Clearing The Desktop

In fact, in Ubuntu Linux 12.04 with the Gnome 3 shell, the default desktop is completely clear, and many of us keep it that way in the interest of sanity. So I'm speaking only metaphorically...

• Tesla Announces New Product To ‘Fundamentally Change The Way The World Uses Energy’ (H/T ellroon. The new product is a battery.)
  
  
• Judge Halts Work On Maryland Pipeline Due To Environmental Concerns (Don't get your hopes up; the ruling is by a Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge, and I don't doubt the pipeline company has an appeals court judge securely in its pocket somewhere up the line.)
  
  
• Hawaii Will Soon Get All Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources (Give me a few minutes to pack my bags, and a few more to earn another $1m or so to live on in Hawaii for a couple of years...)
  
  
• NSA Phone Data Collection Program Revealed By Edward Snowden Ruled Illegal (What a surprise! [/irony])
  
  
• French Lawmakers Approve Sweeping Expansion Of Spying Programs (Following in America's footsteps, despite all typical wisdom of the French...)
  
  
• Can Bernie Sanders Break Through the Status Quo?
  He may have already done it, with his unapologetic defense of social democracy and assaults on the “billionaire class.”
  
  

WTF Would NSA NOT Do?

Apparently it's a short list, and this, from Bruce Schneier, didn't make it:

Last May, we learned that the NSA intercepts equipment being shipped around the world and installs eavesdropping implants. There were photos of NSA employees opening up a Cisco box. Cisco's CEO John Chambers personally complained to President Obama about this practice, which is not exactly a selling point for Cisco equipment abroad. Der Spiegel published the more complete document, along with a broader story, in January of this year:

...

Now Cisco is taking matters into its own hands, offering to ship equipment to fake addresses in an effort to avoid NSA interception.

...

Wassamatter, NSA guys; you not competent to collect what you want without physically installing sh!t on the router while you have it in your clammy hands?

I know no one gives a fv<k whether I approve of any given NSA activity, but c'mon, this is outside the pale. I find myself really tempted to violate Godwin's Law on this one...

‘I Never Metadata I Didn't Spike’: FBI Finds Ways To Broaden Internet Dragnet

emptywheel has such details as are available in her post "How Internet Dragnettery Got Way More Permissive Under PRISM". "Metadata" is being significantly redefined for surveillance purposes, and now includes some content. Welcome to our shiny new engine of internet freedom, folks...

NSA Report Must Have Been (ahem) An Oversight

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept:

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,”  is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

...

Read it all, if you think the gigantic equivalent of a typical Washington Friday press dump contains anything useful. I have other things to do in the next couple of days.

John Napier Tye On EO 12333: Does It Spell The Limit Of Democracy?

Via emptywheel, we have John Napier Tye, who "served as section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from January 2011 to April 2014," writing at WaPo:

What if most American laws looked
like this, even to Congress?

In March I received a call from the White House counsel’s office regarding a speech I had prepared for my boss at the State Department. The speech was about the impact that the disclosure of National Security Agency surveillance practices would have on U.S. Internet freedom policies. The draft stated that “if U.S. citizens disagree with congressional and executive branch determinations about the proper scope of signals intelligence activities, they have the opportunity to change the policy through our democratic process.”

But the White House counsel’s office told me that no, that wasn’t true. I was instructed to amend the line, making a general reference to “our laws and policies,” rather than our intelligence practices. I did.

Even after all the reforms President Obama has announced, some intelligence practices remain so secret, even from members of Congress, that there is no opportunity for our democracy to change them.

...

(Bolds mine. - SB)

The notion that there are federal government intelligence policies and practices that are a) completely secret, even from Congress, b) implemented exclusively according to the dictates of executive agencies historically operated in strictest secrecy, and c) beyond the reach of, and modification or revocation by, our alleged representative democracy, is a concept that would have been familiar to... but abhorrent to... our nation's founders. They would likely have seen such policies and practices as among the worst that an absolute monarchy had to offer. And IMNSHO they would have been absolutely right.

Even our Constitution, that most stable basis of our government, has means of modification when the times require it. Such modification of our fundamental document has been successfully undertaken 27 times in our history. No such procedure for modification of Executive Order 12333 exists. It is, in theory at least, forever immutable.

Have a nice day! [/sarcasm] 

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: do I even need to say it? The motherfucker that is EO 12333 was issued in 1981, by.... of course... Ronald Reagan. If there is an afterlife, and if Reagan lives there, I hope he has no temperature control in his room...

Greenwald: NSA Targets Five American Muslim Leaders For Surveillance, Apparently Because They Are Muslim

Via Kevin Gosztola at FDL's The Dissenter, we have Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept revealing yet more NSA activity in violation of the First Amendment's freedom of religion guarantee. Here's Gosztola's summary:

...

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept have published a much-anticipated story revealing five prominent Muslim-Americans the National Security Agency and FBI spied upon. The surveillance, which primarily appears to have involved monitoring their emails, was conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The five individuals are: Faisal Gill, a former member of President George W. Bush’s administration and a Republican Party operative; Asim Ghafoor, a public relations consultant, lobbyist, lawyer and advocate for the rights of American Muslims; Agha Saeed, a professor who has mobilized American Muslims to become involved in the American political process; Hooshang Amirahmadi, founder and president of the American Iranian Council, who has done considerable work on American policy toward Iran; and Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is the largest Muslim civil rights organization in America.

The national legal advocacy organization, Muslim Advocates, reacted, “This report confirms the worst fears of American Muslims: the federal government has targeted Americans, even those who have served their country in the military and government, simply because of their faith or religious heritage.  The report clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance.”

...

Oh, and Gosztola notes this bit of raw, offensive incivility:

On a visceral level, The Intercept included a section from July 2005 instructions on how to format internal memos “justifying surveillance.” The NSA did not use “John Doe” in the place where the name is supposed to be. They used “Mohammed Raghead” instead.

And this from Greenwald and Hussain:

“I just don’t know why,” says Gill, whose AOL and Yahoo! email accounts were monitored while he was a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “I’ve done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my community—I’ve done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do.”

Please read both articles. Apparently, in today's America, being both a Muslim and a civil liberties activist are enough in combination to ensure you will be spied upon by the most invasive arm of your government. If the Hobby Lobby case wasn't enough to signal to you the death of the First Amendment's establishment clause, this revelation should finish the job. If you're not Christian, as I am not, you have a choice: keep a low profile... or expect your government to spy on you. Once again, Thomas Jefferson turns in his grave...

Is Keith Alexander Selling Classified Information?

If not, how else is he demanding and collecting the huge fees he is known to be receiving in his post-NSA enterprises? Alan Grayson wants to know, and emptywheel marshals available information on the subject from Grayson and other sources. From Grayson's letter, we learn that Alexander is receiving a reported $600,000 a month from a variety of banking industry associations. And emptywheel quotes this tidbit from independent security expert Bruce Schneier:

Schneier also quoted Recode.net, which headlined this news as: “For another million, I’ll show you the back door we put in your router.”

And for a few [million] dollars more... for that much money, why do I not get a sense of security?

A Serious Congressional Effort To Reform The Surveillance State And Restore Constitutional Rights... Or Yet Another Cover‑up?

Shahid Buttar at FDL tells us about the proposed USA FREEDOM Act... and examines what more needs to be done to rein in the decade of secret surveillance of our citizens in which our government has engaged.

NSA Has Known About, Used Heartbleed Bug For Years

Via the same Steven D post linked below, we learn from Bloomberg, which has two unnamed sources, that the NSA has been using the Heartbleed bug for a couple of years to gather "critical intelligence."

The NSA of course denies doing any such damned thing. Of course, loyal Muricans should always believe what they say. Yeah, right.

So the NSA's notion of patriotism when it finds a major vulnerability affecting many of the large internet services and their customers is to a) keep a lid on it, and b) exploit it.

I can't tell you what I think should be done with the NSA, but it may involve a corkscrew...

Obama Calls For End To NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection

... right away. Real soon now... just one more 90-day period, period. Right; yeah, sure.

A lot of proposed versions of this change are floating around, from almost nothing to an outright ban, so I presume the worst, least restrictive version will pass Congress, Obama will cave, and NSA... as they are wont... will ignore it and go back to secret bulk collection.

NYT has become so restrictive of viewing articles that I may have to stop using them as a primary source, but here's a tip: if you get the dialog box insisting that you register, try hitting Reload (in Firefox on a PC that's F5) and as soon as you see most of the text, frantically hit Esc five or six times in a row. I don't know how long or how often this works, but when it no longer does, NYT will have to do without the free advertising of many blogs posting free links to its stories. My patience is almost at an end.

Just to annoy a recalcitrant source, I'll quote one small thing that caught my attention:

...

In recent days, attention in Congress has shifted to legislation developed by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. That bill, according to people familiar with a draft proposal, would have the court issue an overarching order authorizing the program, but allow the N.S.A. to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without prior judicial approval.

The Obama administration proposal, by contrast, would retain a judicial role in determining whether the standard of suspicion was met for a particular phone number before the N.S.A. could obtain associated records.

...

 NO. For the record, I am NOT down with the idea of anything but a court order authorizing a search. There's this thing I have about the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Nothing less will do.

---

PS if you've run out of your daily character count at NYT, you can get at least the basic AP version of the story at TPM.

What? My Church Is Suing The NSA?

Strictly speaking, no, but one of its congregations (the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles) and the Unitarian Universalist Association's social services/activism arm (the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee) are joining in a group of 22 organizations represented legally by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in suing the NSA for violation of the organizations' First Amendment freedom-of-association rights and, separately, the claims by NSA that the aforementioned lawsuit does not require preservation of possible evidence more recent than the original Bush administration NSA spying cases, leading to reasonable speculation that the NSA has in fact destroyed such evidence in cases pending for several years.

I am sorry to be so mistrustful, but I would put absolutely nothing past those (expletive)s... nothing. Destruction of evidence in a pending lawsuit? ¡No problemo! Spying on a church? Why the Hell not? after all, they're only Unitarians. And lying about it all? Lying is their stock in trade. Anything... that's what they would do, and probably did do.

Big Brother Is Watching You

Ordinarily I would avoid a post title quite so melodramatic on the grounds that it exaggerates what is really going on. Not this time.

From Jon Queally at Common Dreams, we learn that GCHQ, with the knowledge and/or assistance of the NSA, is hacking into the webcam chats of "millions" of unknowing users... without a warrant, without even reasonable suspicion that those people are involved in crime, let alone terrorism or other national security issues.

From Queally:

...

The latest documents leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and published Thursday in the Guardian newspaper reveal that the British GCHQ spy agency—with possible assistance from its U.S. counterpart—built and maintained a program that allowed it to tap the live webcam chats of millions of internet users with no connection to criminal or national security investigations.

With a program codenamed "Optic Nerve," the documents reveal how the agency hacked into the camera feeds of those using Yahoo! webchats, capturing both snapshots of conversations and metadata associated with the communication. As its name indicates, at least part of the program was aimed at improving the government's ability to use digital eye-recognition technology to detect and catalog online users that may or may be not be part of a criminal investigation.

...

And yes, of course, many of the images (stills, snapped from webcams used in Yahoo! chats, saved to a GCHQ database) are sexually explicit. You expected otherwise?

Based on what is known, and what the program is called, I'd say they've got a lot of damned Optic Nerve...

Yet Another NSA Lie: Despite NSA Claims, Metadata, Cell Phone Tracking Technology Used For Drone Strikes

Via DSWright of FDL, we have Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald:

...

According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

...

This is bad enough in itself... people use other people's cell phones all the time... but think about it: As various American police departments and other law enforcement agencies deploy drones within the United States, do you doubt for a moment that they will ultimately apply the same approach? Somewhere, the shade of J. Edgar Hoover is smiling his twisted smile...

'Angry Birds', Insufficiently Angry People

DSWright of FDL tells us how NSA uses the low security of games such as Angry Birds on cell phones to accumulate information about their users... probably mostly children. If you're worried about whether your neighbor's five-year-old is secretly an al Qaeda terrorist, relax... the NSA has the kid covered. If you think worrying about five-year-olds perpetrating terrorist acts is fucking nuts, you may have reservations about the NSA's "gather info, all of it, on everyone, all the time" attitude.

Enforce The Fourth Amendment Through NSA's Power, Water Supplies?

Norman Soloman at FDL says quite a few states are contemplating just that:

People Power!

...

Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s secretive outposts.

Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new bill in the legislature — the Fourth Amendment Protection Act — is a statutory nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the south-central part of the state.

The bill throws down a challenge to the NSA, seeking to block all state support for NSA activities violating the Fourth Amendment. For instance, that could mean a cutoff of electricity or water or other state-government services to the NSA site. And the measure also provides for withholding other forms of support, such as research and partnerships with state universities.

...

Ah, the good folks of the state of Washington; more power to them!

Congress will doubtless put an end to such bills, but they are a good way to send a defiant message: Americans really, really don't want their own government to spy on them, in bulk, without a warrant. And perhaps it is also a reminder to the NSA that their operation is more fragile than they may realize.

Marcy Wheeler Offers More Analysis Of The PCLOB Report

Here. emptywheel's assessment begins thus:

PCLOB tells us that the FISA Court approved a new automated query system (versions appear to have been in development for years, and it replaced the automated alert system from 2009) in late 2012 that permitted all the 3-degree contact chains off all RAS-approved identifiers to be dumped into the corporate store at once where they can be combined with data collected under other authorities (presumably including both EO 12333 and FAA) for further analysis.

[extended quote from the PCLOB report; please read at emptywheel's site at the link above]

...

On December 27, 2012, Jeff Merkley gave a speech in support of his amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would push to make FISC decisions public. It referenced both the backdoor loophole (which John Bates extended to NSA and CIA in 2011, was implemented in 2012, and affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2012) and the language underlying the phone dragnet. Merkley suggested the government might use these secret interpretations to conduct wide open spying on Americans.

[another extended quote from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR).]

...

The point, in brief, is that we are being forced to live under a secret law, and that secret law may be in direct conflict with our constitutional rights in the powers it secretly grants to the intelligence agencies. Please note how Sen. Merkley is compelled to tiptoe around the whole issue by stating things as conditionals because he is probably prohibited from stating them outright in a public forum.

Sen. Jeff Merkley

This is not the America I grew up in. That America at least once rejected firmly the secret spying on American citizens undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for purposes that were never freely debated by Congress and authorized by the President, purposes whose constitutionality was highly questionable at best. Nearly five decades later, here we are again: different intelligence agency; vastly advanced technology... but the same old bullshit subverting the same rights and liberties of the American people. What is it going to take to put a stop to the American surveillance state? Will I... will any of us... live to see the day it is shut down for good?

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: To the best of my knowledge, I am no relation to Judge John Deacon Bates, or indeed to any other George W. Bush appointee.

PCLOB Report: NSA Actions Not In Compliance With US Law, May Be Unconstitutional

I didn't know President Obama had created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) as an alleged watchdog over the intrinsic conflicts between the surveillance state (once primarily the FBI; now mainly the NSA) and our constitutionally protected civil liberties (including, at least implicitly, privacy) embodied, among other places, in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, until today, when PCLOB released a report (.pdf, 238pp). I say "alleged" because the Board voted 3-2 to release today's report along what can only reasonably be called partisan lines: the two NO votes were by former members of the Bush 43 Justice Department, which never met a civil liberty it didn't dislike.

Fortunately for my tired eyes, Bryan of Why Now? has collected, in one post, links to a number of important sources analyzing the report, and I am going to send you to him forthwith. Oh, maybe I'll suggest an order to read the posts and articles Bryan links: BBC, Lambert, Charlie Pierce, and last of all, emptywheel. It is rare indeed that I place emptywheel's material last, but it is a detailed indexed annotation of the report, and unless you read the report itself, you will have more context for EW's annotations if you read the other posts and articles first.

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CORRECTION: the PCLOB was created by statute, 42 U.S.C. § 2000ee(c)(1).

Obama's Speech: The Oh-Dash-It-All Of Hope

Bryan points us to five analyses of the President's speech on "reforms" of US intelligence practices. All are worth your time, but if you have time to read just one, read emptywheel's interleaved annotation of the text of the speech itself.

The short version: any hope that Mr. Obama would make substantive changes to NSA practices rather than merely spouting platitudes using all the right words amounts to... Zero. Ain't gonna happen. "Trust me," says Mr. Obama... who then gives us every reason not to do so.

I may have more to say, on this or on other issues. Or I may just hang it up. Now might be a good time to subscribe to my feed; I certainly don't feel like posting daily in the next few days.

Senator Sanders To NSA: Are You The New Hoover FBI?

Sen. Bernie Sanders

That's not how Sanders phrased it. But that is the essence of the question: Is the NSA spying on everyone including Congress and maybe even the President, and is it using the resulting information to extend its own power? That was, after all, the core behavior of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI; are we witnessing a resurrection of Hoover and his nefarious practices?

Yes, says DSWright at FDL — Not only is Sanders asking the right question, but all indications are that the answer is in the affirmative. Quoting from the WaPo's blog The Switch,

"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other elected officials?"

That's the question Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put to the National Security Agency's chief in a bluntly worded letter Friday. It seems, however, that the agency cannot categorically say no.

...

When asked by The Washington Post, an NSA spokesman said that the agency's privacy safeguards are effective at covering all Americans.

"Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons," the spokesman said. ...

...

In other words... none at all. The NSA is, de facto, Hoover's FBI, writ large; the zombie walks again. And what the NSA does is what Hoover would have done if he had had the technology available to him.

Afterthought: the comment thread on DSWright's post is highly critical of Sanders for asking a stupid question. But the quality of the question was never the point. Of course the question virtually answers itself. But why hasn't Congress used its considerable authority to put a stop to NSA's practices? It's easy to see why the President doesn't halt them; hell, he's likely using the results for his own purposes. But it's more difficult for me to see why Congress is not making a serious attempt to stop NSA's effectively universal warrantless spying. Blanket privacy violations (so to speak) have no legitimate value in the pursuit of good governance. Why not restore the Fourth Amendment to its rightful place protecting Americans, both in and out of Congress?

Federal Judge Rules Nothing Can Possibly Challenge PATRIOT Act Section 215 — UPDATED 2x

Kevin Gosztola of FDL:

Judge Defends Government Secrecy & Dismisses ACLU Lawsuit Challenging NSA Surveillance Program

... Friday December 27, 2013

A federal judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of Americans’ phone records is “lawful” and not unconstitutional.

The ruling comes just over a week after another federal judge ruled in a similar lawsuit that the surveillance program violates Americans’ privacy rights and James Madison, one of America’s founding fathers, would be “aghast” if he was alive to see this program.

Judge William H. Pauley, appointed by President Bill Clinton, did find that the ACLU had standing. The ACLU had not had been granted standing in its case against dragnet warrantless NSA surveillance before the Supreme Court and the lawsuit was dismissed. However, Pauley found that Congress had precluded challenges to the provision of the PATRIOT Act known as section 215, which the government has claimed grants the power to indiscriminately collect Americans’ phone records from telecommunications companies. He also did not find the constitutional claims argued by the ACLU had any merit.

“Allowing any challenge to a section 215 order by anyone other than a recipient would undermine the government’s vital interest in keeping the details of its metadata collection program secret,” he wrote in his decision. “It would also—because of the scope of the program—allow virtually any telephone subscriber to challenge a section 215 order.” Congress “intended to preclude statutory causes of action.”

...

[Bolds mine. - SB]

So a federal judge, a Bill Clinton appointee, has ruled that God can make a stone so heavy S/He cannot lift it Congress can pass a law whose constitutionality cannot be challenged by other branches of government through ordinary judicial processes.

This cannot end well. This cannot end with the survival, intact, of the Constitution of the United States of America.

---

UPDATE: patrick devlin at FDL offers thoughts worthy of our attention, notwithstanding a few punctuation and syntax problems:

... a federal judge (appointed by Democratic president Bill Clinton), has established as federal case law that citizens cannot have privacy in their associations and communications under American law and have no right to challenge what the US government has acknowledged is complete and continuous spying within the US court system.

Furthermore, the judge declared that the personal communications of Americans and the citizens of other countries, even as these communications are the physical expressions that reveal the personal cogitative energies carried out by individual humans – the thoughts that are our own and that we understand to be ‘self-expressions’, are in fact not “owned” by us (the expressing individuals) but, are rather the personal possessions of the data service and communications businesses upon whose equipment we hire to deliver our personal ideas and expressions through. As in: the above 2 sentences are the personal possession of the dizzying array of owners, renters, users, firewall builders, server operators and data transmitting and information storing entities who may desire to lay claim to the above two comma laden attempts at cogitation&communication (& this one, too).

...

As inheritors of the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution, we can rest easy because all of this personal rights subversion and annihilation is being carried out as a “counter punch” [ed. note: the judge's words, not devlin's] by our protecting homeland security operatives against the “al-Qaeda’s terror network,” ...

Further, and most importantly as it coagulates our proctors’ in big business, our elected leaders and now the court system, vision of a new American philosophy of freedom, we must understand and accept the notion that;

Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law…the success of one helps protect the other. Like the 9/11 Commission observed: The choice between liberty and security is a false one, as nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil.

One may ask if Pauley’s ruling is not itself the creation of case law that pours poison on the soil of American democracy and its citizens’ rights in an effort to render that fertile ground permanently barren; ...

...

Yes, it's a "counter punch," all right...

... though a head might be a better emblem than a fist.

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UPDATE: emptywheel is also worth reading on the subject.