Obama Continues Bush's Illegal Drone Surveillance

[Rome]

Just more of the same from this gang of thugs...

[rjs246]

"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free," said George Christian, executive director of Library Connection, a consortium of 27 libraries in the Hartford, Conn., area.

Another great quote. And 100% spot on.

[Cerevant]

It's not even a quote - just the correct definition.  Something the government seems to have forgotten.

[ice grillin you]

i love this little line at the end....

Last year, authorities dropped their demand for the records, saying they had discounted the potential threat that led to the request.


talk about burying the lead...so on what basically was a whim the govt insisted on invading peoples privacy

i remember when the patriot act was frist introduced the talking point for the bush admin was "imminent danger"...basically they tried to portray that they would only erode civil rights if your neighbor was a terrorist who was about to blow up your house...and everyone bought it...even tho a samll minority of civil rights defenders at the time said that it would open a can of worms of which we have never seen before

[Diomedes]

"I don't believe that you're involved in a conspiracy to fire somebody because they wouldn't prosecute a particular enemy of a politician or a friend of a politician," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. "But at the end of the day, you said something that struck me: that sometimes it just came down to these were not the right people at the right time. If I applied that standard to you, what would you say?"

Ha!  Gonzo gets it up the pooper from his own party!  Republicans are a mess right now.   

[Cerevant]

Ten steps to fascism - and how close the US is to all 10.

The scary thing is that this doesn't necessarily all go away when Georgie Porgie leaves town...

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

[Diomedes]

While the worst president ever and his gang of evil handlers are busy spying on Americans and torturing prisoners of war, other folks are actually doing some good anti-terrorism work.  Unfortunately, when they let the Bushies in on their intel, they get stabbed in the back for their trouble.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801817.html?hpid=topnews

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events.

more at link

[mussa]

"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free," said George Christian, executive director of Library Connection, a consortium of 27 libraries in the Hartford, Conn., area.

Another great quote. And 100% spot on.

So true

[MURP]

AT&T Whistleblower: Telecom Immunity Is A Cover-Up

Earlier today we flagged that Mark Klein, who uncovered a secret surveillance room run by the NSA while employed as a San Francisco-based technician for AT&T, is in Washington to lobby against granting retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies. In an interview this afternoon, Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was -- or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.

"The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything."

What Klein unearthed -- you can read it here -- points to a nearly unbounded surveillance program. Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."

That's what's at stake in the telecom immunity provision, Klein believes. If the surveillance-related lawsuits are invalidated by a provision in the intelligence-committee-passed FISA bill, then the extent of the program -- at least between 2001 and 2006 -- will remain the exclusive purview of the Bush administration, the communications firms and the handful of Senators selected to review legal justifications for the program. "These are not babes in woods. They knew what they were doing," Klein said. "The violation of the Constitution is where they split off -- where the splitter splits off full copies of a datastream, and connects to other companies' internet stuff, like Sprint or GlobalCrossing. They don't want people to understand that. They want to portray it like the president does, that it's a handful of international phone calls. That's the soundbite, and that's not true. It affects millions of people domestically."

Klein has been public with his insider account for nearly two years, with precious little publicity to show for it, thanks to the relative paucity of national media in San Francisco. Coming to Washington might have changed that: his day was packed with press calls and face time with at least a half-dozen Congressional staffers, mostly from Democratic Senators Joe Biden, Sheldon Whitehouse and Barbara Boxer. Press attention and one-on-ones in the corridors of power might be nice, he said, but it's not enough. "I'm not impressed by people with speeches pretending to be on your side," he said. "I want to see votes. In our favor."

The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on the surveillance bill tomorrow.

[rjs246]

The question becomes, is there any escape from this? This type of domestic spying and strong-arming has always been associated with 'enemies' that we were taught to despise. Now it is very much a reality from our own government. Where do you go? There is no new world to escape to.

Does revolution become the only answer? Is someone monitoring this thread right now to get out in front of people who start to see revolution as an option? farging crazy.

[ice grillin you]

The question becomes, is there any escape from this?

canned food and a basement trap door?

[reese125]

The question becomes, is there any escape from this? This type of domestic spying and strong-arming has always been associated with 'enemies' that we were taught to despise. Now it is very much a reality from our own government. Where do you go? There is no new world to escape to.

Does revolution become the only answer? Is someone monitoring this thread right now to get out in front of people who start to see revolution as an option? farging crazy.

Puuuurple Haze.....Puurple Haze

[rjs246]

You kid, but I'm serious. We have a government that spies on us. Congress and the President had the unmitigated gall to publicly pass a law allowing us to be spied on. We now officially sanction government behavior that we have always regarded as evil and foreign.  And no one seems to give a shtein. No one is up in arms about it. How is that possible? Has this country become so soft that a completely open announcement from the government informing us that we no longer have any privacy or any way to avoid government intrusion invokes no response?

Obviously, the answer is yes. Kill your congressmen.

[Cerevant]

Soft...no.

1) Ignorant: half the population of the US believes in creationism.  Not intelligent design mind you, but literal creation as is described in the Bible.  This is a population that is used to being told what to think.

2) Distracted: no significant amount of the population is suffering yet from this power grab, and in fact, because of #1, the sheeple think that their government is protecting them from terror.  The fact that the terror has been created by those who are doing the protecting is again lost.  The population is more interested in what is happening on American Idol than they are about what is happening in Washington.

[reese125]

The population is more interested in what is happening on American Idol than they are about what is happening in Washington.

or is Britney Spears a good mother?