Dark Days For Democracy: ‘Leaked TISA Docs Expose Corporate Plan For Reshaping Global Economy’

Proposed TISA nations
(credit: wikipedia.org)

WTF is ‘TISA’? Via ctuttle at FDL, I learned only a couple of days ago about the Trade in Services Agreement, revealed in yet another release by WikiLeaks, and in turn explained in some detail by Sarah Lazare, staff writer at Common Dreams. There's no really short answer to the question, but one can simplify to this: "Leaked Docs reveal that little-known corporate treaty poised to privatize and deregulate public services across globe." Shades of the conspiracy theories floating around in my young adult years! Here's a rather extended excerpt from Lazare's article; it's enough to make the Trans‑Pacific Partnership sound downright benign by comparison:

An enormous corporate-friendly treaty that many people haven't heard of was thrust into the public limelight Wednesday when famed publisher of government and corporate secrets, WikiLeaks, released 17 documents from closed-door negotiations between countries that together comprise two-thirds of the word's economy.

Analysts warn that preliminary review shows that the pact, known as the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), is aimed at further privatizing and deregulating vital services, from transportation to healthcare, with a potentially devastating impact for people of the countries involved in the deal, and the world more broadly.

"This TISA text again favors privatization over public services, limits governmental action on issues ranging from safety to the environment using trade as a smokescreen to limit citizen rights," said Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, in a statement released Wednesday.

Under secret negotiation by 50 countries for roughly two years, the pact includes the United States, European Union, and 23 other countries—including Israel, Turkey, and Colombia. Notably, the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are excluded from the talks.

Along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, which are also currently being negotiated, TISA is part of what WikiLeaks calls the "T-treaty trinity." Like the TTP and TTIP, it would fall "under consideration for collective 'Fast-Track' authority in Congress this month," WikiLeaks noted in a statement issued Wednesday.

However, TISA stands out from this trio as being the most secretive and least understood of all, with its negotiating sessions not even announced to the public.

...

And to think we used to fear the Trilateral Commission! And where are the black helicopters? But no, apparently this is new to all of us whose nerves are put on edge by such things, and the people involved could not be described as friendly to genuine democracy. But hey, as far as I can tell, only a lot of old geezers (using the term in a gender-neutral sense) and a few college students are actually friendly to democracy these days...

Please help me out: after you read Lazare's article, keep your eyes open for more details from other sources. Thank you!

2nd Circuit In ACLU v. Clapper: NSA Went Far Beyond Congressional Intent In Applying PATRIOT Sec. 215

Many of us have said this all along, and now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has confirmed it: what the NSA has done in accumulating telephone records purportedly under the PATRIOT Act Sec. 215 went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed that law. As Andrew Crocker at Electronic Frontier Foundation (via Informed Comment) said,

...

... The court completely rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215 that has served as the basis for the telephone records collection program. ...

...

I personally regard all secret law and secret interpretation as invalid, if for no other reason than that it is not possible to comply with a law or interpretation to which one does not know the text.

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AFTERTHOUGHT: please read Crocker's article in detail. This is a stronger decision than I thought at first. One can only hope it survives the Supreme Court in that Court's current partisan configuration.

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] 

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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...

Pure Speculation — Come On, Join In!

I just ran across this article on FDL:

NSA Successfully Figured Out How to Tap Into VISA’s ‘Complex Transaction Network’
By: Kevin Gosztola Sunday September 15, 2013 12:12 pm

While The Guardian has published the most scoops from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, has posted its share of revelations from documents Snowden took with him from the NSA. The latest story shows the NSA managed to figure out how to infiltrate and search records of international VISA credit card customers.

...

This is just one of who knows how many similar incidents (hundreds? thousands?) perpetrated by the NSA. In each case, there appears to have been effectively no supervision by any of the three branches of the American government, no attempt to align the results with the official policy goals established by the three branches, no warrants authorizing the actions, no attempt even to inform relevant congressional committees (let alone the public)... in other words, in these actions, the NSA seems to have acted as a fourth, wholly independent branch of government.

What if it actually is? Is there any precedent for a government agency secretly undertaking to act, unauthorized and unsupervised, on behalf of... or in place of... the duly constituted government?

How about Hoover's FBI?

Your speculations welcome.

Newly Declassified: FISA Court Ruled NSA Domestic Spying Program Unconstitutional

Via FDL's DSWright, from the WaPo:

NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ e-mails before court ordered it to revise its tactics
By Ellen Nakashima, Published: August 21 [Washington Post]

For several years, the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.

In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.

“For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.

...

[Note: to the best of my knowledge, Judge Bates is not related to me. - SB]

Please look at your calendar and note the difference between today's date and the date of the secret opinion. The FISA court has known about the NSA's surveillance of Americans... and known that it was probably a criminal violation... for nearly two years. Yet the court released no public statement about that probable criminality, and the spying went on. And President Obama, as recently as two days ago, in remarks to comedian Jay Leno, continues to deny that there is, in fact, spying on Americans.

What is wrong with this picture?

Quoth McRaven: 'Nevermore!' - Top Special Ops Commander Orders Bin Laden Raid Files Sealed In CIA

Richard Lardner at TPM:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act.

An acknowledgement by Adm. William McRaven of his actions was quietly removed from the final version of an inspector general’s report published weeks ago. ...

...

(As always with AP material, please read it on the original site.)

The fact that the Obama administration is attempting to run the whole bloody government in secret is hardly news, but it is still regrettable that they are not even willing to conceal their secrecy. I do not know if history will look kindly on their attempts to hide everything they do, but it is certain that historians won't.

OK, I'll be honest. I just wanted an opportunity to use that post title...

A [Redacted] Day For The ACLU

Glenn Greenwald:

The ACLU submitted a FOIA request to obtain the Obama administration's policy on intercepting text messages sent to and from cell phones. This is the document they received - here [.pdf] - from the Most Transparent Administration Ever™. It's hard to believe that the DOJ isn't mischievously cackling at their own brazenly displayed contempt as they do these things.

For those of you reading on the few remaining mobile devices on which .pdf readers may not be universally available, take it from me: all 15 pages of the requested document are wholly redacted. Yep. Fifteen solid black pages, thanks to your sadly misnamed "Justice" department.

I do not believe this response complies with the spirit of the FOIA. But that seems to be the nature of American government these days: the executive branch does whatever it damned well pleases, and the rest of us suck on it and "like" it.

As you contemplate this response, remember not to text your deepest secrets even to your life partner. Good grief... has it come to this, that the increasingly fascist regime feels it necessary to capture... text messages? OMG I hp thy njoy rdng abbrs...

Remind me: why did I ever vote for this prez?

‘Once... I Had A Secret Law,’ Part 148257

Obama has issued a secret directive regarding cyber security which may, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), enable "military deployment within the United States." EPIC has filed a FOIA request for the text of the heretofore secret law. Here's Stephen C. Webster at Raw Story:

...

Bill of Rights

The FOIA was filed in response to an article that appeared in The Washington Post this week, claiming that Obama issued a secret directive shortly before the elections that empowers the military to “vet any operations outside government and defense networks” for cyber security purposes.

However, because the exact text of the directive remains a secret, nobody can really say exactly what it does. That was somewhat disconcerting to American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Michelle Richardson, who told Raw Story on Wednesday that without the text, “it’s hard to see what they mean.”

In their FOIA, EPIC attorneys Amie Stepanovich and Ginger McCall go even further, arguing that the directive is tantamount to the president issuing a “secret law” that may enable “military deployment within the United States” in order to vet network security at companies like AT&T, Facebook, Google and others. And indeed, the Post‘s article seems to substantiate that concern, explaining that the order will help “finalize new rules of engagement that would guide commanders when and how the military can go outside government networks to prevent a cyberattack that could cause significant destruction or casualties.”

But that’s literally all anyone outside of the chain of command knows about this order, McCall told Raw Story Thursday afternoon. “We don’t know what’s in this policy directive and we feel the American public has the right to know.”

...

Indeed we do. "AT&T, Facebook, [and] Google" are companies with substantial involvement in civilian communications of several types. Yet the NSA is first and foremost a military agency. While it is difficult from the wiki to ferret out all the interrelationships among intelligence-related agencies, there is a clear, unambiguous statement that "[b]y law, NSA's intelligence gathering is limited to foreign communications, although domestic incidents such as the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy have occurred." So which is this secret law: military or civilian? If it is civilian, why is it secret?

One of the aspects of the "war on terror[ism]" that most upsets me is the apparent use of the "war," which has no end and no limits to its scope, as a means to involve our most powerful, capable government intelligence-gathering agencies in the process of spying on American civilians... a practice hard to justify in any case and surely unconstitutional.

I don't want to know military secrets; they are for the most part none of my affair. But I damned surely want to know when my "person[], house[], papers and effects" (and implicitly, emails including encrypted business emails, and other electronic communications) are being spied upon without benefit of a warrant. The Fourth Amendment, at least in theory, guarantees us all no less than the security of those things. I want my security, or I want to know a damned good reason why I don't have it.

Correction (?): apparently I mistakenly assumed the NSA was involved. Well, OK, it was to have been, but apparently, facing considerable pushback, Obama has moved the most draconian information-sharing parts of the mystery program under the control of the DHS, which is a civilian agency. See this Raw Story article.