"...only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers" - Jane Mayer | New Yorker

Most everyone has heard about Jane Mayer's epic New Yorker article about the NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, who is being prosecuted as an "enemy of the state" via The Espionage Act for the "crime" of publicizing a $1.2 Billion-dollar disaster that has resulted in the permanent loss of privacy of every American who uses any electronic communication device. What's troubling is that no one seems to care.

Only 10 years ago, government agents had to obtain a warrant before mucking around in our personal data; bills, phone calls, email, GPS locations, etc. Remember the outrage at Total Information Awareness -- the DARPA surveillance system proposed by John Poindexter, Iran-Contra CONVICT? Well, this is worse. Much worse. And it's all the more insidious b/c we no longer have a Reagan-era CRIMINAL at the helm. Our own democratic administration now owns this Orwellian nightmare.


from the article “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” Jack Balkin, law professor at Yale, asserts that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation.

Only a decade ago it was considered a GRAVE breach of public trust to gather information on people who weren't accused of a crime. Now, every person in the United States is tracked and according to this article, the NSA "made a CORPORATE DECISION" to use a system that not only revealed the identities of everyone they were tracking, it allows for the NSA to SELECTIVELY track people based on their profile...be it political, religious or even taste in music.

If Obama would like a respite from criticism, he'd be well advised to take measures that lead to praise rather than horror. If this program doesn't horrify you, you're not paying attention. And, Obama would gain beau coup praise for eliminating it and making sure that whistleblowers like Thomas Drake are protected from political prosecution. We either put an end to the "bipartisan normalization" of total surveillance, or we make peace with the reality that the American Legacy will be nothing less than an Orwellian dystopia.

Here's just a smidge of the article -- you owe it yourself to read the whole damn thing -- Brook


Thomas Drake at home

THE SECRET SHARER - Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.

by Jane Mayer

(big snip)

The Espionage Act has rarely been used to prosecute leakers and whistle-blowers. Drake’s case is only the fourth in which the act has been used to indict someone for mishandling classified material. “It was meant to deal with classic espionage, not publication,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University who is an expert on the statute, says.

The first attempt to apply the law to leakers was the aborted prosecution, in 1973, of Daniel Ellsberg, a researcher at the RAND Corporation who was charged with disclosing the Pentagon Papers—a damning secret history of the Vietnam War. But the case was dropped, owing, in large part, to prosecutorial misconduct. The second such effort was the case of Samuel L. Morison, a naval intelligence officer who, in 1985, was convicted for providing U.S. photographs of a Soviet ship to Jane’s Defence Weekly. Morison was later pardoned by Bill Clinton. The third case was the prosecution, in 2005, of a Defense Department official, Lawrence Franklin, and two lobbyists for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and the case against the lobbyists collapsed after the presiding judge insisted that prosecutors establish criminal intent. Unable to prove this, the Justice Department abandoned the case, amid criticism that the government had overreached.

Few people are more disturbed about Drake’s prosecution than the others who spoke out against the N.S.A. surveillance program. In 2008, Thomas Tamm, a Justice Department lawyer, revealed that he was one of the people who leaked to the Times. He says of Obama, “It’s so disappointing from someone who was a constitutional-law professor, and who made all those campaign promises.” ...Tamm questions why the Drake case is proceeding, given that Drake never revealed anything as sensitive as what appeared in the Times. “The program he talked to the Baltimore Sun about was a failure and wasted billions of dollars,” Tamm says. “It’s embarrassing to the N.S.A., but it’s not giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1MqUGbuvF

Extremely important. Thank you for this!

Jane Mayer is a treasure.

I posted it yesterday but it didn't stay up very long.

Glad it's up again. :hi:

:D

Well, we have to make the world safe for fascism.

i started it at lunch day before yesterday and got totally sucked in.

but my post was deleted, probly because I contrasted Candidate Obama's words on whistle blowers to President Obama's actions towards whistle blowers. Or maybe because I painted it as just the latest installment in Obama's betrayal of anything progressive.

At any rate, thank you for getting it in here. The article needs to be read by every American, not just for the material on Drake but for the material on Binney as well.

thanks for sharing that -- i've been too busy to pay attention to DU beyond the headlines.

Obama said and what Obama does --

However, Pelosi made it clear when she said:

"Obama was for a lot of things when he was campaigning which he is no longer for!"

Thanks to you both -- this is a subject which needs much more attention!!


Americans need to understand that this is not about "terrarists" -- it's about

controlling the population! Wiretapping and torture are not tools for a democracy --

they are the tools of dictatorships!


:)

they're Obama-obsessed, as if he's going to drive voters to the polls. that might not materialize...i'm not saying it won't, but it's not set in stone, and the people i've been observing can't imagine it any other way. it's as if 2010 didn't happen.

Though Obama's comical reaction was to suggest that he was ready to mvoe

even further to the right!


Personally, I think we should draft Sen. Bernie Sanders for president -- he can run

on a Dem ticket --

And, how about Tom Hayden for VP - ?

Two strong anti-war candidates --

There are tons of democrats outside the party who are not pre-owned and pre-bribed

by elites/corporations --


They've almost succeeded in knocking the legs out from under democracy -- the New Deal --

and structures of government which provide for citizens being heard --

Obama has two new trade agreements -- Korea and Colombia -- little discussed here.

And they'll be sucking yet more jobs out of US!

Any differences between the parties are fading fast!!


:hi:

They've also been going after medical marijuana dispensaries.

We medicinal or recreational users of Cannabis are considered 4/5ths human! Its only when you turn into a closed minded asshat that you become a real person!:smoke:

btw, i'm totally using that from now on...the asshat = hunan thing! :evilgrin:
on edit... not hunan...that's dinner, i meant human.

Satirical and to the point.

"Looking forward."

Erm.

Pepsi or Coke --

or are both bad for you?

But everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey.

:evilgrin:

:eyes:

n/t.

bananas are just the tip of the iceburg here. I don't want to reveal too much, but let's just say that once incident involved the monkey, liederhosen, and a garden hose. I'll let you connect the dots.

n/t.

than pathetic puppet-boy bush. At some point the middle class and the working class will figure it out. Until then, we can't do much.

...there is no way this cabal could pull off all of their unconstitutional crap without help from
both sides of the aisle. They are ALL in on it. The differences between the parties are a joke
now. The social issues that inflame us and get us fighting--are trodded out when they need us
to believe that we have a two-party system. As we scream on messageboards and on blogs about
the abortion issue--they've steal our entire democracy and turn our nation into their big
Fascist playground. Oh, how they must laugh their asses off at how ridiculous and clueless
we all are.

There is no two-party system. There is one powerful element, made up of neocon Democrats and
Republicans--who work in tandem with corporations and other power brokers. They've created
a perversion of democracy that is veiled by a thin veneer that looks like a democracy if you're
easily fooled.

We hear a handful of politicians decrying all of this Fascist bullshit. However, these are not
powerful politicians who can affect change. They're not in the inner circle. And what do the
neocons care if Dennis Kucinich makes a firey speech on the House floor every four months or so?
They probably figure that it gives the sheep some kind of hope. False hope, for sure.

There's no way in hell our democracy can erode the way it is--without cooperation from both sides.

What powerful voices do we hear decrying the spying, the torture, the fact that any of us
can be labeled an "enemy combatant" and detained indefinitely without a trial? Where's
the outrage and real change regarding the corporations that totally control our government?
The banks cratered our economy, BP destroyed the Gulf and now the energy companies will
again get their way and keep us in the dark regarding Fukushima. The Fascism just keeps
rolling on...with no one really standing up.

and this is why: we're tired of being played. we're tired of being used. and we're tired of nothing ever being done to turn back the fascist tide.

people aren't as stupid as they think we are -- there actually IS A POINT where we decide it's not worth our time to get emotionally involved in abortion/environment/justice issues b/c it's not worth it when no one has our back.

I used to be an engaged activist until recently when Obama caved on ending the tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and allowed whistleblower aides to be hunted down openly as in the case of Assange and others. Now I have given up on the idea of still contributing my small share in hopes of sparing hard-working Americans the tidal waves of bad Karma that are inevitably coming to your shores.

it's not too late, but i fear it is. It's been a good ride.

The sad thing is that I see us old people out there on the front lines, but this is for the young people.

(as if i'm a youngster! ha!) after 2008, the local dem party board filled with college students hot from the presidential election...and the organization (from what I can see) is pretty much in chaos right now. the budget is a wreck, committee chairs are empty, fundraising is in shambles...and thank god for the older folks capable of speaking up who've run things in the past. the last meeting was painful. the chair yelled at the members and guests, and her strategy for winning the next election was to start doing Obama 2008-style phone trees for the first 15 minutes of every meeting going forward. just doesn't seem like a plan to most people...b/c it isn't. and there's complete denial about how effective obama is going to be in GOTV. also, complete denial about the new voting law. it's not good, and the only way i see out of it is to get people with experience back in the driver's seat.

Nader was right.It makes no difference who we vote for.

It may be a while...

As far as your signature line, Jack Nicklaus said it: "you cant handle the truth". I think that applys for most Americans. They carefully choose what they intake to avoid "the truth".

I agree with you except that it was the actor Jack Nicholson, the actor, who said that in A Few Good Men, not Jack Nicklaus, the golfer. Well maybe he said it too while hitting a hole-in-one in the PGA. ;)

not accurate.

No Prosecution Seen for Official in N.S.A. Leak

Also, Stopfraud.gov

News for May, 2011

Co-Owner of North Carolina Company Arrested for Defrauding Commodities Trading Investors of More Than $3.2 Million
May 18, 2011 | External Link

Three Arraigned Today in Sacramento Area Mortgage Fraud Scheme Involving Eight Defendants
May 17, 2011 | External Link

Former Miami Beach, Florida, Day Trader Pleads Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to Insider Trading Charges
May 16, 2011 | External Link

Connecticut Man Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison for Operating $100 Million Ponzi Scheme
May 16, 2011 | External Link

Seven Indivduals Indicted for Fraud Scheme Tied to One of the Largest Credit Union Collapses in History
May 13, 2011 | External Link

Former Financial Advisor Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Investors of at Least $2 Million
May 13, 2011 | External Link

Former TSMC Company Account Manager Pleads Guilty in New York Federal Court to Conspiring to Engage in Insider Trading
May 11, 2011 | External Link

Hedge Fund Billionaire Raj Rajaratnam Found Guilty in New York Federal Court of Insider Trading Charges
May 11, 2011 | External Link

Former CEO and Two Board Members of Publicly Traded Chinese Company Charged in Connection with $50 Million Scheme to Defraud SEC, Investors and Others
May 10, 2011 | External Link

Chico Couple Plead Guilty to Mortgage Fraud Charges
May 05, 2011 | External Link

Justice Department Reaches Settlement with Citizens Republic Bancorp Inc. and Citizens Bank Regarding Alleged Lending Discrimination in Detroit
May 05, 2011 | External Link

UBS AG Admits to Anticompetitive Conduct by Former Employees in the Municipal Bond Investments Market and Agrees to Pay $160 Million to Federal and State Agencies
May 04, 2011 | External Link

Investor Sentenced to 27 Months for Role in $4 Million Mortgage Fraud Scheme in Arizona
May 03, 2011 | External Link

United States Sues Deutsche Bank and Subsidiary MortgageIT for Years of Reckless Lending Practices
May 03, 2011 | External Link

Stock Promoters Indicted for Conspiracy in Stock Manipulation Scheme
May 02, 2011 | External Link

Last year the Obama administration arrested hundreds of thousands of people for using Cannabis! So they catch a couple dozen crooks and its like Obama walks on water and can do no wrong.:smoke:

Are you objecting to the subject line of the OP? The person quoted in that line is Tamm, who leaked stuff to the NYTimes. He was referring to those involved with warrantless surveillance. He said, “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.” You say that this is inaccurate and then link to (1) an article pointing out that Tamm himself was not prosecuted (who said that all whistleblowers had been prosecuted?), and (2) a list of prosecutions that have nothing to do with NSA surveiilance. WTF?

The title of the OP asserts that no one has faced federal prosecution outside of whistleblowers. As this link shows http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/StatisticalTablesForTheFederalJudiciary/2010/D03DJun10.pdf that is not true.

Like Manning, Drake is being prosecuted under the almost-never-used Espionage Act. Notably, we applied it to someone who sold the identities of U.S. agents to the Soviet Union.

Drake stands accused of having five pieces of paper, which may or may not be "classified," which are not bomb plans or the identities of agents, which he transmitted to no one, for no money.

His actual crime appears to have been relaying gargantuan NSA bureaucratic waste to a reporter. For this, armed agents break down doors and point guns to people's heads?

THIS is what the Constitution was supposed to prevent. We're not edging closer to a possible police state. It is here, now.

The only thing making it less evident is that it is not being applied to more people, more often.

That we know of.

Yet.

Unacceptable.

He supported the ThinThread system, which was eventually used by the Bush administration for its illegal, FISA-shredding surveillance and data-gathering operations. ThinThread's supporters, of course, claim that the original system had "privacy controls" built into it, but those controls were obviously pretty easy to disable given the fact that the NSA managed to retool the system and strip them out in a matter of months.

So for the folks who want to cast Drake as a champion of open government being savagely persecuted by a fascistic police state, just remember that he leaked to the newspapers because he wanted the government to wield a cost-effective and devastatingly efficient Big Brother data-gathering system, and he got disillusioned when the government instead adopted a bloated, overpriced, barely functional catastrophe.

With that said, the prosecution of Drake is a mistake, as he is a legitmate whistle-blower. Unfortunately, Bradley Manning's treasonous idiocy has created a climate that is not sympathetic to government leakers.

you're entitled to your opinion, but not your own set of facts. Drake was sigint and a patriot who wanted to fight bad guys. he did not set out to install TIA. he fought that.

altho, your narrative would likely be much more compelling if Drake were a Poindexter-type. good luck woth that.

And now I see you calling Drake a "patriot," so it's pretty clear that you aren't exactly sticking to the objective "facts." Moreover, I did not present a "narrative"; I simply reiterated facts. Drake supported the development of a vast, highly-efficient surveillance and data-mining system that was eventually adapted/perverted by Bush-Cheney to shred the FISA laws. He claims he supported the original version in part because it paid greater respect to privacy laws and the Constitution than did Trailblazer, and he may be telling the truth, but that's sort of like saying he supported building nuclear weapons provided they were equipped with guidance systems that could only select military targets. In the end, he was supporting something that had the potential to be horrifically abused, and he was relying on the government not to disable its safeguards and abuse it.

I'm not casting Drake as anything more than an ordinary NSA apparatchik. I oppose his prosecution as I think he is a legitmate whistle-blower whose actions were justified. But I also think that portraying him as some kind of persecuted, open-government, anti-surveillance activist waging a heroic twilight struggle against a 1984 police state is absurd.

I think your need to smear him sadly (but hilariously) betrays your bias. This is where ideology becomes idiocy. There's more to political life than whether or not your team is ahead in the polls. There's right and wrong. There's legacy. There's the world that you're creating.

You're deploying an argument against Drake that's as nasty as saying a woman deserved to be raped b/c she was wearing red lipstick. To wit -- as a military professional he is, by definition, an evil-doer. It seems absurd to have to remind ANYONE of this, much less someone on DU, but the vast majority of people in the military sincerely want to do only that which is best for the country, and as a sigint officer, his duty was to collect the intelligence that could prevent another attack on the US. He's being persecuted for fighting to protect US citizens from losing their freedom and privacy. So, yeah, he's a patriot -- much more so than the keyboard commandos you're likely to rub semaphores with on the internet.

Do you really expect that a non-military person would ever be in the position to act in our interest regarding such matters? Is the vegan cash register dude at Whole Foods going to? No, b/c he doesn't have access. The fact that he's military does not make him LESS heroic in my book. It makes him more heroic, b/c it's all the more difficult for an insider to eschew their culture. So yeah, I salute him. Fuck yeah.

Just a couple of points off the top of my head.

1) Drake was not in the military while he was at the NSA. He left the Air Force over twenty years ago. He wasn't a military professional; he was a civilian. Hence most of your previous post collapses.

2) Drake is rather up front about the fact that his opposition to Trailblazer had as much to do with bureaucratic concerns as it did with his concern for the Constitution. He thought Trailblazer was a bloated, wildly expensive failure.

3) Trailblazer (and thus the Bush illegal spying program) used the same technology that Drake supported and defended. He backed the idea of the government employing a colossal, automated surveillance system that would spy on hundreds of millions of people across the globe, provided it had some easily-removable privacy safeguards in place.

4) Comparing an NSA spook who championed a massive government surveillance system to a woman who has been raped is patently offensive.

should not be prosecuted. He faces a maximum sentence of 35 years if he is found guilty.

You don't find that patently offensive? Oh wait, I forgot, the prosecution is being brought by William Welch . . . in the Obama Justice Department.

Welch is patently offensive and so are your pathetic and puerile attempts to minimize the seriousness of this matter.

there's few things more offensive than "it's OK when our people do it." putting the D-with a circle-around-it logo on this makes it worse, not better.

I guess that's not surprising since you wrote an entire post based on the manifest falsehood that Drake was a military officer while he was at NSA. I think it's fairly obvious at this point that you either have no idea what you're talking about, or you're simply willing to invent facts for your cause.

you're selling.

see if you can't do that. remember -- be clear and concise and try not to use too many 4-letter words.

good luck! :)

Drake is not some anti-government surveillance activist being persecuted by a police state. He was a career NSA officer who was a big supporter of government surveillance. He leaked to the newspapers because be believed the Trailblazer project was a bureaucratic boondoggle that was wasting taxpayer dollars and not properly respecting FISA laws. He did NOT leak because he wanted to dismantle the NSA's surveillance capabilities; he leaked because he wanted more efficient surveillance with some (apparently easily-removable) privacy safeguards.

In short: he is a legitimate whistle-blower calling attention to government waste and fraud, but he is not a symbol of anti-Big Brother surveillance activism.

bone up on your reading comprehension -- it might save you some trouble.

Really? That's the argument you want to press? Because offensive metaphors like that, coupled with attacking me personally, aren't going to engender a whole lot of sympathy for your cause.

But even if true, it in no way diminishes what I said. Drake may be a lot of things, but he is most certainly not the poster boy for anti-government surveillance.

I'm sure he is a jerk just like everyone else. He's being revered only because he told the truth.

Anyone who does any whistle blowing on the NSA can expect BIG trouble. I'm not sure how he got that job, being the whistle blower type, unless he just does not fear prison.

No one is perfect. I am actually quite sympathetic to Drake, but my sympathy is not based on the false notion that he is some kind of anti-Big Brother hero. I see him as an NSA careerist who was legitimately concerned that tax money was being wasted on a boondoggle that he believed would ultimately hinder the NSA's ability to do its job, both because the Trailblazer system apparently didn't work particularly well, and because it didn't even pretend to observe privacy laws, a fact he knew would inevitably lead, sooner or later, to more public scrutiny of the agency.

As you say, anyone who messes with the NSA is in for big trouble, which is why he is being prosecuted. Unfortunately, I think he would have had a better chance of beating the charges and arousing public sympathy for his plight if the whole Manning/Wikileaks thing hadn't happened.

as worthless.

Not yet, any way.

It's not illegal to wear a KKK outfit and march through Compton or Harlem, alone and at night, either. But I'm not sure that I'd want to be the one doing it:think:

And an ad hominem against Drake, who he "supports" and what he "believes" is utterly irrelevant. He's not treasonous. Pure and simple.

I never accused Drake of being treasonous, and I never said anything about him supporting someone.

I did say, rather clearly, that Manning's treasonous idiocy has created a climate in which it will be very hard for any government leaker, even a legitimate one, to get sympathy or protection.

Tsk, tsk. Clearly you're looking for trouble.

Got it.

I say "they've completely lost their marbles." :)

a fool maybe, but not an idiot and certainly not a treasonous idiot. It is at least a violation of the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions to target civilians during war. The Pentagon routinely covers up that sort of thing unless it is exposed. Manning exposed it. He was obliged by his oath of allegiance to the Constitution to do what he did regarding the intentional killing of non-combatants. As a point of fact, that is indisputable. He also deserves a speedy trial, a Constitutional right he has already been denied. He also deserves protection against cruel and unusual punishment, which he has also been denied. This has become a much bigger issue than Bradley Manning's guilt or innocence.

Bookmarked.

Hey, babe.

How are you? Miss you - but figured you needed some time away at the spa. :D

Well worth the read

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

I'm willing to consider that charitable interpretation, but how long will it take for him to "notice" these insane abuses have continued (or accelerated) since he took office?

I am remembering Obama's brilliant and passionate speech on this very topic, the FISA bill when he was a candidate, only to turn around and vote for the bill that let the telecoms and the Bush gang off the hook.

The more I see of this president, the more I believe he has no convictions. Apparently once he figures out what is 'acceptable' to the PTB, he will flip flop on anything in order to please them.

I hope there will be will outrage over this. This man is a hero.

We prosecute heroes, and elevate scoundrels now.

:kick:

I don't usually take the time to read such long articles. Having read this article, it was worth the time, a rare moment when the curtain is pulled back a little on the state of our national surveillance apparatus. Thinking of the kinds of searches they could do with this data, multidimensional queries that can merge data that tracks activities across all aspects of our lives, not good. We don't want anyone to have this capability.

Also not good is Michael Hayden, and the White House that put him up to it.

"In the weeks after the attacks, rumors began circulating inside the N.S.A. that the agency, with the approval of the Bush White House, was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the 1978 law, known as FISA, that bars domestic surveillance without a warrant. Years later, the rumors were proved correct. In nearly total secrecy, and under pressure from the White House, Hayden sanctioned warrantless domestic surveillance."

...

"She asked Hayden why the N.S.A. had chosen not to include privacy protections for Americans. She says that he “kept not answering. Finally, he mumbled, and looked down, and said, ‘We didn’t need them. We had the power.’"

'we did it b/c we could," basically.

these quote from the article are what i found the most chilling in the whole damn thing.

to note that since the Nine Eleven attack, the Presidents of our nation are imperial powers.

Cross them and you might not live to tell about it.

The Obama administration should be ashamed.

Saw something on Tom Drake the other night on Amy Goodman, I think --

but we haven't paid attention to this story here at DU --

When I look at Drake's story, I see Obama imitating the runaway reactions

that Nixon had to the Pentagon Papers which moved him to put his "Plumbers"

in place -- and which eventually brought down his administration.


Americans have to begin to understand this isn't about "terrarists" -- it's about

controlling the nation -- and political opponents which most often now are the

population! Wiretapping and torture are a large part of that control as we have

seen in other dictatorships.


:)

...is the enemy of democracy.



"Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the
nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure
and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves.
They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the
corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its
rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the
safest depository of the ultimate powers of government"
-- Thomas Jefferson



"An informed citizenry is the only true repository of
the public will."
-- Thomas Jefferson


"Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't
exist without an informed public."
-- Bill Moyers


God forbid that the American People should find out what is being done in their name.

and, the younger people are, the less likely they are to get it.

Philip K Dick, I think, was a prophet.

Considering the campaign rhetoric and the actions of this administration, it's downright scary.

And now they want to rush through a renewal for the Patriot Act next week? It's time to stop this slow creep towards totalitarianism.

K&R

I am willing to overlook what it consider Obama's shortcomings in his policy of bipartisanship, but this is outrageous. These secret agencies are a necessity, however, it is glaringly obvious that they lack oversight. If the Obama administration pursues this then I will have to withdraw any support that I have for his reelection. This is far too serious an issue to overlooked. The very freedoms that our Republic are based on are in serious jeopardy. I will write to the White House expressing my condemnation.

and also that you have to start with condemning this. we have to register our outrage or else it's just going to get worse.

"Yeah, now, look - sure I mentioned "hope" but what I really meant was fear, despair and on going terror! If you people deserved different, you would be rich beyond compare, like my friends on Wall Street!"

wrt intimidation of dissent. But now it's even worse. The popular wisdom is Obama's a thoughtful intellectual, a constitutional scholar, doesn't come from privilege, it's 10 years post 9-11 and he's a Democrat - the anti-Bush - and yet here we are. The message is that these actions or abuses must be necessary in order to keep us safe. His justifications for these actions will be used as cover for abuses of liberty by future presidents.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55341.html


Any differences between the parties are hard to find -- and fading fast!!

feh.

They say they will do, while the Democrats pretend they will oppose the Republicans, and end up colluding.

but another Rec for this informative, although disturbing, article.

Why isn't anyone running against him? Because his NSA eavesdrops on all the potential contenders. We cannot claim to have a democracy or even a sham of a representative government when our government can eavesdrop on its critics.

This has to change.

Electronic surveillance is incompatible with freedom of speech and assembly and the right to self-government. We can have one or the other. We cannot have both.

I feel like the game is lost at this point.
welcome to "1984"

for the lies he tells the American people

each accusing the other of wanting Sarah Palin to be President.

Oh well.

this is the position that any right-thinking person would hold. it's not OK if we continue to wreck this country the way Bush did, because, my friend, one day the GOP will be back in power, and you should spend some time imagining what they'll be doing with this power -- they sure won't be letting go of it.

It predates *.
It predates Clinton.

It just wasn't publicly talked about. NSA's been gathering insane amounts of data under legal cover for a very, very, long time. The "whistleblowers" only came forward after doing it for years, and not getting lucrative side contracts that they wanted.

And no, this is a Bush-era data-mining program, unprecedented in scope and illegality.

Might want to read the actual article.

If you think this was an unprecedented Bush-era program, more power to you... I didn't even know Bush was President in 1997 when the Narus nodes were deployed, or back in the 60's when they were steaming open mail sent to other countries, or the 60's-80's when they started grabbing cell phone calls and tapping ocean wires to listen in on all international calls, and in the early 90's when they started pulling data off the internet by logging data center traffic and sniffing major exchanges.

Not only did I read the article, I've been reading up on the NSA for a long, long, time. The tech mentioned most in this particular article (ThinThread) is basically 90's era work, building on the existing stacks of data collection to sort and correlate it more efficiently. ThinThread and Trailblazer were competing for over what turned out to be more than 480 million dollars, so yes, there was a lot of money tied up in this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project

It's not all really about "a Bush-era data mining program", as this data's been collected and mined for a long, long, time (since the 50's). The challenge has always been to mine it more *efficiently*, and to do it in ways that effectively legally circumvented (while legally complying with) FISA laws. The Church committee created some minor roadbumps, but workarounds were rapidly developed.... and that was 1978.

Didn't see it. And the issue over data mining U.S. citizens by name,whether conceptually related to past NSA misdeeds or not, is still a Bush era issue, is still something Obama campaigned against, and is still a subject for whistleblowing, as the Bush administration's fury demonstrated when the press broke other stories on the subject.

Is it your position the Bush administration never advanced illegal domestic electronic surveillance? Just a lot of silly reporters fussing over nothing?

Fascinating.

I'm amused that many people seem to think "data mining US citizens by name" is new, or recent, but I was also amused by the sturm and drang that resulted from the Bush era "revelations"... I thought it was pretty much an open secret, and technologically illiterate reporters were just now figuring out how this all works.

Are you familiar with USSID 18? There's a *lot* of loopholes in there.
http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18.htm

Pay attention to the redacted parts. Oh, and FWIW, this version is a Clinton era document, and the protocols Clinton's NSA, bush's NSA, and Obama's NSA have operated under.

Oh, and The ACLU also sued the NSA over the bush policies (lost, "standing" issues). Lots of good legal info and arguments here:
http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/nsa/aclunsa70607opn.pdf

#2 -- that a whistleblower would be criminally prosecuted for embarrassing the government, should be chilling to anyone interested in Democracy.

#3 -- the Obama administration and Congress has just reauthorized the PATRIOT Act and

#4 -- EXPANDED the power to muck around in your internet browsing records, while

#5 -- the Obama Justice Dept is likely in violation of open-records laws for refusing to release their legal opinion that gives them the right to our internet browsing records.

So, not only is the Obama administration complicit in the continuation of the surveillance power grab of the Bush admin -- they're EXPANDING it while prosecuting people blowing the whistle on abuses.

1. The criminal prosecution is about classified information being kept as personal documents.
2. The "whistleblowing" is about favoring one program over another, both of which were sifting through vast amounts of data *without any warrants*.
3. There's some things in PATRIOT that should probably be permanent, some of the more disagreeable parts have been altered or removed.
4. They already had that power, arguably, there just wasn't as much detail in any law for or against it as there is now.
5. This one is new to me, or I don't understand what you're referencing. Do you mean that it's legal to search things, and browser history is one of those things?

end secrecy and this national security state!!

Yet those who shine light on corruption get the book thrown at them.

Why would this be?

Thank you for an excellent OP, thread and article, nashville_brook. All must-read.