The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom
and individual liberty
"There is but
one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington
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Five myths about the National Security Agency By James Bamford
James
Bamford is the author of three books on the NSA, including “The Shadow Factory:
The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.” by James
Bamford When the National Security Agency was created through a top-secret
memorandum signed by President Harry Truman in 1952, the agency was so secret
that only a few members of Congress knew about it. While the NSA
gradually became known over the decades, its inner workings remain extremely hidden,
even with the recent leaks about its gathering of Americans’ phone records and
tapping into data from the nine largest Internet companies. Let’s pull back the
shroud a bit to demystify this agency.
1.
The NSA is allowed to spy on everyone, everywhere.
After
his release of documents to the Guardian and The Washington Post, former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden said, “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the
authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge
to even the president if I had a personal e-mail.” But Snowden probably
couldn’t eavesdrop on just about anyone, including the president, without
breaking the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids the NSA
from targeting U.S. citizens or legal residents without an order issued by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This applies whether the person is in
the United States or overseas. According to documents from Snowden published by
The Post and the Guardian on Thursday, if agency employees pick up the
communications of Americans incidentally while monitoring foreign targets, they
are supposed to destroy the information unless it contains “significant foreign
intelligence” or evidence of a crime. What’s technically feasible is a
different matter. Since 2003, the NSA has been able to monitor much of the
Internet and telephone communication entering, leaving and traveling through
the United States with secret eavesdropping hardware and software installed at
major AT&T switches, and probably those of other companies, around the
country.
2.
The courts make sure that what the NSA does is legal.
This
is part of the NSA’s mantra. Because both the surveillance court and the
activities it monitors are secret, it’s hard to contradict. Yet we know about
at least one transgression since Congress created the court in 1978 in response
to the NSA’s previous abuses. Under the court’s original charter, the NSA was
required to provide it with the names of all U.S. citizens and residents it
wished to monitor. Yet the George W. Bush administration issued a presidential
order in 2002 authorizing the NSA to eavesdrop without court-approved warrants.
After the New York Times exposed the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005,
Congress amended the law to weaken the court’s oversight and incorporate many
of the formerly illegal eavesdropping activities conducted during the Bush
years. Rather than individual warrants, the court can now approve vast,
dragnet-style warrants, or orders, as they’re called. For example, the first
document released by the Guardian was a top-secret order from the court
requiring Verizon to hand over the daily telephone records of all its
customers, including local calls.
3.
Congress has a lot of oversight over the NSA.
This
is the second part of the mantra from NSA Director Keith Alexander and other
senior agency officials. Indeed, when the congressional intelligence committees
were formed in 1976 and 1977, their emphasis was on protecting the public from
the intelligence agencies, which were rife with abuses. Today, however, the
intelligence committees are more dedicated to protecting the agencies from
budget cuts than safeguarding the public from their transgressions. Hence their
failure to discover the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping activity
and their failure to take action against the NSA’s gathering of telephone and
Internet records.
4.
NSA agents break into foreign locations to steal codes and plant bugs.
According
to intelligence sources, a number of years ago there was a large debate between
the NSA and the CIA over who was responsible for conducting “black-bag jobs” —
breaking into foreign locations to plant bugs and steal hard drives, or
recruiting local agents to do the same. The NSA argued that it was in charge of
eavesdropping on communications, known as signals intelligence, and that the
data on hard drives counts. But the CIA argued that the NSA had responsibility
only for information “in motion,” while the CIA was responsible for information
“at rest.” It was eventually decided that the CIA’s National Clandestine
Service would focus on stealing hard drives and planting bugs, and the NSA,
through a highly secret unit known as Tailored Access Operations, would steal
foreign data through cyber-techniques.
5.
Snowden could have aired his concerns internally rather than leaking the
documents.
I’ve
interviewed many NSA whistleblowers, and the common denominator is that they
felt ignored when attempting to bring illegal or unethical operations to the attention
of higher-ranking officials. For example, William Binney and several other
senior NSA staffers protested the agency’s domestic collection programs up the
chain of command, and even attempted to bring the operations to the attention
of the attorney general, but they were ignored. Only then did Binney speak
publicly to me for an article in Wired magazine. In a Q&A on the Guardian
Web site, Snowden cited Binney as an example of “how overly-harsh responses to
public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill
involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to
ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience
forbids it.” And even when whistleblowers bring their concerns to the news
media, the NSA usually denies that the activity is taking place. The agency denied
Binney’s charges that it was obtaining all consumer metadata from Verizon and
had access to virtually all Internet traffic. It was only when Snowden leaked
the documents revealing the phone-log program and showing how PRISM works that
the agency was forced to come clean.
~~~~~~
We Know Washington Doesn’t Want to Stop Illegal
Immigration - Rush Limbaugh
It’s
never been about stopping illegal's and securing the border. We
don’t trust them! They don’t want to secure the border. The 1986 law was to
ensure that we never ended up where we are. They
promised us in 1986, “We do this, and this is the last time.” It doesn’t
happen. The fence, 700 miles of
fence, it’s the law; it must be built. Only 36 miles has been built.
Two amendments offered to complete the fence, which is already the law, were
defeated. Now this Hoeven-Corker amendment says, they don’t get a green card until
we have these new border agents in place, and they don’t get a green card until
the new exit visa technology’s in place. “In place” doesn’t mean anything.
How’s it going to be used? Is it going to be used? There just isn’t any
evidence! You know, the minutia of McCain, “Well, we got the 60 votes, 61. We
got Big Business, we got the evangelicals, but we need to enlist their help in
spreading the word.” There’s no word to spread, because there
isn’t any trust that undergirds the words. It isn’t any more complicated than
this. Do you realize that if they want 46 million illegal's, most
people in this country would sign off on that if there were just a serious
efforts to shut down the border and make it really the last time this happened?
They don’t want to secure the border,
and that’s why none of the rest of it matters to anybody and that’s why the
details end up being ignored and that’s why the details end up being laughed at
and it’s why certain people are losing respect because they aren’t trusted, and
it’s a shame. It’s not that we’re not smart enough to understand what’s
going on. We know full well what’s going
on. Republicans and Democrats
both want open borders for their own political and financial reasons, and in
order to get what they want, they’re going to have to somehow convince us
that they mean to do something they have no intention of doing, and that is
securing the border.
~~~~~~
Jihawg
Ammo: Putting the “Ham” in Muhammad: maybe not so true, but truly humorous - by
Michael Minkoff
For
years, my pastor used to recommend that we dip our ammo in pig’s blood and tell
Muslim terrorists we were doing it. He said this would end the Muslim jihad
against us overnight. Pork is “harem” to Muslims, meaning it is sinful—unclean.
According to my pastor, if you eat or even touch pork as a Muslim, you cannot
enter paradise until you are cleansed. Haraam should not be confused with
“harem” which is what all the jihadists think they will be getting when they
get to heaven. That’s going to be one nasty surprise. Anyway, so my pastor recommended that we dip
all our ammo in pig’s blood and let all the jihadists know what we were doing.
If we shot them during a terrorist attack, they would be barred from paradise
even though they had died in jihad. Apparently, Allah’s arbitrary sense of
retribution trumps his obligation to reward. “Sorry, pal. No seventy brown-eyed
virgins. And, to add insult to injury, you could have been eating bacon this
whole time. Bummer.” Well, have no fear intrepid patriots. A company in Idaho—South Fork
Industries—is doing just that. Called “jihawg ammo,” their pork-laced munitions
are guaranteed to contaminate even the most devout Muslim in death so that his
cruel god will not be able to accept his riddled corpse into the promised den
of chauvinist debauchery. One of their slogans is “Put some HAM in
MuHAMmad.” No, I can’t take credit for that one. If you’re interested in
buying some jihawg ammo, you can find out more here. As an aside, I don’t think the Quran actually
penalizes someone for coming in contact with pork, only for consuming it. But,
hey, if we can get the Muslims to believe our interpretation of their “holy”
book, we should be golden, right? Oh, and I just had a thought: If the
bullet hits their bloodstream, wouldn’t that kind of be like consuming pork? I
don’t know. If I were a Muslim jihadist, I would definitely not risk a chance
at Paradise on a technicality.
~~~~~~
Snowden, the World, Making a Fool of Obama
This
is a matter of trust. We certainly can’t trust liberals with this kind of
power. All of the recent scandals show that our government is out of control. NSA leaker Edward Snowden slipped back under the radar on Monday,
failing to show up on the Cuba-bound flight he was expected to board from
Moscow and befuddling the media who have been tracking the international
fugitive’s every move. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s foreign minister said the country
was considering a request from Snowden for asylum. Snowden, who evaded U.S.
extradition efforts and left Hong Kong for Russia over the weekend, had been
booked on an Aeroflot flight to Havana on Monday morning. But reporters on the
plane, and an Aeroflot agent, reported no sign of him. It’s unclear what U.S.
officials might know about Snowden’s location. The U.S. government has been
pressuring countries not to provide him passage, and has revoked his passport.
~~~~~~
"Constitutions
are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of
expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the
exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments
of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to
common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common
understandings." --Joseph
Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
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