Congress must end mass NSA surveillance with next Patriot Act vote

by Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Wednesday 8 April 2015 12.01 EDT

Despite doing almost everything in their power to avoid voting for substantive NSA reform, Congress now has no choice: On 1 June, one of the most controversial parts of the Patriot Act – known as Section 215 – will expire unless both houses of Congress affirmatively vote for it to be reauthorized.

…

While the government claims that its other uses of Section 215 are “critical” to national security, it’s extremely hard to take their word for it. After all, the government lied about collecting information on millions of Americans under Section 215 to begin with. Then they claimed the phone surveillance program was “critical” to national security after it was exposed. That wasn’t true either: they later had to admit it has never stopped a single terrorist attack.

We also just learned two weeks ago that the NSA knew the program was largely pointless before the Snowden leaks and debated shutting it down altogether. Suddenly, after the Snowden documents became public, NSA officials defended it as “critical” again when they had to go before an increasingly skeptical Congress.

…

Whatever else they’re doing with Section 215 behind closed doors, the phone surveillance program is illegal. As the author of the Patriot Act, Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner has said: “I can say that without qualification that Congress never did intend to allow bulk collection when it passed Section 215, and no fair reading of the text would allow for this [mass phone surveillance] program”.

It’s also likely unconstitutional, as the first federal judge to look at the program ruled almost a year ago. Judge Richard Leon wrote at the time in his landmark opinion: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval”.

These days, Congress can barely get post office names passed, let alone comprehensive reform on any subject affecting the American people. So the fact that they haven’t passed NSA reform yet says more about their near-total dysfunction than the American public’s views about privacy.

But now they have no choice. A year and a half ago, the House came within a few votes of cutting off funding for Section 215 in an unorthodox appropriations vote and, since then, opposition to the NSA’s massive spying operation on Americans has remained strong.

Only time will tell if Congress will actually receive this message. But if citizens call their representatives, they might just get it. Then, come June, the NSA will have a lot less of our private data at their fingertips.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Welcome back to Science Thursday.  This particular film was shot by CERN interns during some downtime, of which they have quite a lot actually since it’s broken more often than it’s working.

Science!

What a lot of people don’t know about the Large Hadron Collider is that it’s basically been operating at half capacity since an accident during the test phase blew out a large section.  Now, after two years of re-building, it is poised again to create that Black Hole Apocalypse that swallows the Earth into it’s singularity (not to worry, as it turns out micro Black Holes are unstable and loose mass (energy) through Hawking Radiation at a rate too great to sustain themselves indefinitely, so you can rest assured that we’re far more likely to die of Global Climate Change).

Anyway it’s been down for two years (much like Shell’s Arctic drilling scheme) and started it’s run up to full capacity next week.  Beyond nailing down the Higgs Boson, a lot of what they expect to find is nothing.

Huh?

Scientific method.  A Theory is not a Theory unless it makes predictions that are experimentally disprovable-

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

The dog did nothing in the night-time.

That was the curious incident.

A lot of the work for CERN from here on out is testing some of the predictions of various Theories and seeing if the experimental results match.  The fuzzyness of the Higgs Boson for instance could indicate Supersymmetry which predicts up to 5 types of Higgs Bosons.

If the Standard Model is in fact correct, it covers only 4% of the observed Universe.  27% is “Dark Matter” that is currently undetectable but exerts a huge Gravitational influence (umm… Black Holes are detectable so it ain’t that).  “Dark Energy” even less so, but this is the force that observationally inflates the Universe beyond a size where Gravity can ever collapse it.

The Large Hadron Collider might, might produce energy levels sufficient to detect Dark Matter.  Nobody is talking about Dark Energy yet.

Oh, and ‘Dark’ in this context means undetectable by current means, might as well call it Rebellion.

So how to do you detect the undetectable?  Why, by it’s absence.  The hope for Dark Matter is that certain types of collisions will, instead of producing results that conform with the Standard Model, lose detectable energy (mass) in a replicatible way that advances the math describing it’s nature.

Or not.

Cern restarts Large Hadron Collider with mission to make scientific history

by Ian Sample, The Guardian

Sunday 5 April 2015 15.48 EDT

The pat on the back and call to arms marked the restart on Sunday morning of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. More than two years after it handed researchers the Higgs boson, and was closed down for crucial upgrade work, the machine is ready to make scientific history for a second time.

How that history will be written is unknown. High on the wishlist for discoveries are dark matter, the invisible material that appears to hang around galaxies and makes up more than 25% of the universe; hidden extra dimensions that would explain why gravity is so puny compared to other forces of nature; and an explanation for why the world around us is not made from antimatter.

But there is another history that keeps scientists awake at night: the possibility that the LHC’s discoveries begin and end with the Higgs boson, that it finds nothing else over the next 20 years it is due to run. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told the Guardian: “My thoughts on the possibility of the LHC telling us nothing new don’t go beyond hopeless fear.”

…

Until now, the Large Hadron Collider has run at only half its design energy. The machine was restricted to 7TeV collisions after a weak connection led to a short circuit that caused an explosion less than two weeks after it was first switched on in September 2008. The blast covered half a kilometre of the machine with a thin layer of soot and closed the collider for more than a year. The repairs cost the lab £24m.

The machine was switched back on in 2009, but Cern took the precaution of running at half energy to slash the risk of another accident. The gamble paid off. On 4 July 2012, the lab’s Atlas and CMS detector teams declared they had discovered the Higgs boson months before the machine was shut down. A year later, Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist, and François Englert from Brussels, won the Nobel prize for their work on the particle, which is thought to give mass to others.

…

The Higgs boson was the last piece of what physicists call the Standard Model, a series of equations that describe how all the known particles interact with one another. Though successful, the model is woefully incomplete, accounting for only 4% of the known universe. With the LHC, scientists hope to find physics beyond the Standard Model, a first step to explaining the majority of the cosmos that lies beyond our comprehension.

“The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a Cern spokesman.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• The Moon Was Formed in a Smashup Between Earth and a Near Twin  By Jesse Emspak, Smithsonian Magazine
• For the first time, scientists find complex organic molecules in an infant star system, By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
• A few unwanted goldfish turn into thousands and endanger a Colorado lake, By Nick Kirkpatrick, Washington Post
• Dear Humans, Industry, Not Your Activities, Is Causing Climate Change, by Aaron Huertas, Huffington Post
• Report: Silence and denial surround Oklahoma’s “frackquake” problem, by Lindsay Abrams, Salon
• If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get, by Michael Greenstone, The New York Times
• This Cosmic Ring Photo Is the One to Rule Them All, by Calla Cofield, Live Science
• Brontosaurus Rising, By Elif Batuman, The New Yorker
• The NSA’s plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else, by Trevor Timm, The Guardian
• Homeopathy: How 200-Year-Old Junk Science Created Junk Medicine and Lasted Until This Day, By Larry Schwartz, AlterNet
• SPOILER ALERT: Google is trying to get rid of spoilers, The Guardian

There is of course only one topic tonight as our attention turns from College Basketball (told you the Lady Huskies would win) to other subjects and that is Trevor Noah.

I’ll spare you the tribalism of his ancestry except to note that as a South African with mixed parentage of a type forbidden under apartheid he certainly brings a different global perspective to The Daily Show

Feeling the exceptionalism?  I’m sure that’s one of the things that attracted Jon to the idea of Trevor Noah as a host.

Initial reaction was generally positive-

• Why Comedy Central thought Trevor Noah was perfect for ‘The Daily Show’, By Emily Yahr, Washington Post, March 30

• Trevor Noah to Succeed Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’, By DAVE ITZKOFF, The New York Times, MARCH 30, 2015

• Trevor Noah – from Soweto to The Daily Show, by Bruce Dessau, The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2015 18.04 EDT

To over the top ecstatic-

• Good riddance, Jon Stewart: How Trevor Noah could revitalize “The Daily Show”, by Peter Finocchiaro, Salon, Monday, Mar 30, 2015 07:00 PM EST

There were some quibbles, one of which was his general lack of experience as a Daily Show correspondent (he only has 3 appearances).  Another reservation was under representation of females as Late Night TV hosts-

• Daily Show: now it’s not all white on late night, but what about the women?, by Ashley Clark, The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2015 17.03 EDT

And whether he had the background knowledge to handle the 2016 election (frankly I’m surprised Jon didn’t wait until after, but maybe he was tired of interviewing empty chairs)-

• Can Trevor Noah fill Jon Stewart’s big shoes for ‘Indecision 2016’?, by Elise Czajkowski, The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2015 11.03 EDT

But we were also warned that a more serious backlash might be coming-

• Trevor Noah in our crazy birther age: Right-wing rage at “The Daily Show” is about to get very, very ugly, by Sonia Saraiya, Salon, Monday, Mar 30, 2015 02:55 PM EST

And sure enough, there were the tweets- all 8 out of 8000 or so for a percentage of 0.01 (for the record I’ve tweeted exactly once and while I thought it was screamingly funny at the time I can’t remember what I said).

(To be continued…)

Ex-F.B.I. Agent Claims Retaliation for Dissent in Anthrax Inquiry

By SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times

APRIL 8, 2015

(A) former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Department of Energy’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.

…

Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

Review: Judith Miller’s ‘The Story: A Reporter’s Journey’

by Terry McDermott, The New York Times

APRIL 7, 2015

In late 2002 and through 2003, Judith Miller, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, wrote a series of articles about the presumed presence of chemical and biological weapons and possible nuclear matériel in Iraq. Critics thought the articles too bellicose and in lock step with the George W. Bush administration’s march to war. They all included careful qualifiers, but their overwhelming message was that Saddam Hussein posed a threat.

Ms. Miller’s defense of her work then was straightforward: She reported what her sources told her. She has now written a book-length elaboration of that defense, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.” The defense is no better now than it was then.

…

The string of exclusive articles she produced before the Iraq war had the effect of buttressing the Bush administration’s case for invasion.

She had built her career on access. She describes finding, cultivating and tending to powerfully situated sources. She writes that she did not, as some critics of her prewar reporting supposed, sit in her office and wait for the phone to ring. She pounded the pavement. And an ambitious reporter with the power, prestige and resources of a large news organization behind her can cover a lot of road.

Opponents of the Iraq invasion and media critics of her reporting accused her of being a secret neoconservative thirsting for war. Whatever her actual politics, though, the agenda that comes through most strongly here is a desire to land on the front page. She rarely mentions an article she wrote without noting that it appeared on the front page or complaining that it did not.

…

(S)he was the sole reporter embedded with the military team charged with finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It failed, meaning so had she. Ms. Miller concedes that the Bush administration’s case for war was built largely on Iraq’s presumably ambitious weapons program. In describing what went wrong with one particular claim, she offers a defense that is repeated throughout the book: “The earlier stories had been wrong because the initial intelligence assessments we reported were themselves mistaken – not lies or exaggerations.”

Ms. Miller’s main defense is that the experts she relied upon – intelligence officials, weapons experts, members of the Bush administration and others – were wrong about Mr. Hussein’s weapons. She acknowledges being wrong but not making any mistakes. She quotes herself telling another reporter: “If your sources were wrong, you are wrong.” This is where she gets stuck.

And this is where Terry McDermott ends his Rand Paul 5 minutes of lucidity.

Journalists, especially those who have a talent for investigative work, are taught early to write big, to push the story as far as possible. Be careful; nail the facts; be fair, but push hard. Nobody pushed harder than Ms. Miller. In this case, she wound up implicitly pushing for war.

A deeper critique of her own reporting, and through that example a critique of the entire enterprise of investigative reporting, would examine its inherently prosecutorial nature. Investigators – journalistic or otherwise – are constantly trying to build a case, to make things fit even when they don’t obviously do so. In the process, the rough edges of the world can be whittled away, nuance can become muddled in the reporter’s head, in the writing, or in the editing.

Investigative Reporting?!  INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING?!

Let’s try whoring your soul, bootlicking sychophancy, shilling for war criminals.

What Judith Miller did has nothing to do with investigative reporting.  It was “access journalism.”

And as excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of FOX News. FOX News gives you both sides of every story: the President’s side, and the Vice President’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking? Reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Sunday’s Results-

Today’s Matchups-

It was destined to be.

The first thing you have to realize is the Muffet and Geno hate each other.  No, really.  They try to appear all polite and stuff on the record but they’re really seething underneath.

Well, Muffet does anyway.  I think Geno hardly notices anyone now that Pat Summit is safely in the rearview mirror.

So the question everyone asks is why is UConn so dominant.  For one thing it is the top sports program in Connecticut.  We have no Major League teams, UConn Throwball is a joke, likewise Men’s Basketball.  You want to know the only one that comes close?  Women’s Soccer.

Also Geno could be coaching rabbits or aliens.  He doesn’t care.  The Lady Huskies are are as tough as nails and better than the guys who they regularly scrimmage with and almost always beat.  Geno is the type of coach who would do a split squad simulated game with the Red flags those players with the skills closest to the team they’re matching against, Starter or not, and the Blue flags everyone else, Scrub or not.  Winner hits the hot tub, loser gets extra practice with Geno “patiently” explaining what they did wrong.

He only looks like a nice guy, he’s a godless killing machine.

Now some people see UConn dominance as a problem and have proposed various fixes.  Diana Taurasi says- “grow up.”

And most of Connecticut agrees.  You see, before 1985 it wasn’t much of a program at all and we’ve more than paid our dues.  Some things you can never change no matter how you jigger the rules and one of them is the best teams attract the best players.

There are those who look forward to Geno’s retirement before he doubles John Wooden’s record, that’s as may be.  We won’t have to look far to find some alum he’s taught the system and until the other teams change to keep up, UConn will continue to win baring flukes, injuries, or some super human player.

(ps. Please read the link and for the record I think the Men and Women should play under exactly the same rules, if you want more scoring you need to shorten the shot clock, not lengthen it, and lowering the rims (Geno’s big idea) is just dumb- if you want a dunk contest where only the last 4 minutes matter watch the NBA.)

Ok, so we’re just die hard Mid-Westerners at Casa de Hornbeck.  Anyone for a quick game of Euchre?

Saturday’s Results-

At least Kentucky’s out of it because I’m just not ready to see Larry Wilmore fed like a bird (ick).

Tonight’s Big Game-

Kentucky’s defeat has left the “experts” scrambling but the Vegas line is Wisconsin by 1.  This may be due to the fact that Duke is about as popular as the New York Yankees (who lost their home opener today 1 – 6 against the Jays).  Fortunately I’m a Mets fan.

Since you insist, they won 3 – 1 away against the Nationals and I get to say (probably for the last time this season) that they are tied for the lead in the National League East.

But I can’t truly transfer my attention to Baseball until the College Basketball season officially ends tomorrow with the Lady Huskies thumping Notre Dame.

Take me out to the ball game…

Monday’s Results-

Today’s Matchups-

The Battle of the #1 Seeds.  Notre Dame over South Carolina.  Maryland won’t be as much fun to crush as Tennessee, but we will anyway.  Tuesday the Grand Finale, Notre Dame thinks they can win because they have before.

Not this year I’m afraid.

Sunday’s Results-

Go Spartans!

Composed by Leonard Falcone.

Tonight’s Matchups-

Tonight in addition to the national coverage we will have home team broadcasts using the commentators who cover the regular season games.  On TNT we will be seeing the crews that do Duke and Kentucky and on True the ones for Michigan State and Wisconsin.

I guess that tells you how the experts are calling it.

As for me I think State can definitely beat Duke who are not all that by any means.  Likewise I give Wisconsin at least an even chance against Kentucky who have proven with several scares that they’re not very special.

The NCAA didn’t pull the Final Four over Indiana’s bigoted RFRA but logistically they hardly could on just a week’s notice.  They are however talking about pulling their national headquarters out of Indianapolis which would be a good thing for its own sake, not just as a protest.