AdamSmith

...it was not a choice between, But of... -- Wallace Stevens

I only wish! But alas...

Now what good would my doorbell (vs My Dingaling; viz. Chuck Berry ) do the pizza guy? BTW, above I meant not the good frozen pie crusts available but rather the, I find, even better refrigerated ones now available from Pillsbury as well as many good store brands: http://www.pillsbury.com/products/pie/refrigerated-pie-crust They seem to cook up closer to homemade dough (ever a fraught proposition for any of us who do not practice the art several times a day), and to boot come in packages of 4 so you have a top crust should the need or mood arise.

This editorial expounds just that point, in suitably blistering terms: NSA surveillance revelations: Osama bin Laden would love this http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/nsa-surveillance-osama-bin-laden

One way the Internet companies' denials of "direct access" might be technically true, while still giving the Feds huge chunks of data: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/direct-access-is-the-defining-phrase-of-the-nsa-scandal

In college I discovered the way to get the pizza delivery guy to bring ours first was to give him, on top of the tip, a big hit off our bong.

My solution (when living in Beantown) was to have a friend who had a wood-fired pizza oven in his home and made heavenly pizzas for family and friends. Ideal setup, worth the trouble of finding! Failing that, have you tried frozen (refrigerated?) pizza dough? I have no idea if it's any good, but the refrigerated pie crusts are all right, if those are any guide.

Following on the Verizon and PRISM news, Anonymous has published additional documents that it says show government surveillance overreach: http://thedocs.hostzi.com/ ...prefaced by this memo: _ / \ _ __ ___ _ __ _ _ _ __ ___ ___ _ _ ___ / _ \ | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \| | | | '_ ` _ \ / _ \| | | / __| / ___ \| | | | (_) | | | | |_| | | | | | | (_) | |_| \__ \ /_/ \_\_| |_|\___/|_| |_|\__, |_| |_| |_|\___/ \__,_|___/ |___/ Greetings Netizens, and Citizens of the world. Anonymous has obtained some documents that "they" do not want you to see, and much to "their" chagrin, we have found them, and are giving them to you. These documents prove that the NSA is spying on you, and not just Americans. They are spying on the citizens of over 35 different countries. These documents contain information on the companies involved in GiG, and Prism. Whats GiG you might ask? well... The GIG will enable the secure, agile, robust, dependable, interoperable data sharing environment for the Department where warfighter, business, and intelligence users share knowledge on a global network that facilitates information superiority, accelerates decision-making, effective operations, and Net-Centric transformation. Like we said, this is happening in over 35 countries, and done in cooperation with private businesses, and intelligence partners world wide. We bring this to you, So that you know just how little rights you have. Your privacy and freedoms are slowly being taken from you, in closed door meetings, in laws buried in bills, and by people who are supposed to be protecting you. Download these documents, share them, mirror them, don't allow them to make them disappear. Spread them wide and far. Let these people know, that we will not be silenced, that we will not be taken advantage of, and that we are not happy about this unwarranted, unnecessary, unethical spying of our private lives, for the monetary gain of the 1%. And now, the candy: http://thedocs.hostzi.com/ Mirrors: http://t.co/XVlZQ53Zhp http://t.co/JYUHrhi3Ue http://t.co/qR9PRzySbq http://t.co/yGw2sP976W http://t.co/MrmBj4kma5 We are Anonymous We do not forgive We do not forget and by now, You should expect us http://pastebin.com/MPpT7xaf

On whistleblowers and government threats of investigationNo healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 June 2013 08.04 EDT James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, who called the Guardian's revelations 'reprehensible'. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come. But I do want to make two points. One is about whistleblowers, and the other is about threats of investigations emanating from Washington: 1) Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here. I'll say more about all that shortly, but for now: as these whistleblowing acts becoming increasingly demonized ("reprehensible", declared Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday), please just spend a moment considering the options available to someone with access to numerous Top Secret documents. They could easily enrich themselves by selling those documents for huge sums of money to foreign intelligence services. They could seek to harm the US government by acting at the direction of a foreign adversary and covertly pass those secrets to them. They could gratuitously expose the identity of covert agents. None of the whistleblowers persecuted by the Obama administration as part of its unprecedented attack on whistleblowers has done any of that: not one of them. Nor have those who are responsible for these current disclosures. They did not act with any self-interest in mind. The opposite is true: they undertook great personal risk and sacrifice for one overarching reason: to make their fellow citizens aware of what their government is doing in the dark. Their objective is to educate, to democratize, to create accountability for those in power. The people who do this are heroes. They are the embodiment of heroism. They do it knowing exactly what is likely to be done to them by the planet's most powerful government, but they do it regardless. They don't benefit in any way from these acts. I don't want to over-simplify: human beings are complex, and usually act with multiple, mixed motives. But read this outstanding essay on this week's disclosures from The Atlantic's security expert, Bruce Schneier, to understand why these brave acts are so crucial. Those who step forward to blow these whistles rarely benefit at all. The ones who benefit are you. You discover what you should know but what is hidden from you: namely, the most consequential acts being taken by those with the greatest power, and how those actions are affecting your life, your country and your world. In 2008, candidate Obama decreed that "often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out," and he hailed whistleblowing as: "acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." The current incarnation of Obama prosecutes those same whistlelblowers at double the number of all previous presidents combined, and spent the campaign season boasting about it. The 2008 version of Obama was right. As the various attacks are inevitably unleashed on the whistleblower(s) here, they deserve the gratitude and - especially - the support of everyone, including media outlets, for the noble acts that they have undertaken for the good of all of us. When it comes to what the Surveillance State is building and doing in the dark, we are much more informed today than we were yesterday, and will be much more informed tomorrow than we are today, thanks to them. (2) Like puppets reading from a script, various Washington officials almost immediately began spouting all sorts of threats about "investigations" they intend to launch about these disclosures. This has been their playbook for several years now: they want to deter and intimidate anyone and everyone who might shed light on what they're doing with their abusive, manipulative exploitation of the power of law to punish those who bring about transparency. That isn't going to work. It's beginning completely to backfire on them. It's precisely because such behavior reveals their true character, their propensity to abuse power, that more and more people are determined to bring about accountability and transparency for what they do. They can threaten to investigate all they want. But as this week makes clear, and will continue to make clear, the ones who will actually be investigated are them. The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals. This dynamic - the hallmark of a healthy and free society - has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That's the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable. There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they've done we're all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner. These endless investigations and prosecutions and threats are designed to bolster that fear-driven dynamic. But it isn't working. It's doing the opposite. The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That's what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that's what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency - the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions - the more quickly that backlash will arrive. I'm going to go ahead and take the Constitution at its word that we're guaranteed the right of a free press. So, obviously, are other people doing so. And that means that it isn't the people who are being threatened who deserve and will get the investigations, but those issuing the threats who will get that. That's why there's a free press. That's what adversarial journalism means. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/whistleblowers-and-leak-investigations

From NYT:U.S. Confirms That It Gathers Online Data Overseas Alex Wong/Getty Images Senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss spoke to reporters Thursday about the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Verizon phone records. By CHARLIE SAVAGE, EDWARD WYATT and PETER BAKER Published: June 6, 2013 WASHINGTON — The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night. The N.S.A. and other government agencies declined to comment about the disclosures. The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration. Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state. The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified documents obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday afternoon. In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful requests for information. “It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.” The Prism program grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with the matter. The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach. Before the disclosure of the Internet company surveillance program on Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security. Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the kind of surveillance at issue “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.” He added: “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.” The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program. The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying. Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America’s own vast surveillance operations. But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it. “A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr. Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.” Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective. Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the N.S.A. “on an ongoing daily basis” until July logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported. “As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act.” “Therefore, it is lawful,” she said. “It has been briefed to Congress.” While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of calling information to the N.S.A. Randy Milch, an executive vice president and general counsel, wrote that “the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.” Sprint and AT&T have also received demands for data from national security officials, according to people familiar with the requests. Those companies as well as T-Mobile and CenturyLink declined to say Thursday whether they were or had been under a similar court order. Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program defended it in part by noting that it was only for “metadata” — like logs of calls sent and received — and did not involve listening in on people’s conversations. The Internet company program appeared to involve eavesdropping on the contents of communications of foreigners. The senior administration official said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to obtain an order from a national security court to conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without individualized warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil. The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is controversial in part because Americans’ e-mails and phone calls can be swept into the database without an individualized court order when they communicate with people overseas. While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies’ servers, several of the companies — including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements. “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” the company said in a statement. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.” While murky questions remained about the Internet company program, the confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks. Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national security investigation. Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon — have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was classified. On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted — or is even effective. But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of broad, bipartisan support for the program. “If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.” And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He gave no details. It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications metadata and mining the database to identify associates — called a “community of interest” — of a suspected terrorist. In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule of law. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Confirms Gathering of Web Data Overseas. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

An update that does not clarify too much: http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22809541

Faster than a speeding electron. Actually, at about exactly that speed. About this and your other remarks on this UK paper providing better US coverage than our own press, The Guardian did publish something recently on its deliberate expansion of US coverage over the past couple of years, and this being one of its biggest, maybe THE biggest, growth areas in its readership. If I find it, I'll post it. Clearly as you said the dearth of serious journalism this side of the pond gives them and others such as say The Economist an opening. I don't know anything about the business model of The Guardian, how their ad revenues are doing print vs. online, etc. But they do offer their full content online with no pay wall such as at WSJ has for most of its content now, nor a limited number of free article views/month and then pay wall as NYT and others do. They do have, and have long been known for, a stoutly liberal editorial stance. (One crack goes, They are The Guardian of Manchester, but have anointed themselves guardian of the free world.) They are of course forthright about this and, I find, consistently conscientious to keep the reporting evidence-based, well and explicitly sourced and documented. In all, a welcome relief from the formless mush that we increasingly get in lieu of real journalism here.

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to serversSilicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history Dominic Rushe and James Ball in New York guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 19.48 EDT Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers. The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US." Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM. However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency. The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge. An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said. Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said: "We do not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law." A Google spokesman said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data." Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007. Executives said they were "confused" by the NSA claims. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it. The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007 Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.05 EDT A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program. In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data." Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said. An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM. The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US. It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants. Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata. Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online. Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies. Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US". The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the Fisa Amendments Act in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces. When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more. The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy. The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users. The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US. "Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all." The new measures introduced in the FAA redefines "electronic surveillance" to exclude anyone "reasonably believed" to be outside the USA – a technical change which reduces the bar to initiating surveillance. The act also gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general power to permit obtaining intelligence information, and indemnifies internet companies against any actions arising as a result of co-operating with authorities' requests. In short, where previously the NSA needed individual authorisations, and confirmation that all parties were outside the USA, they now need only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA. The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming "access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning". In the document, the NSA hails the PRISM program as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA". It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google. The NSA document indicates that it is planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider. The agency also seeks, in its words, to "expand collection services from existing providers". The revelations echo fears raised on the Senate floor last year during the expedited debate on the renewal of the FAA powers which underpin the PRISM program, which occurred just days before the act expired. Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware specifically warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs meant there was no way to know if safeguards within the act were working. "The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don't know how well any of these safeguards actually work," he said. "The law doesn't forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can't say and average Americans can't know." Other senators also raised concerns. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon attempted, without success, to find out any information on how many phone calls or emails had been intercepted under the program. When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a "report". According to the NSA, "over 2,000 PRISM-based reports" are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year. In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data. "It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications. "This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation." Additional reporting by James Ball and Dominic Rushe http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-2%20Special%20trail:Network%20front%20-%20special%20trail:Position1

I think she was a Realist.

The New York Times is livid: "...The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it..." Editorial President Obama’s Dragnet By THE EDITORIAL BOARD Published: June 6, 2013 Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers. Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.” That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where. This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy. The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.” But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used? The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.” That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions. We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by issuing a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans. “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?_r=0

Remembrance of wars worth fighting.

For hitoall ... one down, two to work on!

Maybe this one really belongs in the Political Joke thread, the way things are going...

That could quickly become the subject of some ribald humor.

I think of Google more as Revelations.

Others are noting the same thing. Obama Administration Confirms Massive Surveillance Program Of U.S. Citizens JONATHAN TURLEY Res ipsa loquitur ("The thing itself speaks") Published 1, June 6, 2013 While the media in the United States (with some notable exceptions) have been criticized for relatively soft coverage of attacks on civil liberties by the Obama Administration, the British press appears to be filling the gap. The Guardian is reporting on a massive surveillance program by the Obama Administration where the government has ordered Verizon (and presumably other carriers) to turn over all calls made within the United States and calls between the United States and other countries. The surveillance was conducted under an order from our controversial secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and demanded by the Justice Department and the FBI. The Administration has confirmed the existence of the program — another blow to civil liberties under Attorney General Eric Holder and this president. It also adds another area where Obama officials appear less than candid with Congress. The order signed by Judge Roger Vinson requires the company to turn over the phone numbers, location, duration, time and unique identifiers for all calls for all citizens. There is no effort to confine the search for individuals connected to any investigation. It is a sweeping surveillance on all citizens. Of course, just as Democrats have remained quiet over the recent attacks on the free press, it is not clear if even this abuse will generate opposition in Congress. Civil libertarians have been complaining for years about these programs and have met a wall of silence from Democrats protecting President Obama and Eric Holder. In February, the Administration succeeded in blocking a challenge to its surveillance policies by arguing that any confirmation of such programs would put American lives at risk. Now that the case is dismissed, they have simply acknowledged the program. The decision is Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, and it is a true nightmare for civil liberties. The Supreme Court rejected the standing of civil liberties groups and citizens to challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs. President Obama has long been criticized for his opposition to such lawsuits and his Justice Department has continued a successful attack on the ability of citizens to challenge the unconstitutional actions of their government in the war on terror. The 5-4 opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. insulates such programs from judicial review in yet another narrowing of standing rules. Alito rejected the ability of an array of journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates to challenge the constitutionality of the 2008 law allowing secret surveillance without meeting constitutional standards of probable cause. Alito simply said that the parties could not prove that they were subject to surveillance — since the Obama Administration has classified such evidence — and insisted that their fears and precautionary actions are merely efforts to “manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of nonimminent harms.” Alito wrote that just because no one may be able to challenge the law is no reason to recognize standing — a position that guts the separation of powers principles underlying judicial review. He also cites to the secret FISA as judicial review — a truly laughable proposition. I have been in that court as a NSA legal intern and the thought that it constitutes any real form of review is a preposterous notion. I have written and testified on this court in the past. Now we can see the inevitable consequence of this secret court and the Administration’s surveillance program. The Administration is creating a massive databank for all calls, including calls within the United States. This surveillance program is the result of a sense of political immunity reflected in this Administration. With some Democrats blindly following this President, there appears no concern over excessive surveillance or the ever-expanding security state. It is the final evidence of how Obama has truly crippled the civil liberties movement in the United States. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/06/06/obama-administration-confirms-massive-surveillance-program-by-nsa/

That article is The Onion's take on the story.