Maybe they'll finally do something

By Carl 

The CIA searched computers intended to be used solely by the Senate Intelligence Committee in an apparent effort to determine how committee staff members gained access to a draft version of an internal agency review of its controversial interrogation program, U.S. officials said.

The action, some officials say, would mark the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has accessed congressional computers and would be an apparent violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

So the CIA finally decided that senators are people, too? 

It's not the separation of powers that should concern senators. It's the fact that the CIA is directly tasked with espionage overseas, not domestically (that's the purview of the NSA, thankyewverymuch).

And it's not like this is an ambiguous situation. We've been down this road already once in recent memory.

As with many things CIA, it looks like a case of trying to intimidate and badger people looking into behaviors they would prefer be kept under wraps, no matter how sworn to secrecy that investigator(s) might be. I can understand that a spy agency might want to keep a lower profile about some of the sausage-making it has to perform – after all, imagine if someone got a whiff of Zero Dark Thirty ahead of time – but senators?

And even allowing for the grandstanding many of them, who really ought to know better, engage in, it might be a good idea to rein in the hounds.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Barack Obama, Surveillor-in-Chief

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Barack Obama has done a lot of really good things as president, and I have remained for the most part enthusiastically supportive, particularly when it came to getting him re-elected last year, but I find his conduct of "national security," notably the drone war and surveillance, generally abhorrent.

And his speech on surveillance last Friday was just that. Far from being the pragmatic leader pulling the country together on a complex problem, as for example he did on race and racism following the Zimmerman verdict, he hid behind a veneer of (faux) transparency and doubled down on the assault on liberty and privacy over which he is presiding.

As Conor Friedersdorf wrote:

On Friday, President Obama spoke to us about surveillance as though we were precocious children. He proceeded as if widespread objections to his policies can be dispatched like a parent answers an eight-year-old who has formally protested her bedtime. He is so proud that we've matured enough to take an interest in our civil liberties! Why, he used to think just like us when he was younger, and promises to consider our arguments. But some decisions just have to be made by the grownups. Do we know how much he loves us? Can we even imagine how awful he would feel if anything bad ever happened while it was still his job to ensure our safety?

Friedersdorf then helpfully proceeds to break down the "disinformation," the "weasel words," the "impossible-to-believe protestations," and the "factually inaccurate assertions." For example:

The passage: 

I'm also mindful of how these issues are viewed overseas because American leadership around the world depends upon the example of American democracy and American openness, because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation.

It's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.

But his surveillance politics and policy, whatever one thinks of it, has never been characterized by open debate. There are secret sessions conducted by Congressional committees -- and secret hearings conducted by FISA court judges -- where hugely consequential policy decisions are made. If the real world depends on the example of American openness, we are failing the world. The example we're setting is that it's okay for governments to secretly intercept the private communications data of all citizens. How would that work out in most countries? The official secrecy surrounding the NSA has already corroded U.S. democracy in real ways.

If this were Bush, or any Republican, Democrats would be outraged. But because it's Obama, many on the left have turned into surveillance state apologists. And they join those on the right, as well as throughout the establishment "center," who have little regard for liberty and privacy in any event.

But let's be blunt about this: President Obama is lying to the American people, and to the world, and in so doing is undermining the significant progress he has made in other areas, like health care and women's rights.

And that should be abhorrent even to his most ardent supporters.

Obama the hypocrite, Snowden the patriot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Snowden made me do it."

There was yet another Guardian report today (this one not authored by Glenn Greenwald) of yet another troubling revelation, via Edward Snowden, about the extent of the U.S. surveillance state:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.

Yes, that's right: warrantless surveillance of American citizens. (And you still see no problem with this, surveillance state apologists?)

Apparently all this has gotten to be too much even for noted surveillance state enthusiast Barack Obama:

President Obama said Friday he would pursue reforms to open the legal proceedings surrounding government surveillance programs to greater scrutiny, the administration's most concerted response yet to a series of disclosures about secret monitoring efforts.

At his first full news conference in more than three months, Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice -- such as a lawyer assigned to advocate privacy rights -- to the secret proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In addition, Obama said he intends to work on ways to tighten one provision of the Patriot Act -- known as Section 215 -- that has permitted the government to obtain the phone records of millions of Americans. He announced the creation of a panel of outsiders -- former intelligence officials, civil liberties and privacy advocates, and others -- to assess the programs and suggest changes by the end of the year.

"It's not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs," Obama said in the White House East Room. "The American people need to have confidence in them as well."

All of this is quite promising, if not nearly enough (really, a privacy lawyer, that's it?), but it's clear that the president has been forced into doing this -- by media reports, public outcry, and falling approval ratings -- and for that reason it's reasonable to be skeptical of his sincerity, and of his commitment to ensuring there is anything like serious oversight and accountability. 

Read more »

More evidence of the government's assault on liberty, privacy, and the Constitution

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Reuters:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin -- not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence -- information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

Because the DEA's Special Operations Division (SOD) -- which also includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and DH -- is supposedly targeting (bad) people suspected of drug-related crimes, this will no doubt be written off by many, including the surveillance state apologists, as necessary, just like the supposedly anti-terror surveillance conducted by the NSA.


Read more »

There's no Tea Party rift

By Frank Moraes 

Ed Kilgore reflected yesterday on the fact that the only real ideological divide in the Republican Party is over national security. That is true, although even Rand Paul has shown himself to be nothing is not malleable when it comes to ideology. But it is true that a large bipartisan minority voted for an amendment to the half-trillion-dollar defense authorization to restrict the NSA's ability to collect telephone metadata on U.S. calls. The final vote was 205-217, so it only barely lost.

Kilgore speculated that there would have been more Democratic votes for the amendment if a Republican had been in the White House. Of course that's true. Even still, I'm pretty happy with the party; they voted in favor of the amendment 111-83 -- that's 57% of the caucus on a bill where the leadership and the White House were very vocal about how it would mean the end of free society and would effectively mean the terrorists won.

On the Republican side, Kilgore is less certain about how the White House control affected the vote. As it was, while Republicans voted for the amendment in large numbers, they did not have a majority. The vote was 94-134 -- that's just 41%. I suspect that had a Republican been in the White House, that number would have gone down to perhaps 30%.

The main question is why some Republicans care about privacy issues while others do not. Kilgore noted, "I certainly haven't figured out any consistent principle... that makes it possible to predict which fire-eating Tea Party conservative these days is frothing for an immediate war with Iran and perhaps domestic profiling of Muslims, and which is worried about excessive overseas commitments or domestic surveillance." For example, Michele Bachmann and Steve King both voted against the amendment.

Read more »

So you think Ray Kelly should head up the Department of Homeland Security?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, whether you do or don't, you should read Conor Friedersdorf's excellent piece at The Atlantic, "Prominent Democrats Are Now Comfortable With Racial and Ethnic Profiling," which includes:

Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere. Officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," AP reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created 'additional risks' in counterterrorism."

Moreover, "In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." The horrifying effects on innocent Americans are documented here. But despite the high costs and lack of counterterrorism benefits, Kelly stands behind the surveillance on Muslims.

*****

On its own, Kelly's treatment of Muslims ought to disqualify him from the position, and even from being praised by the president of the United States. On its own, his treatment of blacks and Hispanics ought to disqualify him from being promoted, too. But his tenure has also been characterized by a dearth of transparency that has exacerbated his abuses. As Murray Weiss explains, "The lack of transparency during the Kelly administration played a pivotal role in keeping the public -- and by extension the NYPD -- from recognizing years earlier that the number of stop-and-frisks in New York was escalating to troubling levels. Kelly failed to disclose the stop-and-frisk numbers for seven years despite being required by law to do so. When he was finally forced to release them, the numbers were stunning, and caused critics to ask why stop-and-frisks escalated from 100,000 during Bloomberg's first year in office to 500,000 seven years later."

Yet New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is lobbying for him, and on Wednesday President Obama said Kelly's "obviously done an extraordinary job" and would be "very well qualified for the job" of Homeland Security secretary.

Sadly, this isn't at all surprising, though it is to the immense discredit of both men.

Peter King, terrorism supporter, eyes White House, role of bigot-in-chief

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

Apparently, Peter King -- the congressman from New York, not the SI/NBC football guy -- is thinking about running for president.

(I'll pause while you let out a hearty laugh.)

I look forward to hearing him explain his rabid anti-Muslim bigotry and his enthusiastic support for the terrorist Irish Republican Army on the campaign trail.

Doesn't stand a chance, you say? I thought so, too, at first.

But consider how well anti-Muslim bigotry and the right (i.e., right-wing, or at least white) sort of terrorism freedom fighting, not to mention the call for greater domestic surveillance particularly of Muslims, plays among Republicans.

They lap that shit up.

It's still a long shot, but stranger things have happened.

Your privacy is not their concern: Microsoft, the NSA, and the rise of the surveillance state

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This isn't quite the military-industrial complex, but it's something similar, and similarly nefarious, and it shows just how the national security state operates, the government enlisting the support of corporations in its quest for universal surveillance, your civil liberties be damned:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

*****

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."

Similarly, Skype's privacy policy states: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.

But Snowden and Glenn Greenwald are the bad guys, right? Because knowing about what's going on is apparently worse than what's actually going on.

Seriously, where's the fucking outrage?

Denying reality: Surveillance state apologists and the obsequious submission to authority

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Ever since the Edward Snowden saga started, I've been writing "surveillance state apologists of the left" tweets, directed mainly at Obama-can-do-no-wrong types who seem to think there's nothing wrong with what the NSA is doing, with what's been authorized under the Patriot Act, and with what the country is doing generally in its effort to go after terrorists. In some cases, these surveillance state apologists are also drone war apologists. Generally, they're a-okay with the national security state, not least because it's one of their own running the show right now, and so they viciously attack Snowden, and Greenwald, and make fun of "emoprogs," and avoid actually having to address the nuts and bolts of what the government is doing in their name, and to them, and what that means for life, liberty, and privacy.

Great to see the surveillance state apologists of the left turn their head-up-the-ass venom on #Snowden and @ggreenwald again.
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 1, 2013

At The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, whom I admire greatly for his uncompromising views on drones, domestic surveillance, and other aspects of the national security apparatus, wrote about the "privacy moderates" in similar terms -- that is, about those who think that "the national-security state ought to be subject to more oversight, debate, scrutiny, and restrictions" but who also "contrive frames that enable them to criticize both the surveillance state and its antagonists, as if the excesses of both sides are commensurately important and worrisome," and who sometimes "even attack critics of the NSA more energetically than the surveillance state itself." He writes:

I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

Indeed. I would just add that there are many not just in the "middle" but also on the left who aren't yearning for any such thing, so enamored are they of Obama, so much have they been taken in by the fearmongering propaganda that is the democracy-crushing currency of the national security state, the state of fear that it feeds to justify its acquisition of ever more power, justifying ever more intrusions into life, liberty, and privacy.

Read more »

The government is reading your mail -- at least the outside of it

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So, all you apologists for the surveillance state, how do you feel about this?

Oh, it's just "metadata," you say? Just the outside of mail: "the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year."

Oh, but they can tell a lot about you just from that, and of course if they want to, if they can get that warrant, which hardly seems like a difficult thing these days, they can see what's inside.

At what point is enough enough, you apologists?

Will you finally have had enough when you wake up one day and find that it's all gone, that your life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness are no longer really yours?

Happy Fourth of July.

The NSA and the criminal surveillance of Americans

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In case you missed it, make sure to read "The Criminal N.S.A.," an op-ed in Thursday's Times by Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman. Their argument is essentially this:

The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government's seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans' communications.

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties. 

*****

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans' privacy. It's time to call the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.  

I haven't written much about it here, but on Twitter I've frequently expressed my opposition to what the NSA is doing, and more broadly to the growth and activities of the national security surveillance state. (I've also expressed my general support for Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, though my view is really that it's not about them but rather about what they've exposed.)

What I've seen is that some of the most virulent defenders of the NSA and Orwellian America are on the left, where among many support for President Obama trumps all else: Obama can do no wrong, and so what he's doing with respect to continuing Bush-Cheney domestic surveillance, prosecuting whistleblowers, and otherwise waging the so-called war on terror cannot be wrong. Either that, or they don't see anything wrong with mass surveillance of Americans. One expects that sort of thing from the right, but when it comes from the left, particularly when they then attack others on the left for expressing what I and others have been expressing, it's simply grotesque.

I call these people the "surveillance state apologists of the left." And what I often hear from them is that it's all legal, end of story. First, what is legal is not necessarily what is right or just. Slavery used to be legal. What the state does in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is legal, because the legal is simply a code of acceptable and unacceptable behavior enacted by the ruling power. There was a lot that was legal in Nazi Germany that I think we can all agree was unjust. But second, is it really all legal? Not according to Granick and Sprigman, who are right, I think, to call it criminal.

Conservative goals and the NSA

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I happened to hear David Brooks on NPR. He was asked about the huge NSA surveillance program. He said, "I'm somewhat bothered by the secrecy, but I don't feel it's intrusive. Basically, they're running huge amounts of megadata through an algorithm. That feels less intrusive to me than the average TSA search at the airport. And so I don't think it's particularly intrusive. It is supervised by the court. It has some congressional supervision." Okay, it's Brooks. What's the big deal?

Well, that morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, "We bow to no one in our desire to limit government power, but data-mining is less intrusive on individuals than routine airport security." I think it is interesting that Brooks is brought on NPR as a "reasonable" Republican and he just spouts the WSJ editors. Brooks is not supposed to be just some random politician; he's supposed to be an independent thinker. But let's leave that aside.

Jonathan Chait wrote a good article yesterday, "Conservative Freedom Lovers: You're Doing It Wrong." In which he showed the cognitive dissonance in the conservative movement regarding issues of freedom. For example, noted that Jack Welch is a-okay with the NSA spying, even as he claimed that Obama was secretly manipulating the Jobs Report for his own nefarious purposes.

Or consider Roger Vinson, who was one of the lower court judges who struck down Obamacare. He claimed that if the government could force people to get health insurance, it could force them to do anything. So he's a big believer in freedom. Or at least certain kinds of freedom. As Chait noted, "Judge Vinson has reentered the news for having approved the National Security Agency's program of collecting all of the phone records in America."

Read more »

Police use Predator drones for surveillance in North Dakota

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So you really don't think the U.S. is becoming more and more of a police state?

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

No big deal, you say? Police should use whatever means necessary to apprehend criminals? Please. Are you not paying attention as your privacy -- and indeed your freedom -- is being taken away from you without you even knowing it?

As John Cole writes: "[T]o those of you poo-pooing this and saying "how is this any different than a helicopter," in five to ten years when unmanned drones are flying all over your neighborhood surveilling and storing info at random, you can think back to mocking us privacy hysterics. I'm sure very similar arguments were made in years past about police needing armored vehicles and .50 cals and every locale needing a SWAT team armed to the teeth."

It's one thing, and then another thing, and then another thing, and each time you say, "oh, so what?" Well, it all adds up to something, doesn't it? It's bad enough that your phone is allowing you to be tracked, that you can't make any sort of transaction without being identified on the grid. Do you really want to live with drones flying overhead?

As Libby Spencer writes: "A police state doesn't happen overnight. Big changes happen in just such tiny incremental infringements. If we wait to express our concern until, like the Geneva Conventions, Posse Comitatus is rendered quaint, it will be too late."

Actually, it's probably too late already. And not just in North Dakota.

(photo)

I know what you're thinking

By Capt. Fogg

My first thought was: I've seen this scenario in some cheesy Tom Cruise infected Sci-Fi movie. Apparently that thought occurred to the Nature.com editorial staff as well. The Department of Homeland Security it would seem, is testing a system to detect malicious thoughts. No really.

They call it Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) because that's what government departments do with their doings, lest clear speech shed clear light. They make up acronyms that disguise the tunnels they dig under the foundations of liberty, but I digress. The technology purports to identify individuals who are planning to blow things up or have "malintent" as they say in the dialect.

Like a more traditional polygraph, FAST measures heart rates, among other things. Heart rates respiration and perspiration go up, after all when you're nervous about the bomb in your shorts or wishing you could throttle some thick-skull TSA twit as he gives you grief over an aspirin in your pants pocket that shows up on a scanner and starts groping you for explosives as you put your hands over your head in abject submission. Hell I'm sure I'd set off all kinds of alarm bells right now just thinking of how I've so often been treated as a felon on his way into the penitentiary instead of a tired traveler trying to get home.

I have no idea about what else this electro-mechanical night club bouncer measures and I'm not sure it invades any privacy that hasn't already been taken away by the cowardly traitors who passed the "Patriot" Act. I'm too lazy and too unwilling to provoke myself into another Lewis Black style tantrum to read the " Privacy Impact Assessment" our bureaucratic brethren at DHS have given us. I'll leave that to you. Besides my loathing of people who seem to exist only for the purpose of inserting that fly-blown and putrid metaphor into every sentence, it was written, most revealingly, by someone any German speaker will recognize as the Devil himself: Hugo Teufel III, Chief Privacy offer at the DHS under George W. Bush.

Does it work any better than the Polygraph does at detecting the evasions of sociopaths? It would have to, since those tend to be the people we're looking to put on no-fly lists and of course we won't have the results interpreted by a seasoned professional, but rather someone who was promoted from K-Mart security officer last week.

No, it's the stuff of B movies or sarcastic Dr. Strangelove sequels or even Orwell novels, but perhaps we've lost the ability even to see what the politics of fear has done to us in our cringing, cowardly new century.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Wherein I praise the 26 House Republicans who voted with 122 Democrats to block an extension of especially egregious Patriot Act provisions

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The forces of freedom, even in the minority, triumphed earlier today in the House:

A measure to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act counterterrorism surveillance law through December failed the House Tuesday night, with more than two-dozen Republicans bucking their party to oppose the measure.

The House measure, which was sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and required a two-thirds majority for passage, failed on a 277-to-148 vote. Twenty-six Republicans voted with 122 Democrats to oppose the measure, while 67 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans to back it. Ten members did not vote.

The measure would have extended three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire on Monday, Feb. 28, unless Congress moves to reauthorize them. One of the provisions authorizes the FBI to continue using roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access "any tangible items," such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third is a "lone wolf" provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act that allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

The vote came as several tea party-aligned members of the new freshman class had been expressing doubts about the measure.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who highlighted his opposition to the law during his upstart 2010 Senate campaign, signaled Monday that he may vote ultimately vote against an extension when the measure comes up in the Senate, likely later this month.

Look, I'm a proud Democrat, but where Republicans deserve praise I'll happily give it. And for this they -- or at least 26 of them -- do. (If that aligns me with Rand Paul, however much I may dislike him, so be it.)

And shame on the 67 Democrats who voted with the majority of Republicans.

And shame, too, on President Obama, who wants a three-year extension of these provisions. (Because, of course, he's enthusiastically keeping much of the Bush-Cheney national security state in place -- so much for all that change we thought we might be able to believe in. Think there would have been so much enthusiastic support for him if he's been clearer about his policy priorities?)

When Rand Paul and Tea Party House Republicans make you look bad, you know you're doing something horribly wrong. And Obama is doing just that.

**********

For some political perspective on the vote, see The Nation's John Nichols:

Most House Republicans -- including supposed defenders of the Constitution such as Michigan Congresswoman Michele Bachmann -- went along with their leadership. In so doing, they failed to address fundamental concerns, raised by conservatives and liberals, about Patriot Act abuses of the very Constitution that theyread aloud at the opening of the current Congress.

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, led the vast majority of House Democrats in opposing any extension. In all, 122 Democrats -- roughly two-thirds of the party's House caucus -- voted "no" to extending surveillance authorities that the American Civil Liberties Union warns "give the government sweeping authority to spy on individuals inside the United States and, in some cases, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. All three should be allowed to expire if they are not amended to include privacy protections to protect personal information from government overreach."

Joining the Democrats in voting "no" were 26 Republicans, including Texas Congressman Ron Paul and a number of other senior Republicans with records of breaking with their party on civil liberties issues, such as Tennessee's John Duncan Jr. and South Carolina's Walter Jones Jr. Joining them were several new members of the GOP caucus, such as Illinois Congressman Randy Hultgren and Michigan Congressman Justin Amash.

The vote came Tuesday evening after a heated floor debate, which saw Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, call on members of both parties to obey their oaths to defend the Constitution.

"The PATRIOT Act is a destructive undermining of the Constitution," Kucinich told the House. "How about today we take a stand for the Constitution to say that all Americans should be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and to make certain that the attempt to reauthorize the Patriot Act is beat down."

Against the lobbying of the Obama administration and the determined efforts of House GOP leaders -- who kept what was supposed to be a 15 minute open for 25 minutes as they tried to corral the needed seven votes -- Kucinich's argument carried the day.

Very well done, Dennis. Though as this vote suggests, most Republicans and many Democrats are more than willing to disobey their oaths.

And when this extension comes up for a simple majority vote, the forces of freedom will lose. The Republican Party will make sure of that, and President Obama won't get in the way.

Spy in the Sky

By Capt. Fogg

You expect the smaller government gospel in Texas and Texans will tell you that the damned government should stay out of private matters like dragging gay men to death behind pickup trucks, instituting safety standards for drilling rigs and demanding proper accounting practices from Bush beloved companies like Enron, but there's an alternate logic in Texas; one that has no problem with the government spying on us with unmanned drones. Following us down the road recording our movements and our speed and our destinations, peeking into our back yards. The largest of these things are as big as airliners and the smallest, I'm told, can fly right into your window. Some are remotely operated, some are almost autonomous. They can see in the dark, they know when you're sleeping; they know when you're awake -- well, maybe not, but they know if you've been good or bad.

Of course there's support for patrolling the borders with these machines, which are much cheaper to operate and aren't dangerous to the operators, but they pose a collision hazard to civil aviation and the FAA, pushed by manufacturers, fear-mongering politicians and the government, has been trying to balance the need for aviation safety with the lust for more government surveillance. Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, are so hot to employ drones on the border and who knows where else that they're trying to twist the President's arm. Cornyn, for instance is blocking a Senate confirmation vote on Michael Huerta, Obama's nominee for the No. 2 FAA job, until he gets his way.

Of course there are legitimate uses for drones, but there are legitimate dangers, not all of which concern collisions and the urge to deploy more eyes in the sky; the insistence that we can and must trust the government with another spy tool seems to make liars out of the people making careers out of telling us we can't trust anyone but them.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Barack Obama and the Seven Samurai

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I don't have much to say today. Or, rather, I do, but I'm just too busy with other things to blog. I'll be back later with new posts, but make sure to stay tuned for more from my great co-bloggers.

I also need my anger and frustration to subside a bit. Consider:

1) NYT: "A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush."

2) NYT: "The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday."

Now, while I applaud the judge's ruling, a confirmation that Bush's illegal domestic surveillance program was (and is) indeed illegal, I oppose offshore drilling strenuously. But what especially angers/frustrates me -- and this is what links the two stories -- is how President Obama, whom I continue to support and whose victory, along with the Democrats', on health-care reform I consider an historic triumph, is essentially governing as, if not quite a Republican, a moderate-conservative Democrats in Republican clothing.

His health-care reform plan, a solidly moderate Republican effort, was hardly as progressive as it could have been, and ought to have been, but I accepted that political reality was what it was and that the plan itself was probably the best that could have been achieved -- not that Obama ever pushed for more, however, such as a public option. Meanwhile, the stimulus package was good but not enough and the Wall Street bailout was a concerted effort to reward some of those in the financial oligarchy who had helped cause the meltdown in the first place. And then there's the escalation of the Afghan War and... do I need to go on?

Well, Obama's been propping up some of the worst elements of Bush's national security state (even if he did away with some of the worst abuses), and now he's doing his best Sarah Palin impersonation on drilling. And for what? Bipartisanship? It's not like Republicans, excepting Lindsey Graham and maybe one or two others, are about to support a meaningful climate-energy bill, and it's not like they're about to go along with him, and his party, on anything else this year. They showed all their cards during the health-care debate, and all they've got is obstructionism and ideological extremism.

So what is it, then? Is Obama just playing the bipartisan card to win public support in anticipation of eventual Republican opposition? Is he just setting Republicans up to look bad? Maybe, but it's not all image. He really does seem to support domestic surveillance and he really does seem to want offshore drilling. His presidency, if we judge it on its record, is anything but solidly progressive, health-care reform (which is progressive only in relative terms) aside.

I know, I know. This is hardly news. Critics like Glenn Greenwald have been saying this all along, and they're right. I've been saying it, too, from time to time, though I've usually given Obama the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure I'll continue to support him, not least because the alternative, Republican rule, is so much worse. But, while I realize he's in campaign mode and trending to the right in consideration of November, when running as bipartisan moderates could help Democrats stave off electoral disaster, there are real-world consequences to governing as a Republican lite. And for that Obama deserves our anger and frustration.

Alright, so I guess I did have a fair amount to say, and the time to say it.

But my intention here was not to riff off a couple of NYT articles but to say that I'm busy and, in belated celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest film director of all time, Akira Kurosawa (who was born on March 23, 1910 and who died in 1998), to post the trailer for the greatest film of all time, Seven Samurai. Yes, I really think it's the greatest, tied with Kieslowski's Decalogue (which isn't really a single film) and ahead of, among others (and in no particular order), Ozu's Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds, Imamura's The Profound Desire of the Gods, Gance's Napoleon, Watkins's Edvard Munch, Girard's 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Lumet's Network, Altman's Nashville, Lang's M, Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan, Wenders's Wings of Desire, and another Kurosawa film, Ran.

Anyway, here it is -- a trailer that hardly does the movie justice, a movie that, to me, is about everything, as I often describe it. If you haven't seen, there's a massive hole in your life. So go watch it. All of it.

See you later.

Under my skin

By Capt. Fogg

It's strange to find myself on the same side of any fence with the Book of Revelation literalists, a group for which my loathing is nearly boundless. Nonetheless, the disturbingly Orwellian prospect of having RFID devices implanted in people so that their employers can track their movements scares hell out of them as much as it does me.

A Radio Frequency Identification Device is small enough to be placed under the skin with a hypodermic needle, and it's a great thing for keeping tabs on cattle or identifying lost dogs. They can also contain data, medical or otherwise, that can be read by a scanner. Most humans object to being forced to having one inserted, however, particularly as a substitute for a key or ID badge.

Civil libertarians -- indeed, any kind of libertarians -- tend to be militantly opposed to allowing this to be done to people, but it's of course for reasons of privacy and the protection thereof, not because they give credit to what may be the looniest book to worm it's way into the Christian canon. There are many such people in places like Virginia, and it seems to be they who are behind a bill designed to prevent such implants. Why? Because John of Patmos, almost 2000 years ago, had RFID capsules in mind when he talked about the Mark of the Beast.

He didn't, and the Beast is most likely Nero, but even if the enemy of my enemy is not really my friend, these things are the mark of some kind of beast, corporate or governmental, and I'm as much against it as they are.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Obsolete

By J. Thomas Duffy

That ear-splitting screeching you heard through most of the day was that of the Flying Monkeys, of the Right-Wing Freak Show, flinging their own feces around, aghast at the prospects that the Obama Administration's Department of Homeland Security is (or has already started) looking into Right Wing Extremists, the prospects of the raising of violence, you know, from all those calls for revolution, and stockpiling of weapons due to Obama coming in and taking them all away.

And, as I read through a bevy of posts, particularly those that question, why would, say, an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, conservative get their panties in a bunch, automatically associating themselves with gun-toting, bomb-making freaks?

And, that led me to think about Fritz Weaver, and his appearance in one of the many classic Twilight Zones, in this case (as he was in many), "The Obsolete Man."



Here's the IMDb plot summary:

In a totalitarian society, Romney Wordsworth is condemned to death for the crime of being a librarian, and he is subjected to the harangues of the state's Chancellor and his lectures about Wordsworth's obsolescence. Wordsworth, however, makes one final request -- that he be allowed to choose his method of execution and that it be televised live to the society. The Chancellor agrees and later visits Wordsworth at his house, where he learns that Wordsworth has had tons of explosives rigged under the house to go off at midnight in full view of national television cameras. But as The Chancellor begins to leave, he finds he has been double-crossed by Wordsworth, and suddenly he must face Romney Wordsworth's terrifying vigil as the clock ticks down to the fateful period of midnight.

Weaver plays the Chancellor, and the great Burgess Meredith is the Romney Wordsworth character.

And, the Chancellor is, oh so, haughty, carrying out the State's business, much with the crispness of Donald Rumsfeld.

While the plot episode is not quite the same circumstances, our little Flying Monkeys -- Michelle "Stalkin" Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, the whole lot of them -- all played out the "Chancellor's" role these past eight-years, cheerleading The Bush Grindhouse chopping up the Constitution, infringing on and violating our rights, wiretapping us, Extraordinary Rendtioning others, torture, and these little Flying Monkeys set up the proverbial gaunlet, beating down, smearing, anyone who, let alone criticized The Commander Guy, but even questioned it.



So, today, they all break down, all the little Flying Monkeys, sweaty and trembling, much, like Fritz Weaver's "Chancellor" character, panicking that, like the Chancellor, they, too, will be dubbed "obsolete," or, in this case, they get roped in with a bunch of violent nutjobs.

Glenn Greenwald summed it up rather nicely:

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it's going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That's its nature. I'd love to know how many of the participants in today's right-wing self-victim orgy uttered a peep of protest about any of this, from 2005.

And, Steve Hynd, in his "From The Shoe on Other Foot Files":

What I find unpleasant but nonetheless poetic justice is that the 30% who were all for illegal warrantless wiretapping and internet surveillance sweeps when Muslims and environmentalist hippies were the prime targets might be feeling a whole lot different now that they themselves may well be the subject of such spying.

Like Fritz Weaver's Chancellor, in the end;

"Chancellor: [becoming hysterical] You're making a mistake! *I'm not obsolete!* I BELIEVE in the State! I WORK for the State! I help give the State STRENGTH! How can you call ME obsolete? HOW CAN YOU?"

Flail away there, Fly Monkeys ...

Go to sleep tonight, thinking about, knowing, perhaps, your name is in a DHS file.


Bonus Flying Monkey Riffs

Tbogg: It’s all fun and games until they start looking at the white man

Ali Frick: Fox host wonders if Obama administration will send ‘spies’ to tea parties

Attytood: There's a right way and a wrong way to combat right wing violence

Tim F: The Point (You’re Never Gonna Get It)

Bonus Bonus

Watch 'The Twilight Zone' episode, "The Obsolete Man" HERE




(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Bigger, more intrusive government

By Capt. Fogg

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men — the right to be let alone."

- Justice Louis Brandeis -

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well, of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and, of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)