Verizon Customer?

[The Feral Slasher]

Worse and worse and the "Snowden is a liar" crowd is looking more and more foolish....

Emptywheel has lots of good commentary on the whole NSA issue. I thought this one was particularly good. Are there still people out there who question if we are being lied to and deceived ?

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/01...et-correction/

Clapper got the question for the test before taking it, and he still — he says — misunderstood it.

But of course that’s not what happened. The way Clapper has made false statements in public and then “acknowledged errors” in secret is all part of the game by which Clapper mostly sort of tells the truth to Congress, but continues to lie to the American people.

In other news, it has now been almost a week since, caught in another lie, the NSA took down their “Section 702 Protections” document, without replacing them with an accurate description of what protections, if any, Americans have under Section 702.

[johnnya24]

Just popped up -

Breaking news: Plane carrying Bolivian president, Eva Morales, rerouted to Austria on suspicion US whistleblower Edward Snowden is on board. More soon …

Bolivia leader's jet diverted 'amid Snowden suspicions'

Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane has been diverted to Austria amid suspicion that US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden is on board, the foreign minister has said.

David Choquehuanca denied that Mr Snowden was on the plane.

France and Portugal reportedly refused to allow the Bolivia-bound flight to cross their airspace.

Mr Snowden is seeking asylum in several countries to avoid extradition to the US for leaking intelligence secrets.

Mr Choquehuanca told reporters on Tuesday that France and Portugal had closed their airspace over the "huge lie" that Mr Snowden was on board.

"We don't know who invented this lie, but we want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales," he said.

[johnnya24]

... and it's being reported he wasn't on the plane. Another success for US Intelligence. A major international diplomatic incident on the off-chance Snowden was on-board. Good to see all those hundreds of billions of $ aren't going to waste.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j_xUcVPWE_-TCaS8UFxcr_JZOQwA?docId=CNG.44ef79e756fb08f20a059d00e1b0f826.01

I guess they've just shown their hand as regards the extent they will go to snatch him.

[heyelander]

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering a case that could be pivotal in determining whether the government needs a warrant to track your cell phone. Today the ACLU, together with the ACLU of Maryland, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed an amicus brief arguing that the Fourth Amendment requires the government get a warrant to find out everywhere a person has been for the past seven months. In the case, United States v. Graham, the government obtained a staggering 221 days of historical cell site location information for two suspects. For one suspect, Aaron Graham, this timespan allowed the government to sweep up his location at 29,659 specific points.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/fighting-striking-case-warrantless-cell-phone-tracking

[johnnya24]

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-...phone-tracking

I'm pretty sure the supreme court have already ruled that no geolocation metadata can be stored without a warrant. Alexander and Obama have been trying to carefully maneuver around this by claiming they don't keep any such data ... though it has been shown that they definitely keep IP addresses, and presumably a lot more.

[johnnya24]

Mos Def being force fed using Guantanamo standard procedures

[johnnya24]

Part 2 of the Snowden Interview

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jul/08/edward-snowden-video-interview

[Roto Rooter]

Um yeah they wouldn't have to go through that if ya know they ate the food served to them.

[nots]

Don't worry about what goes on down at Gitmo-- President Obama is going to close that place 5 years ago.

[chancellor]

NSA goes to recruit new potential employees at the U of Wisconsin and gets a lot more than they bargained for:

LOL...morons. They're lucky that's all they got. UWs hard-left consists of a lot of hard-nosed bastages who don't exactly conform to Gandhi's non-violence model.

[johnnya24]

James Robertson breaks ranks and says he was shocked to hear of changes to allow broader authorisation of NSA programs

A former federal judge who granted government surveillance requests has broken ranks to criticise the system of secret courts as unfit for purpose in the wake of recent revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

James Robertson, who retired from the District of Columbia circuit in 2010, was one of a select group of judges who presided over the so-called Fisa courts, set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are intended to provide legal oversight and protect against unnecessary privacy intrusions.

But he says he was shocked to hear of recent changes to allow more sweeping authorisations of programmes such as the gathering of US phone records, and called for a reform of the system to allow counter-arguments to be heard.

Speaking as a witness during the first public hearings into the Snowden revelations, Judge Robertson said that without an adversarial debate the courts should not be expected to create a secret body of law that authorised such broad surveillance programmes.

"A judge has to hear both sides of a case before deciding," he told members of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) recently appointed by President Obama.

"What Fisa does is not adjudication, but approval. This works just fine when it deals with individual applications for warrants, but the 2008 amendment has turned the Fisa court into administrative agency making rules for others to follow."

"It is not the bailiwick of judges to make policy," he added.

[johnnya24]

The curtain has really been pulled back to reveal the "real" Google over the last 6 months!

Massive global tax avoidance schemes, lying to its customers about handing over their data, now supporting climate change deniers.

Google hosts fundraiser for climate change denying US senator

Google, which prides itself on building a "better web that is better for the environment", is hosting a fundraiser for the most notorious climate change denier in Congress, it has emerged.

The lunch, at the company's Washington office, will benefit the Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, who has made a career of dismissing climate change as a "hoax" on the Senate floor.

Proceeds of the 11 July lunch, priced at $250 to $2,500, will also go to the national Republican Senatorial Committee.

It's the second show of support from Google for the anti-climate cause in recent weeks.

Ubuntu mobile can't come quick enough!

[johnnya24]

The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus (Glenn Greenwald)

This guys sounds like the nullnor of journalism. The whole conspiracy theory BS we see Kohm spouting has really turned on its head ... they've started believing their own friggin' misinformation.

On Monday night - roughly 36 hours ago from this moment - the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden's behavior, and then Assange, rather than have WikiLeaks publish the documents itself, generously directed them to the Guardian.

To peddle this tale, Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions ("Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton's Hawaii facility?" - "Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?" - "Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?") and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques ("Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation" - "Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks").

Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over "what is journalism?" with this answer: you fill up articles on topics you don't know the first thing about with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of "just asking questions". You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy without bothering even to ask them about it first, all while hiding from your readers the fact that they have repeatedly and in great detail addressed the very "questions" you're posing.

But shoddy journalism from the Washington Post is far too common to be worth noting. What was far worse was that Pincus' wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods.

[johnnya24]

Greenwald on the New York Times' recent Snowden smear fabrications

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an interview on Saturday and then again Tuesday afternoon, vehemently denied media claims that he gave classified information to the governments of China or Russia. He also denied assertions that one or both governments had succeeded in "draining the contents of his laptops". "I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops," he said.

The extraordinary claim that China had drained the contents of Snowden's laptops first appeared in the New York Times in a June 24 article. The paper published the claim with no evidence and without any attribution to any identified sources.

In lieu of any evidence, the NYT circulated this obviously significant assertion by quoting what it called "two Western intelligence experts" who "worked for major government spy agencies". Those "experts" were not identified. The article then stated that these experts "said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong" (emphasis added).

[johnnya24]

More details about the extent of Microsoft's collusion with the NSA

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".