The Commentariat -- June 9, 2013
Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian: "The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications. The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks." ...
... James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence: "Over the last week we have seen reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe. In a rush to publish, media outlets have not given the full context -- including the extent to which these programs are overseen by all three branches of government -- to these effective tools." ...
... Robert O'Harrow, et al., of the Washington Post: "The statement from Clapper is both an affirmation of PRISM and the government's strongest defense of it since its disclosure by The Post and the Guardian on Thursday. On Wednesday, the Guardian also disclosed secret orders enabling the National Security Agency to obtain data from Verizon about millions of phone calls made from the United States." ...
... Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed: "The main author of a string of stories revealing large-scale top secret spying on American citizens by the National Security Agency says that there are parts of the story that have been withheld for legal reasons and that the goal is not to execute an unedited document dump. 'We're not engaged in a mindless, indiscriminate document dump, and our source didn't want us to be,' said Glenn Greenwald ... in an email to BuzzFeed Saturday. 'We're engaged in the standard journalistic assessment of whether the public value to publication outweighs any harms.'" ...
... Timothy Gardner & Mark Hosenball of Reuters: "A U.S. intelligence agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, a spokesman for the intelligence chief's office said. Confirmation that the NSA filed a 'crimes report' came a few hours after the nation's spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an aggressive defense of a secret government data collection program." ...
... Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "Senior Obama administration officials, including the directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and national intelligence, have held 13 classified hearings and briefings for members of Congress since 2009 to explain the broad authority they say they have to sweep up electronic records for national security purposes, a senior administration official said Saturday. The administration, by disclosing the briefings to lawmakers, sought to push back on claims by Democrats and Republicans in Congress that they were either not aware of programs to mine vast amounts of Internet data and business telephone records or were insufficiently briefed on the details. Lawmakers said that what they knew was vague and broad -- and that strict rules of classification prevented them from truly debating the programs or conducting proper oversight." ...
... I Guess He's Not Obambi Any More. Maureen Dowd: "Back in 2007, Obama said he would not want to run an administration that was 'Bush-Cheney lite.' He doesn't have to worry. With prisoners denied due process at Gitmo starving themselves, with the C.I.A. not always aware who it's killing with drones, with an overzealous approach to leaks, and with the government's secret domestic spy business swelling, there's nothing lite about it." ...
... Rob Taylor & Naomi Tajitsu of Reuters: "Unease over a clandestine U.S. data collection program has rippled across the Pacific to two of Washington's major allies, Australia and New Zealand, raising concerns about whether they have cooperated with secret electronic data mining. Both Canberra and Wellington share intelligence with the United States, as well as Britain and Canada. But both Pacific neighbors now face awkward questions about a U.S. digital surveillance program that Washington says is aimed primarily at foreigners."
Jackie Calmes & Steven Myers of the New York Times: "President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China said that they were building 'a new model' of more cooperative relations after 40 years of diplomatic ups and downs, as they wound down a second day of talks on Saturday that included discussion of a nuclear-armed North Korea, cyberespionage, climate change, free trade and human rights. Mr. Xi said he and Mr. Obama 'reached important consensus on these issues' when they spoke to reporters during a break late Friday, after meeting for more than the planned three hours and before a nearly two-hour working dinner." ...
... Update. New Lede: "Even as they pledged to build 'a new model' of relations, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China ended two days of informal meetings here on Saturday moving closer on pressuring a nuclear North Korea and addressing climate change, but remaining sharply divided over cyberespionage and other issues that have divided the countries for years." ...
... Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "The agreement between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday to wind down the production and consumption of a class of chemicals commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners could mark a key step toward eliminating some of the most potent greenhouse gases. The United States and roughly 100 other countries have already pledged to seek substitutes. For the first time, the United States and China will work together to persuade other countries, most notably holdouts such as Brazil and India, to join the effort to slash or eliminate the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs."
Sometimes members of Congress have good ideas. WCBS reports that Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) will introduce legislation to repeal dishonorable discharges that were ordered because servicemembers were gay. Changing dishonorable discharges to honorable would allow the gay former servicemembers to receive medical & other benefits.
Congressional Race
Kate Zernicke of the New York Times: "Cory Booker, who has built national celebrity from his perch as mayor of this beleaguered city [Newark], brought another of the state's most famous political figures here on Saturday as he officially declared his campaign for United States Senate. At the announcement, former Senator Bill Bradley, who like Mr. Booker is a Democrat who entered politics as an Ivy League-educated former Rhodes scholar, introduced the mayor-turned-candidate as 'the right person for the right office at the right time,' one who sees politics as 'a noble enterprise, not a dirty business.'"
Remember those GOP "autopsy reports"? Now Republicans are beginning to act on the recommendations. First step: ratchet up their outreach to evangelicals! Pete Hamby of CNN reports. CW: the New GOP is just like the Old GOP, except worse.
News Ledes
AP: "A heavy equipment operator who is accused of being high on marijuana when a downtown building collapsed onto a thrift store, killing six people, is in custody after surrendering to face charges in the deaths, police said. Sean Benschop, who has a lengthy police record, surrendered Saturday and faces six counts of involuntary manslaughter, 13 counts of recklessly endangering another person and one count of risking a catastrophe. A warrant had been issued for his arrest and police had been searching for him. He is awaiting arraignment." The Philadelphia Inquirer story is here. CW: so the contractor who hired the guy & the building's owner who hired the contractor have no culpability?
Boston Globe: "Argeo Paul Cellucci, a Hudson, [Massachusetts,] native who rose from a small-town selectman to become governor of Massachusetts and ambassador to Canada, died at his home in Hudson [Saturday] afternoon after a five-year battle with Lou Gehrig's disease, according to two close family friends. He was 65. Mr. Cellucci, who served as governor from 1997 to 2001, died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a degenerative and incurable neurological condition."
Reuters: " Jury selection begins on Monday in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and then famously walked free for 44 days, triggering nationwide protests and calls for his arrest."
AP: "Government delegates from North and South Korea began preparatory talks Sunday at a 'truce village' on their heavily armed border aimed at setting ground rules for a higher-level discussion on easing animosity and restoring stalled rapprochement projects."
Share Article
Reader Comments (4)
The following is based loosely on a story from CNN:
Republican Party to step up outreach to people it despises
The Republican National Committee has brought on a Director of Outreach to Those People (yes, them) to upgrade the party's complicated relationship with gay-, Latino-, Asian-, and African-Americans as well as believers in climate change, single women, college students, proponents of drug legalization and clean energy, those who believe in evolution, citizens concerned about gun violence, women who have been sexually abused in the military, those who believe that austerity is economic suicide, union members, beneficiaries of the ACA (ObamaCare), most scientists, those troubled by religious people who believe they’ve been given a mandate by a deity to get the rest of us to “shape up or ship out,” proponents of a smaller military footprint worldwide, others who believe that the government regulation of dangerous materials is necessary, and poor people (including former members of the middle class) who depend on government assistance, GOP sources told the Washington Times on Saturday.
The party organization has hired Roger Fallon, a long-time RNC “message” consultant who, until this weekend, was the president of Prevaricators of America. Fallon resigned from that job Saturday and informed members of the organization’s executive committee that he will be taking a job at the RNC. At first, they didn’t believe him.
Details of his job will not be announced until next week, and a spokeswoman for the RNC declined to comment on the new hire. But Fallon, who impressed the RNC brass when he sanitized Darryl Issa’s resume, has told multiple Prevaricators that he will be steering the national party's outreach to people without whom the nation would be a lot better off. According to the Republican map of America, Fallon will be based in Sodom.
Hiring a full-time demographic outreach director was one of 14 recommendations outlined by the RNC's post-election "Growth and Opportunity Project" released earlier this year. Later, it was discovered that “Growth and Opportunity Project” could be shortened to “GOP.” This was considered a serendipitous message from God, which is remarkably similar to Gop.
The so-called GOP "autopsy" did little to define the job other than to say the RNC should "focus on engaging those we abhor" - a complicated task as the party tries to continue to woo ignorant Red State voters whose attitudes on environmental and social issues are increasingly at odds with those of the majority of Americans.
Ah yes; the combination of Mo Dowd and Glen Greenwald gives us the perfect storm of very righteous indignation and the naked arrogance of all knowing at having some secret knowledge exposed through their timely intervention. It is quite capable of being cartoonist in the sense that one can conjure all sorts of evils supposedly taking place which even reasonable people can never convince us of the ridiculousness of their assumptions. It similar to pictures of dragons drawn at the edge of the known world by cartographers of old implying of dangers if one exceeds the limits of the land. It is an example of the illusion of certainty. The earth is flat...we're walking in a straight line, aren't we?
But what is metadata? A mysterious word indeed, and one that inflames the imaginations of the already flame engulfed weirdos. An example which I read from a reader's comment on this program illustrate perfectly. The reader said he was a postal delivery person and that he knew a lot about a household just by looking at the sender information; that he could tell if the receiver was receiving Social Security, whether he was being sued; whether he has student loans, whether he was current or behind in mortgage payments...all of this information from an examination of the outside of the envelope without opening the mail. The only way to eliminate the delivery person from knowing this information would be for the receiver to go to the post office and pick up his own mail, but one would have to eliminate the sorter of the mail too, and on and on it goes. Is this feeding of paranoia worth giving up your convenience of getting delivery of your mail? This type of metadata would be calls "cues" by crime writers, and many are in prisons who have been convicted on "circumstantial evidence."
So it's important not to a rush to judgment by the Dowds and Greenwalds of this world. Stop, think slowly, look at the big picture.
@dan. Thanks for adding some balance. As it happens, I am writing something in the same vein as your comment & will post it shortly.
Marie
@ Jack Mahoney, That would be hilarious, if it didn't mean I may soon be getting calls and email from professional Prevaricators. It would probably be less scary if I knew what prevaricatation is. I will not be answering the doorbell, and am putting a sign in the window that says Gone To Brazil.