historically conducted such surveillance under a claim of executive authority, such as E.O. 12333. However, Congress has never before approved using executive authority in that way to capture and use Americans’ private telephone records, electronic communications, or cloud data.

This provision received little media attention because of the unusual way in which it was adopted. During consideration of an earlier version of the FY 2016 IAA in June of this year, I offered an amendment in the Rules Committee to strike this provision from law. The committee ruled my amendment out of order without explanation. Here’s the timeline for how this provision came to be adopted: At 8:50 p.m. on December 9, 2014, the Senate passed a substitute amendment to H.R. 4681, the IAA for Fiscal Year 2015, which included a new provision (Section 309) that was not part of the original bill that moved through the House several months earlier. The Senate adopted the substitute amendment by unanimous consent and passed the bill by voice vote at 8:51 p.m. At 1:13 p.m. on December 10 (the next day), then-Chairman Mike Rogers attempted to suspend the rules and agree to the Senate amendment by voice vote—passing into law a provision virtually no one knew about and that had thus far received no real vote or been subject to any real debate. I rushed to the floor to demand the yeas and nays. Less than four hours later, the House voted on the measure with most members still unaware of this provision.

As noted above, I offered an amendment to the IAA in June to strike from law the words, "which shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B)". The intelligence committees and intelligence community have claimed that this provision does nothing. If that’s the case, removing these words should be uncontroversial.

Congress and the American people deserve real substantive debate on these important issues, and we should reject reauthorization of surveillance authorities until our Fourth Amendment concerns are addressed. I urge you to join me in voting “no” on H.R. 4127, the IAA for Fiscal Year 2016, when it comes before the House this afternoon.

Sincerely,
/s/
Justin Amash
Member of Congress

Congressional Oversight Of The National Security State-- Only Patsies Like Patrick Murphy Need Apply

Just under a year ago, the House had a rare victory over a U.S. spying and surveillance establishment that has no effective oversight and that has long ago run completely amok. It passed a toothless NSA "reform" bill." 51 Republicans and 70 Democrats, including Alan Grayson, of course, voted against it, but, tragically, it passed by an overwhelming 303-121. But, as I wrote at the time:

Grayson did more than just vote against the flawed bill. Miraculously, he managed to add and pass a bipartisan amendment-- the first ever to actually limit the powers of the NSA in a substantive way-- in the Science and Technology Committee that was ultimately part of the bill that passed. Grayson's bill protects encryption standards from NSA tampering. This is the letter Grayson sent his colleagues on the committee that persuaded them-- and, as you know, most are Republicans-- to pass it:

These are serious allegations. NIST [The National Institute of Standards and Technology], which falls solely under the jurisdiction of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has been given "the mission of developing standards, guidelines, and associated methods and techniques for information systems." To violate that charge in a manner that would deliberately lessen encryption standards, and willfully diminish American citizens' and business' cyber-security, is appalling and warrants a stern response by this Committee. Many businesses, from Facebook to Google, have lamented the NSA's actions in the cyber world; and some, such as Lavabit, have consciously decided to shut their doors rather than continue to comply with the wishes of the NSA. Changes need to be made at NIST to protect its work in the encryption arena.

Until then, the NSA had been allowed to influence decisions about encryption standards. And the NSA was interested in finding ways to circumvent the standards to make it easier for them to intercept communications and data that the senders think are secure. The agency even prevailed upon NIST to publish a standard which many in the cryptography community warned had been weakened and probably contained a backdoor for easy NSA access…

That was hardly Grayson's only battle with the National Security State. At the time, he said:

The question for the American public is this: do you believe that this is the way it has to be? Do you believe that we must give up our privacy, our liberty, our autonomy-- the very essence of what makes us Americans and human beings-- in order to be safe? My answer is “no.” There is no threat to national security when I call my mother, and there is no reason for the NSA to obtain information about that call-- and every other call we make. If it were up to the NSA, there would be a camera on every street corner, and a meter by every bed. I know that it is possible to preserve both privacy and security, and it’s up to Americans to take back our privacy to make that happen. 

Yesterday, after Lee Fang's Intercept exposé about who in Congress can and can't be trusted to protect their constituents from domestic spying and National Security State overreach, Grayson told me that "the spying-industrial complex thinks that it can stick its nose into everyone else’s business, but that not even Members of Congress can find out what the spies are up to: how they are violating our laws and our Constitution, how they are wasting taxpayer money..." They're probably not looking forward to seeing him get into the Senate, not when a patsy like Patrick Murphy is the alternative.

Here's what Lee Fang reported:

Congressmen who asked about oversight of NSA mass surveillance and domestic spying in 2013 could have “compromise[d] security” and were denied the records they sought because of concerns they lacked formal government security clearance, a former member of the House Intelligence Committee says in a newly-released video.

The footage, from an August 29, 2013 town hall meeting, sheds new light on why lawmakers were denied key rulings and reports from the secret courts overseeing the National Security Agency-- even as the Obama administration and intelligence officials claimed that all NSA programs were subject to strict congressional oversight and therefore could be held accountable.

In the video, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., then a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, discusses why Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., and Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., should not and did not receive information they sought from the committee. The committee had previously declined to explain why the information was withheld, going so far as to tell Grayson that even its discussion of his request was classified. Because the committee, like its Senate counterpart, tends to be particularly sympathetic to the intelligence community, getting information to non-committee-members like Grayson and Griffith is potentially crucial to reforming U.S. spy agencies. And in late 2013, following revelations of mass surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were any number of reform bills pending.



At the time, President Obama defended bulk collection of telephone metadata, claiming in a press conference that “these programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate. And if there are Members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up.”

Writing for The Guardian, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that several lawmakers, including Sen. Richard Blumental, D-Conn., were unaware of the NSA’s bulk data collection efforts, and even more concerning, other lawmakers, including Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., Griffith, and Grayson were blocked from accessing oversight documents even after making multiple requests. Griffith, a Tea Party-aligned lawmaker, had requested access to FISA court orders concerning the NSA program, but was repeatedly ignored. Grayson, a progressive, faced similar treatment after requesting FISA court opinions and documents relating to the PRISM program. The House Intelligence Committee denied Grayson’s request, and later told the congressman that the committee discussion regarding his denial was classified.

...Grayson says he was ultimately denied the information about NSA surveillance activity that he sought. “The Republicans on the Intelligence Committee were unhappy that I discussed the Guardian coverage of the Snowden revelations on the floor of the House,” he says in an interview.

Grayson noted that the House Intelligence Committee maintains rules requiring lawmakers not on the committee to obtain permission from them to view classified information. “The committee has no authority to make those kinds of distinctions,” says Grayson. “They’ve created two tiers for members of Congress,” he adds. “I’m not aware of any statutory authority for such a distinction; but it’s just a power grab as members of Intelligence and I have the same constitutional authority.”

“It is a practical impossibility for members of the House of Representatives to do effective job of oversight of the intelligence community given the current structure of the House and its rules,” says Patrick Eddington, the Cato Institute’s policy analyst in Homeland Security and civil liberties. He explains that only a “tiny set of members” and staff have access to information about the NSA and other classified matters.

“Let’s remember that what Mr. Grayson and Mr. Griffith and others were seeking access to was information on programs that they were asked to cast votes on,” adds Eddington, a former senior policy advisor to Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., and a former CIA analyst. “These revelations from Mr. Snowden and potentially other sources … should have sparked the creation long ago of a Joint Congressional Investigative Committee to explore all of this stuff, and it hasn’t happened yet, and it’s just another example of the collapse of congressional oversight.”