James Clapper, EU play-acting, and political priorities

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Wednesday 3 July 2013 09.34 EDT

Defending the Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced that “the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the right wing wants.” Really? In what conceivable sense is this not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone a journalist, don’t find it deeply objectionable when top national security officials systematically mislead your representatives in Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying, what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate domestic spying that warps if not outright violates legal limits isn’t a “scandal”, then what is?

For many media and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what’s truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the endless fixation on Edward Snowden’s tone and choice of asylum providers, the flamboyant denunciations of this “29-year-old hacker” for the crime of exposing what our government leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his passport. This is what our media stars and progressive columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope of distracting attention away from the surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials and their serial deceit about it.

What kind of journalist – or citizen – would focus more on Edward Snowden’s tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight? Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and is angrier about, Edward Snowden’s exposure of these facts than they are about James Clapper’s falsehoods and the NSA’s excesses.

What we see here, yet again, is this authoritarian strain in US political life that the most powerful political officials cannot commit crimes or engage in serious wrongdoing. The only political crimes come from exposing and aggressively challenging those officials.

Clapper under pressure despite apology for ‘erroneous’ statements to Congress

Dan Roberts in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York, The Guardian

Monday 1 July 2013 16.16 EDT

The US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has attempted to head off criticism that he lied to Congress over the extent of government surveillance on American citizens, with a letter to senators in which he apologised for giving “erroneous” information.

Two weeks after telling NBC news that he gave the “least untruthful answer possible” at a hearing in March, Clapper wrote to the Senate intelligence committee to correct his response to a question about whether the National Security Agency “collected data on millions of Americans”.

But the US senator who asked the question, Ron Wyden, said on Monday that Clapper’s office had admitted in private that his answer was wrong, after the March hearing. Yet the intelligence chief only corrected the record on 21 June, when disclosures by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden prompted weeks of intense public pressure.

Clapper: I gave ‘erroneous’ answer because I forgot about Patriot Act

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 2 July 2013 15.59 EDT

In the full letter, Clapper attempted to explain the false testimony by saying that his recollection failed him. “I simply didn’t think of Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” he wrote to committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California) on 21 June, referring to the legal provision cited to justify the mass collection of Americans’ phone data, first disclosed by the Guardian.

…

In his newly released letter, Clapper told Feinstein that his remarks were “clearly erroneous,” and he issued them because he was thinking instead of a different aspect of surveillance, the internet content collection of persons NSA believes to be foreigners outside of the United States.

“I apologize,” Clapper wrote. “While my staff acknowledged the error to Senator Wyden’s staff soon after the hearing, I can now openly correct it because the existence of the metadata program has been declassified.”

In statements for the past month, Wyden and his staff have said they told Clapper before the fateful hearing that he would face the question, and contacted his staff afterward to correct the record.

“The ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] acknowledged that the statement was inaccurate but refused to correct the public record when given the opportunity. Senator Wyden’s staff informed the ODNI that this was a serious concern,” Wyden spokesman Tom Caiazza said on Monday.

Clapper’s letter does not acknowledge that he had earlier told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News that he provided Wyden with the “least most untruthful” answer he could publicly offer, likening the question “in retrospect” to a “stop beating your wife kind of question.”

NSA officials ‘not always accurate’ in public statements over surveillance

Spencer Ackerman in Washington, The Guardian

Tuesday 2 July 2013 18.50 EDT

Two US senators on the panel overseeing the National Security Agency said intelligence officials were “unable” to demonstrate the value of a secret surveillance program that collected and analyzed the internet habits of Americans.

…

“We were very concerned about this program’s impact on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights, and we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its effectiveness,” Wyden and Udall said in a statement late Tuesday, the first senators to acknowledge the internet metadata collection. “They were unable to do so, and the program was shut down that year.”

Shawn Turner, the chief spokesman for director of national intelligence James Clapper, who is currently under congressional fire over the truthfulness of his testimony on the surveillance efforts, told the Guardian last week that the Obama administration unilaterally ended the program for “operational and resource reasons”.

…

“In our judgment it is also important to note that intelligence agencies made statements to both Congress and the [Fisa] Court that significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness,” Wyden and Udall said. They did not elaborate.

“This experience demonstrates to us that intelligence agencies’ assessments of the usefulness of particular collection programs – even significant ones – are not always accurate. This experience has also led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program in particular.”

Barack Obama seeks to limit EU fallout over US spying claims

Ian Traynor in Brussels and Dan Roberts in Washington, The Guardian

Monday 1 July 2013

Barack Obama has sought to limit the damage from the growing transatlantic espionage row after Germany and France denounced the major snooping activities of US agencies and warned of a possible delay in the launch next week of ambitious free-trade talks between Europe and the US.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and French president, François Hollande, demanded quick explanations from Washington about disclosures by the Guardian and Der Spiegel that US agencies bugged European embassies and offices. Berlin stressed there had to be mutual trust if trade talks were to go ahead in Washington on Monday.

Hollande went further, indicating the talks could be called off unless the alleged spying was stopped immediately and US guarantees were provided.

…

As Washington desperately sought to contain the diplomatic fallout from the bugging controversy, Obama acknowledged the damage done by the revelations and said the NSA would evaluate the claims and inform allies about the allegations.

After the Guardian’s disclosure that US agencies were secretly bugging the French embassy in Washington and France’s office at the UN in New York, Hollande called for an immediate halt to the alleged spying.

“We cannot accept this kind of behaviour between partners and allies,” he said. “We ask that this stop immediately … There can be no negotiations or transactions in all areas until we have obtained these guarantees, for France but also for all of the European Union … We know well that there are systems that have to be checked, especially to fight terrorism, but I don’t think that it is in our embassies or in the European Union that this threat exists.”

Merkel delivered her severest warning yet on the NSA debacle. “We are no longer in the cold war,” her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said. “If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable.”

…

“This is a topic that could affect relations between Europe and the US,” said the French trade minister, Nicole Bricq. “We must absolutely re-establish confidence … it will be difficult to conduct these extremely important negotiations.”

“Washington is shooting itself in the foot,” said Germany’s conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

“Declaring the EU offices to be a legitimate attack target is more than the unfriendly act of a machine that knows no bounds and may be out of the control of politics and the courts.”

…

Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, likened the NSA to the Soviet-era KGB and indirectly suggested a delay in the talks. Greens in the European parliament, as well as in France and Germany, called for the conference to be postponed pending an investigation of the allegations. They also called for the freezing of other data-sharing deals between the EU and the US, on air transport passengers and banking transactions, for example, and called for the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, to be granted political asylum in Europe. French Greens asked Hollande to grant Snowden asylum in France.

Schulz said: “I feel treated as a European and a representative of a European institution like the representative of the enemy. Is this the basis for a constructive relationship on the basis of mutual trust? I think no.”

NSA revelations: why so many are keen to play down the debate

Nick Hopkins, The Guardian

Tuesday 2 July 2013 12.51 EDT

This week there have been more revelations about the way the US spied on the EU, which followed the Guardian’s disclosures about how the British snooped on diplomats from Turkey and South Africa, among others, at the G20 summit in London four years ago. This has caused genuine fury among those targeted, particularly the Germans and the French. But their anger has been met with shoulder-shrugging indignation from former British diplomats and security experts, who say this sort of thing happens all the time.

They would hardly say anything different. In all likelihood, they have either authorised or benefited from such covert intelligence gathering, so the lack of biting analysis was entirely predictable. For those in the media unsure how to deal with Snowden, and rather hoping the complex saga would go away, this was another easy escape route: “No story here, let’s move on.”

But there is a story. It gets lost, all too conveniently, in the diplomatic rows and the character-assassinations, but ultimately it is the legacy of the Snowden files. The documents have shown that intelligence agencies in the UK and the US are harvesting vast amounts of information about millions of people. This is fact, not fantasy. They are doing this right now, on a scale that could not have been envisaged five years ago, let alone when the laws covering the collection and retention of data were drafted. They are also sharing this treasure trove of intelligence with each other, and other close allies.

…

Those who wail about the leaks affecting national security might consider the words of Bruce Schneier, a security specialist, who wrote in the New York Times: “The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn’t even pass the laugh test; there’s nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do.”

The technology and information revolution allows the government to cast its net wider than ever before; collecting data, watching, spying and analysing. As revelations of systemic snooping continue to hit the headlines, Empire asks: who is watching the watchers?

…

With more than 1,300 government surveillance and monitoring facilities in the United States, Empire looks to understand why so many government programmes are top secret. Why is secrecy and surveillance becoming such big business? And, is a national security state anything new?

We discuss whether state secrets really work, the rationale behind them, and examine what the world might be like without secrets.

As Empire explores the ultimate secret of secrets, the implicit conclusion that emerges is that secrecy in government is counterproductive. It is not only terribly damaging to the democratic process, but also, in the long-run, to the very objective of national security.

…

Who is watching the watchers is not simply questioning whether governments should surveil citizens, but also wonders when government secret-keeping crosses the line from democracy to dictatorship.

One of my favorite parts of Le Tour is the Team Time Trials because of the beautiful co-ordination of the riders.  Heck, if I had my way the race would be nothing but (except for mountain stages).  Alas U.S. Postal and Radio Shack domination of this event have led race organizers to de-emphasise it to the point where it is but a single stage.

Of the 22 teams competing this year, 16 were within a minute of the best time, so it’s a lot more competitive than it used to be nor did it bounce around the General Classification very much with 3 Orica team mates tied for first and race favorite Froome a mere 3 seconds behind in a 3 way tie for 6th place.

Tomorrow’s course from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Marseille isn’t pancake flat (classed Medium Mountain) with 3 Category 4s and a Category 3, but most riders should find it of little difficulty except for those injured in the disasterous crash at the end of Stage 1 some of whom are expected to withdraw now that the Team Time Trial is over (they’ve basically been hanging on to support the team).  There will be one Sprint Checkpoint in addition to the finish.

After 4 Stages there are 39 riders within 30 seconds of the lead-

The sprinters are already starting to sort themselves out with 44 points separating the leader Peter Sagan from the 3 way tie for 10th.

There are only 3 Mountain Kings worth mentioning, Pierre Rolland, Simon Clarke, and Blel Kadri-

And 4 Young Riders-

19 Teams are within 2 minutes of the lead and 9 are under 30 seconds out-

Sites of Interest-

• Wikipedia
• Cagnes-sur-Mer / Marseille (142 miles, Le Tour)
• Cagnes-sur-Mer / Marseille (Guardian)
• The Guardian
• Guardian Interactive Route Guide
• Le Tour

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour

Reddit, Mozilla to stage Fourth of July protest against NSA spying

By Jennifer Martinez, The Hill

07/02/13 01:53 PM ET

Reddit, Mozilla and a host of other websites are planning to launch an online protest this Fourth of July against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic.

The participating sites, including 4chan and WordPress, will display anti-NSA spying messages on their home pages. They will also direct people to the site CallForFreedom.org, where supporters can donate money to help fund TV ads against the intelligence programs and press for action from lawmakers.

…

“The NSA programs that have been exposed are blatantly unconstitutional, and have a detrimental effect on free speech and freedom of press worldwide. This is going to be our biggest protest since SOPA, and it should be no surprise,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, a spokeswoman for the Internet Defense League, in a statement.

…

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox Web browser, and advocacy groups Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ColorofChange.org and Restore the Fourth also announced Tuesday that rallies will be held in major cities across the United States, including Washington and San Francisco, on July 4th to protest the surveillance programs and call for more government accountability.

…

Lending his star power to the cause, actor John Cusack also participated on the call. Cusack, who serves as a Freedom of Press Foundation board member, lambasted the media and government for focusing too much attention on Snowden and his whereabouts rather than looking at the information in the documents he leaked.

“We’ve shifted the conversation to almost anything but the revelations that are there,” Cusack said.

It didn’t really happen after all.

Tour de France 2013: chaos and crashes mark disastrous first stage

Sean Ingle, The Observer

Saturday 29 June 2013 12.33 EDT

It was supposed to be the day when Mark Cavendish wriggled into the Tour de France’s famous yellow jersey for the first time. Instead it will be remembered for an Orica GreenEdge team bus wedged under the finish line and a spectacular crash with six kilometres remaining that took out half the peloton.

With the driver trying – and failing – to extricate the bus, before throwing his hands in front of his eyes as if desperately hoping to wish his worries away, Tour organisers frantically switched the finish to the three-kilometre line down the road. Moments later the bus started reversing – and so did the organisers, who switched the finish back to its original spot near Bastia beach. It was a decision that, in the words of Cavendish, led to “carnage”.

With the peloton going at more than 40mph, Cavendish’s Omega Pharma-Quickstep team-mate Tony Martin appeared to buckle suddenly, and as his bike jumped and skipped and then slipped from under him several riders were sent flying – including Team Sky’s Geraint Thomas. Despite Thomas doing a passable impression of Superman he was cleared to race on Sunday after hospital x-rays showed no damage.

Because of the confusion, everyone was given the same finishing time as the winner, the German Marcel Kittel. That, however, was scant consolation for Cavendish, who blamed the organisers for causing the chaos with their late switch. “We were hearing in the radios with 5k to go the finish was in 2k,” he said. “Then a kilometre later, it’s at the finish. It was carnage. I’m lucky I didn’t come down. Some of my team-mates are a lot worse.”

Martin, the world time-trial champion, later lost consciousness twice on the team bus and was reported to have widespread abrasions. Even though a brain scan came back clear the chances of him participating in the second stage from Bastia to Ajaccio must be slim.

Still having trouble, more after Formula One.

Let me start out by saying this is an odd weekend, what with the start of Le Tour and all.  Silverstone takes a decided back seat in coverage by its new network, NBCSports, and Qualifying was on tape delay while the race itself moves to CNBC (a good fit actually).

It is the debut of the new construction Pirellis and fiddly aero bits from the wind tunnel wonks.  The goal is to have the minimum amount of down force on the faster tracks.

On offer are the Hards and Mediums.  As it turns out all Pirelli has done is slap on some stronger glue.  NO Kevlar!  Perez suffered a spectacular delamination in practice but that was just a sidewall puncture so not a big deal (hmm…).

Van der Garde qualified 21st but was penalised five grid spots for causing a collision at the previous round.  di Resta qualified 5th but excluded for underweight car.  Allowed to start from back of grid.

The BIG news is that Mark Webber has had it and is leaving Formula One and Ricciardo is ready to fill his shoes.

My personal opinion is that drivers don’t matter as much as the cars (though I acknowledge Alonso is an effective counter-argument in that he always drives better than his iron).

I meant to write more but my machine is steadily deteriorating under the noted Flash Player failure and I’ve had to devote considerable time to upgrades and tweaking.  Sigh, always at periods of great stress. I’ll try to update as we move along.

• British Grand Prix
• Silverstone
• Guardian Interactive Track
• Formula One Interactive Track

• Formula One Official Site
• NBC Sports Motor Sports

100th Running!

Wars and stuff, you know.

It’s going to take me a day or two to acclimate myself to the magnitude of the task and the fact that nobody I know is racing.

Bradley Wiggins, the defending champion, is Sir Not Appearing in this Film.  He dropped out of Giro d’Italia because he was sick and then he got injured.  He’s been replaced by Chris Froome as the “great British hope” (second place finisher in 2012) and it’s unknown at this point if he’ll ever return to professional cycling at all.  Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador are the other names I’m most familiar with among the pre-race favorites.

But more on that as we go along.

In other shocking developments- No Sprint Prolog!  We race in Corsica (French btw, home of Napolean Bonaparte) over 132 miles of flat from Porto-Vecchio to Bastia.  Corsica has the only 2 Departments (States) of Metro France Le Tour has never visited, but they’ll be spending 3 days there before moving to the mainland with the only Team Time Trial in Nice.

Night Time Finish!  You heard that right.  The meaningless parade around the Champs-Élysées will take place under the lights for the first time evah!

From the official site–

Running from Saturday June 29th to Sunday July 21th 2013, the 100th Tour de France will be made up of 21 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,404 kilometres (2115 miles).

These stages have the following profiles:

• 7 flat stages
• 5 hilly stages
• 6 mountain stages with 4 summit finishes
• 2 individual time trial stages
• 1 team time trial stage
• 2 rest days (I’ll be looking forward to these)

10 new stage towns

Porto-Vecchio, Bastia, Ajaccio, Calvi, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Saint-Gildas-des-Bois, Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, Givors, Chorges, Annecy-Semnoz

The Route!

Today’s Stage is a Sprinter’s course which could leave one of the Speed Demons like Mad Manx Cavendish in the maillot jaune for the first time in a long time.

Guardian Guide to the 100th Tour de France

• Tour de France 2013: The six major contenders for the yellow jersey
• Tour de France 2013: the green jersey contenders
• Tour de France deserves to have landmark celebrated with a new hero, William Fotheringham

The New York Times

• The Terror and Humiliation of Learning to Ride a Bike at 33 By MARY H. K. CHOI

Sites of Interest-

• Wikipedia
• Porto-Vecchio / Bastia (132 miles, Le Tour)
• Porto-Vecchio / Bastia (Guardian)
• The Guardian
• Guardian Interactive Route Guide
• Le Tour

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour

Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis

(h/t Diane Sweet @ Crooks & Liars)

It seems to me his only crime was not being a member of “the club” and not having $1.7 million in his pocket at the end of the auction (which is by law open to anyone).

He was soon able to raise it (after he became notorious, but too late to keep him from being convicted) and this has always struck me as a far more effective form of environmental activism than wasting your money on an ineffective institutional activist organization who’s real goal is cushy K Street offices for their over-paid lobbyists.

NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama

Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 27 June 2013 11.20 EDT

• Secret program launched by Bush continued ‘until 2011’
• Fisa court renewed collection order every 90 days
• Current NSA programs still mine US internet metadata

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA’s inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began “collection of bulk internet metadata” involving “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States”

…

The Obama administration argues that its internal checks on NSA surveillance programs, as well as review by the Fisa court, protect Americans’ privacy. Deputy attorney general James Cole defended the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records as outside the scope of the fourth amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“Toll records, phone records like this, that don’t include any content, are not covered by the fourth amendment because people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in who they called and when they called,” Cole testified to the House intelligence committee on June 18. “That’s something you show to the phone company. That’s something you show to many, many people within the phone company on a regular basis.”

But email metadata is different. Customers’ data bills do not itemize online activity by detailing the addresses a customer emailed or the IP addresses from which customer devices accessed the internet.

Internal government documents describe how revealing these email records are. One 2008 document, signed by the US defense secretary and attorney general, states that the collection and subsequent analysis included “the information appearing on the ‘to,’ ‘from’ or ‘bcc’ lines of a standard email or other electronic communication” from Americans.

How the NSA is still harvesting your online data

Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 27 June 2013 11.20 EDT

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans’ online data – despite the Obama administration’s insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011.

…

On December 26 2012, SSO announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.

The NSA called it the “One-End Foreign (1EF) solution”. It intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for “broadening the scope” of what it is able to collect. It relied, legally, on “FAA Authority”, a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions.

This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. “The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter,” the SSO December document reads. “This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories.”

…

It is not clear how much of this collection concerns foreigners’ online records and how much concerns those of Americans. Also unclear is the claimed legal authority for this collection.

Explaining that the five-year old program “began as a near-real-time metadata analyzer … for a classic collection system”, the SSO official noted: “In its five year history, numerous other systems from across the Agency have come to use ShellTrumpet’s processing capabilities for performance monitoring” and other tasks, such as “direct email tip alerting.”

Almost half of those trillion pieces of internet metadata were processed in 2012, the document detailed: “though it took five years to get to the one trillion mark, almost half of this volume was processed in this calendar year”.

Another SSO entry, dated February 6, 2013, described ongoing plans to expand metadata collection. A joint surveillance collection operation with an unnamed partner agency yielded a new program “to query metadata” that was “turned on in the Fall 2012”. Two others, called MoonLightPath and Spinneret, “are planned to be added by September 2013.”

Bush NSA Bulk Email Collection Policy Continued Under Obama

By: DSWright, Firedog Lake

Thursday June 27, 2013 9:55 am

The revelation contradicts initial talking points by spying program apologists that the NSA’s surveillance of American citizens was targeted and limited.

So much for hope and change.

…

Obama came to office with a mandate to rollback the police state and decided – nah. This proves Obama to be an outright liar given his numerous campaign promises and public pronouncements opposing these types of policies.

…

(C)ontrary to some misleading pushback, the government is reading your email and has been since at least 2001.