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.

…

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.”

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?).

Hmm.  I didn’t really expect CBS to be as forthcoming as Comedy Central and they’re not.

Or perhaps I just don’t understand the new system well enough, do you really want to see Justice Breyer again?  I thought not.  Tonight’s guests are Jake Gyllenhaal, Tim Cook, Run The Jewels, and TV On The Radio (direct fron CBS, I don’t believe it either).

Let me explain my relationship with Apple.  I was an early adopter back in the days when the archtecture was open, the firmware code with BIOS entry points free and documented, and Romar ][s roamed the earth with a massively fast 1.5Mhz 6502 with 48K and could be coupled with an impressive 2Mhz Z80 for your CP/M satisfaction (not at the same time of course, are you crazy?  Good enough that you don’t have to buy a separate keyboard and monitor).  I still have a licensed Applesoft Basic Compiler and an Apple 2c lightly used in box.

Who would have thought the big blue giant of corporate proprietary computing would manage to do something good for a change and provide us with the open cheap systems we need instead of the over priced chic crap that didn’t really start in a garage in Los Altos anyway.

Yes, I’m sorry Steve Jobs is dead despite the fact he was a thoroughgoing asshole of middling intellect.  I have no sympathy at all for his company which is a collection of fashion obsessed Wall St. ripoff artists who haven’t had a genuinely new idea since they looked at an S-100 Bus and said “why do we need all those wires?”

I mean c’mon.  You can do everything you need in 64K can’t you?  Lunar Lander is an exact model of the code we actually used to put a guy on the Moon and that runs in a 1K calculator.  The problem is that we’re too geeky to be cool.

We need to fix that.

So now you can have a Dick Tracy watch with a Hermes price tag.  I hope you think your life is improving, there are children in Africa who don’t have basic cable, ice cubes, and microwaves you lucky dogs.

The New Continutity

Keeping it Oathy

Tonightly the topic is ‘The War On Cops’.  Our panel is Salman Rushdie, Chloe Hilliard, and Jordan Carlos.

The Reviews are in

Yeah

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

Tonight we have Emily Blunt, the Baker’s Wife from Into The Woods (I’ll not spoil it but it came as quite a shock to me and rather unfair actually because all she does is cheat a little on James Corden who since he is now Stephen’s co- late night white male sausage will no doubt get the privilege pass and did you notice that Prince Charming but not sincere skates?  Just saying.).

I presume she’ll be wanting to talk about Sicario and not Lip Sync Battle.  Our other guests are Stephen Breyer, and The Dead Weather.

The New Continuity

It’s not really as much fun as he makes it seem.

Tonightly the topic is whatever and our panel is Mike Yard, Brooke Van Poppelen, and Mac Miller.

Lehman Day: Making Fun of the Second Great Depression Crowd

By Dean Baker, Truthout

Monday, 14 September 2015 00:00

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the huge investment bank. This collapse set off the worldwide financial panic that brought Wall Street to its knees. The anniversary of this collapse, September 15, is the day set aside to ridicule the people who warned of a second Great Depression (SGD) if the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board didn’t rescue the Wall Street banks.

Just to recount the basic story, there is no doubt that without a government bailout most of the big Wall Street banks would have gone under. Citigroup and Bank of America were both effectively bankrupt and remained on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of government subsidized loans well into 2010. The remaining investment banks, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs were all facing bank runs. These would have been unstoppable without the helping hand of big government. Many other financial institutions also would have been brought down in the maelstrom, but these giants were for sure dead ducks at the time of the bailouts.  

There is no doubt that the initial downturn would have been more severe if the market was allowed to work its magic and put these banks out of business. But the question the SGD gang could never answer is how this collapse would prevent the government from boosting the economy immediately afterward. After all, then Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke once ridiculed people who questioned the ability of the government to boost the economy, commenting the government “has a technology, called a printing press…”

Rather than sitting through a decade of double-digit unemployment, why would Congress not pass a large stimulus package supported by aggressive monetary policy from the Fed? There certainly was no economic obstacle to this path. And the claim that political gridlock somehow would have prevented any stimulus flies in the face of history. Even Republicans have supported stimulus to counter economic slumps. For those too young to remember, the last such incident was the stimulus package signed by President George W. Bush in February of 2008, when the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent.

In short, the idea of the government sitting paralyzed while the unemployment rate sat in the double digits is entirely an invention of the SGD crew. It has no basis in the real world.

It is easy to see why the SGD myth persists. Most obviously, the big Wall Street banks like to pretend they did us all a favor by letting the government bail them out. In their story the bailout wasn’t about saving Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, it was about rescuing the economy.

…

They want the public to believe that the issues involved are complicated and beyond the understanding of normal people. This is why their focus is always the financial crisis. After all credit default swaps and collaterized debt obligations can be complicated.

On the other hand, the basic story of the housing bubble was pretty damn simple. When the country saw an unprecedented run-up in house prices it should have caught some economists’ attention. After all, the US housing market was the largest market in the world and it was not previously subject to erratic fluctuations of this sort.

The huge construction boom driven by the bubble was also not a secret. Nor was the flood of dubious loans, which even at the time were the subject of jokes about their poor quality by people in the industry.

In short, the story of the housing bubble and the devastation wreaked on the economy by its collapse is a simple one that the great minds of the economics profession should have all seen coming. Rather than acknowledge that they made a colossal blunder, it’s much better to build up the myth that it’s all so complicated. And, if we didn’t give Wall Street everything it wanted, we would be subject to the curse of the SGD.

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

Officials Cover Up Housing Bubble’s Scummy Residue: Fraudulent Foreclosure Documents

by David Dayen, The Intercept

Sep. 14 2015, 8:17 a.m.

Every day in America, mortgage companies attempt to foreclose on homeowners using false documents.

It’s a byproduct of the mortgage securitization craze during the housing bubble, when loans were sliced and diced so haphazardly that the actual ownership was confused.

When the bubble burst, lenders foreclosing on properties needed paperwork to prove their standing, but didn’t have it – leading mortgage industry employees to forge, fabricate and backdate millions of mortgage documents. This foreclosure fraud scandal was exposed in 2010, and acquired a name: “robo-signing.”

But while some of the offenders paid fines over the past few years, nobody cleaned up the documents. This rot still exists inside the property records system all over the country, and those in a position of authority appear determined to pretend it doesn’t exist.

In two separate cases, activists have charged that officials and courts are hiding evidence of mortgage document irregularities that, if verified, could stop thousands of foreclosures in their tracks. Officials have delayed disclosure of this evidence, the activists believe, because it would be too messy, and it’s easier to bottle up the evidence than deal with the repercussions.

…

In both of these cases, evidence of fraudulent activity harming homeowners has either been suppressed or not acted upon. Refusing to investigate illegal actions is an effective way of remaining in denial. But refusing to release the contents of those investigations, or refusing to rule on cases where the illegal actions have already been proven, really takes denial to the extreme.

In November 2010, Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin explained in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee why there were no real investigations of bank misconduct during the foreclosure crisis.

“Federal regulators don’t want to get this information, because they are too scared that if there is a problem, they’re going to have to do something about it,” Levitin said.

A set of unrelated and usually short instrumental pieces, movements or sections played as a group, and usually in a specific order.

Key Igor Stravinsky work found after 100 years

by Stephen Walsh, The Guardian

Saturday 5 September 2015 19.05 EDT

Igor Stravinsky composed his Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (Funeral Song) in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, shortly after Rimsky’s death in June 1908. The 12-minute work was performed only once, in a Russian symphony concert conducted by Felix Blumenfeld in the Conservatoire in January 1909, but was always thought to have been destroyed in the 1917 revolutions or the civil war that followed.

Stravinsky recalled it as one of his best early works, but could not remember the actual music.

…

Stravinsky was 26 when The Funeral Song was performed and was by no means advanced as a composer. He was completely unknown outside Russia – and barely known even there. Yet in the next four years he would compose The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, transforming himself into the most notorious modernist of them all.

…

There is a touching postscript to the story. Stravinsky was desperate to have his composition included in one or other of the memorial concerts being planned, and his surviving letters to Rimsky’s widow, to their son, Vladimir, and to the conductor Alexander Ziloti, positively cry out with the insecurity of a young composer who had never quite been accepted at the heart of musical St Petersburg and feared its judgment. They are the first hint of a split that would rapidly widen after Stravinsky’s dramatic successes in Paris. But by then of course, it hardly mattered.

The lost genius of Mozart’s sister

by Sylvia Milo, The Guardian

Tuesday 8 September 2015 09.54 EDT

“I am writing to you with an erection on my head and I am very much afraid of burning my hair”, wrote Nannerl Mozart to her brother Wolfgang Amadeus. What was being erected was a large hairdo on top of Nannerl’s head, as she prepared to pose for the Mozart family portrait.

…

Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation. And so she was left behind in Salzburg, and her father only took Wolfgang on their next journeys around the courts of Europe. Nannerl never toured again.

But the woman I found did not give up. She wrote music and sent at least one composition to Wolfgang and Papa – Wolfgang praised it as “beautiful” and encouraged her to write more. Her father didn’t, as far as we know, say anything about it.

Did she stop? None of her music has survived. Perhaps she never showed it to anybody again, perhaps she destroyed it, maybe we will find it one day, maybe we already did but it’s wrongly attributed to her brother’s hand. Composing or performing music was not encouraged for women of her time. Wolfgang repeatedly wrote that nobody played his keyboard music as well as she could, and Leopold described her as “one of the most skilful players in Europe”, with “perfect insight into harmony and modulations” and that she improvises “so successfully that you would be astounded”.

Like Virginia Woolf’s imagined Shakespeare’s sister, Nannerl was not given the opportunity to thrive. And what she did create was not valued or preserved – most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries. We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss.

Lubec, Maine

The story that goes with this picture is about Hopley Yeaton, the first officer commissioned (March 21, 1791) under the Constitution of the United States by George Washington into the Revenue Marines.  By most Coast Guarders (of whom Alex Haley is one and I am not but… New London) he is considered the first Commandant.

So in a friendly gesture the Coast Guard dug him up and planted him in New London where you can lie on his grave and think about death.

Now even though his grave was threatened by development, that of his family were not and they remain six feet (more or less, it’s pretty rocky) under the sod in North Lubec, once a bustling industrial center and now a wasteland of corrugated metal strapped around concrete slabs that machines and production lines used to be anchored on.

The libertarian impulse would be to point out the decline in commerce stems from an EPA ruling that it was no longer cool to dump buckets of blood, fish guts, and chicken beaks and feet straight into the water until the bay was red with it.

Scavanger species went into a predictable decline.  Yes, I like lobster and I know what they eat.  Do you like Pollack, Haddock, and Cod?

Seagulls I can do without even if they are agreeable to a close up.

So Lubec North, South, East, and West is available for about a dime and it is a bustling hub of International commerce.

I still don’t think grave robbing is an acceptable practice but when in Rome…  It certainly made things easier when I injured myself and had to exchange body parts after the beach amputation with shell edged tools.

What?  I had seaweed to grind my teeth on.  You guys are so effete.

Which brings us to Valhalla, New York and not by way of Wagner (Pfui!).

Family Balks at Talk by Russia to Move Rachmaninoff’s Remains

By JAMES BARRON, The New York Times

SEPT. 6, 2015

Resolutely nationalistic Russians want his body back. His great-great-granddaughter, Susan Sophia Rachmaninoff Volkonskaya Wanamaker, says “nyet.” Or she might, if she spoke Russian, but probably not. In a conversation about where his remains belong, she repeatedly used words like “dignity” and “respect.”

…

The dispute over his burial place started last month, when Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, said that Rachmaninoff’s remains should be exhumed and sent to Russia. “The composer dreamed of being buried in Russia, that’s why returning his remains to his motherland would be a great deed,” he said, according to a report on the ministry’s website.

Ms. Wanamaker said Rachmaninoff had no such dream.

…

(W)hile he died in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 28, 1943, “the family’s roots in New York were deeper than their roots in Beverly Hills,” Ms. Wanamaker said. Rachmaninoff, who left his homeland to escape the Russian Revolution in 1917, had rented a house on Riverside Drive when he arrived in Manhattan in the 1920s. He became an American citizen eight weeks before he died.

Mr. Medinsky accused the United States of laying claim to Rachmaninoff’s legacy. “If you look at American sources, you’ll see that Sergei Rachmaninoff is a great American composer of Russian descent,” he said. “Americans are presumptuously privatizing the name of Rachmaninoff.”

That idea was echoed by Valery Poliansky, the president of the Rachmaninov Society in Moscow (the group spells his last name with a V). Mr. Poliansky told the Govorit Moskva radio station that “nobody in America needs him,” referring to Rachmaninoff, or his remains. “America doesn’t need anyone, except itself,” he said.

Ms. Wanamaker disputed that. “It’s not possible to privatize a name that’s well known,” she said, also noting that her great-great-grandfather “was always proud to be a Russian, even while he was living in exile in America.”

“There is no separating Sergei Rachmaninoff from Russia,” Ms. Wanamaker said. “His music is the embodiment of the Russian romantic spirit. It’s the embodiment of the Russian soul.”

She added, “I believe the name Rachmaninoff, because it’s recognized and respected, gives Medinsky a platform to spout his nationalism.” She suggested that Mr. Medinsky was “trying to politicize a personal choice” – Rachmaninoff’s decision to leave Russia and never return.

…

Ms. Wanamaker said that Rachmaninoff, great as he was, was not the only one to think about.

“He rests next to his wife and his daughter,” she said, “and there’s no mention of moving them. So they want to separate his family, one that he fought to keep together through the Russian Revolution, through World War II? It’s simply unconscionable.”

My wishes?  I want to go like El Cid.  Shove a stick up my butt, light me on fire, and give my horse a slap on the ass.

It’s kind of unfair to the horse.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Last Day

Football Town

War Games

Cat Park

Twue Wuve

Therapy

Therapy Part 2

More Therapy

Celebrity Interview

Amy Schumer is as funny as Bill Murray, and I like Bill Murray a lot.

I hope she get the bulk of the time because I don’t much like Stephen King (it’s a jealousy thing, his style is too similar to my own).  The musical guest is Troubled Waters.

This is a minor mystery–

According to the New York Times, Troubled Waters is an unknown Paul Simon tribute band, which makes sense considering the iconic singer/songwriter’s track “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” However, the group doesn’t have any social media presence–not a Facebook, Twitter or Soundcloud–so we’re going to wager that this is some elaborate prank. Will it be Paul Simon himself? Will Colbert go the “Fallon” route and do his best Paul Simon impression? Is it some to-be-named supergroup?