I was interviewed yesterday in an extraordinary case out of South Florida where Attorney Marshall Dore Louis faced a problem that phone records material to his defense of a car robbery suspect have disappeared. Accordingly, he is seeking the records from one resource that has stored every call from every citizen: the National Security Agency (NSA). After all, the Administration has admitted the existence of the storage and program. After that, Dore is arguing that it is just another government agency with material evidence. Indeed, the NSA wanted a complete record of all calls to store and it is now being called upon to hand over material evidence in its possession.
Clearly, NSA views this program as a one way street and will not yield willingly to being a resource of litigators. The interesting question will be how it now objects. In the past, the government has refused to confirm such programs but it has now done so. In February, the Administration succeeded in blocking a challenge to its surveillance policies by arguing that any confirmation of such programs would put American lives at risk. Now that the case is dismissed, they have simply acknowledged the program. The decision is Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, and it is a true nightmare for civil liberties. The Supreme Court rejected the standing of civil liberties groups and citizens to challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs. President Obama has long been criticized for his opposition to such lawsuits and his Justice Department has continued a successful attack on the ability of citizens to challenge the unconstitutional actions of their government in the war on terror. The 5-4 opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. insulates such programs from judicial review in yet another narrowing of standing rules.
While insisting that disclosing such programs would put lives at risk to secure the dismissal of the Clapper case, the Administration readily did so a couple months later. That has not only removed the prior national security barrier but has raised questions over the truth of Clapper’s own testimony.
Dore says that the prosecutors have informed him that a month of the records of defendant Terrance Brown are missing for two phones. His provider, MetroPCS, says it has no longer has them. Then Dore was reading the newspapers and found an agency who helpfully collected all calls for all citizens. If the program is no longer secret and the calls were obtained directly from the carriers (without some secret method or device), what is the objection from the government beyond that it finds such requests a hassle. Are they ready to come to court and say that they are the government and they are not here to actually help citizens . . . just spy on them.
It is particularly ironic to seek access to this program to protect due process after the program itself blew away so many other constitutional rights. It is like an 11th Century Englishman stopping some Vikings for directions. They would like respond “we really are not there to help you.”
The government is likely going to win but it will be fascinating to watch them deal with the demand.
Source: Politico
Thanks for the link, Max-1.
“There were about 1500 Army agents in plain clothes watching every demonstration in the United States of twenty people or more … As a result of those disclosures and the Congressional hearings the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished.”
Unfortunately for the United States, it looks like the salutary abolition of US Army intelligence didn’t last long, so that now we have all these “talented” people back feeding off us again — calling themselves the NSA this time — and making military music look even worse by comparison.
Published on Jun 13, 2013
http://www.democracynow.org – As NSA director General Keith Alexander blasts the leaks that exposed widespread surveillance of Americans, we’re joined by Chris Pyle, a former military instructor who exposed the CIA’s monitoring of millions of Americans in the 1970s. Pyle discovered the CIA was spying on millions of Americans engaged in lawful political activity while he was in the Army working as an instructor. His revelations prompted Senate hearings, including Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, ultimately leading to a series of laws aimed at curbing government abuses. Now teaching constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College, Pyle says the NSA is known for attacking its critics instead of addressing the problems they expose.
Daniel Ellsberg once said that we should not consider our government officials stupid just because they do obviously stupid things. Rather, he said, we should think of them as “clever people who have lost their minds.”
On the other hand, we have the Forrest Gump way of looking at the world:
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
I have the greatest respect for Daniel Ellsberg and his admirable restraint, but with regard to America’s so-called “intelligence community” — especially the militarized NSA — I’ve got to go with Gump.
“Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, [Walt] Rostow, slightly shaken, said, ‘But you do admit it’s all be over in six months.’ ‘Oh,’ said Vann somewhat airily, ‘I think we can hold out longer than that.'” — David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Given all that “secret” stuff that our “intelligence community” claims to know about something or other (“to a significant degree of confidence”), one has to wonder: For how many more Friedman Units can the United States hold out in Afghanistan — 24 FUs and counting so far — until the Afghans give us the same word the Vietnamese did forty years ago?
From the Best and the Brightest to the Worst and the Dullest in a single generation.
Never Secure about Anything
Mike Spindell 1, June 13, 2013 at 4:38 pm
The NSA: Hoisted on their own petard.
==============================
And flying high over the Pentagon as a military operation.
“Heroes bringing you your freedoms.”
Where retired military “intelligence” goes to make a killing — in more ways than one:
I just love it when all those elected representatives of ours tell us that their lavishly funded corporate camp followers and dogs-of-war mercenaries won’t allow them to see all the “intelligence” stuff because they don’t have the “security clearance” for it. How much clearance does a person need in order to understand four charred mercenary corpses hanging from a bridge and the subsequent Vengeance and Retribution Operation by the U.S. Marine Corps that leveled a city of 300,000 in “retaliation”? How much super-secret clearance does one need to understand “Falluja.”
Michael Murry,
The Music budget has been eliminated due to necessary austerity budget cuts due to the ballooning overhead of National Security…
“Military intelligence is to intelligence as military music is to music.” — age old aphorism
Only in the United States, after a boom in “privatization,” the “intelligence” costs twice as much, in many ways. Don’t know about the “music.”
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/national-security-inc-our-private-intelligence-apparatus-numbers
U.S. Tax payer monies spent on military spy operations against the US Tax payer…
… Now, how do we cut the head off that snake?
I think starvation is a cleaner solution… IMO.
Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society Larry Lessig stopped by to speak with Bill Moyers about how the government should be using its ability to control information to protect its citizens’ privacy rather than exploit it.
[vimeo http://www
w=400&h=300]
His provider, MetroPCS, says it has no longer has them. Then Dore was reading the newspapers and found an agency who helpfully collected all calls for all citizens. If the program is no longer secret and the calls were obtained directly from the carriers (without some secret method or device), what is the objection from the government beyond that it finds such requests a hassle.
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The IRS was supposed to provide all the emails during the discovery process. They didn’t. I already had most of them.
Mike S.,
Yep. (-:
The NSA: Hoisted on their own petard.
HELP! Two comments eaten by the carnivore. Only one needs to be rescued.
MikeA, Trac phones used only a day or two, and pay phones, just like organized crime figures.
MikeA, You’ll just need to do what organized criminals do, throw away trac phones and pay telephones[endangered species].
I have no doubt we in the US are under attack from every direction, that there is a war & it’s against us, the people.
I don’t think some people can see it because it doesn’t look like WW2, Korea, Nam…
It looks like some of the pieces I keep describing.
If the same type people that built the Nazis decide to attempt another try at complete fascism what would modern fascism look like?
The current Wallst/London banking system would be key.
But if they wanted to get rid of large masses of people they’d know from WW2 the people of the world can’t stand seeing people lined up in a ditch & shot in the head.
That is why from the looks of the evidence I see they/the modern Nazi types are using soft kill weapons against us.
One of the places we can see huge death rates amassing is in the rapidly increasing cancer rates & other diseases.
Why are these Cancer/Disease rates soaring? What’s is causing the increase?
This new piece of data below is about Britain, but I can see movement by the polecats in the US preparing to deal with our own stats.
Take a look, apply those same percentage this report to the US’s pop & see something about what your family’s/friend’s health might be in just 6.5 years.
You really never thought they’d pay you that promise/insurance of a old age pension did you?
That was stolen years ago & that’s another reason they/modern Nazis likely have to attempt to kill off us Baby Boomers.
**
In modern Britain, we can all live longer … at our peril
Ian Bell
Columnist
Saturday 8 June 2013
LONGEVITY is beginning to look like the race that can’t be won.
Freed from the curse of early death, we start to realise that health, long life and happiness do not necessarily go together. Nor do they come cheap.
The headline statistic supplied by Macmillan Cancer Support is startling in any number of ways to the lay people among us. As a society we are living longer. This means, surely, that we are healthier. Yet by 2020, 47% of us can expect to have endured one or other form of cancer.
That’s not what is commonly described as healthy. Equally, on one, semi-intuitive understanding of the situation, things are getting worse. In 1992, 32% could expect to suffer cancer at some time; in 2010, the figure was 44% **
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/in-modern-britain-we-can-all-live-longer-at-our-peril.21288087
Actually, having a national database like the NSA’s could be very helpful for old people who have trouble remembering the contents of a phone call or who accidentally deleted a needed email. The NSA could just have a hotline where we could dial in our request for them to locate what we have forgotten or lost. What a boon it could be to 80 million aging boomers.