'A Republic if you can keep it' ?

When Americans remained silent as the media was consolidated, silently lost was our Freedom of the Press that protected citizens since our Founding, a foundation of our nation.

The media coverage during the period preceding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq serves as a stark and horrific reminder - international media discredited the claims of the Bush/Cheney/Military Industrial Complex and the warmongers' drumbeat to war.

Each person who spoke out, took a stand, attempted to bring facts and reason forward for consideration was discredited or attacked. The favorite epithetic was 'UNPATRIOTIC.'

Let's think again about how we categorize Edward Snowden and why we would believe anything we view on Corporate Media that is becoming more biased, more willing to genuflect.

We are currently writing a pathetic and horrifying chapter in our nation's history.
When Benjamin Frankin was asked the kind of government the Constitutional Convention had created, he responded 'A Republic if you can keep it.' Let's not make this the generation that repudiates our responsibility.

Glenn Greenwald tweeted: 'Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?' (photo: NBC)

David Gregory Wants Me Arrested for Writing This

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

24 June 13

f reporters who report on leaked government secrets are going to be labeled as criminals by the corporate-owned media, then why have reporters at all?

Even though the media died a long time ago, when the news department's purpose of reporting on content was merged with the sales department's needs to sell ads, this week was a historic moment in the downfall of the media. When David Gregory of NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed Glenn Greenwald on scooping the NSA surveillance story, he implied that Greenwald was a criminal for aiding and abetting NSA leaker Edward Snowden, and then challenged his credentials as a journalist while hiding under the oft-heard "some others have said..." cover. You can see the exchange here.

The corporate media is only following cues from its owners. "Meet the Press" is sponsored by Boeing, the same corporation that owns NSA contractor Narus, an Israeli company that makes the rapid interception technology used by the NSA. Boeing is also part of the corporate coalition for "Fix the Debt," a sham organization funded by Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson that aims to frame government debt as a Very Serious Problem, and Social Security and Medicare as the chief causes of that Very Serious Problem. This likely explains why Gregory was so eager to frame Social Security and Medicare as necessary sacrifices to deal with our debt, while completely ignoring the fact that companies like Boeing (and many other companies whose CEOs are in the Fix the Debt "fiscal leadership council") pay NEGATIVE federal income tax rates due to a preferential tax code that their lobbyists helped write in the first place. But David Gregory is merely a propagandist for the inside-the-DC-beltway elite, not the main problem.

 

Since the Obama administration charged Edward Snowden with espionage (at the end of the day on a Friday, doing their best to bury the news as much as possible), the DC beltway elite have been chomping at the bit to extradite Snowden to the US, where he would likely be put in solitary confinement and tortured like Bradley Manning. As much as President Obama likes giving speeches defending his decisions on immigration and gun violence prevention, he's been silent on his decision to label Edward Snowden's leaks as tantamount to treason. Even though Snowden didn't work with a foreign government or sell the secrets of the PRISM program for millions of dollars to hostile entities, he's being given the same treatment as someone who did.

 

Politicians of both parties who vociferously defended the NSA's massive secret surveillance programs that treated everyday Americans as terror suspects are now lining up to call for Snowden's head. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blew up at Russia for letting Snowden fly to Moscow from Hong Kong. Representative Peter King (R-Ia.), chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, said Snowden had "betrayed his country." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) was booed for calling Snowden a criminal at Netroots Nation in San Jose, an annual gathering of progressive activists who are usually sympathetic to the Obama administration and top congressional Democrats. Andy Borowitz rightly pointed out the irony of a government that got caught spying on ordinary Americans prosecuting one of its citizens to the fullest extent of the law for spying.

 

Greenwald is right in that the US government is waging a war on investigative journalism. He quoted New York magazine's Jane Meyer, perhaps best known for her exhaustive report on the billionaire Koch Brothers' financing of Tea Party organizations, as saying investigative journalism has been brought to a "standstill" under the Obama administration. This can be plainly seen in the Obama Department of Justice's seizing the phone records of AP reporters without their knowledge to try to track down one of their sources. The lack of substantive journalism in the world of mainstream journalism can be directly attributed to government intimidation of journalists through acts like those described above, and to government apologists in the media like David Gregory. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the corporate-owned media is supporting a corporate-owned government's narrative in an important story sparking international debate.

 

Greenwald was also correct in saying that the future of journalism is in independent news organizations supported by donations from their readers, rather than through sponsorship from corporations with vested interests, like Boeing. Anyone who sympathizes with Greenwald should also not hesitate to make a donation to Reader Supported News, so honest journalism can continue amidst the government's attempts at suppressing it. After all, your support is the reason you're reading this article in the first place.

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Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.


Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson | The NSA's Intelligence-Industrial Complex
Valerie Plame Wilson, Joe Wilson, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "We are now dealing with a vast intelligence-industrial complex that is largely unaccountable to its citizens. This alarming, unchecked growth of the intelligence sector and the increasingly heavy reliance on subcontractors to carry out core intelligence tasks...have intensified since the 9/11attacks."
READ MORE

 

Spy Program Began Under Bush/Cheney, Patriot Act

More details will emerge over time, along with the opinions of many.

Sad to watch the revelations of what many suspected.



Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations --Snowden is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA. 09 Jun 2013 The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again' --Source for the Guardian's NSA files on why he carried out the biggest intelligence leak in a generation – and what comes next 09 Jun 2013 Edward Snowden was interviewed over several days in Hong Kong by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Q: Why did you decide to become a whistleblower? A: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under." ...Q: When did you decide to leak the documents? A: "You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive.... A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

Edward Snowden was NSA Prism leak source - Guardian 09 Jun 2013 A former CIA technical worker has been identified by the UK's Guardian newspaper as the source of leaks about US surveillance programmes. Edward Snowden, 29, is described by the paper as an ex-CIA technical assistant, currently employed by defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The Guardian said his identity was being revealed at his own request. The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data.

 

Verizon Top Secret FISC Order 08 Jun 2013 Verizon Top Secret FISC Order (.pdf) TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN Derived from: Pleadings in the above-captioned docket Declassify on: 12 April 2038 This Court having found that the Application of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an Order requiring the production of tangible things from Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. on behalf of MCI Communication Services Inc., d/b/a Verizon Business Services (individually and collectively "Verizon") satisfies the requirements of 50 U.S.C. § 1861, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

New NSA tool to quantify, track intelligence collection revealed – live 08 Jun 2013 Over the last week, three main prongs of top secret government intelligence activity have come to light. These are the dragnet collection and storage of Americans' phone records; the exploitation of data from the world's largest Internet companies with their apparent co-operation; and the casing of potential targets overseas for pre-emptive cyber-attacks.

 

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation --UK security agency GCHQ gaining information from world's biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme 07 Jun 2013 The UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

U.S. spy agency seeks criminal probe into leaks 08 Jun 2013 A U.S. intelligence agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, a spokesman for the intelligence chief's office said. Confirmation that the NSA filed a "crimes report" came a few hours after the nation's spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, launched an aggressive defense of a secret government data collection program. Clapper blasted what he called "reckless disclosures" of a highly classified spy agency project code-named PRISM.

Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies 06 Jun 2013 Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said. Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA's domestic collection policies.

June 7, 2013

Can Justice Sotomayor Stop the N.S.A.?

Posted by Lynn Oberlander

The Verizon Business customers who learned, this week, that the company had given records of every call they made within and from the United States to the National Security Agency might also have been surprised to find out that, under current law, the government did not need a warrant (or probable cause) to access that information. The records are not considered private, and all the government needed was an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. That might sound like a safeguard against government overreach, but the court approved all but one of the five thousand one hundred and eighty applications submitted for surveillance and physical searches between 2010 and 2012. It is hardly what you would call a watchdog.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/can-justice-sotomayor-stop-the-nsa.html

NSA Whistlebolower Spills the Beans About Spying

Amazing! Worth viewing the video!

Top NSA Whistleblower Spills the Beans on the Real Scope of the Spying Program
Top NSA Official: Government Tapping CONTENT, Not Just Metadata … Using Bogus “Secret Interpretation” of Patriot Act

By Washington's BlogJune 08, 2013 "Information Clearing House - We reported in 2008 that foreign companies have had key roles scooping up Americans’ communications for the NSA:

At least two foreign companies play key roles in processing the information.

Specifically, an Israeli company called Narus processes all of the information tapped by AT &T (AT & T taps, and gives to the NSA, copies of all phone calls it processes), and an Israeli company called Verint processes information tapped by Verizon (Verizon also taps, and gives to the NSA, all of its calls).

Business Insider notes today:

The newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandal raises an important question: If America’s tech giants didn’t ‘participate knowingly’ in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSA get all of their data?

One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.

In April 2012 Wired’s James Bamford — author of the book “The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” — reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel’s intelligence service provided hardware and software the U.S. telecommunications network for the National Security Agency (NSA).

By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don’t have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway.

From Bamford (emphasis ours):

“According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon…

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004.”

Klein, an engineer, discovered the “secret room” at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively “vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that “much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.”

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein’s assertions, testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to “seize and save all personal electronic communications.”

Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s.

***

“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.

And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.

This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.

The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Wyden and Udall – have long said that the government has adopted a secret interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans, because it provides a breathtakingly wide program of spying.

Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:

Any data in any third party, like any commercial data that’s held about U.S. citizens ….

(relevant quote starts at 4:19).

I called Binney to find out what he meant.

I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.

Binney replied no … it was broader than that.

Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any information about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:

Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.

I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic. In other words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that it was not using its governmental powers (called “acting under color of law” by judges), but that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).

Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based upon. Since all digital communications go through private company networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn them over.

Let’s use an analogy to understand how bogus this interpretation of the Patriot Act is. This argument is analogous to a Congressman hiring a hit man to shoot someone asking too many questions, and loaning him his gun to carry out the deed … and then later saying “I didn’t do it, it was that private citizen!” That wouldn’t pass the laugh test even at an unaccredited, web-based law school offered through a porn site.

I then asked the NSA veteran if the government’s claim that it is only spying on metadata – and not content – was correct. We have extensively documented that the government is likely recording content as well. (And the government has previously admitted to “accidentally” collecting more information on Americans than was legal, and then gagged the judges so they couldn’t disclose the nature or extent of the violations.)

Binney said that was not true; the government is gathering everything, including content.

Binney explained – as he has many times before – that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn’t like).

Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is correct when he says that no digital data is safe (Clemente says that all digital communications are being recorded).

Binney gave me an idea of how powerful Narus recording systems are. There are probably 18 of them around the country, and they can each record 10 gigabytes of data – the equivalent of a million and a quarter emails with 1,000 characters each – per second.

Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – that the NSA spying programs violate the Patriot Act. After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on external threats … not on Americans.

Binney asked rhetorically: “How can an American court [FISA or otherwise] tell telecoms to cough up all domestic data?!”

Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection:

It’s clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus other text type data on the web.

As for phone calls, I don’t think they would record/transcribe the approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It’s more likely that they are recording and transcribing calls made by the 500,000 to 1,000,000 targets in the US and the world.

This article was originally published at Washingtons Blog

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35212.htm