Monday, July 01, 2013

Barack's spying on the entire world scandal

I went looking for progressives, and found only Democrats. And proto-fascist Democrats at that.
With only mild exaggeration, those statements represents my recent, frustrating experience of visiting self-styled "progressive" Facebook pages to promote progressive initiatives, for example, RootsAction's timely petition to Obama to keep the government's hands off Ed Snowden and let him find political asylum. To my horror--and the word is NO exaggeration--one of the first responses I received is that Ed Snowden is a traitor for betraying "our nation's secrets." These three words speak volumes about how far our nation has traveled down the road toward fascism, and I intend to give them the closest scrutiny.

So opens Patrick Walker's "Obama's Turning Progressives Into Model Fascist Citizens" (OpEd News).  And as it Barack's spying turns progressives into fascists, it also turns politicians into idiots.  Alan Hall (Daily Mail) reports on the latest revelations of spying and notes that Secretary of State John Kerry insisted yesterday,  "I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that. All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations."  That 'excuse' is both idiotic and embarrassing.  Secretary of State is above that sort of comment and, in the future, Kerry needs to work harder at protecting the office, not disgracing it.  Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel immediately struck back stating the obvious, that spying on allies is unacceptable.  Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock (Der Spiegel) report on the latest  revelations about Barack's spying:


 According to the listing, Germany is among the countries that are the focus of surveillance. Thus, the documents confirm what had already been suspected for some time in government circles in Berlin -- that the US intelligence service, with approval from the White House, is spying on the Germans -- possibly right up to the level of the chancellor. So it comes as little surprise that the US has used every trick in the book to spy on the Washington offices of the European Union, as one document viewed by SPIEGEL indicates.
But the new aspect of the revelations isn't that countries are trying to spy on each other, eavesdropping on ministers and conducting economic espionage. What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance. Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.
The documents show that, in this situation, the services did what is not only obvious, but also anchored in German law: They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance.


Michelle Kuepper (Venture Village) explains the latest revelations:
While it was known that German citizens were also a major international target of NSA surveillance, the extent of the surveillance was unclear. As it turns out, Germany is being monitored far more than its EU neighbours, including France – where only roughly one-tenth of the amount logged in Germany is being investigated. UK newspaper The Guardian, which received the initial leaked documents from Snowden, released heat maps that show the amount of data collected by the NSA in various countries. These maps highlight that the NSA is apparently putting about as much spying effort into Germany as it is to Iraq, China and Saudi Arabia.
Only a handful of countries that are defined as “second-party partners” are reported to be excluded from the snooping – including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Germany, on the other hand, is classified as a “third-party foreign partner” – and the NSA allegedly claims in an internal presentation leaked to Der Spiegel that they “can, and often do, target the signals of most third-party foreign partners”.


"The Guardian and the Washington Post," Mike Wheatley (Silicon Angle) notes had the revelations about the spying on Germany and others but also had more details on PRISM that leave Google and Microsoft in an embarrassing position, "More eye-opening perhaps were the additional slides from PRISM, which infer that someone has been telling very big porkies since news of this whole kerfuffle first broke. The new slides make numerous references to government agencies placing on-premises hardware at the nine technology companies participating in PRISM, raising serious questions over their earlier denials."


Writing for the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald broke the story on the spying weeks ago.  Saturday night, he noted a few recent pieces worth reading:

 (1) The New York Times has an Op-Ed from Thursday by law professors Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman entitled "The Criminal NSA". It argues, citing recent revelations, that "it's time to call the NSA's mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal."
(2) The New York Times' excellent public editor, Margaret Sullivan, examines recent debates over who is and is not a "journalist" and provides one of the best working definitions yet. [. . .]  Meanwhile, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich argues that whatever "journalist" means, David Gregory doesn't qualify.
(3) Edward Snowden isn't the first NSA whistleblower of this decade. He was preceded by senior official Thomas Drake, who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ under espionage statutes and previously wrote that he saw the same things at the NSA that Snowden says prompted him to come forward. Another was William Binney, the long-time NSA mathematician who resigned in the wake of 9/11 over the NSA's domestic spying; as this article notes, the last set of documents we published regarding bulk collection of email metadata vindicates many of Binney's central warnings.


The scandal is not going away.  Attempts to discredit or smear Ed Snowden are not working and attempts at attacking Glenn Greenwald for reporting just make the attackers look ignorant and ridiculous.  Barack's run out of the country as usual to avoid dealing with a problem.  He's refused to address it with the American people and his cowardly fleeing does not speak well for the United States on the international stage.  More importantly, it goes to the biggest flaw in his presidency: He cannot deal with any real moment, everything must be pre-planned and carefully staged.  That's why Barack can't even speak before the public without his blessed tele-prompter, why he has to stall and joke -- can't wing it -- if the tele-prompter isn't properly loaded. 

When people aren't ready for the job, they're not the only ones who suffer.  Let it be a lesson.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.






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