US Politics Thread |OT| THE DARKEST TIMELINE

[Oblivion]

Dunno about you guys, but I'm a big fan of the skewed polls mentality staying strong on the right. Let those fucks lull themselves into a false sense of security. It'll be all the sweeter when reality eventually hits them.


Btw, PD. How long are you banned for this time?

[Phoenix Dark]

Until the 14th. I must say, I was dumb. That's two bans within what, 30 days? And before then, I hadn't been banned in almost two years.

I guess Japanese porn stars are mod waifu material and Serious Business.

[Human Snorenado]

Dunno about you guys, but I'm a big fan of the skewed polls mentality staying strong on the right. Let those fucks lull themselves into a false sense of security. It'll be all the sweeter when reality eventually hits them.


Btw, PD. How long are you banned for this time?

Remember how after the election when they faced the reality of, "shit, maybe more than half the country really DOESN'T want what we want, what do we do?" for like, three days before going back to head up their ass mode?  Good times, good times.

[Great Rumbler]

Dunno about you guys, but I'm a big fan of the skewed polls mentality staying strong on the right. Let those fucks lull themselves into a false sense of security. It'll be all the sweeter when reality eventually hits them.


Btw, PD. How long are you banned for this time?

Remember how after the election when they faced the reality of, "shit, maybe more than half the country really DOESN'T want what we want, what do we do?" for like, three days before going back to head up their ass mode?  Good times, good times.

Republican outreach

[Great Rumbler]

Thoughts on the recent NSA stuff from David Simon [creator of The Wire]:

Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.

Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.

All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?

Because they aren’t listening to the calls.

It’s at that point, people, that law enforcement requires a full-throated argument of probable cause. It’s at that point that privacy rights must be seriously measured against the legitimate investigate needs of law enforcement. And it’s at that point that the potential for authoritarian overreach becomes significant.

I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As is the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.

Keep in mind that the FISA court was created as a means of having some definitive oversight into a world that previously had been entirely unregulated, and wiretapping abuses by the U.S. executive branch and by law enforcement agencies were in fact the raison d’etre for the creation of FISA and a federal panel of judges to review national security requests for electronic surveillance. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it problematic that the court’s rulings are not public? Surely.

But the fact remains that for at least the last two presidential administrations, this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon Bombing before they occur.

So think for a minute about a scenario in which, say, a phone number is identified overseas as being linked to terror activity. It is so identified by, say, NSA overseas intercepts or through intelligence gathering by the CIA or the military. And say that there exists a database of billions and billions of telephonic contacts in the United States over a period of months or years. And say a computer could then run the suspect number through that data base and determine a pattern of communication between that overseas phone and several individuals in New York, or Boston, or Detroit. Would you want that connection to be made and made quickly? Or do you want to leave law enforcement to begin trying to acquire the call history on that initial phone from overseas carriers who may or may not maintain detailed retroactive call data or be unwilling to even provide that data fully to American law enforcement or do so while revealing the investigative effort to the targets themselves?

Keep in mind that law enforcement must still establish probable cause to then begin to actually monitor conversations on the domestic numbers, and that this request for electronic surveillance is then, of course, subject to judicial review by the FISA court.

Yes, I can hear the panicked libertarians and liberals and Obama-haters wailing in rare unison: But what about all the innocent Americans caught up in this voracious, overreaching dragnet? To which the answer is obvious if you think about the scale of this: What dragnet?

Your son’s devotional calls to 1-800-BEATOFF? Your daughter’s call from the STD clinic? Your brother-in-law calling you from his office at Goldman with that whispered insider-tip on that biomed stock? Is that what you’re worried about?

Take a deep breath and think:

When the government grabs the raw data from hundreds or thousands of phone calls, they’re probably going to examine those calls. They’re going to look to establish a pattern of behavior to justify more investigation and ultimately, if they can, elevate their surveillance to actual monitoring of conversations. Sure enough.

When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

There are reasons to object to governmental overreach in the name of law enforcement and anti-terrorism. And it is certainly problematic that our national security apparatus demands a judicial review of our law enforcement activity behind closed doors, but again, FISA is a basic improvement on the preceding vacuum it replaced. Certainly — and I find myself in rare agreement with the Rand Pauls of the world on this one — we might be more incensed at the notion of an American executive branch firing missles at U.S. citizens and killing them without the benefit of even an in absentia legal proceeding. Or ashamed at a racially-targeted sentencing guideline that subjects rock cocaine users to seventeen times the penalty of powdered-cocaine users? Or aghast at a civil forfeiture logic that allows government to seize private property and then requires citizens to prove a negative — that it was not purchased with money from ill-gotten gains.

There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.

But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks. After all, we as a people, through our elected representatives, drafted and passed FISA and the Patriot Act and what has been done here, with Verizon and assuredly with other carriers, is possible under that legislation. Indeed, one Republican author of the law, who was quoted as saying he didn’t think the Patriot Act would be so used, has, in this frantic little moment of national overstatement, revealed himself to be either a political coward or an incompetent legislator. He asked for this. We asked for this. We did so because we measured the reach and possible overreach of law enforcement against the risks of terrorism and made a conscious choice.

Frankly, I’m a bit amazed that the NSA and FBI have their shit together enough to be consistently doing what they should be doing with the vast big-data stream of electronic communication. For us, now — years into this war-footing and this legal dynamic — to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse. We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing. Of course we do.

When the Guardian, or the Washington Post or the New York Times editorial board — which displayed an astonishing ignorance of the realities of modern electronic surveillance in its quick, shallow wade into this non-controversy — are able to cite the misuse of the data for reasons other than the interception of terrorist communication, or to show that Americans actually had their communications monitored without sufficient probable cause and judicial review and approval of that monitoring, then we will have ourselves a nice, workable scandal. It can certainly happen, and given that the tension between national security and privacy is certain and constant, it probably will happen at points. And in fairness, having the FISA courts rulings so hidden from citizen review, makes even the discovery of such misuse problematic. The internal review of that court’s rulings needs to be somehow aggressive and independent, while still preserving national security secrets. That’s very tricky.

But this? Please. This is bullshit.

In Baltimore thirty years ago, after the detectives figured out which pay phones were dialing pagers, and then did all the requisite background checks and surveillance to identify the drug suspects, they finally went to a judge and asked for a wiretap on several pay phones. The judge looked at the police work and said, okay, you can record calls off those public pay phones, but only if you have someone watching the phones to ensure that your suspects are making the calls and not ordinary citizens. And if you make a mistake and record a non-drug-involved call, you will of course “minimize” the call and cease recording.

It was at that point — and not at the earlier stage of gathering thousands and thousands of dialed numbers and times of call — that the greatest balance was sought between investigative need and privacy rights. And in Baltimore, that wiretap case was made and the defendants caught and convicted, the case upheld on appeal. Here, too, the Verizon data corresponds to the sheets and sheets of printouts of calls from the Baltimore pay phones, obtainable with a court order and without any demonstration of probable cause against any specific individual. To get that far as a law-abiding investigator, you didn’t need to know a target, only that the electronic medium is being used for telephonic communication that is both illegal and legal. It’s at the point of actually identifying specific targets and then seeking to listen to the conversations of those targets that the rubber really hits the road.

[Broseidon]

[TakingBackSunday]

Read it.  It's fucking terrific.

[Great Rumbler]

(Image removed from quote.)

tl;dr version: "Collection of telephone record meta data has been going on for decades and is a vital tool for law enforcement. Most of the people who are screaming about this don't even understand what they're talking about."

[Barry Egan]

David Simon is very unlikely to be running damage control for the government.  I'd wager that if he has skin in this game its only insofar as he'd rather people know what it is they should actually be pissed about.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

David Simon is very unlikely to be running damage control for the government.  I'd wager that if he has skin in this game its only insofar as he'd rather people know what it is they should actually be pissed about.

Nah, he's a supporter. Great writing but his content is bullshit when you know his actual standing.

[Mandark]

He's also called Obama "very disappointing" on immigration policies, and pretty vocally opposes the drug war that Obama and Holder have continued.

It's almost as if someone can vote for a politician in the context of a particular election, but still retain the capacity for independent thought!

[Great Rumbler]

He's also called Obama "very disappointing" on immigration policies, and pretty vocally opposes the drug war that Obama and Holder have continued.

It's almost as if someone can vote for a politician in the context of a particular election, but still retain the capacity for independent thought!

I'm pretty sure that's not right, Mandark. By voting for someone, you are saying that you 100% agree with that person and you must defend everything they do, otherwise you're a hypocrite.

[Mandark]

So anyways it's a pretty good piece, and probably a needed corrective for the recent freakout that happened when journalists realized they'd be subject to the same monitoring as everyone else.  Plus I'm a sucker for the "shut up everyone, I've actually been paying attention for more than five minutes" type of crotchety opinion piece.  I'm more worried than he seems to be, though.

Here's the key part for me:

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As is the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.

Keep in mind that the FISA court was created as a means of having some definitive oversight into a world that previously had been entirely unregulated, and wiretapping abuses by the U.S. executive branch and by law enforcement agencies were in fact the raison d’etre for the creation of FISA and a federal panel of judges to review national security requests for electronic surveillance. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it problematic that the court’s rulings are not public? Surely.

But the fact remains that for at least the last two presidential administrations, this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon Bombing before they occur.

Simon's arguing that the program isn't the Big Brother that it's been painted as because 1) it is collecting records of calls rather than their content, 2) judicial precedent has established a higher standard of evidence for actually listening in, and 3) FISA provides a pretty explicit statutory constraint specifically for federal agencies that want to monitor electronic communication, even if it's not perfect.


The problem is that I don't necessarily trust that the FBI/NSA will always abide by those constraints.  Yeah yeah, slippery slope.  But within the last decade we had an administration that basically ignored FISA and implemented wiretaps without any warrants, justifying it with some very specious legal arguments about the AUMF, if I'm remembering this right.

Basically the federal government has a long, shitty record when it comes to wiretaps, especially when national security issues get tangled up with domestic law enforcement.  Thanks to John Yoo and buddies, we can't just chalk it all up to decades-old Cold War nuttiness.  Plus the political incentives are all against civil liberties.  Plus the Fourth Amendment's generally been taking a beating in the courts.  Plus there's a massive lack of oversight or transparency, abetted by a public and a Congress who really don't want to actually sort this out explicitly.  Plus I'm pretty sure there have been zero prosecutions for FISA violations that took place under Bush.

I can believe the program is generally behaving as it should right now, but I think this is an area where you don't just need a law keeping it in check, but assurances that there's a pretty robust implementation of that law to avoid backsliding.

[Mandark]

tl;dr  They might not be doing anything improper right now, but do they really have the safeguards to ensure that doesn't change?

[Positive Touch]

fuck no

[Phoenix Dark]

Given the government's record of harassing civil rights, unions, and other dissidents including with illegal survellience I can't cosign this shit. They may be running it decently now but there's no guarantee that will be the norm. Especially as each president becomes worse on civil liberties.

David Simon has never feared leaving the democrat plantation, to use the parlance of our times, so his semi support of this is noteworthy. He's not some slappy and has criticized Obama before.

[Brehvolution]

May 2004: After Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said "the direction [in Iraq] has got be changed or it is unwinnable," Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said Democrats are "basically giving aid and comfort to the enemy." Similarly, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Bush an "incompetent leader," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) said Pelosi "apparently is so caught up in partisan hatred for President Bush that her words are putting American lives at risk."

September 2004: As John Kerry steps up his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq and the war on terror, Republicans repeatedly suggest that he is emboldening the enemy. Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) says that "while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief." President Bush says, "You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message... You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages." And Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists "are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry," adding that Democrats are "consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there."

November/December 2005: With critics of the war in Iraq growing increasingly vocal, Republicans lash out, suggesting that Democrats are encouraging the enemy and want to surrender to terrorists. President Bush says that "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) states that "Many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender" and Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) says that "[T]he liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies."

Appearing on "Meet the Press," Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that "I think that's a dangerous position to take, to oppose a sitting commander in chief while we've got people being shot at on the ground. I think it's one thing to have a debate and a discussion about this strategy, but to openly oppose, in essence, the strategy, I think that can be a very risky thing for our troops."

[Joe Molotov]

Shocking!

[Human Snorenado]

ID of NSA whistleblower revealed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance?CMP=twt_gu

[TakingBackSunday]

yourealreadydead.jpg

[Positive Touch]

did i miss something? my twitter feed is all shitted up with liberals going in on the nsa leaker dude, and the only reason ive been able to pick out so far is because he complained about usa's spying destroying democracy and then ran off to china. oh and that he killed our freedoms by leaking this even tho yesterday everyone was saying the program wasnt really that big a deal and that we were already doing this and yadda yadda. what is going on?

[Phoenix Dark]

My twitter feed is the same. It's basically

1) the leaker donated to Ron Paul
2) Glen Greenwald is a racist who supported the Patriot Act, illegal taped a hate crime victim's testimony

[Positive Touch]

so basically its a bunch of people i normally like going off the rails for obama in an extended version of "NO U"

time to log off the internet

[Phoenix Dark]

Obama's shredding of civil liberties is going to be a major part of his legacy, from a historical perspective. I think it's clear there will be one side that focuses entirely on legislative achievements and economic growth; I really think the ACA will eventually be viewed similarly to Medicare and Social Security, two programs that started relatively small before becoming what they are today. Barring future interventions, I'd imagine that side will also note he didn't start any wars. But there will be another side that points out the shadow the whistle blowing crack down and civil liberty abuses cast over everything.

[Human Snorenado]

It would be a major negative part of his legacy assuming that one day there's a major corrective swing in the other direction, which is not an assumption I'm ready to make.  One thing I've learned in the past 12 years is that people really don't give a shit about civil liberties enough to stop this nonsense from happening. 

[Positive Touch]

yeah i think the major "negative" part of his legacy will be "OMG BLACK MAN." i think the civil liberties stuff will be only be brought up in scholarly debates and occasionally in "obama did it too!" internet arguments

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Does explain Obama phones though...eh...dipshits?

ZombieRon.jpg

[Phoenix Dark]

Shouldn't they be called W Bush phones since, you know, that's a very old welfare benefit.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Shouldn't they be called W Bush phones since, you know, that's a very old welfare benefit.

Stop going all Dikembe on my well placed sarcasm damnit.

[Human Snorenado]

Shouldn't they be called W Bush phones since, you know, that's a very old welfare benefit.

Stop going all Dikembe on my well placed sarcasm damnit.

http://www.casualhoya.com/2011/9/16/2429354/the-legend-of-who-wants-to-sex-dikembe

 

[Am_I_Anonymous]

A better question is who doesn't?

[Mr. Gundam]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22837221

So the airport in Kabul is shut down and there are reports of gunfire and explosions, yet none of the American channels are talking about it.

Shocking, I know.

[Human Snorenado]

I sure hope they're careful with our oil over there.

Wait.  Shit.  Wrong country.

I sure hope they're careful with our opium over there...

[Phoenix Dark]

Afghanistan is going to be such a hellhole the minute we leave. Well it's a hellhole right now, but it'll be even worse next year.

[Human Snorenado]

We should just start building a 25 foot wall around the border of the country, and whenever a local asks why just be all like "NOTHING!"

[Mandark]

We should just start building a 25 foot wall around the border of the country, and whenever a local asks why just be all like "NOTHING!"

Isn't that pretty much how Bin Laden kept hidden all those years?

[Human Snorenado]

QUIET YOU

[Oblivion]

PD, clean your inbox!

[Phoenix Dark]

My bad

[Mandark]

Oh, another reason to be skeeved about the program that I missed before.  While examining the contents of billions of calls/e-mails/texts might be daunting right now, it won't at some point in the future.  Post-9/11 there was an urgent push to get in place some automated system that could sift through millions of intercepted messages in Pashto and flag likely AQ/Taliban communications, and digital reading is getting more sophisticated in general.

It's very possible at some point the government could get the capability to have an automated system go through the communications themselves, having humans only deal with the ones flagged for probable cause by the algorithm.  Now that's probably illegal according to FISA and current law, but all it would take is some next-generation John Yoo writing an opinion for the Justice Department that running a call through a program doesn't constitute a "search" and then you're in business.

[Phoenix Dark]

The conservative activist who gained a following during last year's campaign for his efforts to "unskew" polls has a theory on why his predictions for the election were so wildly off the mark, writing late last month that his analysis was incomplete because he did not consider the purported voter fraud and voter suppression efforts that he claimed were integral to President Barack Obama's victory.

Dean Chambers, the founder of UnSkewedPolls.com, wrote in a piece on Examiner.com that the "Obama Regime definitely won the election" by suppressing votes from would-be supporters of Mitt Romney and committing "massive voter fraud in the key swing states" – although he offered no evidence for either claim.

"I was only wrong in those projections because I was not aware nor did I calculate in the voter fraud and the voter suppression, both of which exceeded the margin by which Barack Obama was declared the winner of that election last Fall," Chambers wrote.

It wasn't the first time Chambers floated such a theory. Shortly after last year's election, he launched a new website — BarackOFraudo.com — in which he alleged that the President did not legitimately carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. That website included a map (shown below) with the disputed states colored black.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/unskewed-polls-founder-i-was-only-wrong-because

[Am_I_Anonymous]

let's leave the post election blubbering to the pro's like Edwards....

[Brehvolution]

Pros? It's much more entertaining watching the Cons whitewash the whole thing. Gotta keep up dat fairytale.

[Steve Contra]

The NSA whistleblower looks like a friend of mine.  Like exactly.  Since he's a software developer some people even messaged him to see if it was him.

[Phoenix Dark]

I'd make a joke like "so now the government is reading their emails/phone calls lol" but the government is already reading everyone's emails/phone calls

[Oblivion]

The conservative activist who gained a following during last year's campaign for his efforts to "unskew" polls has a theory on why his predictions for the election were so wildly off the mark, writing late last month that his analysis was incomplete because he did not consider the purported voter fraud and voter suppression efforts that he claimed were integral to President Barack Obama's victory.

Dean Chambers, the founder of UnSkewedPolls.com, wrote in a piece on Examiner.com that the "Obama Regime definitely won the election" by suppressing votes from would-be supporters of Mitt Romney and committing "massive voter fraud in the key swing states" – although he offered no evidence for either claim.

"I was only wrong in those projections because I was not aware nor did I calculate in the voter fraud and the voter suppression, both of which exceeded the margin by which Barack Obama was declared the winner of that election last Fall," Chambers wrote.

It wasn't the first time Chambers floated such a theory. Shortly after last year's election, he launched a new website — BarackOFraudo.com — in which he alleged that the President did not legitimately carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. That website included a map (shown below) with the disputed states colored black.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/unskewed-polls-founder-i-was-only-wrong-because

Okay, the voter fraud thing I get, but how did Obama "suppress" Romney voters?

[Steve Contra]

White people don't like going places where there's lots of black people, duh.

[Phoenix Dark]

"voter suppression"


You heard it right. He suppressed the vote by convincing people not to vote for Mitt Romney. 

It's like saving the Ravens stole the Superbowl from the 49ers by playing defense/stopping the 49ers from scoring enough.

[Oblivion]

Well that solves that mystery.

[TakingBackSunday]

snowden is missing

i fucking called it!

[Boogie]

snowden is missing

i fucking called it!

Snowden didn't count on Batman not giving a shit about jurisdiction.

[Phoenix Dark]

Dude is a dumbass for hiding in Hong Kong. The Chinese government was going to give him up no matter what.

TBH I think Greenwald knew this would happen, and it ultimately helps his story if Snowden gets arrested/hit with 10 years or more. Dude should have tried to get to Sweden or something BEFORE revealing identities.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Dude is a dumbass for hiding in Hong Kong. The Chinese government was going to give him up no matter what.

TBH I think Greenwald knew this would happen, and it ultimately helps his story if Snowden gets arrested/hit with 10 years or more. Dude should have tried to get to Sweden or something BEFORE revealing identities.

[Boogie]

Dude is a dumbass for hiding in Hong Kong. The Chinese government was going to give him up no matter what.

TBH I think Greenwald knew this would happen, and it ultimately helps his story if Snowden gets arrested/hit with 10 years or more. Dude should have tried to get to Sweden or something BEFORE revealing identities.

Indeed.  I guess there was a reason why he was a tech guy and not an intelligence officer.

[Great Rumbler]

From The Daily Banter:

9. By the end of the day Friday, Business Insider reported that the Washington Post had revised its article. The article no longer reported that the tech companies “knowingly” cooperated with PRISM. But, more importantly, the phrase “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” in the article’s lede was revised to “track foreign targets.” There’s a huge difference between the two phrases. Public outrage was almost entirely based on the idea that the NSA was spying on everyone who uses those services — broad, unrestricted access to private information (as private as social media and email is). But the revision limits the scope of the operation to international communications.

As of Saturday, Greenwald, unlike the Washington Post, hadn’t corrected or revised his reporting to reflect the new information, and, in fact, Greenwald continued to defend his reporting on Twitter. (It’s worth noting how speculative Greenwald’s article was. The following line was particularly leading: “It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.” There’s no indication whatsoever that the government was gathering information without warrants.)

10. Heads, sadly, continued to explode all over the place in spite of the total de-fanging of both stories.

11. Meanwhile, TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine reported on Saturday, “[T]he NSA did not have direct access or any special instant access to data or servers at the PRISM targets, but instead had to send requests to the companies for the data.”

From ZDNet:

The story alleges that the NSA is “reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.” It specifically names nine companies: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. And the story alleges, “From inside a company's data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes.”

Within hours after the story broke, it had been amplified by other news agencies and tech websites and had inspired expressions of outrage over this invasion of privacy. And seven of the nine companies named issued categorical denials that they knew of or participated in any such program.

And then a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to that story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t  just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story.

Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”

[Brehvolution]

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a "traitor" in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" Tuesday.

"He's a traitor," he said. "The president outlined last week that these were important national security programs to help keep Americans safe and give us tools to fight the terrorist threat that we face."

"The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law," he said.

Obama cracking down on whistle blowers. 'R'eal repubs want Patriot act repealed.

[Phoenix Dark]

Rubio is getting savaged by the right

In a Spanish-language interview Sunday with the network Univision, Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform group, made his strongest statement yet that legalization of the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants must happen before any new border security or internal enforcement measures are in place, and will in no way be conditional on any security requirements.

“Let’s be clear,” Rubio said. “Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence.”

In most of his public appeals for the Gang of Eight bill, Rubio has stressed its enforcement provisions, saying that border security must come before immigrants are granted legal permanent resident status. What he has not stressed so much is the fact that the bill would legalize the 11 million almost immediately, after they have passed background checks and paid some sort of fine. That would happen before any new security measures are completed, or even begun.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/rubio-in-immigration-reform-legalization-comes-first-it-is-not-conditional/article/2531504

Pretty ballsy, after spending months focusing on the security triggers. I wonder how long he can handle the pressure before walking from the table - or whether he has gone too far to turn back.

[Phoenix Dark]

With Mandela on his death bed, it seems an apt time to revisit
http://www.nationalreview.com/content/more-gloom-and-doom-derb

[Mandark]

Hey, National Review got rid of his ass for racist BS.  Eight years later, but still.  Also, I only think there will be riots if Mandela recovers then goes on to beat the Duke men's basketball team.


In better news, the administration has dropped efforts to limit the over-the-counter availability of Plan B contraceptives.  Took them getting slapped down by a judge multiple times.

[Positive Touch]

With Mandela on his death bed, it seems an apt time to revisit
http://www.nationalreview.com/content/more-gloom-and-doom-derb

farewell, sweet momo