September 2015 archive

Nick Merrill: the man who may unlock the secrecy of the FBI’s controversial subpoenas

by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 17 September 2015 07.30 EDT

Unless the US Justice Department challenges a federal judge’s order that was kept secret until Monday, 27 November will be a landmark date for transparency in the post-9/11 era. The black bars obscuring the specific kinds of data the FBI sought from Merrill in 2004 will lift, revealing categories of information the bureau seeks to acquire outside the normal warrant process.

…

Merrill, president of the firm Calyx, which at the time provided web hosting services, chose to fight the NSL instead of complying. He said that the public would be horrified to see the sorts of things the FBI acquires without a warrant.

“Internet service providers, email providers and other online services often store huge amounts of intensely personal and revealing data. NSLs have allowed the FBI to run rampant, demanding the sensitive records of innocent people in complete secrecy, avoiding the constitution’s carefully designed system of checks and balances, without ever appearing before a federal judge,” Merrill, now 42, told the Guardian.

…

The 2001 Patriot Act lowered the standards for issuing NSLs substantially. No longer did the FBI need a particularized suspicion against an individual target, just “relevance” to a terrorism or espionage investigation. Special agents-in-charge at the FBI’s 56 field offices could now issue an NSL, not merely senior officials at its Washington headquarters. The gag orders, however, remained.

Accordingly, the Patriot Act transformed NSLs from a rarity into a routine tool. While secrecy has made hard numbers about NSLs hard to acquire, the FBI made 8,500 requests for data through NSLs in 2000. In 2014 an advisory group on surveillance appointed by Barack Obama reported that the FBI now issues 60 NSLs on average every day, which works out to 21,900 annually. Since a single NSL can request records from multiple people, the total number of people affected is likely to be vastly higher – and remains obscured in secrecy.

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Obama’s surveillance advisory group, which included former US intelligence officials, warned that NSLs sought for intelligence investigations “are especially likely to implicate highly sensitive and personal information and to have potentially severe consequences for the individuals under investigation”. It said it was “unable to identify a principled reason why NSLs should be issued by FBI officials“.

…

As Merrill sought to disclose more, the FBI said, according to New York federal judge Victor Marrero, Merrill “would reveal law enforcement techniques that the FBI has not acknowledged in the context of NSLs, would indicate the types of information the FBI deems important for investigative purposes, and could lead to potential targets of investigations changing their behavior to evade law enforcement detection”.

Marrero, on 28 August, ruled in Merrill’s favor anyway. But the judge’s opinion was kept secret until Monday to ensure that it did not itself reveal classified information.

“The gag was never necessary to protect national security, but to prevent a fulsome debate about the scope of the government’s unchecked power to obtain personal information about Americans,” said German, the former FBI agent, now with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

“Its release should be just the first step in a much more comprehensive discussion about the full range of government programs to spy on its own citizens.”

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Michael Winship: Congress Is a Confederacy of Dunces

Already we’re deep into September and Congress has reconvened in Washington, prompting many commentators to compare its return after summer’s recess to that of fresh-faced students coming back to school, sharpening their pencils, ready to learn, be cooperative and prepared for something new.

This, of course, is where the analogy crumbles.

For this particular Congress to cooperate and do something new would require a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes — perhaps Pope Francis can do something about that when he’s on the Hill next week. His Holiness may be the only hope.

What’s happening is just the latest virulent iteration of the strategy with which the Republicans have infected Congress from the night Barack Obama became president. Make governing impossible (as the old P.J. O’Rourke saying goes, “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”). Shut down democracy, if that’s what it takes. Keep from happening anything that helps and protects the 99 percent or threatens the plutocracy.

Linda Sarsour: Ahmed Mohamed is just one example of the bigotry American Muslims face

Parents like me send our children to school every weekday morning entrusting the adults there to educate them and to cultivate, encourage and promote innovation and creativity among them. More importantly, I trust that my children are protected from any harm – not arrested and interrogated without my presence or that of an attorney by law enforcement officers for trying to intellectually impress the very adults we ask them to trust and with whom they spend most of their days. [..]

But as much as I am outraged at the treatment this young boy endured, I’m dumbfounded at the ignorance of the adults in his school including the police who literally cannot tell the difference between a clock, a bomb and a “fake bomb”, let alone the kind of kid who might bring any of the above. What message does Ahmed’s treatment by his own teachers send to American Muslim students, aspiring inventors, innovators and engineers? We have spent billions of dollars promoting the math and sciences in schools across the United States – but I guess the people who designed those outreach efforts didn’t mean for Muslim kids to take the bait.

The only plausible explanation for a teacher at a school chartered for innovation to respond to a student’s invention with incarceration is that the student was Sudanese American and Muslim, and the teacher, like many Americans, had been saturated with anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

September is the 260th day of the year (261st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 105 days remaining until the end of the year.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution was signed. As dictated by Article VII, the document would not become binding until it was ratified by nine of the 13 states. Beginning on December 7, five states–Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut–ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve undelegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. In June, Virginia ratified the Constitution, followed by New York in July.

On September 25, 1789, the first Congress of the United States adopted 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution–the Bill of Rights–and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of these amendments were ratified in 1791. In November 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island, which opposed federal control of currency and was critical of compromise on the issue of slavery, resisted ratifying the Constitution until the U.S. government threatened to sever commercial relations with the state. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted by two votes to ratify the document, and the last of the original 13 colonies joined the United States. Today, the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

What about them do you not understand?  Funny on a deep fried stick.

Stephen- Kevin Spacey, Carol Burnett, Willie Nelson, and John Mellencamp.

Larry, Larry, Larry- Ice T, Ricky Velez, and Calise Hawkins. Tick tock, be afraid of the clock.

No, the dog is not there to lick your plate and it’s terribly undignified.  Hey look!  There are more clowns!

I’d tell you to send in the lions except they’re clowns too.

We start tonight with Funnel in your Pants, one of the classics.

Performing are Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki and Rick Santorum.  Unfortunately we will not be favored by Rick Perry who is too busy being indicted to appear or Jim Gilmore (who is he again?).

Tonight, starting at 6 PM EDT on CNN and round two at 8 PM EDT on the same cable channel, the GOP will present its second debate from the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. As before, the first debate will lead off with the lower ranking candidates in the polls. This time there are only four that didn’t make the cut for the main event, while eleven will now occupy the main stage. Former Hewlett Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina will join the boys club for this round.

This will mostly be an event to try to counter the bombastic rhetoric of the front runner, real estate mogul and performance artist Donald Trump. Mr. trumps unscripted screed has dominated the regular and cable news station, so much so that some high profile figures are calling them out on it. HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher lambasted MSNBC’s  Chris Matthews on Matthews’ own show, “Hardball” for what Maher called non-stop coverage of Trump’s “rambling brainfarts”

When Matthews asked for his thoughts about how Trump could be pulling in the crowds and the poll numbers that he does, Maher’s said the reason was that when it comes to how much live coverage the media gives the plutocrat, MSNBC needs only to look in a mirror.

“Why cover it, like he’s Churchill giving an important speech? Have you listened to these speeches?” Maher asked. “Trump is always saying other countries are laughing at us. This is why they’re laughing at us, because of what he says and how we are taking it seriously.”

Maher also brought up Trump’s attacks on his rivals for using teleprompters, saying that though people have been responding to his speeches, Maher described them as “brain fart, stream of conscious ramblings.”

Matthews responded that network news keeps Trump on in order to see how long he’ll last, to which, Maher supposed Trump could go on repeating the same points forever.

“He’s already repeating his material. He says this stuff in every speech,” Maher said. He finished the conversation by acknowledging also how, whether Trump is giving speeches or taking questions, he either disregards evidence contrary to his views, or promises “something terrific.”

So what happened last night? Yes, they did it again when during Chris Hayes’ show, they cut to complete coverage of Trump’s alleged foreign policy speech, which was mercifully shorter than usual and had nothing to do with foreign policy. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, apparently fed up with Trump’s babbling, cut away:

Trump was speaking in broad terms about doing good things for the military and veterans. Now, normally whenever Trump’s speaking on TV, cable news can’t resist it. But it appears this speech may have been a final straw of sorts, as Cooper just cut into the speech and very blatantly said they were told there will be specifics.

He informed viewers if Trump started giving specifics, they would cut back to his remarks. They did not.

And it didn’t even end there. At various different points throughout the evening, Cooper made a point of highlighting how Trump gave no specifics, which apparently people were led to believe would be in this particular speech.

What is even more pathetic is former Politico writer Maggie Halberman, now writing with a New York Times by-line, trying to convince her readers that Trump has become a more “disciplined” candidate. Really??? My guess would be that Ms. Halberman hasn’t seen or heard Trump’s last two speeches.

I really hate dwelling on The Donald but he is a useful tool in the sense that he is showing the GOP for what it truly is: a racist, egocentric, party of old white men who care only about catering to the 1% who support them. No offense to Dr. Ben Carson, who is a very close second in the polls. While he maybe an excellent neurosurgeon and a innovator in his field of medicine, he is out of touch with the realities of the vast majority of black Americans. It sad that instead of being remembered for his greatness in the OR, he’ll be remembered for his clueless presidential run.

We will be live blogging this event. I will be removing all sharp and hard objects from the room lest I be tempted to throw one at my TV. I will also have a pitcher of very dry martinis and, just for The Donald, a large bowl of home made salsa and tortilla chips.

I honestly don’t know what to do with myself. It’s bad enough that I’ve never had any driving ambition to actually be or accomplish anything “big.” Now that I have time on my hands I find myself both overwhelmed by some of the responsibilities I have, and at a loss for how to best use the time I’ve recently regained. I really should be cleaning and clearing out the house, and that’s happening in fits and starts, but did I mention overwhelming? Oh, on many levels.

I’m trying to take a step back, assess what’s important to me, what matters. Especially what I do online. Does it matter? I want to believe that it does. I want to think that the time I put into certain things counts for something. The  Snowden supporters facebook group I took on tests that belief more often than I would like. I think it’s important, I don’t want to walk away, but it is disheartening as hell to see the fan boy posts outnumber the privacy activist posts–to see the number of “likes” pile up on the 25th repost of the Snowden statue vs any given post on domestic spying or trying to restore our forth amendment rights. Or how many people join simply due to their rabid hate of government or Obama, misunderstanding core issues, what has been done, and what needs to be done. It’s frustrating as all hell, Edger threatened to walk away more than once, but now that he’s gone–well, I don’t think I can.

I’m trying to spend more time on art. I’ve done a few pieces I’m happy with. My well has run dry for the moment, so I am working with various media to color in other people’s work. I think it’s good. I’m learning new techniques, how to blend alcohol markers, how to use several different mediums on one piece, stuff like that. Until it fires up a spark of inspiration the color itself makes me happy, and it’s something I can do with a clipboard propped her in front of me while that group keeps me tethered to this computer. Although, I have to admit that I’ve been (and this may be somewhat irrational) spending every spare dollar I get trying to amass some quality supplies for that time down the road when there will be no spare dollars.

I’ve been cajoling the kids to spend time with me. Just get their butts off their computers and do something, anything else. Come color with me, I’ll let you use the good stuff. Let’s play a game, I have some good ones…but they don’t suffer this same yearning for time and meaning as I do. They have other interests now, the allure of that is too strong to set aside for one of mom’s whims. Time feels short for me, it stretches out endlessly before them, and may the Deity grant that be so. I will not browbeat them, but I will continue to invite.

This is about as close as I get to an existential crisis–which for me has always just boiled down to anything that makes one seek meaning or purpose. I don’t find my life completely bereft of either of those two things, I just feel like it’s inventory time. That’s a healthy thing, I think.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hawks Aren’t Giving the Iran Deal a Chance

Bellicose posturing too often ends up isolating the United States-and undermining our security.

The Iran nuclear agreement-characterized by The Washington Post‘s editorial board as the “most consequential US diplomatic agreement in decades”-will go forward, as all but four Senate Democrats rallied to fend off Republican efforts to torpedo it. The difficult and concrete achievement of diplomatic compromise has overcome the vacuous fantasies of military bluster. The question now is: What comes next?

Led by the early support of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Martin O’Malley and pressured by grass-roots activists, Democrats in the House and Senate lined up to defend the agreement (with a notable exception of Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who aspires to lead the very caucus he abandoned).

But now, opponents and supporters threaten to hamstring it at birth. Instead of building on the agreement to explore new areas of cooperation, the administration and its critics are pivoting quickly to threatening Iran in anticipation of it cheating on the agreement. While the agreement calls for lifting multilateral sanctions focused on foreign companies, most US sanctions against Iran will remain in place. The administration and senators of both parties are now proposing new sanctions and military maneuvers to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. Not surprisingly, that has precipitated a harsh reaction from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This could quickly snatch defeat from the hands of victory, foreclosing any broader transformation of US-Iranian relations and locking the United States into a continuation of its failed Middle East strategy.

Bianca Jagger: President Obama’s Mortal Sin

President Obama’s approval of Shell’s Arctic oil drilling has tarnished his environmental legacy.

President Obama is the first incumbent US President to cross the Arctic Circle. The purpose of his expedition was to “witness first-hand the impact of climate change on the region” and to announce new measures to address it. Speaking at the Glacier climate summit in Anchorage Obama recognised the role of the US “in creating this problem.” He also stated “we embrace our responsibility to help solve it” because failure to do so will “condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.” Yet less than one month ago his administration gave the green light to Shell to drill for oil in the Arctic.

President Obama must know that it is impossible to protect the Arctic while allowing Shell to drill for oil 70 miles off the coast of Alaska. He cannot have it both ways. His policies and proclamations are irreconcilable.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders receive conditional amnesty; Palestinian refugees massacred in Lebanon; Mexico pushes for independence; Opera star Maria Callas dies; Blues great B.B. King born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

Albert Einstein