Yves here. At first I thought I’d relegate this Real News Network piece to Links, but on further reflection, I decided it was too important for that. The segment recaps the main findings of a new book, Enemies Within, about a heretofore secret operation in the NYPD. This might appear to be a local story, but think twice.
Read more...The Obama Administration is presenting the upcoming Congressional votes on its blank check Authorization to Use Military Force in Syria as justified, irrelevant (since Kerry has asserted that the Administration doesn’t need Congress’ approval can attack even in the face of a no vote), but a done deal nevertheless. None of those claims stand up to scrutiny.
Gaius focuses on the question of the degree to which the military-surveillance complex is already calling the shots in the US. While he uses the current sanitized formulation, “deep state,” I wish he and others in the opposition would use a more accurate, if perhaps less tidy, turn of phrase, like “slow motion military coup.”
Read more...By Patrick Durusau. Cross posted from Another Word for It
Just in case you missed it, Groklaw has gone dark.
In Forced Exposure, Pamela Jones outlines why Groklaw cannot continue when all email is subject to constant monitoring by the government.
Read more...Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
Read more...Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).
The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.
Read more...Your Google-collected, Verizon-collected data seems to very broadly available. How broadly? Way more than you thought. Read on for the grizzly details.
Read more...Before readers start throwing brickbats at me, understand that I am no fan of the Google Glass project. But the killer app for Google Glass could be protecting citizens from authoritarian policing.
Read more...Yves here. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. As soon as Glenn Greenwald started to reveal the extent of NSA snooping, Ed Harrison remarked via e-mail that one of the casualties would be cloud-based computing models. Wolf Richter catalogues the damage so far. And who would trust any of the proprietors, given how obliging virtually all Silicon Valley players have been when it comes to indulging the pet needs of the surveillance state?
Read more...In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.
Read more...Yves here. Van Buren looks at how severely the Constitution has been eroded and catalogues elements of both monitoring and legal abuses that have not gotten the attention they warrant.
Read more...Thanks to Obama’s famed “no drama” coolness, it’s hard to detect when he’s breaking a sweat. But if you look at the substance of his actions, it’s clear the President is losing his famed poise, at least as far as Snowden and the surveillance state revelations are concerned.
Read more...Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.
Read more...One of the things I never expected to read was a promise by any United States official that a potential defendant in a criminal prosecution by our federal courts “will not be tortured.”
Read more...While I am sure readers will be disappointed that this proposal to curb the NSA was defeated (see background here), the margin of victory for the bad guys was so stunningly narrow that it shows how badly support for the NSA has fallen even among its normal allies.
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