when the time comes, you use this information to protect your agency which serves the president who serves the establishment...,

HuffPo | Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst who in 2005 blew the whistle on what he alleged was massive unconstitutional domestic spying across multiple agencies, claimed Wednesday that the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.

Speaking on "The Boiling Frogs Show," Tice claimed the intelligence community had ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

"Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois," he said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It's a big white house in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the president of the United States now."

Host Sibel Edmonds and Tice both raised concerns that such alleged monitoring of subjects, unbeknownst to them, could provide the intelligence agencies with huge power to blackmail their targets.

"I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on," Tice said.

the insider threat program

mcclatcheydc | Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

The Obama administration is expected to hasten the program’s implementation as the government grapples with the fallout from the leaks of top secret documents by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who revealed the agency’s secret telephone data collection program. The case is only the latest in a series of what the government condemns as betrayals by “trusted insiders” who have harmed national security.

“Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” Obama said on May 16 in defending criminal investigations into leaks. “They can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers, who are in various, dangerous situations that are easily compromised, at risk. . . . So I make no apologies, and I don’t think the American people would expect me as commander in chief not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed.

sibel edmonds: classified woman

theamericanconservative | Sibel Edmonds is no stranger to longtime TAC readers. I wrote an article exploring some of her claims back in January 2008, a blog item in August 2009, and Kara Hopkins and I did an interview with her for the November 2009 issue of the magazine. It was featured on the cover as “Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?”

Edmonds has recently written a book entitled Classified Woman detailing her journey from FBI translator to whistleblower, finally emerging as an outspoken advocate of free speech and transparency in government through her founding of the National Security Whistleblowers’ Coalition and her always informative Boiling Frogs Post website.

As Edmonds ruefully notes, her tale of high level mendacity has always found a better reception in the European and Asian media than in the United States, though her odyssey has included an appearance on “60 Minutes” in October 2002 and a feature article in Vanity Fair called “An Inconvenient Patriot” in September 2005. Two senators, Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy, became interested in her case early on and found her a credible witness, as did a U.S. Department of Justice IG’s report. She speculates that that her ostracism by the Fourth Estate, and also by congressmen who were ostensibly engaged in elevating government ethics, is due to the fact that both Republicans and Democrats were parties to the criminal behavior that she describes. In one particularly delicious account of high level shenanigans she recounts how an interview with Congressman Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform staff was stopped abruptly when a staffer asked her if any Democrats were involved. “We have to stop here and not go any further. We don’t want to know,” he intoned after she confirmed that the malfeasance was not strictly GOP.

I will not even try to reconstruct all the twists and turns that Edmonds describes in her 341 pages, but rest assured that she has the ability to surprise one with new revelations, even for readers like myself who have been following her case. Edmonds’s tale is basically about high level incompetence at the FBI both before and after 9/11, including hiring translators who could not speak the language they were translating or who were former employees of the organizations being investigated, leading to deliberately falsified translations. The translators and their supervisors would engage in go-slows, sabotage of work already done, and padding of accounts within the department to create a backlog of work and red ink, thus encouraging budget increases and more resources to rectify the shortfalls. Laptops and files containing classified information regularly disappeared. Attempts to report security problems were routinely ignored as all levels within the bureau because no one wanted to make anyone look bad. One Edmonds supervisor described the translation department as “drowned in corruption, incompetence, nepotism, you name it…” but then proceeded to do nothing about it. Bear in mind that this was after 9/11, when the government was on high alert and allegedly fully focused on security issues.

the real enemy (you 99%'s) must be subdued and kept in your place...,

History will view Snowden very kindly

medialens | Reports of Washington's anger directed at surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a basic truth about power. Noam Chomsky has expressed it as the underlying problem for genuine democracy, even in so-called 'free' societies:

'Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population.' (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002, p. 70.)

Anyone who steps out of line, especially if they defy authority's attempts to apprehend them, risks severe punishment. All the more so because it is important to publicly discipline miscreants, lest the threat of a 'bad' example become a contagion sweeping through society.

Snowden was denounced by Dick Cheney, the warmongering former US vice-president, as a 'traitor' and a possible spy for China. Senator Dianne Feinsten, chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, told reporters that Snowden had committed an 'act of treason'. There was 'undisguised fury' amongst many US politicians at Snowden's slipping away from Hong Kong and arriving at Moscow airport where he continued to evade detection. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, complained that Snowden 'is clearly an individual who's betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent.'

Given the source of such accusations – largely senior officials in the current and previous US administrations - rational observers will be unimpressed. As Norman Solomon correctly points out:

'The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government's rationale for pervasive snooping is the "war on terror," the warfare state under whatever name.'

Solomon issues a warning:

'The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?'

Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as 'the international community', are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden's exposure of the massive US secret surveillance programme aids and abets 'the enemy', and damages international relations.

marijuana dispensaries becoming exclusive domain of the 1%

HuffPo | Once a business proposition that required little more than a few thousand dollars and some gardening equipment, selling medical marijuana is quickly becoming a dream fit only for deep-pocketed entrepreneurs.

Regulations in states that only recently legalized medical marijuana are mandating that would-be dispensary operators set aside large amounts of cash before even applying for a license, tipping the scales in favor of businesspeople with money to burn. Drawn-out licensing processes being devised in those states mean permits to run dispensaries will likely only go to those able to afford a cadre of consultants and lawyers.

Five years ago, Ean Seeb helped open Colorado dispensary Denver Relief with “four thousand dollars and half a pound of cannabis.”

“I don’t think that would ever happen again,” said Seeb, who now works as a dispensary consultant. “Somebody who just has a good idea but little capital would find it difficult to impossible to go into the business today.”

Seeb said he is counseling clients in Massachusetts, where only 35 dispensary licenses will be granted starting later this year, to set aside at least $2 million before even considering going into the medical marijuana industry. Not only are state fees related to the permitting process likely to total over $100,000 for many dispensaries, but the merit-based process for obtaining a license is also expected to privilege those who can demonstrate they have excess cash to secure an abundant supply of cannabis. Fist tap Arnach.

Booz-Allen - the world's most profitable spy organization

Businessweek | Booz Allen and its competitors are able to keep landing contracts and keep growing, critics charge, not because their expertise is irreplaceable but because their Rolodexes are. Name a retired senior official from the NSA or the CIA or the various military intelligence branches, and there’s a good chance he works for a contractor—most likely Booz Allen. Name a senior intelligence official serving in the government, and there’s a good chance he used to work for Booz Allen. (ODNI’s Sanders, who made the case for contractors, is now a vice president at the firm, which declined to make him available for an interview.) McConnell and others at Booz Allen are quick to point out that the contracting process has safeguards and oversight built in and that it has matured since the frenzied years just after Sept. 11. At the same time, the firm’s tendency to scoop up—and lavishly pay—high-ranking intelligence officers once they retire suggests the value it places on their address books and in having their successors inside government consider Booz Allen as part of their own retirement plans.

Rich contractor salaries create a classic public-private revolving door. They pull people from government intelligence, deplete the ranks, and put more experience and knowledge in the private sector, which makes contractors even more vital to the government. “Now you go into government for two or three years, get a clearance, and migrate to one of the high-paying contractors,” says Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. That’s what Snowden did. “You have to have a well-developed sense of patriotism to turn that money down,” Aftergood says.

As a result, says Golden, the headhunter, a common complaint in spy agencies is that “the damn contractors know more than we do.” That could have been a factor in the Snowden leak—his computer proficiency may have allowed him to access information he shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Snowden is an anomaly, though. What he did with that information—copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker—cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.

In the wake of the Snowden leak, Congress is paying more attention to contractors like Booz Allen and the role they play in intelligence gathering. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say that the ease with which Snowden was able to gain access to and divulge classified information highlights the need for greater oversight of contractors’ activities. “I’m just stunned that an individual who did not even have a high school diploma, who did not successfully complete his military service, and who is only age 29 had access to some of the most highly classified information in our government,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.) told reporters on Capitol Hill on June 11. “That’s astonishing to me, and it suggests real problems with the vetting process. The rules are not being applied well or they need to be more strict.”

Changing them, however, may be easier said than done. “At the very highest level, whether at the White House or the Pentagon, there will always be a contractor in the room,” says Golden. “And the powers that be will turn around and say, ‘That’s a brilliant plan, how do we make that work?’ And a contractor will say, ‘I can do that.’ ”

counter-intelligence

topdocumentaryfilms | It is no secret that CIA is engaged in criminal activities around the world, some of which are quite deadly, some of which are quite provocative in the sense of laying the groundwork for large scale military conflict, and it’s happening in a lot of countries. This is not unique to the United States. The United States learned some of this from the British who learned it in turn during the 19th century when they were a dominant imperial power around the world. They cut their teeth on this stuff.

The other major powers are definitely engaged and capable of these same types of operations, and small powers as well. Israel is an example. The CIA grew out of the OSS, which had been established during World War II. Its earliest years are interesting because the new president, Harry Truman, did not trust the OSS because he felt it was too dominated by parts of the Democratic Party that he didn’t align himself with, so he abolished the OSS. Then they first created a smaller intelligence agency from the remains of the old OSS called the Central Intelligence Group. And that was focused on analyzing intelligence. It wasn’t a covert operations agency.

In one inbox would come all information whether it was from intercepted communications, or satellite photography, or defector reports, or clandestine reports, embassy… it would all come to that one person, and that person would be “accountable.” One person would be accountable for looking at that stuff, pouring through it, and if it were important, assuming it was a good analysis, that could end up on the president’s desk the next morning, unadulterated synthesis of information.

About two years after that, many of the agents who had worked on the covert operation side, the paramilitary warfare operations, black operations, that sort of thing, were reestablished in an outfit called the Office of Policy Coordination. This “office” eventually grew to have about 5,000 agents in the early Cold War years, and the existence of this office was itself entirely top secret. It had no open existence at all, and it wasn’t until some years later that the Office of Policy Coordination was folded into the CIA, and the CIA became an agency. CIA had both a clandestine black operations arm and an intelligence analysis arm.

The OPC was set up to organize propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, sabotage, demolition, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

What happened at the end of World War II when Truman disbanded the OSS? The covert operators were in the wilderness for a little while, and some of them had been leading Wall Street bankers and lawyers, and there’s a certain logic there because prior to the war, the people engaged in international trade and international law were a relatively small number of people, and they were the specialists in international affairs for the United States; so for example, the man who was later to become chief of covert operations, black operations, for the CIA was a man named Frank Wisner, quite a prominent Wall Street lawyer.

7 Myths about Edward Snowden - Free Bonus! Myth 8: The Democratic Party cares deeply about civil liberties.

thenation | So many questions! How much of our personal information can the NSA get at, with and without a warrant? What exactly does “server” mean on that NSA PowerPoint slide? Is Snowden in Moscow, Havana, Quito, none of the above? Tracking the fast-evolving scandal of NSA surveillance and whistleblower Edward Snowden requires a bullshit-detector cranked up to eleven. Though the NSA-Snowden affair is scarcely three weeks old, all manner of official folklore and panic-infused idées reçues have already glommed on, limpet-like, to media accounts, often deforming the story beyond recognition. Below is your handy myth-stripping guide to understanding this critical news item.

wozniak: snowden is a hero

dailybeast | The Apple co-founder tells Lloyd Grove why he supports the NSA leaker, how the agency hasn’t ‘done one thing valuable for us’ in regard to Prism—and why the Internet wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Computer whiz Steve Wozniak is more than a little distressed that the technology he helped develop nearly four decades ago is being used on a massive scale to invade people’s privacy.

He’s especially troubled by the secret intrusions into the private emails of American citizens by the National Security Agency—secret, that is, until the recent detailed revelations of the NSA’s Prism program of electronic surveillance by a 29-year-old NSA contractor turned fugitive named Edward Snowden.

“I think he’s a hero,” said the 62-year-old Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs and invented the Apple I and Apple II personal computers that launched a technological revolution. “He’s a hero to my beliefs about how the Constitution should work. I don’t think the NSA has done one thing valuable for us, in this whole ‘Prism’ regard, that couldn’t have been done by following the Constitution and doing it the old way.”

Sitting down with me on Tuesday at the Ford Motor Co. campus in Dearborn, Michigan, during the “Go Further With Ford” 2013 Trend Conference, Wozniak added: “I don’t think terrorism is war. I think terrorism is a crime. And by using the word ‘war’ we’ve managed to use all these weird ways to say the Constitution doesn’t apply in the case of a war. And I think Edward Snowden is a hero because this came from his heart. And I really believe he was giving up his whole life because he just felt so deeply about honesty, about spying on Americans, and he wanted to tell us.”

politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession...,

thenation |  In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”
Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.  Fist tap Dale.

u.s. rulers fear the american people

ICH | What the disclosures of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden show perhaps above all else is just how petrified the leaders of the United States have become - of ordinary citizens both in the US and around the world. When we say “leaders” we mean the ruling elite - the top one percent of the financial-corporate-military-industrial complex and its bought- and paid-for politicians. 

The international manhunt by the US authorities for Snowden, which has accelerated with his flight to Moscow to evade extradition from Hong Kong, is indicative of the desperation in Washington’s elitist establishment to quash him and what he is revealing about their despotic rule.

Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans - a sixth of the population - are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown.

American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. This is not unique to the US. All around the world, people are rebelling against the inequity of crony capitalism - there is only one form of capitalism - from Europe to the Arab Middle East, from Turkey to Brazil.

But the US is a phenomenal case in point of collapsing capitalist society. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, within living memory; the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world. Now it more and more resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty that is interspersed with a few gated rich communities, the latter populated by the top one percent of society.

it's like shearing a piglet: there's a lot of squealing, but there's little wool

reuters | In his first public comments since the fugitive flew in on Sunday, he appeared to make light of the affair around Edward Snowden, whose flight from U.S. authorities is becoming an increasing embarrassment for President Barack Obama. Asked by a journalist about the affair, he smiled fleetingly.

"I myself would prefer not to deal with these issues. It's like shearing a piglet: there's a lot of squealing, but there's little wool," he told a news conference in Finland.

His refusal to hand back Snowden risked deepening a rift with the United States that has also sucked in China and threatens relations between countries that may be essential in settling global conflicts including the Syrian war.

Putin said the 30-year-old American was in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport and, not having gone through passport control, was free to leave.

"The sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it would be for us and for himself," Putin said.

Snowden has applied for asylum in Ecuador but Quito has said it is still considering the application and the United States is trying to persuade the governments of countries where he might head to hand him over. His plans remain unclear.

"He has not crossed the state's border, and therefore does not need a visa. And any accusations against Russia (of aiding him) are ravings and rubbish," Putin said in response to a question at a news conference during a visit to Finland.

Washington has gone to great lengths to try to ensure Snowden has nowhere to go to seek refuge. But Putin said Russia had no extradition treaty with the United States and suggested Moscow would expel Snowden only if he were a criminal.

"Thank God, Mr Snowden committed no crimes on the territory of the Russian Federation," Putin said in the garden of a presidential residence, with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto beside him.

Putin said he hoped relations with the United States would not be affected by the affair but his words seemed to rebuff U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking only hours earlier.

"It is accurate there is not an extradition treaty between Russia and the United states, but there are standards of behaviour between sovereign nations," Kerry said, in Jeddah.

volodya not scurred...,

NYTimes |  Speaking at a news conference while on an official visit to Finland, Mr. Putin offered no new information on where Mr. Snowden might be headed from the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. But he said Mr. Snowden had broken no Russian laws and that Russian security officials had not made contact with him.

“The Russian special services are not engaged with him and will not be engaged,” Mr. Putin said, according to the government-financed Russia Today news site.

“On the territory of the Russian Federation, Mr. Snowden, thank God, did not commit any crime,” Mr. Putin said in an Interfax news agency account of his remarks. “As for the issue of the possibility of extradition,” Mr. Putin said, according to Interfax, “we can give only send back some foreign nationals to the countries with which we have the relevant international agreements on extradition. With the United States we have no such agreement.”

Mr. Putin spoke hours after the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, chastised the United States for its demands regarding Mr. Snowden, whose successful effort, so far, to elude his American pursuers has captivated global attention, showed the limits of American power and strained American relations with Russia and China.

Mr. Snowden has been charged with violating American espionage laws by revealing secret information on intelligence-gathering. He and his allies describe him as whistleblower whose revelations have exposed the United States government’s invasion of privacy around the world.

Mr. Lavrov said Mr. Snowden had not crossed the Russian border, which appeared to be a technical way of saying he was in an international passenger transit area. But Mr. Putin was far more direct.

china: this chess, not checkers...,

NYTimes |  In Beijing, people with knowledge of how China handled Mr. Snowden’s exit from Hong Kong were claiming a tactical victory for China, saying that the government had acted in China’s best interests, and in the long-term interests of its relationship with the United States.

“What did the United States expect China to do? Hand him over? That would be very stupid,” said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Tsinghua University. “This was the best China could do.”

According to a Chinese journalist who often talks with Hong Kong government and mainland Chinese officials in Hong Kong, the Chinese authorities organized an ad hoc group, led by Yang Jiechi, a former foreign minister and now a state councilor, to handle the Snowden matter. The group answered to President Xi Jinping, the journalist said.

The Chinese mainland authorities decided to keep a distance from Mr. Snowden personally to ensure that if Mr. Snowden eventually ended up in American hands he would not be able to disclose what Chinese officials said to him, the journalist said.

Beijing determined early on that Mr. Snowden would have to leave Hong Kong, and should not be allowed to stay to go through a protracted legal battle in the Hong Kong courts to resist the United States extradition demand, the journalist said. “That would have lasted years, and then the United States would also wonder what he was telling China,” the journalist said. “What would the United States prefer?”

The Hong Kong government also hit back at American criticisms, saying that the United States had received ample warning that its request for Mr. Snowden’s detention was incomplete.

black folks who favor panoptic surveillance have forgotten who the deep state targets with these tools...,

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

breakingbrown | A recent Pew Research poll shows that blacks are more willing to accept curbs to privacy than others polled.

According to the poll, 45 percent of Americans say the government should be able to “go further than it is” to increases security, while 55 percent of blacks are accepting of additional curbs to privacy. In all, 52 percent of those polled said broad based monitoring of Americans should not occur.  Among blacks, only 44 percent of those polled found the extra measures unacceptable.

Among all adults, 62 percent said investigating possible threats was more important. The figure was 60 percent among whites, 67 percent among nonwhites and 75 percent among African Americans.

Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders “acceptable”, according to the poll.

But this posture among blacks is curious given the impact of the surveillance state on the civil rights movement. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes brought up this point during his Tuesday show, describing how Martin Luther King was harassed by the FBI.

“They stalked his every move, broke into and bugged his office, they bugged his hotel rooms and they wiretapped his phones,” Hayes said.

“But there’s a pretty major sticking point, and that is the as long as it’s not abused part, because history tells us that is not actually a thing. A nonabused massive government surveillance apparatus. That is not what Dr. Martin Luther King tells us.”

“When you construct a massive surveillance apparatus, history tells us that it will be brought to bear not just on ‘the enemy,’ but on the people who threaten society’s power structure,” he added, “on whoever exists at the political margins, whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or some Occupy Boston protesters. It’s not some Orwellian abstraction. It’s America’s history and America’s recent history.”

a fine and flaming rant on strange partisan pairings in the wake of deep state disclosures...,

1. 'Remember That Time the NSA Listened to U.S. Troops Have Phone Sex With Loved Ones Back Home?'
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/10/rem...

2. 'Whistleblowers Are Not Protected, Mr. Goss' by Sibel Edmonds
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?artic...

3. 3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/po...

4. 'Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.'
http://observer.com/2004/01/whistlebl...

5. 'Edward Snowden's Exposure Of Our State Secrets Should Warrant His Death -- Plain And Simple...'
http://www.teapartytribune.com/2013/0...

6. 'Fox News' Ralph Peters: 'Bring Back The Death Penalty' For Edward Snowden (VIDEO)'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06...

7. 'Glenn Beck, Michael Moore call NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a hero'
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2...

nsa whistleblowers roundtable on snowden...,

usatoday | When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.

Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.

For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.

To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.

Today, they feel vindicated.

did michael hastings get whacked?

HuffPo | The peculiar circumstances of journalist Michael Hastings' death in Los Angeles last week have unleashed a wave of conspiracy theories.

Now there's another theory to contribute to the paranoia: According to a prominent security analyst, technology exists that could've allowed someone to hack his car. Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke told The Huffington Post that what is known about the single-vehicle crash is "consistent with a car cyber attack."

Clarke said, "There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers" -- including the United States -- know how to remotely seize control of a car.

"What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it's relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn't want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn't want the brakes on, to launch an air bag," Clarke told The Huffington Post. "You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it's not that hard."

"So if there were a cyber attack on the car -- and I'm not saying there was," Clarke added, "I think whoever did it would probably get away with it."

Authorities have said that it may take weeks to determine a cause of death for Hastings, but that no foul play is suspected.

Hastings was driving a 2013 Mercedes C250 coupe when he crashed into a tree on Highland Ave. in Los Angeles at approximately 4:30 am on June 18. Video posted online showed the car in flames, and one neighbor told a local news crew she heard a sound like an explosion. Another eyewitness said the car's engine had been thrown 50 to 60 yards from the car. There were no other vehicles involved in the accident.

michael hastings panicked final email...,

rsn | ournalist Michael Hastings wrote an email to his colleagues hours before he died last week in which he said his "close friends and associates" were being interviewed by the FBI and he was going to "go off the radar for a bit." The 33-year-old journalist said he was "onto a big story," according to KTLA that publishes a copy of the email that Hastings sent at around 1 p.m. Monday June 17. Hastings died at around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday morning in a fiery one-vehicle car crash. Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who knew Hastings from Afghanistan, supplied a copy of the email to the network.

"It alarmed me very much," Biggs, who was blind-copied on the email, said. "I just said it doesn't seem like him. I don't know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me." The FBI has denied Hastings was under investigation. But WikiLeaks published a message on Twitter last week that said Hastings contacted the organization's lawyers hours before he died, "saying the FBI was investigating him."

The email with the subject "FBI Investigation, re: NSA" reads:

Hey [redacted] the Feds are interviewing my "close friends and associates." Perhaps if the authorities arrive "BuzzFeed GQ," er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.

Also: I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radat for a bit.

All the best, and hope to see you all soon.

Michael

healthy and safe, whereabouts unknown...,

aljazeera | Edward Snowden has been reported to be "healthy and safe" by Julian Assange but his whereabouts remain a mystery as the US hunted the architect of one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history.

The WikiLeaks founder on Monday said Snowden and a WikiLeaks staff member travelling with him, Sarah Harrison, were "healthy and safe and in contact with their legal team".

However, he added that he could not give information on their whereabouts. Snowden reportedly left Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday, and was said on Monday to have exited on a flight to Cuba. However, journalists travelling on the same plane said his seat was empty.

Strong objections

The White House later said it believed Snowden was still in Russia, said it expected the Russian government to send him back to the US and lodged "strong objections" to Hong Kong and China for letting him go.

A spokesman said on Monday evening that Snowden's exit from Hong Kong "unquestionably'' damaged US-China relations, and that officials believed he was still in Russia and should be handed over.

Snowden has been charged by the US of espionage and spying after revealing to Western newspapers how the US's National Security Agency spies on the internet and phone activities of millions of people. The programme, named Prism, is authorised by a secret court.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said during a visit to India that it would be "deeply troubling" if Moscow defied the US over Snowden, and said the fugitive "places himself above the law, having betrayed his country".