NSA Surveillance - TSA goons destroying America
NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year
NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit findsNSA - trust us, we are not illegally spying on Americans - Honest!!! Swear to God!!!
NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
By Barton Gellman, Published: August 15 E-mail the writer
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.
[FISA judge: Ability to police U.S. spying program is limited]
The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.
The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.
In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.
“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.
“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”
There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.
But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.
The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”
Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.
One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.
In what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.
The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.
In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.
Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”
The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.
What's a 'violation'?
Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. [Wow!!! Sounds like the folks in the NSA are telling Congress what to do. Not vise versa like it should be.] Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.
The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”
Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.
“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.
The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.
One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”
Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006. Those records include the telephone numbers of the parties and the times and durations of conversations, among other details, but not their content or the names of callers.
The NSA’s authoritative definition of data includes those call records. “Signals Intelligence Management Directive 421,” which is quoted in secret oversight and auditing guidelines, states that “raw SIGINT data . . . includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and/or unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and some forms of computer-generated data, such as call event records and other Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata as well as DNI message text.”
In the case of the collection effort that confused calls placed from Washington with those placed from Egypt, it is unclear what the NSA meant by a “large number” of intercepted calls. A spokesman declined to discuss the matter.
The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.
The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.
The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he will hold a hearing on the matter.
In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.
The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.
In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.
Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.
“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”
Julie Tate and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited
Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limitedSo as they have said all along it appears that this so call FISA court is really just rubber stamp to allow the police to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet and spy on us whenever the feel like it.
Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited
By Carol D. Leonnig, Published: August 15
The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.
The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.
The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.
Lawmakers on Friday were quick to express their dismay over the latest surveillance revelations. [Yea, the same lawmakers that voted to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet by passing the unconstitutional Patriot Act.]
“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”
Walton’s comments came in response to internal government records obtained by The Post showing that National Security Agency staff members in Washington overstepped their authority on spy programs thousands of times per year. The records also show that the number of violations has been on the rise.
The court’s description of its practical limitations contrasts with repeated assurances from the Obama administration and intelligence agency leaders that the court provides central checks and balances on the government’s broad spying efforts. They have said that Americans should feel comfortable that the secret intelligence court provides robust oversight of government surveillance and protects their privacy from rogue intrusions.
President Obama and other government leaders have emphasized the court’s oversight role in the wake of revelations this year that the government is vacuuming up “metadata” on Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.
“We also have federal judges that we’ve put in place who are not subject to political pressure,” Obama said at a news conference in June. “They’ve got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they’re empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.”
Privacy advocates and others in government have voiced concerns about the ability of overseers to police secret programs of immense legal and technological complexity. Several members of the House and Senate intelligence committees told The Post last week that they face numerous obstacles and constraints in questioning spy agency officials about their work.
In 2009, for example, a Justice Department review uncovered a major operational glitch that had led to a series of significant violations of the court’s order and notified the court, according to records that were declassified July 31 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The government described the problem as one of “over-collection” of metadata records for U.S. phone calls.
In September 2009, NSA Director Keith B. Alexander made a presentation to the FISA court about the agency’s effort to remedy the problem.
“FISA Court placed several restrictions on aspects of the business records collection program until the compliance processes were improved to its satisfaction,” the memo stated.
The only known details of a 2011 ruling that found the NSA was using illegal methods to collect and handle the communications of American citizens.
Lawmakers on Friday were quick to express their dismay over the latest surveillance revelations.
The public summaries of the violations do not say how long the problem went undetected and unreported to the court, or what information was improperly gathered by the agency’s automated collection systems.
“The problems generally involved the implementation of highly sophisticated technology in a complex and ever-changing communications environment which, in some instances, results in the automated tools operating in a manner that was not completely consistent with the specific terms of the Court’s orders,” according to unredacted portions of a December 2009 memo provided to the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Two people familiar with the 2009 flaw said that the agency was collecting more “fields” of information from the customer records of telephone companies than the court had approved. The NSA declined to answer questions about the event.
One senior intelligence official, who was authorized by the White House to speak on the condition of anonymity, described the 2009 incident as a “major event” that prompted the agency to dramatically increase its compliance staff.
“We uncovered some disconnects between us and our overseers, disconnects between what we had put in documentation, the way we had described things in documentation,” the official said.
Although the violation was unintentional, the official said, “it wasn’t always the easiest of discussions” with the court.
The agency paused, “got ourselves with our overseers back into fair territory,” and has since made “substantial improvement” in compliance, the official said.
Privacy advocates say they fear that some violations are never reported to the court.
In January 2008, the NSA appeared to have mistakenly collected data on numerous phone calls from the Washington area code 202, thinking they were foreign phone calls from Egypt, whose country code is 20. According to a 2013 “quality assurance” review of the incident, a communications switch misread the coding of the calls and presumed they were international. The NSA has broad authority that is not subject to the FISA court to collect and monitor foreign communications under certain circumstances.
The description of the 2008 problem suggests that the inadvertent collection of U.S. phone calls was not reported to the FISA court.
“However, the issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” the review stated.
Under FISA rules, the government is required to immediately notify the court if it believes it has violated any of its orders on surveillance.
The government does not typically provide the court with case-specific detail about individual compliance cases, such as the names of people it later learned it was improperly searching in its massive phone or e-mail databases, according to the two people familiar with the court’s work.
In contrast to the dozens of staff available to Congress’s intelligence and judiciary committees, the FISA court has five lawyers to review compliance violation reports.
A staff lawyer can elevate a concern about a significant compliance issue to a judge on the court, according to a letter Walton recently sent to the Senate describing the court’s role.
The court can always demand and obtain more details about cases, but it is unclear how often that occurs. In the past, while grappling with rules for implementing the surveillance programs, judges on the court have requested a visit to NSA headquarters to inspect the operations, the officials said.
Last week, the president said that he recognizes that some Americans may lack trust in the oversight process — in which the secret court approves the rules for collecting Americans’ communications — and that he will work with Congress on reforms, which could include a privacy advocate to the court.
“In other words, it’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs,” Obama said in his news conference. “The American people need to have confidence in them, as well.”
Barton Gellman, Peter Wallsten and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Members of Congress haven't had a raise in years
Members of Congress make a lousy $174,000 a year
Members of Congress haven't had a raise in yearsDamn almost makes me want to cry. Our royal members of Congress make a measly $174,000 and haven't had a raise since 2009.
Of course our royal members of Congress are not as grossly under paid as they want to make it out. Now they are on a summer 5 week vacation.
According to a second article I attached members of Congress only work a measly 126 days a year.
Most of us normal folks work 245 days a year and get two weeks off for vacation and another week off for the standard holidays.
If you assume the royal members of Congress work 8 hours days, which is usually not the case that means they only work 25.2 five day work weeks.
So their weekly pay is only a lousy $6,904 a week, or $1,380 a day.
Members of Congress haven't had a raise in years
USA Today Thu Aug 15, 2013 1:47 PM
WASHINGTON — Haven't had a raise in a while? Well, neither has your member of Congress.
This month, congressional salaries slid to their lowest inflation-adjusted levels since December 1990.
When congressional approval ratings are at historic lows, congressional pay — $174,000 for rank-and-file senators and House members — may seem high. But some argue that shrinking paychecks for public service perpetuates a political culture where mostly the rich can afford to serve in office.
Members of Congress have to maintain households in two locations, one being Washington, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country even for rentals. [Must be tough making ends meet. On the other hand I probably could maintain households in 3 or 4 locations if I was make $174,000 for a job which I only had to work a lousy 126 days a year. And of course that $174,000 yearly income doesn't include the hundreds of thousands and in many cases millions of dollars in bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions they get. ]
"It's always shocking to see members of Congress sleeping in their offices," says Brad Fitch, president and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation. "I know one who turned their office couch into a bed and their file cabinet into a laundry bin." [of course he doesn't actually do the laundry, the laundry bin is where is maid picks the laundry up at. And sleeping on a couch??? That's just a quaint story he tells the folks back at home to get re-elected. They think he actually sleeps on the couch instead of hanging out in topless bars where he is usually found]
"The pay is adequate but not extravagant," agrees Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute. "It's hard to make that case to most Americans. But in Washington, you're competing for housing with second-year associates at law firms who are already making the same salary as you." [Yea, $174,000 base salary for working 125 days a year certainly isn't extravagant. At least that's what they tell the folks back home to get re-elected]
Since 1992, congressional pay has not kept up with inflation. To keep up, pay would have to be closer to $219,000, according to a June report by the Congressional Research Service. [Life's a bitch when you only make a lousy $174,000!!!, well at least before you throw in the bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions of hundreds of thousands and many times millions of dollars]
By law, Congress obtains an annual automatic pay adjustment, equivalent to the prior year's average private sector wage change. However, the raise can't be a higher percentage than for other federal employees. [Yea, a lot of Congressmen are envious of the janitors that clean their offices, who only make $20,000 a year, but percentage wise got much higher pay raises then the Congressmen!!!]
Congress can vote to delay or deny this raise and has done so five times since the last increase in 2009, most recently in January of this year. If each of those increases had gone into effect, congressional pay would today be 5.5% higher, still less than inflation.
While lawmakers' relative pay is declining, their wealth is increasing: Many in Congress have vast personal wealth. Since 1992, according to Stanford University and the Center for Responsive Politics, congressional net worth increased significantly. Average American household net worth during that time declined. Yet average net worth among freshman members first elected last November stands at more than a million dollars. [Some mean spirited people will point out that the $174,000 doesn't include hundreds of thousands and many times millions of dollars in bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions, but hey a few extra hundred thousand dollars or even a million bucks doesn't go that far in Washington D.C.]
Thomas Mann says this is not coincidence.
"It's politically impossible to set salaries at a reasonable rate," says Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. "So it's not realistic to expect Congress to proportionally reflect America in terms of bartenders or construction workers. Especially to have two homes – one in Washington and one in the district – if you don't have personal wealth, you almost can't do it."
"Most would make far more money in their former jobs or the private sector," Fitch concurs. "Probably the only ones doing better than before are those who have been in public service their whole lives. That's definitely the minority, since most come from the legal or business worlds."
One factor causing this slide was the 1992 passage of the 27th Constitutional Amendment, which required that any pay adjustment Congress votes for itself would not take effect until after the next election. That way, representatives could not vote themselves a self-serving immediate pay raise and would have to risk that any such vote may benefit successors who may be ideological or political rivals.
Since ratification of the amendment, congressional pay has increased at less than half the rate of inflation. By contrast, in the five years before passage, congressional pay increased at almost twice the inflation rate.
Ornstein says lower congressional pay perpetuates a "revolving door" between Congress and K Street.
"When lobbying pays five to 10 times congressional pay, that is genuinely corrupting," Ornstein says. "Almost 50% of those leaving office [either due to retirement or being voted out] stay in Washington, compared to a blip a few decades ago."
Though denying themselves pay increases could earn members of Congress short-term brownie points with their constituents, the consequences could be damaging further out.
"If you continue to let the differential grow, at some point, Congress would be forced to make up for it with pay increases greater than inflation," Fitch predicts. "And there will be hell to pay."
Want a Job With 239 Vacation Days? Become a Member of Congress
New statistics show that Congress may be more dysfunctional than at any time in the last 60 years.
We have to let our representatives know that business as usual isn't acceptable and we expect them, above all else, to get stuff done. The number of laws passed by Congress last year was fewer than at any point since 1947. And to make matters worse, Congress will get 239 "vacation days" in 2013.
The figures from the House Clerk's office paint a bleak picture of Congressional productivity.
But what remains most astonishing about our representatives on the Hill is not only the quantity of legislation, but the amount of time spent working. The Congressional calendar for this coming year consists of 126 days, [let's see, if if they work 126 days a year that is $1,380 a day at their pay rate of $174,000 a year] leaving members of Congress 239 days to perhaps tour our great nation, toy with the idea of running for higher office, and maybe visit a natural disaster or two. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's calendar releases rather embarrassing scheduling without a single 5-day work week or weekend. If you are already feeling riled up about this, I would not suggest looking at the month of August.
So, how? How can hard-working Americans, residents of one of the most overworked countries in the world, commute five times a week to and from work while their money is squandered away in one of the two or three weekly meetings Congress manages in squeeze in?
Well, perhaps my take on activities is somewhat cynical (not that you should have expected any less). Apparently, these weeks off are called "District work periods," also known as free travel at taxpayer expense.
Even Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) admits the wrongdoing of his colleagues: "I think we'd get more work done if we spent more time in Washington. We come in, we go straight to votes, and then we go to our separate quarters. We don't really get to know each other anymore."
But Cantor disagrees in publishing a schedule with many long breaks allowing for travel and "district work periods."
This isn't the beginning. This unabashed congressional laziness has run rampant over the past decade and is only inflating. In 2007, Fox News reported expensive monthly trips taken by members of Congress to far-off lands on whose dime? Oh yes, that’s right. I think I'm starting to understand her point.
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and his wife are particularly cultured because of his spot on the Hill. He and his wife frequent Aspen Institute conferences, along with many other members of Congress. The Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue, has covered the costs of sending members of Congress to their seminars and workshops in the past. From 2000-2007, the Miller couple has attended 30 conferences with a total value of over $200,000. But that is not the kicker. Rep. George Miller, House Education and Labor Committee Chairman, did not even have a place at these conferences. Only 3 of the 30 conferences he has attended were related to education. And don't let the name fool you: The Aspen Institute certainly does not hold conferences in Aspen only. Mr. and Mrs. Miller have traveled to Aspen conferences in:
Naples, Florida, San Juan, Vancouver, Prague, Grand Cayman, Florence, Helsinki, Punta Mita, Mexico, Scottsdale, China, Barcelona, Montega Bay, Jamaica, Rome, Cancun, Venice, Dublin, Istanbul, and Hawaii.
Not only do these luxurious conferences take place across the globe, but they also ended up consuming about half a year in total, or 10% of every year.
So, does the Aspen Institute represent 10% of Rep. George Miller's constituents?
EPA might have used private emails to avoid FOIA
EPA might have used private emails to avoid FOIAAnd of course that is why the Founders gave us the Second Amendment. So when our government masters refuse to obey the Constitution that we can do something about it.
Judge: EPA might have used private emails to avoid FOIA
By The Associated Press
Published: Thursday, August 15, 2013, 7:33 p.m.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge said the Environmental Protection Agency's use of personal email accounts may have been aimed at skirting public disclosure requirements.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled on Wednesday that a conservative public interest law firm, the Landmark Legal Foundation, can question and obtain records from EPA officials as part of the firm's Freedom of Information lawsuit against the federal agency. The judge granted Landmark the right to seek the information to determine whether top EPA officials used personal email accounts to conduct official business — and whether the agency initially excluded those accounts from Landmark's Freedom of Information request.
“The possibility that unsearched personal email accounts may have been used for official business raises the possibility that leaders in the EPA may have purposefully attempted to skirt disclosure under the FOIA,” Lamberth wrote.
He said the possibility that the agency purposefully excluded the top leaders of the EPA from the FOIA search, at least initially, “suggests an unreasonable and bad faith reading of Landmark's FOIA request and subsequent agreement to narrow its scope.”
In the lawsuit last year, the foundation asked for any records that indicated the EPA was delaying the announcement of new environmental regulations until after the 2012 presidential election.
In June, The Associated Press reported that some top Obama administration officials were using secret government accounts to conduct official business. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has said the practice undermines congressional oversight and complicates access to records under FOIA.
Late last year, some EPA critics accused former Administrator Lisa Jackson of using an email account under the name “Richard Windsor” to sidestep disclosure rules. The EPA said emails Jackson sent using her Windsor alias were turned over under open records requests. That email account is an EPA.gov email address, not a personal one.
The EPA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
House panel withheld document on NSA surveillance
SourceHouse panel withheld document on NSA surveillance program from members
By Peter Wallsten, Published: August 16 E-mail the writer
A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program.
The February 2011 document was declassified last month and has been cited repeatedly by administration officials and legislative leaders as evidence that the surveillance program had been properly examined by Congress as part of an aggressive system of checks and balances.
A cover letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees that was sent with the document asked the leaders of each panel to share the written material with all members of Congress.
Ronald Weich, who was an assistant attorney general at the time, wrote that making the material available to Congress would be an “effective way to inform the legislative debate about reauthorization” of the provision of the Patriot Act that served as the legal basis for the phone surveillance. A similar document was available to all members of Congress in 2009, prior to a 2010 reauthorization vote.
But the House Intelligence Committee opted against making the 2011 document widely available. Instead, the committee invited all 435 House members to attend classified briefings where the program was discussed — briefings that critics say were vague and uninformative.
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who has emerged as a leading critic of the National Security Agency program, said he and dozens of other members elected in 2010 did not have access to the information they needed to fully understand the program until the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The withheld document “doesn’t provide enough details, but it would have at least been a starting point to ask questions,” Amash said. He said confronting intelligence officials during the briefings was “like a game of 20 questions,” and added: “If you don’t know about the program, you don’t know what to ask about.”
A spokeswoman for the House committee, Susan Phalen, declined to say whether the panel had voted to withhold the letter or if the decision was made by Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).
“Because the letter by itself did not fully explain the programs, the Committee offered classified briefings, open to all Members of Congress, that not only covered all of the material in the letter but also provided much more detail in an interactive format with briefers available to fully answer any Members’ questions,” Phalen wrote in an e-mail. “The discussion of the letter not being distributed is a side issue intended to give the false impression that Congress was denied information. That is not the case.”
The dispute over the 2011 document comes amid growing questions about the ability of Congress and the judiciary to perform their roles in overseeing the country’s vast intelligence system, with lawmakers on key oversight committees and the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressing concerns in recent days.
The five-page document, headlined “Report of the National Security Agency’s Bulk Collection Programs for USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization,” was posted online by the government in a redacted form last month.
A white paper issued by the Obama administration last week noted that lawmakers had been granted access to a similar document in 2009. The white paper credits the chairs of the House and Senate committees for sharing the document in 2009. A footnote in the white paper says the 2011 document was made available to all senators — but is notably silent on the House.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
House panel withheld document on NSA surveillance
SourceHouse panel withheld document on NSA surveillance program from members
By Peter Wallsten, Published: August 16 E-mail the writer
A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program.
The February 2011 document was declassified last month and has been cited repeatedly by administration officials and legislative leaders as evidence that the surveillance program had been properly examined by Congress as part of an aggressive system of checks and balances.
A cover letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees that was sent with the document asked the leaders of each panel to share the written material with all members of Congress.
Ronald Weich, who was an assistant attorney general at the time, wrote that making the material available to Congress would be an “effective way to inform the legislative debate about reauthorization” of the provision of the Patriot Act that served as the legal basis for the phone surveillance. A similar document was available to all members of Congress in 2009, prior to a 2010 reauthorization vote.
But the House Intelligence Committee opted against making the 2011 document widely available. Instead, the committee invited all 435 House members to attend classified briefings where the program was discussed — briefings that critics say were vague and uninformative.
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who has emerged as a leading critic of the National Security Agency program, said he and dozens of other members elected in 2010 did not have access to the information they needed to fully understand the program until the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The withheld document “doesn’t provide enough details, but it would have at least been a starting point to ask questions,” Amash said. He said confronting intelligence officials during the briefings was “like a game of 20 questions,” and added: “If you don’t know about the program, you don’t know what to ask about.”
A spokeswoman for the House committee, Susan Phalen, declined to say whether the panel had voted to withhold the letter or if the decision was made by Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).
“Because the letter by itself did not fully explain the programs, the Committee offered classified briefings, open to all Members of Congress, that not only covered all of the material in the letter but also provided much more detail in an interactive format with briefers available to fully answer any Members’ questions,” Phalen wrote in an e-mail. “The discussion of the letter not being distributed is a side issue intended to give the false impression that Congress was denied information. That is not the case.”
The dispute over the 2011 document comes amid growing questions about the ability of Congress and the judiciary to perform their roles in overseeing the country’s vast intelligence system, with lawmakers on key oversight committees and the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressing concerns in recent days.
The five-page document, headlined “Report of the National Security Agency’s Bulk Collection Programs for USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization,” was posted online by the government in a redacted form last month.
A white paper issued by the Obama administration last week noted that lawmakers had been granted access to a similar document in 2009. The white paper credits the chairs of the House and Senate committees for sharing the document in 2009. A footnote in the white paper says the 2011 document was made available to all senators — but is notably silent on the House.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years
What rubbish. Bradley Manning isn't a criminal, he is a patriot. He should be given a medal and let out of prison.While Bradley Manning is guilty as hell of all the charges, the jury should have voted to acquit him.
Sure he committed a few victimless crimes, but he only did it to expose even worse crimes our government masters have committed.
The same goes for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. They are all freedom fighters who should be given medals, not time in prison.
The real criminals are the members of the US Congress, the US Senate and Presidents Obama and Bush who allowed the American government to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet and turn Amerika into a police state.
Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years
By Julie Tate, Updated: Wednesday, August 21, 8:17 AM E-mail the writer
A military judge on Wednesday morning sentenced Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Manning, 25, was convicted last month of multiple charges, including violations of the Espionage Act for copying and disseminating the documents while serving as an intelligence analyst at a forward operating base in Iraq. He faced up to 90 years in prison.
Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg says Bradley Manning did not deserve any prison time.
Manning is required to serve one-third of the sentence, minus three and half years of time served, before he is eligible for parole. That will be in eight years when he is 33.
Judge Denise Lind, an Army colonel, said Manning was dishonorably discharged. He was also reduced in rank and forfeits all pay.
Manning stood at attention, flanked by his attorneys, to hear the verdict with his aunt, Debra Van Alstyne, sitting behind him. He did not appear to react when the sentence was read.
As Manning was escorted out of the packed courtroom, more than half a dozen supporters shouted out to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!”
The decision was immediately condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system,” said Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
The government had asked the judge to sentence Manning to 60 years. “There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information,” said Capt. Joe Morrow, a military prosecutor. “National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.”
Defense lawyer David Coombs portrayed Manning as a well-intentioned but isolated soldier with gender identification issues, and he asked Lind to impose “a sentence that allows him to have a life.”
“He cares about human life,” said Coombs as the sentencing phase of the court-martial at Fort Meade ended last week. “His biggest crime was he cared about the loss of life he was seeing and was struggling with it.”
Manning also addressed the court and apologized for his actions, saying he was “sorry that I hurt the United States.”
Manning will receive a credit of 1,293 days for the time he has been confined prior to the sentence, including 112 days of credit for abusive treatment he was subjected to in the brig at the Quantico Marine Base.
Manning transmitted the first documents to WikiLeaks in February 2010, sending what came to be known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs” — field reports from across both theaters. Manning’s lawyers said he had become disillusioned by what he was seeing in Iraq and hoped that the public release of the secret material would prompt greater public understanding of the wars.
Manning established a relationship online with a person who is thought to be Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. As their personal correspondence deepened, Manning continued to transmit more material, including assessments of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and an enormous cache of diplomatic cables. He also leaked a video that showed a U.S. Apache helicopter in Baghdad opening fire on a group of Iraqis, including two journalists and children, that the helicopter crew believed to be insurgents.
According to his lawyers, Manning became more and more stressed in Iraq, wrestling with his sexuality and the breakup of a relationship. At one point, in April 2010, he sent an e-mail to a superior with the subject line “My Problem” and a photo of himself wearing a blond wig and lipstick.
On May 7, Manning was found on the floor of a supply room with a knife at his feet. After some brief counseling, he was returned to his workstation. Later that same day, he struck a fellow soldier and was removed permanently from the secure environment where he worked.
Following these events, Manning boasted to hacker Adrian Lamo that he had been working with WikiLeaks. After engaging Manning for several days, Lamo informed Army investigators and the FBI about the breach of information and provided them with his chat logs with Manning.
Manning was arrested in Iraq on May 27, 2010.
Legal proceedings against Manning began in December 2011 and, in February of this year, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser included charges. The trial portion of the proceedings began June 3, and on July 30, Lind found Manning guilty of 20 of the 22 charges he faced.
NSA can ‘reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic’
Report: NSA can ‘reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic’Does anybody remembers the FBI program "carnivore"??? It sounds like a base for all this stuff. I remember the "carnivore" software being talked about around 1996, 1997 in the early internet days.
According to those stories "carnivore" was placed by the FBI in servers across the country and just looked at all the emails and data that passed thru saving any data it found which had the keywords it was looking for.
Report: NSA can ‘reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic’
By Timothy B. Lee, Published: August 20 at 11:49 pm
The U.S. surveillance state, or at least the parts the public knows about, keeps getting bigger. Initial leaks by Ed Snowden indicated that the National Security Agency was collecting telephone metadata and had a program called PRISM to seek information from the servers of certain major Internet companies. Last month, the Guardian reported the existence of XKeyscore, an NSA program that allows NSA analysts to intercept the contents of e-mail and other online communications. But previous reporting had suggested that the NSA’s Internet interception capabilities were concentrated outside the borders of the United States.
A new report by the Wall Street Journal casts doubt on that comforting notion. According to the Journal, the NSA “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic.” And while the NSA is only supposed to “target” foreigners, the NSA sometimes “retains the written content of e-mails sent between citizens within the U.S.”
The Journal says the NSA relies on extensive collaboration with domestic telecommunications companies to get access to Internet traffic. “The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies.” Filtering occurs at more than a dozen “major Internet junctions.”
These programs have a long history. The NSA was already intercepting international Internet traffic before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. After those terrorist attacks, the government expanded its surveillance activities to include more collection points inside the United States. One of those collection points became the target of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit after an AT&T whistleblower revealed the existence of a secret, NSA-controlled room inside an AT&T facility in San Francisco.
Like the other NSA programs revealed in recent weeks, this one involves minimal judicial oversight. Surveillance must be “covered by a broad court order” under the FISA Amendments Act. But that 2008 law doesn’t require judicial scrutiny of individual surveillance targets. Instead, judges bless broad surveillance programs, leaving decisions about specific surveillance targets up to the NSA itself.
And sometimes surveillance activities can be quite extensive. For example, the NSA engaged in dragnet surveillance during the 2002 Winter Olympics. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event,” the Journal reports. “It monitored the content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.”
Court limits appeal rights for ‘sensitive’ federal jobs
SourceCourt limits appeal rights for ‘sensitive’ federal jobs
By Josh Hicks, Published: August 21 at 6:00 am
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the Merit Systems Protection Board has no standing to review the Defense Department’s security determinations, drawing criticism from labor groups and whistleblower-protection advocates concerned about due process for the agency’s employees.
In a 7-3 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the government’s authority to designate certain jobs as “noncritical sensitive,” even when the positions do not allow access to classified information.
Critics have raised concerns that the ruling could allow supervisors to punish employees with impunity by classifying their positions as “noncritical sensitive” and then declaring the workers unfit for their jobs.
“The court created a ‘sensitive jobs loophole’ without citing any direct legal authority and openly backed a proposed administration rule to declare virtually any job as national-security sensitive,” the Government Accountability Project said in a statement.
The Office of Personnel Management brought the case to the appeals court, challenging the MSPB’s claim that it could review personnel actions against two low-level Defense Department workers because their jobs did not require access to classified information.
The employees in the case were accounting technician Rhonda Conyers, who was suspended indefinitely, and commissary worker Devon Northover, who was demoted.
The majority in Tuesday’s decision wrote that the review board focused too narrowly on access to classified information while ignoring “the impact employees without security clearances, but in sensitive positions, can have.” The judges said a commissary worker could tip off the enemy to a deployment after noticing a surge in inventory.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the two employees, said in a statement Tuesday that it will review the court’s decision and that it expects to seek a Supreme Court review.
AFGE president J. David Cox said the court “dismissed our appeal and with it the due process rights of tens of thousands of current and future federal workers.”
“Due process rights are the very foundation of our civil service system,” Cox added. “That system itself has been undermined by the court today, if this ruling is allowed to stand.”
To connect with Josh Hicks, follow his Twitter feed or email josh.hicks@washpost.com. For more federal news, visit The Federal Eye, The Fed Page and Post Politics. E-mail federalworker@washpost.com with news tips and other suggestions.
Costa Mesa councilmen accuse police union of intimidation in suit
It's not about "protecting and serving", it's about high paying police jobs and police porkCosta Mesa councilmen accuse police union of intimidation in suit
By Jeremiah Dobruck
August 21, 2013, 9:00 a.m.
Costa Mesa Mayor Jim Righeimer and Mayor Pro Tem Steve Mensinger have sued the city's police officers union, alleging the group and two other defendants intimidated and harassed them for political gain.
Much of the lawsuit stems from an Aug. 22, 2012, incident in which private investigator Chris Lanzillo followed Righeimer as he left a local bar and restaurant owned by Councilman Gary Monahan, the Daily Pilot reported.
According to a 911 recording obtained by the Daily Pilot, Lanzillo called to report a potential drunk driver, whom he did not identify as Righeimer, driving erratically and reaching a speed of 50 mph down a residential street.
Police administered a sobriety test in front of Righeimer's Mesa Verde home while his children watched in fear, the lawsuit alleges.
Righeimer was found not to be impaired and soon after the incident held a news conference where he produced a receipt for two Diet Cokes from Skosh Monahan's.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, names the Costa Mesa Police Officers' Assn.; Upland-based law firm Lackie, Dammeier, McGill & Ethir; and Menifee private investigator Lanzillo, alleging they intentionally inflicted emotional distress and violated civil rights, among 15 other complaints.
Righeimer's wife, Lene, is also included as a plaintiff.
"They're coercing and intimidating these people so that they change their vote in favor of the police association," said attorney Vince Finaldi, who filed the suit on behalf of Mensinger and the Righeimers.
At the time of the incident, Righeimer accused political enemies of trying to set him up. He asserted that the association employed Lanzillo to tail him -- an allegation the association strongly denied at the time.
Representatives from the association could not be reached for comment Tuesda.
Righeimer and the council majority have been working to reduce public employee compensation, a move that has drawn fierce resistance from public employee associations, collective-bargaining units that share some characteristics with but are not technically unions.
The suit alleges that the police association, Lanzillo and the law firm were all involved in the situation at least indirectly.
"What we're saying is it's a conspiracy, that they were all conspiring together to do this," said Finaldi, of the Irvine-based law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi.
The plaintiffs have asked for a jury trial, during which any damages would be decided, Finaldi said.
Lanzillo and the law firm also could not be reached after work hours Tuesday evening.
La CIA confirma existencia de base secreta "Área 51" en Nevada
SourceLa CIA confirma existencia de base secreta "Área 51" en Nevada
Hasta ahora el lugar no ha aparecido en los mapas o en las imágenes de satélite oficiales.
La Agencia Central de Inteligencia de Estados Unidos (CIA, por sus siglas en inglés) confirmó esta semana, por primera vez, la existencia de una base militar secreta conocida como "Área 51", que está ubicada en el desierto de Nevada.
Hasta ahora el lugar no ha aparecido en los mapas o en las imágenes de satélite oficiales.
Las revelaciones fueron divulgadas por nuevos documentos desclasificados que detallan cómo el área fue utilizada durante la Guerra Fría, en 1955, para realizar pruebas secretas de los aviones espía U-2.
Los documentos obtenidos por la Universidad George Washington afirman que el sitio fue creado por una orden del presidente Dwight Eisenhower, a mediados de la década de los 50.
Aunque su existencia no era un secreto, el hecho de que el gobierno no reconociera su existencia dio lugar a diversar teorías de conspiración.
Corresponsales aseguran que es muy poco probable que la revelación acabe con esta sospechas conspirativas, que sostienen que en el "Área 51" también está ubicado un centro de investigación de extraterrestres y objetos voladores no identificados (ovnis) perteneciente al gobierno de EU.
NSA collected thousands of U.S. communications
Maybe I should send a request for public records to Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema and ask for a copy of all my emails that her goons in the NSA have read???NSA collected thousands of U.S. communications
Associated Press Wed Aug 21, 2013 12:57 PM
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency declassified three secret U.S. court opinions Wednesday showing how it scooped up as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans with no connection to terrorism annually over three years, how it revealed the error to the court and changed how it gathered Internet communications.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper authorized the release Wednesday.
The opinions show that when the NSA reported that to the court in 2011, the court ordered the NSA to find ways to limit what it collects and how long it keeps it.
The NSA reported the problems it discovered in how it was gathering Internet communications to the court and shortly thereafter to Congress in the fall of 2011.
Three senior U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday that the NSA realized that when it was gathering up bundled Internet communications from fiber optic cables, with the cooperation of telecommunications providers like AT&T, that it was often collecting thousands of emails or other Internet transactions by Americans who had no connection to the intended terror target being tracked.
The officials briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the program publicly.
While the NSA is allowed to keep the metadata — the address or phone number and the duration, but not the content, of the communication — of Americans for up to five years, the court ruled that when it gathered up such large packets of information, they included actual emails between American citizens, it violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban against unauthorized search and seizure.
In the opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denouncing the practice, the judge wrote that the NSA had advised the court that “the volume and nature of the information it had been collecting is fundamentally different than what the court had been led to believe,” and went on to say the court must consider “whether targeting and minimization procedures comport with the 4th Amendment.”
For instance, two senior intelligence officials said, when an American logged into an email server and looked at the emails in his or her inbox, that screen shot of the emails could be collected, together with Internet transactions by a terrorist suspect being targeted by the NSA — because that suspect’s communications were being sent on the same fiber optic cable by the same Internet provider, in a bundled packet of data.
These interceptions of innocent Americans’ communications were happening when the NSA accessed Internet information “upstream,” meaning off of fiber optic cables or other channels where Internet traffic traverses the U.S. telecommunications system.
The NSA disclosed that it gathers some 250 million internet communications each year, with some 9 percent from these “upstream” channels, amounting to between 20 million to 25 million emails a year. The agency used statistical analysis to estimate that of those, possibly as many as 56,000 Internet communications collected were sent by Americans or persons in the U.S. with no connection to terrorism.
Under court order, the NSA resolved the problem by creating new ways to detect when emails by people within the U.S. were being intercepted, and separated those batches of communications. It also developed new ways to limit how that data could be accessed or used. The agency also agreed to only keep these bundled communications for possible later analysis for a 2-year period, instead of the usual 5-year retention period.
The agency also, under court order, destroyed all the bundled data gathered between 2008, when the FISA Court first authorized the collection under section 702 of the Patriot Act, until 2011 when the new procedures were put in place.
The newly released court opinions revealed the court signed off on the new procedures, deeming them constitutionally acceptable.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the White House still contends there is no domestic surveillance program despite new revelations about the scope of U.S. emails and Internet communications that can get swept up by the NSA. He said the program is specifically to gather foreign intelligence, adding that the fact that the extent of incidental American surveillance has been documented is proof positive that accountability measures are working properly.
“The reason that we’re talking about it right now is because there are very strict compliance standards in place at the NSA that monitor for compliance issues, that tabulate them, that document them and that put in place measures to correct them when they occur,” Earnest said.
The Emperor Wears No Clothes
I didn't know this but the book:The Emperor Wears No Clothesis on the web and you can read it for free right here. The book is by Jack Herer who recently died.
If you want a thousand good reasons to legalize, or re-legalize marijuana the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes has those reasons for you.
Proper channels for whistle blowers - Keep your mouth shut!!!!
Emperor Obama says that whistle blowers like Edward Snowden should use proper channels to report government misconduct and crimes. I think Emperor Obama is using government double speak to tell us that whistle blowers like Edward Snowden should keep their f*cking mouths shut.The price Gina Gray paid for whistleblowing
By Dana Milbank, Published: August 20
President Obama, in his news conference this month, said that Edward Snowden was wrong to go public with revelations about secret surveillance programs because “there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”
This is a common refrain among administration officials and some lawmakers: If only Snowden had made his concerns known through the proper internal channels, everything would have turned out well. The notion sounds reasonable, as do the memorandums Obama signed supposedly protecting whistleblowers.
But it’s a load of nonsense. Ask Gina Gray.
Gray is the Defense Department whistleblower whose case I have been following for five years. She was the Army civilian worker who, before and after her employment, exposed much of the wrongdoing at Arlington National Cemetery — misplaced graves, mishandled remains and financial mismanagement — and she attempted to do it through the proper internal channels. Pentagon sources have confirmed to me her crucial role in bringing the scandal to light.
For her troubles, Gray was fired. The Pentagon’s inspector general recommended corrective action to compensate Gray.
According to documents just obtained by Gray’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, Army Secretary John McHugh rejected the inspector general’s suggestion. McHugh wouldn’t offer Gray anything because she was on “probationary status at the time of her termination.”
Gray, who worked in Iraq as an Army contractor and Army public affairs specialist, is now unemployed and living in North Carolina.
“I went all the way up the channels,” Gray told me on Tuesday. “This is what happens when you do that.”
In response to my inquiries to the Pentagon, an Army spokesman, Col. David H. Patterson Jr., issued a statement saying that Gray’s status as a whistleblower was limited and that her firing was unrelated. “We consider the matter closed,” he said, calling the Army’s position “validated” by a federal court’s “dismissal of Ms. Gray’s lawsuit — with prejudice.”
The lawsuit was dismissed this week — because Gray dropped it. She could no longer afford the legal fees.
Sadly, Gray’s case is emblematic of the way this administration has handled whistleblowers. Obama came into office pledging transparency and professing admiration for government workers who expose abuses. But his administration has pursued more cases under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined (including the prosecution of National Security Agency workers who tried to register their objections through “proper” channels). And the alleged intimidation of would-be whistleblowers goes beyond those involved in sensitive intelligence. For example, diplomat Gregory Hicks told a House committee that he was demoted because he gave congressional investigators a description of the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, that was at odds with the official version of events.
Gray’s ordeal began in April 2008 after I covered the Arlington funeral of an officer killed in the Iraq war. While there, I observed a dispute between Gray and deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, the man later at the center of the Arlington scandals. Higginbotham was trying to prevent reporters from observing the burial, in violation of the family’s wishes and Arlington’s regulations — and Gray, though new on the job, told him he was wrong.
Gray registered her objections internally — but loudly. She refused to sign off on a report to the Army secretary’s office that was a whitewash of the way burials were handled at Arlington because, she said, her higher-ups were violating Defense Department regulations. She began to learn of other misdeeds by Arlington management and attempted to let military officials know; in June 2008, according to one of Gray’s legal filings, she told the commanding general of the Military District of Washington about “major problems” at the cemetery, involving fraud, mismanagement and broken regulations.
Two days later, she was fired.
A 2010 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general designated Gray as a whistleblower and concluded that, contrary to regulations, Arlington management “elected to terminate her, rather than make a reasonable effort to address public affairs policy issues that she raised” or to “document performance deficiencies that ANC management later claimed formed the basis for Ms. Gray’s termination.”
After her firing, Gray passed along information about mismanagement at Arlington to three congressional offices, all of which received false assurances from the Army that everything was under control. Gray eventually provided her findings to reporters and to the inspector general, leading to the ouster of the Arlington management.
Snowden’s case is quite a bit different, and murkier; his dalliances with China and now Russia raise questions about his motives. But Gray’s case shows that Snowden was correct about one thing: Trying to pursue the proper internal channels doesn’t work.
If the Obama administration wants whistleblowers to take the “proper” route, it needs to protect them when they do.
The NSA is losing the benefit of the doubt
I don't care what they say, the entire Patriot Act is unconstitutional. All the Congressmen that voted for Patriot Act should be put in jail. And all the police thugs that have been using the Patriot Act to justify their spying on us should also be put in jail.The NSA is losing the benefit of the doubt
By Ruth Marcus, Published: August 22 E-mail the writer
Footnote 14 should scare every American. Even the parts that aren’t blacked out.
The footnote is contained in the just-declassified 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John Bates, then the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
In the ruling, Bates found that the government had been sweeping up e-mails before receiving court approval in 2008 and, even after that, was illegally collecting “tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications.”
That’s not the really scary part. This is: “The court is troubled that the government’s revelations . . . mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program,” Bates wrote in Footnote 14.
He cited a 2009 finding that the court’s approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone records program was premised on “a flawed depiction” of how the NSA uses metadata, a “misperception . . . buttressed by repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions, and despite a government-devised and Court-mandated oversight regime.
“Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA had been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the required standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been ‘so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall . . . regime has never functioned effectively.’ ”
Followed by two full paragraphs of redactions. We can only imagine what that episode entailed.
To judge the significance of Bates’s footnote, it helps to know something about the judge. This is no wild-eyed liberal. Bates spent almost two decades in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington. He served as deputy to independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the investigation of President Bill Clinton. He was named to the bench by President George W. Bush.
If Bates is worked up about being misled by the government — and the sober language of that footnote is the judicial version of a severe dressing-down — people should listen.
Security demands secrecy. The Constitution demands that secrecy be coupled with oversight. In theory, that oversight is twofold, from Congress and the judiciary, through the mechanism of the surveillance court.
In practice, oversight necessarily depends on some measure of good will from the overseen. No matter how well-intentioned and diligent the overseers, particularly in an area as technologically murky and politically fraught as surveillance, the intelligence experts tend to hold the cards.
Their deeply ingrained institutional bias is to reveal only what is absolutely necessary, to trust their secrets and secret methods to as few outsiders as possible. When that instinct for secrecy edges into a willingness to mislead, tacitly or explicitly, effective oversight collapses.
We have already seen this phenomenon on display before Congress, in the person of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In March, Sen. Ron Wyden asked Clapper whether the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s answer, “No . . . not wittingly.”
This was, as Clapper acknowledged, “clearly erroneous.” His belated apology rings hollow. Clapper was not only forewarned about the question, he refused to correct his misrepresentation for months, until it was proved false.
His subsequent explanations for responding in the “least untruthful manner” are unconvincing and contradictory: He had a different understanding, perhaps “too cute by half,” of “collect” — he thought the Oregon Democrat was asking about the contents of phone records, not simply archiving them. Actually, Clapper wasn’t thinking of telephone records at all; he thought Wyden was referring to the separate program to intercept foreigners’ e-mail.
So when Clapper, in announcing the documents’ release, asserts that they demonstrate “the government’s serious commitment to getting it right,” he hauls along a mountain of baggage.
It is possible to construct a happier narrative. After all, Bates’s rebuke was prompted by the intelligence community’s own disclosures. The government then cleaned up its act, with court-approved procedures to minimize privacy invasions. Congress was informed of the program, the court’s problems with it and the fixes being made. The relevant documents were declassified and released (albeit in the face of a lawsuit). President Obama has proposed additional oversight mechanisms, such as building adversary procedures into the surveillance court.
These are hopeful signs, but they do not erase the ugly history: “repeated inaccurate statements” to the court, “clearly erroneous” congressional testimony. Current assurances, made under the duress of unauthorized disclosure, must be judged in light of past performance. An intelligence community consistently too cute by half ends up harming itself, along with the country it strives to protect.
Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.
Army Maj. Nidal Hasan guilty of murder for Fort Hood shootings
Army Maj. Nidal Hasan guilty of murder for Fort Hood shootingsThe British called George Washington a terrorist, Americans called him a "Freedom Fighter".
While the American government calls Army Maj. Nidal Hasan a terrorist, I am sure many anti-war Americans, along with many Arabs call Army Maj. Nidal Hasan a "freedom fighter".
While Army Maj. Nidal Hasan certainly is guilty of murdering 13 American soldiers, you have to remember that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama are guilty of murdering thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also both George W. Bush and Barack Obama are guilty of using drones to intentionally murder hundreds of suspected Arab military leaders along with many innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldier guilty of murder for Fort Hood shootings
Associated Press Fri Aug 23, 2013 12:02 PM
FORT HOOD, Texas — Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was convicted Friday in the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, a shocking assault against American troops at home by one of their own who said he opened fire on fellow soldiers to protect Muslim insurgents abroad.
The Army psychiatrist acknowledged carrying out the attack in a crowded waiting room where unarmed troops were making final preparations to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Thirteen people were killed and more than 30 wounded.
Because Hasan never denied his actions, the court-martial was always less about a conviction than it was about ensuring he received the death penalty. From the beginning of the case, the federal government has sought to execute Hasan, believing that any sentence short of a lethal injection would deprive the military and the families of the dead of the justice they have sought for nearly four years.
A jury of 13 high-ranking military officers reached a unanimous guilty verdict on all charges — 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder — in about seven hours. Hasan had no visible reaction as the verdict was read. After the jury and Hasan left the courtroom, some victims who survived the shooting and family members began to cry.
In the next phase of the trial that will begin Monday, they must all agree to give Hasan the death penalty before he can be sent to the military’s death row, which has just five other prisoners. If they do not agree, the 42-year-old could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Hasan, a Virginia-born Muslim, said the attack was a jihad against U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He bristled when the trial judge, Col. Tara Osborn, suggested the shooting rampage could have been avoided were it not for a spontaneous flash of anger.
“It wasn’t done under the heat of sudden passion,” Hasan said before jurors began deliberating. “There was adequate provocation — that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war.”
All but one of the dead were soldiers, including a pregnant private who curled on the floor and pleaded for her baby’s life.
The sentencing phase is expected to include more testimony from survivors of the attack inside an Army medical center where soldiers were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment.
About 50 soldiers and civilians testified of hearing someone scream “Allahu akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and seeing a man in Army camouflage open fire. Many identified Hasan as the shooter and recalled his handgun’s red and green laser sights piercing a room made dark with gun smoke.
Hasan, who acted as his own attorney, began the trial by telling jurors he was the gunman. But he said little else over the next three weeks, which convinced his court-appointed standby lawyers that Hasan’s only goal was to get a death sentence.
As the trial progressed, those suspicions grew. The military called nearly 90 witnesses, but Hasan rested his case without calling a single person to testify in his defense and made no closing argument. Yet he leaked documents during the trial to journalists that revealed him telling military mental health workers that he could “still be a martyr” if executed.
Death sentences are rare in the military and trigger automatic appeals that take decades play out. Among the final barriers to execution is authorization from the president. No American soldier has been executed since 1961.
Hasan spent weeks planning the Nov. 5, 2009, attack. His preparation included buying the handgun and videotaping a sales clerk showing him how to change the magazine.
He later plunked down $10 at a gun range outside Austin and asked for pointers on how to reload with speed and precision. An instructor said he told Hasan to practice while watching TV or sitting on his couch with the lights off.
When the time came, Hasan stuffed paper towels in the pockets of his cargo pants to muffle the rattling of extra ammo and avoid arousing suspicion. Soldiers testified that Hasan’s rapid reloading made it all but impossible to stop the shooting. Investigators recovered 146 shell casings inside the medical building and dozens more outside, where Hasan shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.
The first person to charge Hasan, a civilian doctor, was shot dead while wielding a chair. Another soldier who ran at him with a table was stopped upon being shot in the hand.
Chief Warrant Officer Christopher Royal saw an opening after hearing the distinct clicking of the gun’s chamber emptying. But he slipped on a puddle of blood while starting a sprint toward Hasan. He was shot in the back.
Tight security blanketed the trial. The courthouse was made into a fortress insulated by a 20-foot cushion of blast-absorbing blockades, plus an outer perimeter of shipping containers stacked three high. A helicopter ferried Hasan back and forth each day. The small courtroom was guarded by soldiers carrying high-powered rifles.
In court, Hasan never played the role of an angry extremist. He didn’t get agitated or raise his voice. He addressed Osborn as “ma’am” and occasionally whispered “thank you” when prosecutors, in accordance with the rules of admitting evidence, handed Hasan red pill bottles that rattled with bullet fragments removed from those who were shot.
His muted presence was a contrast to the spectacles staged by other unapologetic jihadists in U.S. courts. Terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui disrupted his 2006 sentencing for the Sept. 11 attacks multiple times with outbursts, was ejected several times and once proclaimed, “I am al-Qaida!”
Prosecutors never charged Hasan as a terrorist — an omission that still galls family members of the slain and survivors, some of whom have sued the U.S. government over missing the warning signs of Hasan’s views before the attack.
Snowden suspected of covering electronic tracks
Any accountant will tell you the following is true. There ain't much you can do when several employees collude to bypass a businesses internal controls. Or in the case of Snowden, when an employee is part of the internal controls.Think of it as those cops who are wearing video cameras which will supposedly prevent the cop from beating up people. Ain't much you can do when the cop erases the videos of his own crimes. The same applies to Snowden here.
Of course Snowden isn't a crooked cop violating people rights. Snowden is a freedom fighter who has exposed government corruption.
Snowden suspected of covering electronic tracks
Associated Press Sat Aug 24, 2013 12:29 AM
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government’s efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden’s sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.
The government’s forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden’s apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.
The disclosure undermines the Obama administration’s assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can’t be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA’s own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same?
In July, nearly two months after Snowden’s earliest disclosures, NSA Director Keith Alexander declined to say whether he had a good idea of what Snowden had downloaded or how many NSA files Snowden had taken with him, noting an ongoing criminal investigation.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines told the AP that Alexander “had a sense of what documents and information had been taken,” but “he did not say the comprehensive investigation had been completed.” Vines would not say whether Snowden had found a way to view and download the documents he took, without the NSA knowing.
In defending the NSA surveillance programs that Snowden revealed, Deputy Attorney General James Cole told Congress last month that the administration effectively monitors the activities of employees using them.
“This program goes under careful audit,” Cole said. “Everything that is done under it is documented and reviewed before the decision is made and reviewed again after these decisions are made to make sure that nobody has done the things that you’re concerned about happening.”
The disclosure of Snowden’s hacking prowess inside the NSA also could dramatically increase the perceived value of his knowledge to foreign governments, which would presumably be eager to learn any counter-detection techniques that could be exploited against U.S. government networks.
It also helps explain the recent seizure in Britain of digital files belonging to David Miranda — the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald — in an effort to help quantify Snowden’s leak of classified material to the Guardian newspaper. Authorities there stopped Miranda last weekend as he changed planes at Heathrow Airport while returning home to Brazil from Germany, where Miranda had met with Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker who has worked with Greenwald on the NSA story.
Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor, was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii before leaking classified documents to the Guardian and The Washington Post. As a system administrator, Snowden had the ability to move around data and had access to thumb drives that would have allowed him to transfer information to computers outside the NSA’s secure system, Alexander has said.
In his job, Snowden purloined many files, including ones that detailed the U.S. government’s programs to collect the metadata of phone calls of U.S. citizens and copy Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the U.S., then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
Officials have said Snowden had access to many documents but didn’t know necessarily how the programs functioned. He dipped into compartmentalized files as systems administrator and took what he wanted. He managed to do so for months without getting caught. In May, he flew to Hong Kong and eventually made his way to Russia, where that government has granted him asylum.
NBC News reported Thursday that the NSA was “overwhelmed” in trying to figure what Snowden had stolen and didn’t know everything he had downloaded.
Insider threats have troubled the administration and Congress, particularly in the wake of Bradley Manning, a young soldier who decided to leak hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents in late 2009 and early 2010.
Congress had wanted to address the insider threat problem in the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, but the White House asked for the language to be removed because of concerns about successfully meeting a deadline. In the 2013 version, Congress included language urging the creation of an automated, insider-threat detection program.
In Paper War, Flood of Liens Is the Weapon
There really isn't anything new about this. I have posted articles about this before.In Paper War, Flood of Liens Is the Weapon
Ben Garvin for The New York Times
Published: August 23, 2013 231 Comments
MINNEAPOLIS — One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling his refinancing.
“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and on other properties he owned.
But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in 2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.
Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff, county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other court officials.
“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours trying to undo it.”
Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the Uniform Commercial Code.
Occasionally, people who identify with the movement have erupted into violence. In Las Vegas this week, the police said that an undercover sting operation stopped a plot to torture and kill police officers in order to bring attention to the movement. Two people were arrested. In 2010, two police officers in Arkansas were killed while conducting a traffic stop with a father and son involved in the movement.
Mostly, though, sovereign citizens choose paper as their weapon. In Gadsden, Ala., three people were arrested in July for filing liens against victims including the local district attorney and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. And in Illinois this month, a woman who, like most sovereign citizens, chose to represent herself in court, confounded a federal judge by asking him to rule on a flurry of unintelligible motions.
“I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they are,” the judge told the woman, who was facing charges of filing billions of dollars in false liens.
“The convergence of the evidence strongly suggests a movement that is flourishing,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League. “It is present in every single state in the country.”
The sovereign citizen movement traces its roots to white extremist groups like the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s, and the militia movement. Terry L. Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, counted himself a sovereign citizen. But in recent years it has drawn from a much wider demographic, including blacks, members of Moorish sects and young Occupy protesters, said Detective Moe Greenberg of the Baltimore County Police Department, who has written about the movement.
The ideology seems to attract con artists, the financially desperate and people who are fed up with bureaucracy, Mr. Pitcavage said, adding, “But we’ve seen airline pilots, we’ve seen federal law enforcement officers, we’ve seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with this movement.”
Sovereign citizens believe that in the 1800s, the federal government was gradually subverted and replaced by an illegitimate government. They create their own driver’s licenses and include their thumbprints on documents to distinguish their flesh and blood person from a “straw man” persona that they say has been created by the false government. When writing their names, they often add punctuation marks like colons or hyphens.
Adherents to the movement have been involved in a host of debt evasion schemes and mortgage and tax frauds. Two were convicted in Cleveland recently for collecting $8 million in fraudulent tax refunds from the I.R.S. And in March, Tim Turner, the leader of one large group, the Republic for the united States of America, was sentenced in Alabama to 18 years in federal prison. (His group does not capitalize the first letter in united.)
Sovereign citizens who file creditor claims are helped by the fact that in most states, the secretary of state must accept any lien that is filed without judging its validity.
The National Association of Secretaries of State released a report in April on sovereign citizens, urging state officials to find ways to expedite the removal of liens and increase penalties for fraudulent filings. More than a dozen states have enacted laws giving state filing offices more discretion in accepting liens, and an increasing number of states have passed or are considering legislation to toughen the penalties for bogus filings.
The Eilertsons, who were charged with 47 counts of fraudulent filing and sentenced in June to 23 months in prison, were prosecuted under a Minnesota law that makes it a felony to file fraudulent documents to retaliate against officials. John Ristad, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who handled the case, said he believed the Eilertsons were the first offenders to be prosecuted under the law. “It got me angry,” he said, “because at the end of the day, these two are bullies who think they can get their way by filing paper.”
The liens were filed against houses, vehicles and even mineral rights. In an affidavit, the Hennepin County examiner of titles said that in a conversation with the Eilertsons about their foreclosure, one of them told her, “We’re gonna have to lien ya.” The examiner later found that a lien for more than $5.1 million had been placed on her property.
If the purpose was to instill trepidation, it worked. Several county and state officials said in interviews that they worried that they might once again find themselves in the crosshairs. One state employee said it was scarier to engage with offenders who used sovereign citizen tactics than with murderers, given the prospect of facing lawsuits or fouled credit ratings.
Like many who identify with the ideology, the Eilertsons learned the techniques of document filing online from one of many sovereign citizen “gurus” who offer instruction or seminars around the country.
In hours of recorded conversation found by the authorities on their computer, the Eilertsons consulted with a man identified on the recordings as Paul Kappel, learning what he called “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Mr. Eilertson, interviewed at the state prison in Bayport, Minn., denied being anti-government or belonging to any movement. But he was familiar with the names of some figures associated with sovereign citizen teachings, including an activist named David Wynn Miller, who Mr. Eilertson said was “ahead of his time.” (Mr. Miller writes his name as David-Wynn: Miller.)
Mr. Eilertson, who had no previous criminal record, said his actions were an effort to fight back against corrupt banks that had handed off the couple’s mortgage time after time and whose top executives never faced consequences for their actions.
“It seemed like we were being attacked every day,” he said. “We needed some way to stop the foreclosure.
“We tried to do our part with as much information as we had available,” he said, though he conceded that “it kind of got out of control eventually.”
NSA Surveillance - Lady Liberty Raped
NSA decrypted United Nations’ communications
NSA reportedly decrypted U.N. communicationsGerman magazine: NSA decrypted, spied on, United Nations’ internal video conferencing system
By Associated Press, Sunday, August 25, 6:32 AM
BERLIN — The German magazine Der Spiegel says the U.S. National Security Agency secretly monitored the U.N.’s internal video conferencing system by decrypting it last year.
The weekly said Sunday that documents it obtained from American leaker Edward Snowden show the NSA decoded the system at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York last summer.
Quoting leaked NSA documents, the article said the decryption “dramatically increased the data from video phone conferences and the ability to decode the data traffic.”
In three weeks, Der Spiegel said, the NSA increased the number of decrypted communications at the U.N. from 12 to 458.
Snowden’s leaks have exposed details of the United States’ global surveillance apparatus, sparking an international debate over the limits of American spying.
What's your share of the $16.7 trillion debt???
What's your share of the $16.7 trillion debt???The current population of the USA is about 313 million and with a National Debt of $16.7 trillion that means every man, woman and child in the USA owes $53,354 towards their share of the National Debt.
But since most children don't pay taxes lets calculate what ever adult in the USA owes toward the National Debt. I will just double the number because about half the US population is children so each adult in the USA owes $106,709 toward their share of the National Debt.
That means that mythical family of four owes $213,418 toward their share of the National Debt. If they recently bought a home, that is probably about what they owe toward their mortgage.
Of course if you have read the book "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin you probably realize that the National Debt is just an accounting sham where the government pretends to borrow money from itself to justify running the printing presses to print all that money.
U.S. will hit debt limit in mid-October, Treasury secretary Lew says
By Jim Puzzanghera
August 26, 2013, 1:59 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. will run out of borrowing authority under the nation's $16.7-trillion debt limit in mid-October, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew formally told Congress on Monday as he implored lawmakers to act soon to avoid a government default.
Lew had last updated Congress on the debt limit in May, saying that he expected the Treasury to be able to continue borrowing until at least Labor Day.
The new deadline comes as lawmakers prepare to return to Washington next month to battle over government spending. Republican leaders have demanded budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit, and some lawmakers want President Obama and Democrats to agree to other policy concession as well.
Raising the limit doesn't authorize new spending; it simply allows the government to pay the bills for spending Congress already has approved.
But Lew warned that a standoff risked "dire consequences" and urged Congress to act quickly to "remove the threat of default."
"Protecting the full faith and credit of the United States is the responsibility of Congress because only Congress can extend the nation's borrowing authority," Lew wrote to House and Senate leaders, with copies sent to all lawmakers.
"Failure to meet that responsibility would cause irreparable harm to the American economy," he said.
A bitter showdown over raising the debt limit two years ago led Standard & Poor's to cut the nation's AAA credit rating to AA+.
The government technically hit its debt limit again in May. Since then, the Treasury has been using so-called extraordinary measures to juggle the nation's finances and continue borrowing to pay its bills.
The Treasury got additional help this summer when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a combined dividend payment of nearly $60 billion on their bailouts, extending the deadline for the U.S. to raise its borrowing authority.
Based on the latest estimates, the Treasury's extraordinary measures would reach their limit in the middle of October, Lew said.
At that point, the government would only be able to pay bills with cash on hand of about $50 billion on any given day. Because it's not possible to estimate precisely when that cash would run out, Lew said Congress shouldn't wait until the last minute.
"Congress should act as soon as possible to protect America's good credit by extending normal borrowing authority well before any risk of default becomes imminent," he wrote.
Monster rocket to blast off from Pacific coast, rattle Southland
SourceMonster rocket to blast off from Pacific coast, rattle Southland
By W.J. Hennigan
August 27, 2013, 6:05 a.m.
The nation’s largest rocket is ready to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Santa Barbara, carrying a massive, top-secret spy satellite for the federal government.
As early as 10:52 a.m. Wednesday, the 235-foot Delta IV Heavy rocket will lift off from the base's Space Launch Complex 6, leaving a thick white plume over the Pacific.
The rocket, the tallest ever to be launched from the base, is set to place a classified spacecraft into polar orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office, the covert umbrella agency that operates spy satellites.
Southland residents eager to see the blastoff can head to the beaches or the mountains for a glimpse. But it may be difficult to see because it's a daytime launch.
Air Force security and local police have closed nearby locations, such as San Miguelito Canyon and Jalama Beach County Park, as a precaution.
Although little is publicly known about what exactly the rocket will be carrying into space, analysts say it is probably a $1-billion high-powered spy satellite capable of snapping pictures detailed enough to distinguish the make and model of an automobile hundreds of miles below.
This is the second time that a Delta IV Heavy rocket will be launched from Vandenberg. The first time, in January 2011, a sound wave as loud as a freight train swept over nearby Lompoc, a town of about 43,000.
Some people reported hearing the rocket’s roar as far away as 50 miles. Vehicles were pulling off and stopping on the southbound shoulder of U.S. 101 to watch it hurtle into the afternoon sky.
The rocket was built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. It made its maiden flight in 2004 and is capable of lifting payloads of up to 24 tons into low Earth orbit.
Three hydrogen-fueled engines — each roughly the size of a pickup truck — will guzzle nearly a ton of propellants per second to provide 17 million horsepower. When the engines do roar to life, more than 200 Aerojet-Rocketdyne engineers and technicians will be watching.
It took the company five years to develop the engines at the company's sprawling Canoga Park facility during the 1990s. It was also where the engine parts were fabricated before being assembled in Mississippi.
Wednesday’s mission, designated NROL-65, has been on schedule for months.
Although Cape Canaveral, Fla., is the launch site for NASA's civilian space program, Vandenberg has been the site of military space projects for more than half a century.
Vandenberg, a 98,000-acre base along the Pacific, has been the primary site for launching spy satellites since the beginning of the Cold War because of its ideal location for putting satellites into a north-to-south orbit.
Space Launch Complex 6 is known on base as “Slick Six.” The launch pad was built in the 1960s and later was intended to accommodate space shuttle launches, but they remained in Florida. Since then, the pad has gone through many renovations. Most recently, Vandenberg spent $100 million on upgrades over three years.
The launch is slated to be webcast beginning at 10:32 a.m. at rocket maker United Launch Alliance's website at www.ulalaunch.com.
Uncle Sam has your Facebook password???
SourceFacebook: Governments demanded data on 38K users
By Matt Apuzzo Associated Press Tue Aug 27, 2013 6:50 AM
WASHINGTON — Government agents in 74 countries demanded information on about 38,000 Facebook users in the first half of this year, with about half the orders coming from authorities in the United States, the company said Tuesday.
The social-networking giant is the latest technology company to release figures on how often governments seek information about its customers. Microsoft and Google have done the same.
As with the other companies, it’s hard to discern much from Facebook’s data, besides the fact that, as users around the globe flocked to the world’s largest social network, police and intelligence agencies followed.
Facebook and Twitter have become organizing platforms for activists and, as such, have become targets for governments. During anti-government protests in Turkey in May and June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called social media “the worst menace to society.”
At the time, Facebook denied it provided information about protest organizers to the Turkish government.
Data released Tuesday show authorities in Turkey submitted 96 requests covering 173 users. Facebook said it provided some information in about 45 of those cases, but there’s no information on what was turned over and why.
“We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests,” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel company said in a blog post. “When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name.”
Facebook and other technology companies have been criticized for helping the National Security Agency secretly collect data on customers. Federal law gives government the authority to demand data without specific warrants, and while companies can fight requests in secret court hearings, it’s an uphill battle.
Facebook turned over some data in response to about 60 percent of those requests.
It’s not clear from the Facebook data how many of the roughly 26,000 government requests on 38,000 users were for law-enforcement purposes and how many were for intelligence gathering.
Technology and government officials have said criminal investigations are far more common than national security matters as a justification for demanding information from companies.
The numbers are imprecise because the federal government forbids companies from revealing how many times they’ve been ordered to turn over information about their customers. Facebook released only a range of figures for the United States.
The company said it planned to start releasing these figures regularly.
U.N. warns U.S. against illegal spying on diplomats
F*ck international law, I'm the American Emperor and can do anything I want!!! That's probably what President Obama is thinking.According to the US Constitution any treaties the America government enters into must be obeyed before the normal laws passed by Congress and must be obeyed.
Of course the US government doesn't seem to be willing to obey laws that it has agreed to obey when it signed onto treaties any more then it is willing to obey the requirements of the Bill of Rights, such as the 4th Amendment which says it won't spy on us without a search warrant, issued by a court based on probable cause!!!
U.N. warns U.S. against illegal spying on diplomats
By Carol J. Williams
August 26, 2013, 2:15 p.m.
United Nations officials on Monday reacted to the latest leaks about U.S. National Security Agency spying with a reminder to the Obama administration of its legal obligation to respect the “inviolability” of diplomatic missions on U.S. soil.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that the NSA, already under fire for reported intelligence gathering on private phone calls and emails around the world, had also infiltrated the U.N. video-conferencing network to eavesdrop on diplomatic missions in New York.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other officials are “aware of the reports and intend to be in touch with the relevant authorities,” spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters at the daily news briefing at U.N. headquarters.
The United States, as host country for the United Nations and its member delegations, is obliged by “well-established international law” to respect the privacy and sovereignty of national and multinational missions, Haq said.
“Member states are expected to act accordingly to protect the inviolability of diplomatic missions,” Haq said.
Der Spiegel reported in its latest issue that its reporters had analyzed secret NSA documents leaked by fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that disclosed how the U.S. agency gained access to the U.N. communications systems. The respected German magazine also reported that the NSA, in its clandestine surveillance, had discovered similar spying activity conducted by China that U.S. analysts were able to comb for important intelligence insights.
The magazine laid out in detail how the NSA acquired floor plans and diagrams of the European Union's new diplomatic mission at the United Nations in September 2012 in an operation code-named Apalachee.
Under the 1961 Vienna Convention and other international accords, Haq said, the United States is prohibited from conducting covert operations at the United Nations and its associated foreign missions.
The NSA used traditional wiretapping devices to intercept U.N. communications, Der Spiegel said. It also reported that the agency infiltrated the computer networks of foreign diplomatic missions in Washington, including the EU delegation headquarters, and copied computer hard drives.
The magazine referred to an "internal presentation" summing up an NSA objective to acquire "information superiority," not just in its counter-terrorism intelligence gathering, but also with programs aimed at drug trafficking, organized crime and "traditional espionage targeting foreign governments."
NYPD designates mosques as terrorism organizations
Didn't Hitler say the same thing about Jewish groups???? OK, I'm just joking, but Hitler was probably thinking about it even if he didn't.NYPD designates mosques as terrorism organizations
By Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo Associated Press
Wed Aug 28, 2013 7:28 AM
NEW YORK — The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.
Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.
The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials.
The strategy has allowed the NYPD to send undercover officers into mosques and attempt to plant informants on the boards of mosques and at least one prominent Arab-American group in Brooklyn, whose executive director has worked with city officials, including Bill de Blasio, a front-runner for mayor.
The revelations about the NYPD’s massive spying operations are in documents recently obtained by The Associated Press and part of a new book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” The book by AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.
The disclosures come as the NYPD is fighting off lawsuits accusing it of engaging in racial profiling while combating crime. Earlier this month, a judge ruled that the department’s use of the stop-and-frisk tactic was unconstitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups have sued, saying the Muslim spying programs are unconstitutional and make Muslims afraid to practice their faith without police scrutiny.
Both Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have denied those accusations. Speaking Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Kelly reminded people that his intelligence-gathering programs began in the wake of 9/11.
“We follow leads wherever they take us,” Kelly said. “We’re not intimidated as to wherever that lead takes us. And we’re doing that to protect the people of New York City.”
***
The NYPD did not limit its operations to collecting information on those who attended the mosques or led prayers. The department sought also to put people on the boards of New York’s Islamic institutions to fill intelligence gaps.
One confidential NYPD document shows police wanted to put informants in leadership positions at mosques and other organizations, including the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn, a secular social-service organization.
Linda Sarsour, the executive director, said her group helps new immigrants adjust to life in the U.S. It was not clear whether the department was successful in its plans.
The document, which appears to have been created around 2009, was prepared for Kelly and distributed to the NYPD’s debriefing unit, which helped identify possible informants.
Around that time, Kelly was handing out medals to the Arab American Association’s soccer team, Brooklyn United, smiling and congratulating its players for winning the NYPD’s soccer league.
Sarsour, a Muslim who has met with Kelly many times, said she felt betrayed.
“It creates mistrust in our organizations,” said Sarsour, who was born and raised in Brooklyn. “It makes one wonder and question who is sitting on the boards of the institutions where we work and pray.”
***
Before the NYPD could target mosques as terrorist groups, it had to persuade a federal judge to rewrite rules governing how police can monitor speech protected by the First Amendment.
The rules stemmed from a 1971 lawsuit, dubbed the Handschu case after lead plaintiff Barbara Handschu, over how the NYPD spied on protesters and liberals during the Vietnam War era.
David Cohen, a former CIA executive who became NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence in 2002, said the old rules didn’t apply to fighting against terrorism.
Cohen told the judge that mosques could be used “to shield the work of terrorists from law enforcement scrutiny by taking advantage of restrictions on the investigation of First Amendment activity.”
NYPD lawyers proposed a new tactic, the TEI, that allowed officers to monitor political or religious speech whenever the “facts or circumstances reasonably indicate” that groups of two or more people were involved in plotting terrorism or other violent crime.
The judge rewrote the Handschu rules in 2003. In the first eight months under the new rules, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division opened at least 15 secret terrorism enterprise investigations, documents show. At least 10 targeted mosques.
Doing so allowed police, in effect, to treat anyone who attends prayer services as a potential suspect. Sermons, ordinarily protected by the First Amendment, could be monitored and recorded.
Among the mosques targeted as early as 2003 was the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
“I have never felt free in the United States. The documents tell me I am right,” Zein Rimawi, one of the Bay Ridge mosque’s leaders, said after reviewing an NYPD document describing his mosque as a terrorist enterprise.
Rimawi, 59, came to the U.S. decades ago from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“Ray Kelly, shame on him,” he said. “I am American.”
***
The NYPD believed the tactics were necessary to keep the city safe, a view that sometimes put it at odds with the FBI.
In August 2003, Cohen asked the FBI to install eavesdropping equipment inside a mosque called Masjid al-Farooq, including its prayer room.
Al-Farooq had a long history of radical ties. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, once preached briefly at Al-Farooq. Invited preachers raged against Israel, the United States and the Bush administration’s war on terror.
One of Cohen’s informants said an imam from another mosque had delivered $30,000 to an al-Farooq leader, and the NYPD suspected the money was for terrorism.
But Amy Jo Lyons, the FBI assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism, refused to bug the mosque. She said the federal law wouldn’t permit it.
The NYPD made other arrangements. Cohen’s informants began to carry recording devices into mosques under investigation. They hid microphones in wristwatches and the electronic key fobs used to unlock car doors.
Even under a TEI, a prosecutor and a judge would have to approve bugging a mosque. But the informant taping was legal because New York law allows any party to record a conversation, even without consent from the others. Like the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, the NYPD never demonstrated in court that al-Farooq was a terrorist enterprise but that didn’t stop the police from spying on the mosques for years.
And under the new Handschu guidelines, no one outside the NYPD could question the secret practice.
Martin Stolar, one of the lawyers in the Handschu case, said it’s clear the NYPD used enterprise investigations to justify open-ended surveillance. The NYPD should only tape conversations about building bombs or plotting attacks, he said.
“Every Muslim is a potential terrorist? It is completely unacceptable,” he said. “It really tarnishes all of us and tarnishes our system of values.”
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Al-Ansar Center, a windowless Sunni mosque, opened in Brooklyn several years ago, attracting young Arabs and South Asians. NYPD officers feared the mosque was a breeding ground for terrorists, so informants kept tabs on it.
One NYPD report noted that members were fixing up the basement, turning it into a gym.
“They also want to start Jiujitsu classes,” it said.
The NYPD was particularly alarmed about Mohammad Elshinawy, 26, an Islamic teacher at several New York mosques, including Al-Ansar. Elshinawy was a Salafist — a follower of a puritanical Islamic movement — whose father was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, according to NYPD documents.
The FBI also investigated whether Elshinawy recruited people to wage violent jihad overseas. But the two agencies investigated him very differently.
The FBI closed the case after many months without any charges. Federal investigators never infiltrated Al-Ansar.
“Nobody had any information the mosque was engaged in terrorism activities,” a former federal law enforcement official recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation.
The NYPD wasn’t convinced. A 2008 surveillance document described Elshinawy as “a young spiritual leader (who) lectures and gives speeches at dozens of venues” and noted, “He has orchestrated camping trips and paintball trips.”
The NYPD deemed him a threat in part because “he is so highly regarded by so many young and impressionable individuals.”
No part of Elshinawy’s life was out of bounds. His mosque was the target of a TEI. The NYPD conducted surveillance at his wedding. An informant recorded the wedding and police videotaped everyone who came and went.
“We have nothing on the lucky bride at this time but hopefully will learn about her at the service,” one lieutenant wrote.
Four years later, the NYPD was still watching Elshinawy without charging him. He is now a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit against the NYPD.
“These new NYPD spying disclosures confirm the experiences and worst fears of New York’s Muslims,” ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi said. “From houses of worship to a wedding, there’s no area of New York Muslim religious or personal life that the NYPD has not invaded through its bias-based surveillance policy.”
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