Was the aircraft in Feinstein’s drone story actually a drone at all?

The Wire: The Wire spoke by phone with Feinstein’s spokesman Brian Weiss, who confirmed that the incident happened at the senator’s house in San Francisco several months ago. At about the time, it seems, that Code Pink showed up to protest Feinstein’s support for the NSA.

On June 15, the anti-war group held a protest focused on Feinstein, which included activists in disguises and, yes, two remote-controlled helicopters, which might creatively be described as drones…

Steve Rhodes, who took [photos of the event], confirmed to The Wire that the helicopters flying around outside Feinstein’s home didn’t have any cameras, so they weren’t “looking in” anywhere.

If this is the incident that Feinstein was talking about, then the irony overwhelming. The little helicopters were no doubt meant to represent eye-in-the-sky drones that the NSA may or may not be (but probably are) using to spy on US citizens — and Feinstein supports the NSA’s domestic surveillance.

So, govenrment drones spying on Americans are cool. But pretend government drones not really spying on anyone? The worst thing ever!

Newest NSA Revelation Proves Whistleblowers are Essential

If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about -- except when you do.

Washington Post: 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.

It turns out that we've made it so easy to spy on Americans that it happens accidentally, According to the report, "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."

The most compelling NSA success story the agency could come up with

Washington Post: He was a San Diego cab driver who fled Somalia as a teenager, winning asylum in the United States after he was wounded during fighting among warring tribes. Today, Basaaly Moalin, 36, is awaiting sentencing following his conviction on charges that he sent $8,500 to Somalia in support of the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Moalin’s prosecution, barely noticed when the case was in court, has suddenly come to the fore of a national debate about U.S. surveillance. Under pressure from Congress, senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.

Officials have said that NSA surveillance tools have helped disrupt terrorist plots or identify suspects in 54 cases in the United States and overseas. In many of those cases, an agency program that targets the communication of foreigners, including e-mails, has proved critical.

Wow, sending a few grand to Somalia. Clearly, we’ve thwarted the next Osama Bin Laden.

"There’s no reason why NSA needed to have its own database containing the phone records of millions of innocent Americans in order to get the information related to Moalin," said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a Senate Intelligence Committee. "It could have just as easily gone directly to the phone companies with an individualized court order."

And what of the big intel break that resulted in the closure of US embassies throughout the middle east, Africa, and beyond? Wasn’t that supposed to be “the NSA program is proving its worth yet again?” Apparently not. Not according to the NSA, anyway. If you ask them, the big terrorist plot of the century foiled by the agency is a cab driver who basically answered a fundraising appeal. This just confirms my assertion that NSA domestic data collection had nothing to do with the embassy closures and pro-spying people who said otherwise were just plain lying.

If is the best and most compelling case the NSA can come up with to justify their massive data collection, I’d say the cost in privacy and civil liberties is definitely not worth the outcome.

[photo by emilydickinsonridesabmx]

NSA domestic spying even broader than we knew

New York Times: The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

Greg Sargent quotes an email he received from Jameel Jaffer, a senior civil liberties attorney with the ACLU:

The program described by the New York Times involves a breathtaking invasion of millions of people’s privacy. The NSA has cast a massive dragnet over Americans’ international communications, collecting and monitoring all of them, and retaining some untold number of them in government databases. This is precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.

"The latest revelations will likely add to Congressional pressure for reform, which is likely to happen eventually, though how transformative it will be remains to be seen," Sargent writes.

[photo via Dave Wilson Cumbria]

In an appearance on Leno, Pres. Obama just plain lies

The Hill: President Obama on Tuesday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs in a wide-ranging interview on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” arguing that the agency doesn’t target U.S. civilians.

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, according to the media pool report. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”

Obama called the surveillance programs “a critical component to counterterrorism,” but acknowledged that they’ve “raised a lot of questions for people.”

If “We don’t have a domestic spying program,” then explain the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. The FISA court issues warrants for monitoring messages between targets abroad and targets within the United States. If that’s not spying on Americans, then what is? Likewise, the PRISM program that Snowden revealed also monitors information leaving the US for foreign targets and vice versa.

You may not want to call those “domestic spy programs” because you think the term comes loaded with bad PR. But there’s a fine line between lying and spin and suggesting that these programs don’t exist at all is crossing it. When you say the agency doesn’t target Americans, people don’t hear “we target foreign terror suspects talking to Americans,” they hear “we don’t listen to Americans” — which is completely untrue.

Give the people the truth and let them sort it out on their own. They may not come to the conclusion you want them to, but that’s part of what it means to be a free people.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

What if Snowden was a Russian whistleblower?

Conor Friedersdorf asks us to consider a very instructive scenario.

Imagine that an employee of a secretive surveillance agency in Russia or China landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, somehow called a press conference, and revealed that the leaders of his country were secretly gathering up the private data of all Russians or Chinese in previously unknown ways, and that they were also spying on many Americans.

What would be the right thing to do in that situation? Should Obama return the leaker to Russia or China to face charges of revealing classified information and likely spend the rest of his life in prison? Or would the demands of justice and morality be better served by granting political asylum?

For all the freaking out about Russia granting Snowden temporary asylum, the fact is that all that freaking out is just ritual. The people doing it (at least those in government) have to do it, but it’s doubtful they ever seriously expected any other outcome. Russia will not do something simply because we demand it, for the same reason we do not automatically bend to Russian demands. Some people may not like the outcome, but thems the breaks.

We shouldn’t punish Russia for taking in Snowden, because it’s likely we would do the same if the situation was reversed. The global issues involved in our relationship with Russia are far more important than punishing someone who’s embarrassed the United States.

"To me, the U.S. would be foolish to let the Edward Snowden controversy affect its relationship with a nuclear power or to prioritize Snowden when so many more important issues are at stake," Friedersdorf writes.

No, embassy closings do not prove that massive NSA data collection is necessary

As US embassies and consulates close in the middle east and Africa, surveillance hawks are using the news to promote their favorite spy program.

CBS News: Lawmakers used the government’s early warning of a terrorist threat to defend the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs on Sunday, saying the threat — which some have described as among the most serious since 9/11 — might not have been detected without the government’s aggressive intelligence-gathering tools.

Sources tell CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton that intelligence officials learned about the threat, in part, as a result of “intercepts" of terrorist chatter that indicate that the operation is in “the final stages" and “it could be big."

[…]

For [supporters of NSA data-mining], the plot is proof-positive of the need to preserve the embattled surveillance programs. “The NSA program is proving its worth yet again," declared Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on CNN. The hawkish Republican said that al Qaeda is “on the rise" across the Middle East and North Africa, warning that America risks another 9/11 by disengaging.

OK, so here’s the problem: the NSA data collection that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on is data from the US to foreign sources of vice versa. That’s what everyone’s all worked up about and I can say without hesitation that this data collection had jack-all to do with the embassy closures. According to the Telegraph, “US intelligence picked up on messages in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, ordered Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of its Yemen branch, to carry out an attack."

Yemen in not in the United States and if Ayman al-Zawahiri were here, I’d hope we’d be doing one helluva lot more than tapping his phone at the Motel 6. So the NSA program that Graham is praising didn’t bring the intel on the threat to embassies in the Muslim world. It couldn’t possibly have. He’s just cynically and dishonestly trying to shore up public opinion for the program by appealing to people’s fears. And he’s not the only one; Rep. Peter King and Sen. Saxby Chambliss joined in, as well as Democrats Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger and Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve come to expect from security hawks; fearmongering and propagandizing, rather than making a legitimate logical argument for their position. That’s the neocon way, after all, and it shows the weakness of their argument. If your position is good, you don’t need to lie about it.

[photo via misterphisch]

How to undermine your own credibility with a silly conspiracy theory: the Glenn Greenwald edition

Raw Story: Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald on Monday suggested that President Barack Obama had ordered 19 U.S. embassies in the Middle Easy closed not because of a legitimate terror threat, but to silence a debate on recently-revealed details of National Security Agency (NSA) data collection programs.

In a Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said that the embassies had been temporarily closed after the NSA learned of a terrorist plot.

“Here we are in the midst of one the most intense debates and sustain debates that we’ve had in a very long time in this country over the dangers of excess surveillance, and suddenly an administration that has spent two claiming that it has decimated Al-Qaeda decides that there is this massive threat that involves the closing of embassies and consulates throughout the world," Greenwald told Goodman. “And within literally an amount of hours, the likes of Saxby Chambliss and Lindsey Graham join with the White House and Democrats in Congress — who, remember, are the leading defenders of the NSA at this point — to exploit that terrorist threat, and to insist that it shows that the NSA and these programs are necessary."

Except al Qaeda just staged a massive prison break in Iraq, which has increased their numbers in the middle east — including senior leadership who engage in planning the sort of thing the Obama administration say is going on. Besides, Greenwald wishes that “we are in the midst of one the most intense debates and sustain debates that we’ve had in a very long time in this country over the dangers of excess surveillance" — as do I — but the fact is that we’re not. While the continuing revelations about NSA snooping should be big, earthshaking news, they’re not — thanks in part to the people who broke the story in the first place.

Edward Snowden should never have come out as the whistleblower. When he did, he gave the media a chance to change a complex story about civil rights, privacy, government overreach, the rapid expansion of police powers following 9/11, and Constitutional law into a one-word headline: "MANHUNT!" Of course they took that opportunity, because the easier to understand story always gets more coverage. The Obama administration didn’t need to cook up some conspiracy to change the subject, Greenwald’s source already did that for them.

It’s still an important story and there’s still a chance to have the serious national conversation we so desperately need — but Glenn’s not helping by giving the press yet another simpleminded angle to distract from the story. Talk about the substance, not silly speculation that plays right to the media’s sensationalist tendencies.

NSA controversy just expanded dramatically

Glenn Greenwald: A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

Greenwald reports that XKeyscore’s capabilities were denied by congressional leaders; “US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: ‘He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.’"

It would seem that either Rogers himself was lying or that the full extent of the NSA’s snooping was kept even from him.

The system is ripe for abuse. “Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a ‘US person’, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets," according to the report. “But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst."

In other words, it’s illegal to use XKeyscore to snoop on your ex-wife, but there are no other safeguards to guarantee it won’t be abused. The program creates a database that allows you to “search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used." So pretty much any sliver of information will bring you a pile of data.The potential for blackmailers or stalkers is tremendous and, as I’ve pointed out before, even if you trust this president completely with all this info, he’s not the only one who has access. After all, Eric Snowden himself was just some low-level guy and look what he had access to. Human nature is such that you can’t trust everyone. Someone will abuse this system, if they haven’t already.

Poll: majority view Snowden as whistleblower; most think domestic spying goes too far

Bloomberg News: A majority of U.S. registered voters consider Edward Snowden a whistle-blower, not a traitor, and a plurality says government anti-terrorism efforts have gone too far in restricting civil liberties, a poll released today shows.

Fifty-five percent said Snowden was a whistle-blower in leaking details about top-secret U.S. programs that collect telephone and Internet data, in the survey from Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University. Thirty-four percent said he’s a traitor. Snowden, 30, worked for McLean, Virginia-based federal contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH)

The poll also showed that by 45 percent to 40 percent, respondents said the government goes too far in restricting civil liberties as part of the war on terrorism. That was a reversal from January 2010, when in a similar survey 63 percent said anti-terrorism activities didn’t go far enough to protect the U.S. from attacks, compared with 25 percent who disagreed.

“The massive swing in public opinion about civil liberties and governmental anti-terrorism efforts, and the public view that Edward Snowden is more whistle-blower than traitor, are the public reaction and apparent shock at the extent to which the government has gone in trying to prevent future terrorist incidents,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac’s polling institute.

"The view of Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than traitor predominated among almost every group of respondents broken down by party, gender, income, education and age," according the the report. “Black voters were the lone exception, with 43 percent calling Snowden a traitor compared with 42 percent saying he was a whistle-blower."

The “exception" of black voters is entirely theoretical here, since the 1% difference is well within the margin of error. On that point, it’s probably truer to say the poll is inconclusive.

The fact that a majority doesn’t see the danger in government snooping is depressing, but it’s nice to know the shift is moving in that direction. As I’ve pointed out before, you may trust Pres. Obama with the information gained through the massive data collection Snowden revealed, but he’s not the only one you should be worried about. He’s not going to be president forever, that data will be around until it’s destroyed, and a lot of people other than the president have access to it. It’s not just a system that lends itself to abuse, it’s a system that’s begging for it.

It’s good to know that more and more people are realizing that.

[photo by stevendepolo]

So the NSA has my personal info. What could go wrong?

WonkBlog: When stated abstractly, the risk of the NSA violating your privacy may not seem so alarming. The Associated Press reports on an FBI database that provides some concrete examples of how a massive database about Americans can be abused.

The National Crime Information Center database, maintained by the FBI, provides law enforcement agencies across the country with information they need to do their job, including information about outstanding arrest warrants, gang memberships, firearms records, and much more. According to the AP, it serves 90,000 agencies and receives 9 million data points every day.

The New York Police Department says one of its detectives was recently caught using the NCIC database to secretly obtain personal information about two other NYPD officers. Police officials have suggested that the man, who also hacked into several individuals’ e-mail accounts, was trying to figure out “who his ex-girlfriend, also a police officer, was chatting with.”

Another police officer, Gilbert Valle, was convicted in March for using the NCIC database to “help compile dossiers on women that listed their birthdates, addresses, heights and weights,” apparently as part of a “bizarre plot to kidnap, cook and cannibalize women.” Fortunately, the authorities stepped in before the women he had profiled were harmed.

Now, AP reports that “authorities have accused a Memphis police officer of using the NCIC database to leak information to a confidential informant about a watch dealer who the informant believed had stolen a Rolex; a reserve patrolman in Clarkston, Ga., of running names and license plates for marijuana dealers; a Montgomery County, Md., officer of running checks on cars belonging to a woman who later reported that the vehicles had been vandalized; and a Hartford, Conn., police sergeant of supplying database records to a woman who used them to harass her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend."

In short, not everyone with access to private information is a good person. Those examples are just the ones we know about. Obviously, we have no way of knowing how many people abused the system and got away with it.

"All of your personal data is in the hands of the same people that run the TSA, the IRS and likely the DMV," explains author Peter Van Buren. “Do you trust all of them all the time to never make mistakes or act on personal grudges or political biases? Do you believe none of them would ever sell your data for personal profit ever? In fact, the NSA is already sharing your data with, at minimum, British intelligence. That’s a foreign government that your American government is informing on you to, FYI."

Van Buren also explains that even if you trust completely the people overseeing the NSA right now, those people won’t be around forever — but that data will. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us that the NSA’s history shouldn’t inspire trust. It was the NSA’s abuse of domestic surveillance that resulted in FISA — which George W. Bush basically ignored. Those who don’t learn from the past…

Nixon resorted to burglary to get information and stay in power, how much more tempting must it be to access information without resorting to breaking into the Watergate Hotel? And the temptation isn’t just for the president, As we see with the NCIC database, the danger of abuse exists with every person involved. If it can be abused, it will be abused. It’s simply human nature.

[image by JefferyTurner]

Following NSA revelations, Army blocks access to The Guardian

Montery Herald: The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday’s Herald, but Armywide.

Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke stories on data collection by the National Security Agency.

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering “some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative “network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

“We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security," he wrote, “however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information."

In a later phone call, Van Vleet said the filter of classified information on public websites was “Armywide" and did not originate at the Presidio.

Presidio employees described how they could access the U.S. site, www.guardiannews.com, but were blocked from articles, such as those about the NSA, that redirected to the British site.

Seems kind of pointless, unless they’re also blocking cable and broadcast news. Kind of a case of locking the barn door after the horse got out. It’s like trying to patch a leak in cheesecloth. It really is quite futile. It’s not going to limit the spread of the info, it just makes the Army look pissy and like it’s punishing The Guardian by denying it web traffic.

[image by IsaacMao]

After NSA story, users flock to privacy-protecting search engine DuckDuckGo

The Next Web: Just over a week after passing a record 2 million searches in a single day, DuckDuckGo has announced a new milestone: the company processed 3,095,907 searches [on Monday] . DuckDuckGo made it clear that this stat does not include yesterday’s 18.9 million searches via its API and approximately half a million bot searches.

It’s no coincidence that DuckDuckGo’s stats are climbing as the PRISM and larger NSA surveillance controversy grows. The startup has received considerable attention as a Google alternative — remember, Google was cited as a main data source for PRISM. After facing severe criticism for its involvement, Google appealed to the US government in hopes of sharing more about the data requests it receives.

Asked if the PRISM program could be used to monitor users of DDG, CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg answered, “…if the NSA were to come to us and ask for all our data, it would not be useful to them because our data is truly anonymous (as opposed to pseudo-anonymous, which is never really anonymous).”

Once again, we see the “the public appreciates and understands the NSA’s efforts” line fall apart. Polls show we’re against it and evidence like this shows that a lot of people are willing to actually do something about it. Besides, when the data collection is so easily thwarted, how can it actually be useful? You might not have noticed, but criminals are kind of secretive, so you’d expect them to have been doing this sort of stuff all along.

[photo by JoakimLagerqvist]

Pres. Obama’s approvals take a dive as young voters react to NSA controversy

CNN: President Barack Obama’s approval rating dropped eight percentage points over the past month, to 45%, the president’s lowest rating in more than a year and a half, according to a new national poll.

The CNN/ORC International survey released Monday morning comes as the White House has been reacting to controversies over a massive U.S. government surveillance program; the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea party and other conservative groups who applied for tax-exempt status; the administration’s handling of last September’s attack in Benghazi that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead; and the Justice Department’s secret collection of journalists’ phone records as part of a government investigation into classified leaks.

The poll indicates that for the first time in Obama’s presidency, half of the public says they don’t believe he is honest and trustworthy. And Americans are split on the controversial National Security Agency anti-terrorism program to record metadata on U.S. phone calls, but they support the NSA program that targets records of Internet usage by people in other countries. That doesn’t mean they necessarily like what is going on: Just over six in 10 believe that government is so large and powerful that it threatens the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.

“The drop in Obama’s support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. Holland credits news about the NSA’s PRISM program, as well as “older controversies like the IRS matter” for the drop. I’m less convinced about the IRS story, since it wasn’t really going anywhere before and now all of a sudden it’s some huge planet-tilter? No, the new information that seems to be changing opinions here is PRISM. Obama is also down 10 points with Independents.

So much of what the chattering class has assumed has been wrong so far. First, we were all supposed to be supportive of this sort of thing — until polls showed we weren’t. And young people were supposed to be so used to electronic invasions of privacy from Facebook, Google, tracking cookies, etc. that they weren’t going to get all worked up over it. Now here we see young voters getting all worked up over it.

That said, it’s hard to see Obama’s approvals have much impact on the elections. There is a legitimate split in both parties on domestic surveillance and that seems to be more of a potential influence than anything. When the issue isn’t polarized on a Democrat/Republican axis, it’s hard to see what the president’s party membership has to do with anything.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

No, massive data collection did not stop Danish terror plot

Pro Publica: Defending a vast program to sweep up phone and Internet data under antiterror laws, senior U.S. officials in recent days have cited the case of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said a data collection program by the National Security Agency helped stop an attack on a Danish newspaper for which Headley did surveillance. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Senate intelligence chairwoman, also called Headley’s capture a success.

But a closer examination of the case, drawn from extensive reporting by ProPublica, shows that the government surveillance only caught up with Headley after the U.S. had been tipped by British intelligence. And even that victory came after seven years in which U.S. intelligence failed to stop Headley as he roamed the globe on missions for Islamic terror networks and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Supporters of the sweeping U.S. surveillance effort say it’s needed to build a haystack of information in which to find a needle that will stop a terrorist. In Headley’s case, however, it appears the U.S. was handed the needle first 2014 and then deployed surveillance that led to the arrest and prosecution of Headley and other plotters.

So basically, US authorities were tipped off that something was up — and then the surveillance began. So pretty much what you think of when you think of ordinary, everyday criminal surveillance. It wasn’t spying or snooping or data-mining, it was police work. You know, the old-fashoned kind law enforcement that supposedly can’t possibly deal with modern terrorist threats, because terrorists are magic or something.

And how few and far between must NSA success stories be that they’d have to exaggerate one like this to justify PRISM? If there were plenty of defeated terrorist plots out there, they wouldn’t have to pad this story to supply one. From a logical standpoint, the lie weakens their case — it doesn’t strengthen it.

White House gives up fight to age restrict emergency contraception

Agence-France Presse: The Obama administration will comply with a judge’s order to allow women and girls of any age to purchase emergency contraception, ending its efforts to restrict the drug’s availability.

The reversal on the politically sensitive issue means that anyone, including young girls, will soon be able to purchase the popular Plan B One-Step morning-after pill over the counter, without a prescription.

President Barack Obama’s administration had fought against US District Court Judge Edward Korman’s order seeking to make the drug more widely available after a more than decade-long court fight, warning of health and social dangers.

“To comply with the order, FDA has asked the manufacturer of Plan B One-Step (PBOS) to submit a supplemental application seeking approval of the one-pill product to be made available OTC without any such restrictions,” the FDA explained in a letter to Judge Korman.

“Once FDA receives that supplemental application, the FDA intends to approve it promptly.”

I’ve always been a little lost on what the problem was in the first place. But I get the feeling that the administration’s taking advantage of the PRISM controversy to get some housekeeping done under the radar. This is the sort of news that would normally have Republicans clawing their eyes out, but they're so busy defending or attacking the NSA that they don’t have time for much else. The White House put together a climate deal with China yesterday with the same lack of fanfare — a move the GOP would’ve demagogued endlessly in a less active news cycle.

Someone in the White House has realized that this news cycle has become Friday Dump-Day seven days a week. Perhaps it was around the same time they noticed that it kicked the IRS controversy back to page 11 in your average newspaper. Politically, this story is turning out very well for Obama. The majority support the program and it still manages to suck up all the oxygen in the newsroom.

Out in the open

Matt Bors.

The pushback against the surveillance state

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Today, a bipartisan coalition of 86 civil liberties organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the American Civil Liberties Union – are demanding swift action from Congress in light of the recent revelations about unchecked domestic surveillance.

In an open letter to lawmakers sent today, the groups call for a congressional investigatory committee, similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s. The letter also demands legal reforms to rein in domestic spying and demands that public officials responsible for this illegal surveillance are held accountable for their actions.

The letter denounces the NSA’s spying program as illegal, noting:

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.

The letter was accompanied by the launch of StopWatching.us, a global petition calling on Congress to provide a public accounting of the United States’ domestic spying capabilites and to bring an end to illegal surveillance.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver writes that surveillance could become a wedge between establishment partisans and civil libertarians in upcoming primaries and makes an interesting observation; that the partisan shift shows opinions aren’t set in stone. “[M]any Americans do not hold especially firm views on some issues and instead may adapt them depending on which party controls the executive branch,” he writes. Which means it may not be as difficult to sway opinion as I’d originally thought.

The problem in Washington is fear. Even if an official is inclined to end the surveillance state, they may not want to take the risk. What happens when you end a program and there’s a terrorist attack? No one wants to take the blame for that, which is a big reason why these sorts of programs so often outlive their already dubious usefulness.

If politicians are motivated by fear, then the obvious strategy here is to make them afraid to side with the snoops. This is where the calls, emails, and letters to elected officials make all the difference in the world.

[photo by Milica Sekulic]

What should be a scandal and won’t be

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian: The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

“Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls,” Greenwald reports. “The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.” So a tiny shred of respect for privacy remains, but this should strike anyone as troubling. As under the Bush administration, the government is spying on citizens — without warrant or even any demonstrable cause for suspicion.

But it won’t get much of a rise out of Washington — even from the scandal-mongering GOP — because Washington is complicit here. This is all extremely legal and above board, thanks to the PATRIOT Act. The neocons pushed for a post-9/11 surveillance state and they got one. You won’t see many of them complaining about it now.

“Given that this will rightly generate a lot of questions today, Congressional Dems and Republicans alike who criticize the news need to be asked why they support the Patriot Act, given that the court order in question explicitly relies on it,” writes Greg Sargent.

Kevin Drum is somewhat more damning, writing with withering sarcasm, “Obviously I’m missing something. After Democrats caved on the surveillance bill in 2007, I simply assumed that this kind of massive data mining of telephone metadata was going to continue forever and everyone knew it. But Glenn suggests that, in fact, this is something surprising. So I guess I assumed wrong.”

Of course, not every critic of this move will be a hypocrite — but those non-hypocritical voices will be the ones Republicans painted as wild-eyed leftist terrorist sympathizers back in the day. And they’re the only ones you should pay any attention to. Like the AP phone records controversy, I doubt anyone else will give this much more attention other than a reaction.

After all, they were all for it before.

Griper Blade: Sex, Lies, and Pointless Wiretapping

Wall Street and the economy are in flames and the Republican party is smoldering. The party should burst into flames itself about some time in early November.

And one man, smelling strongly of gasoline and burnt matches, tries to blend into the wallpaper. President George W. Bush, widely considered a front-runner for the less than coveted title of "Worst President in History," pops his head up occasionally to make a brief statement, then disappears into the White House in hopes that everyone will forget he even exists. For Bush, the market failure is like a thunderstorm rolling through -- not anyone's fault and totally unavoidable. Both parties in Congress point fingers across the aisle, but no one points to Pennsylvania avenue, where a stupid, stupid man sits nearly forgotten. And he wants to keep it that way.

For the most part, he's been successful. The economy, the market, the election, the two wars he began without any plan to finish them, all keep President Zero off the front page. The lamest of lame ducks, Bush is merely a clockwatcher now, waiting to clear out his desk and start his foundation to promote his lousy ideas (no, he doesn't plan to go away).

But the ghosts of old lies and crimes poke at him, driving him out into sunlight. His neocon paranoia and his contempt for constitutional principles will continue to follow him around long after he leaves office and even into the grave. His shiny new neocon think tank for a New American Century will suffer from its association with its founder -- a man with such powerful organizational skills that he once lost a fair fight to a pretzel...

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