White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CHARLIE SAVAGE and DAVID E. SANGER | New York Times | December 21, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.

In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in court.

But the government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency.

Read more

How George W Bush Failed the GOP

English: Official photograph portrait of former U.S. President George W. Bush. Português: Foto oficial de George W. Bush, presidente dos Estados Unidos da América. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rachel Maddow | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | December 12, 2013

fter a presidency, what comes next? Not just for the president but also for the members of the administration, the president’s allies in Congress, his or her political party?

In the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, no hearty saplings were ever able to take root in the shade of that big tree. No one expected Vice President Dick Cheney to ever be a contender for the presidency – part of his effectiveness was his willingness to say and do very unpopular things. When he snapped at ABC’s Martha Raddatz, “So?” as she questioned him about public disapproval of the Iraq war, he wrote the perfect epitaph for his vice presidency.

But by the time the Bush era was winding down, the whole administration, including the president, was stewed in terrible, Cheney-level disapproval ratings. And now, almost no one who played a significant role in that administration is anywhere to be found in electoral politics, beyond the tertiary orbits of Punch-and-Judy cable news and the remains of what used to be the conservative “think tank” circuit.

How the White House and the CIA Are Marketing a War in the YouTube Era

English: Dennis Kucinich Created by user and released into the public domain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dennis Kucinich | Reader Supported News | September 11, 2013

Governments have always used fear and manipulation of emotion to get the public to support wars. The Bush administration did it in 2002 in Iraq and it is happening again in Obama’s push for war in Syria.

In possibly the biggest development yet in the story, we learned this weekend that the CIA has now been enlisted to sell this new war with unproven evidence. On Saturday, U.S. intelligence officials claimed they “authenticated” 13 videos that show the horrific aftermath of a chemical attack in Syria in August. What exactly did they “authenticate”?

Why are these videos suddenly news when they have been publicly circulating the web for weeks? Here’s why: The videos are meant to market the war, not to “prove” who committed the atrocities. (CBS News and others have reported that the White House case for war has been described as “largely circumstantial.”)

Read more

Bush-Cheney Began Illegal NSA Spying Before 9/11

Ralph Lopez a| Digital Journal | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013

Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by Richard Nixon.   Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at a meeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001, he and other QWest officials declined to participate.  AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications records to an NSA database.

In 2007 the Denver Post reported:

“Nacchio suggested that the NSA sought phone, Internet and other customer records from Qwest in early 2001. When he refused to hand over the information, the agency retaliated by not granting lucrative contracts to the Denver-based company, he claimed.”

Other sources corroborate the former CEO’s allegations, which were made in the course of his legal defense against insider trading charges.  Both Slate.com and National Journal have published reports in which sources are quoted which support the former CEO’s claims.

Read more

James Comey’s Troubling Answers on Surveillance and Transparency

James Comey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

George Zornick | The Nation | July 11, 2013

If James Comey is confirmed to be the next director of the Federal Bureau of  Investigation, he will naturally find himself at the center of the rapidly  evolving debate over government surveillance.

The FBI is often the organization making applications to the Foreign  Intelligence Surveillance Court, which, as we’ve learned thanks to Glenn  Greenwald at The Guardian, is authorizing all sorts of broad, and  deeply troubling, surveillance. For instance, it was the FBI who made the now-infamous application to FISC mandating  that Verizon turn over all of its telephonic metadata to the National Security  Agency.

This means members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a serious obligation  to press Comey on this issue—not least because, despite his bold stance against  the very worst excesses of the Bush administration’s surveillance techniques, he still approved several other problematic  surveillance programs.

Read more

Bush Knew the Patriot Act Would be a Political Trap for All Future Politicians

Allen Clifton | Forward Progressives | June 17, 2013

When the Bush administration pushed for (and passed) the Patriot Act, they knew exactly what they were doing.  They seized on a time in our country where we were afraid, angry and distraught over what had happened on September 11, 2001.

It was the perfect time to pass something that on September 10, 2001 would have been opposed by the vast majority of Americans.

But even going beyond that, the Bush administration knew the Patriot Act was a political trap.  It’s truly a no-win situation for any president or majority in Congress that might want to repeal the whole thing.

Read more

Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

Dana Milbank | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | June 15, 2013

Where have all the liberals gone?

President Obama, who as a Democratic senator accused the Bush administration of violating civil liberties in the name of security, now vigorously defends his own administration’s collection of Americans’ phone records and Internet activities.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he thinks Congress has done sufficient intelligence oversight. His evidence? Opinion polls.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi defended the programs’ legality and said she wants Edward Snowden prosecuted for leaking details of the secret operations.

Read more

Pre-9/11 NSA Memo Pushed to Rethink 4th Amendment

Philip Ewing | Politico | Reader Supported News | June 9, 2013

The National Security Agency pushed for the government to “rethink” the Fourth Amendment when it argued in a classified memo that it needed new authorities and capabilities for the information age.

The 2001 memo, later declassified and posted online by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, makes a case to the incoming George W. Bush administration that the NSA needs new authorities and technology to adapt to the Internet era.

In one key paragraph, NSA wrote that its new phase meant the U.S. must reevaluate its approach toward signals intelligence, or “SIGINT,” and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today,” it wrote. “The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.”

Read more

Obama’s Verizon Phone Records Collection Carries on Bush’s Work

Richard Seymour | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | June 6, 2013

Barack Obama built up much of his electoral base as a critic of George W Bush’s policies, from war to surveillance. In office, he has pursued many of the same policies even more vigorously, and nowhere is this more true than in his hoarding of executive power. The administration’s collection of phone records data, and its legal defences thereof, illustrate the problem acutely.

In opposition, Obama criticised Bush’s policy of spying on citizens’ phone calls – under the rubric of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Programme – and threatened to filibuster a bill being pushed through the Senate in 2008 to retroactively legalise the practice. He voted for the bill, but protested that he was doing so reluctantly. He claimed to oppose the attempt to give legal cover to the previous administration and the companies colluding in its actions.

Yet, once in office, Obama continued the policy of intrusion on a vast and indiscriminate scale. The same can be said for his attorney general, Eric Holder, once a firm critic of the Bush administration’s spying, now a firm practitioner of the same. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Obama team has continued with the same legal doctrines.

Read more

Tell President Obama to Protect Free Press

Tell President Obama to protect our freedom of press. Do not forward: The links will open a page with your information already filled in. Dear Victoria, From exposing torture at Abu Ghraib to the revelation of warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration, members of the media help protect us all. And this week we’ve learned about one of the most chilling, unprecedented assaults on our freedom of press in recent memory. The Department of Justice (DOJ) secretly retrieved the records of over 20 telephone lines used by nearly 100 Associated Press reporters last year. It’s an unthinkable abuse of power designed to intimidate both reporters and potential whistleblowers from uncovering government corruption and illegality. Now President Obama is feeling intense political pressure to do something. But though he’s calling for a federal reporter shield law, he’s failed to mention the role his administration already played in preventing a comprehensive shield bill from passing in 2009—which might have prevented this scandal altogether! So we need to let President Obama know now, while the media and the public are demanding action in the face of this scandal, that talk is cheap and weak legislation is too little, too late. Sign the petition to President Obama—urge him to push through a strong reporter shield law now that respects the freedom of press and our right to know. The breadth of data the DOJ was able to collect—in the name of tracking down the single source of a government leak—and the secrecy with which they went about it, was truly unprecedented. But with a reporter shield law in place, just like forty states around the nation already have, the DOJ might never have gotten away it. And it could have extended the same protections to phone companies, who are critical to the free flow of information to the media—unless we want to go back to the Watergate days of reporters meeting their sources in dimly lit garages. When President Obama called for a reporter shield law a few years back, his administration stalled important progress on a comprehensive shield bill by carving out such a massively overbroad national security exception that it ceased to protect the press much at all. So, we need to make sure we hold the president accountable to his promise by pushing for a strong and effective reporter shield law that doesn’t prioritize government power over our right to know. Take action now. Tell President Obama you don’t want another AP subpoena scandal—you want strong reporter shield laws instead. This wasn’t just an attack on journalists— it was an attack on all our freedom. Let’s stand together to keep the presses rolling, unfettered from outrageous government overreach. I’ll be right there with you, Anthony for the ACLU Action team