USA Government Snooping and Stealth - The Obama Doctrine

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

USA Government Snooping and Stealth - The Obama Doctrine

I'm sure everyone right now has seen the headlines about the government getting the telephone records from Verizon for every USA citizen.

Here's the deal. Verizon, a private company, destroys them after a while. This is a common practice of all telecoms. The government wants a permanent record of them.

Why?

That's a question that the government says has only one answer: to combat the bad guys.

Of course the government would never use them to target innocent people.

Yeah, right.

Come closer, Little Red Riding Hood. I won't hurt you...

The government would never do that. Just ask James Rosen, the reporter who was cited by the DOJ in a court petition for a warrant as having "potential criminal liability" in a leak the administration didn't like.

For people who are still unaware of what I am talking about (albeit I don't see how unless they are so disgusted with the news culture they have tuned out), here are a couple of Guardian stories that broke the current scandal of the Obama administration, which is actually No. 4 of the recent biggies if you count the Benghazi mess, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the AP phone records scandal:

June 5: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily

June 6: NSA PRISM program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others.

Oddly enough, I already knew about PRiSM because I bop around Black Hat sties at times and they discuss stuff like this, even thought Black Hat is mostly for Internet marketing. (ECHELON is another governmental surveillance program I have seen a lot, although this one is multinational.)

Massive surveillance of citizens is not a good thing and it flies in the face of everything it means to be an American citizen. I have been against The Patriot Act ever since Bush pushed it through Congress and this is why.

Welcome to its progeny.

If a rights-crunching law seems like a good thing under a good leader like it did after 9/11, imagine what such an expansion of power will look like in the hands of someone you consider bad. This is a point I debated a lot over the years and I have seen others debate it too.

Unfortunately in the Objectivist orbit, many, many people supported this under Bush. The libertarian orbit not so much. That has been an actual difference between the two subcultures (most of the differences are cosmetic in my view, but not that one). Well, Obama's use of The Patriot Act, and other laws even going back to Woodrow Wilson's espionage and sedition acts, is the concrete reason it was an evil law and it was wrong to support it.

For those who defend the current surveillance practices of Obama as not as bad as people are saying, imagine what this power will look like in the hands of, say, Jeb Bush. Or Sarah Palin.

(I personally believe Sarah would roll those powers back as far as she could if she became President, but that's not my point. I'm asking the anti-Palin pro-Obama people to imagine what Obama's cloak and dagger policies would look like in the hands of Sarah to them. Is that something they are comfortable with?)

Obama is on the Left. OK. I can live with that because we have checks and balances. But there are not many checks and balances against snooping and stealth.

And that, to me, characterizes Obama's danger. It's a premise of his political style. If you look at his entire career, it has been poetry on the outside to present to the public, but snooping and stealth and backstabbing in the the background. Everything he has touched has that as a common theme running throughout.

I used to believe Obama was a patsy, a face for powers behind the scenes, but I'm starting to believe he knows exactly what he is doing on the snooping and stealth and backstabbing front. (On actual administration issues, I believe his is incompetent and doesn't know what the hell he is doing, but I now believe he is a supreme Black Belt in Dirty Tricks and it is a critical mistake to underestimate him.)

Glenn Beck even came up with an interesting thought about Chief Justice John Roberts on his sudden switch a year ago about sanctioning Obamacare as constitutional, including the convoluted reasoning he presented for it.

Wouldn't it be interesting if Roberts got a late-night visit from someone who had a dossier on some misdeeds he may have committed over his life--or those of his adopted kids, etc.--and something in that file threatened to discredit his entire career? That is, unless, of course, his opposition to a certain health care law could be reexamined...

That's only speculation, but given the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, the massive increase in surveillance and surveillance technology (both public and private), and the dirty tricks of the current administration, it's pretty good speculation.

From The Industrial Revolution to The Information Revolution, humans made gigantic strides in overall improvement of everything. Hell, we even live longer than ever.

Well, welcome to the Stealth and Snoop Revolution.

I wonder where that's going to take us...

Michael

[Robert Baratheon]

Justin Katz of the Ocean State Current had a good piece on the topic this morning:

http://oceanstatecurrent.com/opinion/from-scandals-to-tyranny/

I'm constantly disappointed to see how readily others make the security-for-liberty tradeoff. The Patriot Act was such a cartoonish caricature of a police-state power grab in the wake of a crisis that I couldn't comprehend at the time how it was even entertained as a serious proposal, much less passed by Congress, or how any reasonable American could support it. It seems "repeating history" is just a cliche everyone now parrots without giving any serious thought to what that means or what specific mistakes of history we are repeating.

So now the government has your phone records. Well, as long as you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about, right?

Until the definition of what's "wrong" changes.

[Selene]

Will the media still refuse to be as scared as they should be...

At least it is still Bush's fault! Such infantile stupidity actually makes some in the media feel comfortable.

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Published: June 6 | Updated: Friday, June 7, 10:51 AM

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_print.html

Remember what Heinlein stated...As soon as they pass laws protecting privacy, you have no privacy, nor will you ever...might have been a Lazarus Long statement.

[william.scherk]

Remember what Heinlein stated...As soon as they pass laws protecting privacy, you have no privacy, nor will you ever...might have been a Lazarus Long statement.

According to the website Infocalypse, the quote is this:

"Ira, I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowded enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs -- microphones and lenses and so forth -- are that much harder to spot."

--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 15

[Selene]

Remember what Heinlein stated...As soon as they pass laws protecting privacy, you have no privacy, nor will you ever...might have been a Lazarus Long statement.

According to the website Infocalypse, the quote is this:

"Ira, I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowded enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs -- microphones and lenses and so forth -- are that much harder to spot."

--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 15

William: That's it. Thanks.

[Selene]

Nothing to see here...Move along...

"Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far." ones.com/politics/2013/06/justice-department-electronic-frontier-foundation-fisa-court-opinion

This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week's disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:

* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

* I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

It just keeps getting worse the more we begin to know.

[syrakusos]

USA Government Snooping and Stealth - The Obama Doctrine

Here's the deal. Verizon, a private company, destroys them after a while. This is a common practice of all telecoms.

The government would never do that. Just ask James Rosen, the reporter who was cited by the DOJ in a court petition for a warrant as having "potential criminal liability" in a leak the administration didn't like.

Massive surveillance of citizens is not a good thing and it flies in the face of everything it means to be an American citizen. I have been against The Patriot Act ever since Bush pushed it through Congress and this is why.

(I personally believe Sarah would roll those powers back as far as she could if she became President, ...

I had to look up James Rosen. I found this from Fox News Analyst Karl Rove.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/05/24/did-holder-mislead-congress-about-targeting-reporters-like-james-rosen/

At least, we have a two-party system. One side keeps the other more or less honest. I found it pointedly ironic that Diane Feinstein defended the seizure of Verizon records.

As you say, had it been Bush... But you posted a link to a software that makes a line drawing out of any art. Take a picture of George Bush. Make it a line drawing. Get a brown crayon. Make it into Barack Obama.

Unlike George Bush, Obama really is smart. I agree that he is fronting for others, rather than delivering his own power base. Ronald Reagan "represented" the Cowboys versus the Yankees, but he spent years and years building that following. I heard him at a conservative rally in Ohio in 1968. So, Reagan had a power base of his own. Some presidents do. Others do not. But, after 10 years in the White House, Obama learned quite well what to do ... what to do to whom and what for whom....

Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow and I are from the same neighborhood. (We were Shaklee distributors together.) She was my county commissioner and my state rep and state senator and Congresswoman and Senator.

• Critical balance between staying safe and keeping our rights. (Oct 2006)
• Voted YES on extending the PATRIOT Act's roving wiretaps. (Feb 2011)
• Voted YES on requiring FISA court warrant to monitor US-to-foreign calls. (Feb 2008)
• Voted NO on removing need for FISA warrant for wiretapping abroad. (Aug 2007)
• Voted YES on preserving habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees. (Sep 2006)
• Voted YES on requiring CIA reports on detainees & interrogation methods. (Sep 2006)
• Voted YES on reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. (Mar 2006)
• Voted NO on extending the PATRIOT Act's wiretap provision. (Dec 2005)
• Rated 100% by SANE, indicating a pro-peace voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Repeal Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell, and reinstate discharged gays. (Mar 2010)
• Restore habeas corpus for detainees in the War on Terror. (Jun 2007)

http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/debbie_stabenow.htm#Homeland_Security

Not all Democrats are created equal.

As for Gov. Palin and what she would do and what you would do about what she would do. We know that you have a thing for redheads, so let's start there. If Sarah Palin were President, she would be the Tea Party Obama. The job defines the person. That is why is does not matter whom we elect. We think that Franklin D. Roosevelt was some sort of stealth socialist, talking up free enterprise while campaigning and then attempting to crush every light of freedom while president. All I can say is that if you were president, you would have all kinds of psycho-largyngeal advertising libertarian reasons for doing exactly what FDR did. And Sarah Palin would shoot caribou to feed the prisoners in Guantanamo.

As for Verizon destroying records after some arbitrary time, I do not know where you got that from, or how you dreamed that up, but I assure you that it is absolutely A is A not true. Restore and Recovery is critical to IT (information technology) infrastructure. Nothing is destroyed on purpose. Archiving costs about 1 cent per gigabit per year. Losing data costs much more.

[Brant Gaede]

Brother, you asked for it!

--Frank O'Connor

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As for Verizon destroying records after some arbitrary time, I do not know where you got that from, or how you dreamed that up, but I assure you that it is absolutely A is A not true. Restore and Recovery is critical to IT (information technology) infrastructure. Nothing is destroyed on purpose. Archiving costs about 1 cent per gigabit per year. Losing data costs much more.

Michael,

Research on Google is the easiest thing in the world.

Really... come on...

This is from my first Google search. I could do more with one hand tied behind my back:

Cell Phone Location Tracking Request Response – Cell Phone Company Data Retention Chart

Don't you ever feel the least amount embarrassment in tut-tut-tutting when you are so totally wrong and the right facts are so easy to find?

This isn't the first time.

btw - This is a Rand-related epistemological problem. A person gets into the habit of saying everything with certainty as a habit, not because he knows something. This induces mental laziness. It actually replaces cognition with an emotion.

I say this as a person who has gone through it. Rand was correct in Atlas Shrugged to mock those who say "it seems to me" and other related phrases when they used it as a habit. But the contrary is just as bad.

I had to make a promise to myself to only use the certainty voice when I actually knew something. There is no shame at all in not knowing. You just pick up a book, do a Google search, ask someone, etc., and you fix that problem. But there is a great deal of embarrassment to be had by constantly pontificating on facts you don't know just because you think they should be one way when they are actually another.

At least it feels good when you do it, so I guess that's a plus.

For me, it's not worth the later embarrassment.

It's simpler to check. That's a great habit to get into, anyway.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brother, you asked for it!

--Frank O'Connor

Brant,

LOL...

Michael's a good dude. Just overly emotional when you say Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. That makes him turn his brain off.

Michael

[Robert Baratheon]

Brother, you asked for it!

--Frank O'Connor

Brant,

LOL...

Michael's a good dude. Just overly emotional when you say Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. That makes him turn his brain off.

Michael

I'm still waiting for the self-described "rational empiricist" to produce the evidence upon which he based his conclusion in another thread that I am a racist who fears minorities. Since he has yet failed to produce any, we can rationally conclude based on that evidence that he is neither rational nor an empiricist.

Edit: On second look, it isn't clear to me whether the "rational empiricist" title above his name is self-description or designation from the blog. If the latter is the case, I withdraw my statement and instead move that he be stripped of said title.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On another issue, I have been reflecting on the media interest in the Obama scandals. And it doesn't say anything good about one facet of human nature.

Look at this progression:

1. Back before the 2012 election, when the IRS was harassing conservative groups, this was reported by some right-wing media, but almost everyone ignored it.

2. But the law is a beautiful thing at times. Because of some lawsuits, the IRS decided to preempt the embarrassment of this coming out in a court ruling and made a staged confession. The impact was immediate in some quarters of the media. The conservative media went nuts, of course, but the liberal media started becoming really interested. After all, if the IRS was confessing to doing politics, maybe, it might be used against them one day...

Suddenly that Benghazi thing didn't look like a right-wing conspiracy anymore. Maybe the Obama administration does manipulate in a heavy-handed manner. No biggie, but still, it looks like Obama misspoke and there actually is a there there. Oh well, still no biggie. Who cares? Back the the grind...

3. Then the AP discovered its phone records were spied on with a secret court warrant.

Woah...

The media woke up.

You are supposed to oppress others, not me!

4. Then journalist James Rosen was mentioned as if he were a criminal in a petition for a court warrant.

If Obama's folks do that to Rosen, they might be doing that to me!

Now that Benghazi thing is starting to stink, come to think of it.

5. Then the Verizon scandal broke. And gets worse by the day. Now it's not just the media--it's the media's readers and viewers!

All hell is breaking loose.

OK...

Now...

While I am glad this is coming out and I predict very bad things for the Obama administration, I can't help note that no principle about oppression was involved except:

1. Incredulity that "I" am also included, and

2. Fear about what the government will do to me.

In other words, this is hindsight morality. Moral principles are supposed to be a "code of values to guide man's choices," to use Rand's definition. Notice that ALL choices are in the future, not the past.

When people--and I mean all people, from the elites to the media to the man and woman in the street--were living through these government abuses, they were content with the government being immoral and oppressing people other than them. This reminds me of the Germans ignoring what was happening to the Jews pre-WWII--on a smaller scale of atrocity, of course.

In Brazil, they say hot pepper burning someone's ass is like a cool refreshing drink to another.

But when the American people found out, bit by bit, that they, too, were targeted, or could be and this was entirely plausible, suddenly they found morality.

I would like to celebrate that discovery, but I don't believe it will last long.

It takes a person who sets his own moral bar high to stand for the rights of people he despises at the moment those rights are under attack.

Oh well... America is waking up and that's better than nothing. The American people do wake up at times and clean out the stables. They always go back to sleep, but it's good to know they can wake up when they feel their own butt is on the line.

This is a good moment for preachers to get converts. So let 'er fly if you have that urge...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

THE ONLY SENATOR WHO VOTED AGAINST THE PATRIOT ACT SEEMINGLY PREDICTED THIS DAY WOULD COME

He was Russ Feingold from Wisconsin.

And he was a Democrat.

The above article is on TheBlaze.

Michael

EDIT: Here's a YouTube video of an interview with Feingold from around 2005:

This was also in the article from TheBlaze.

I further looked into Feingold. His comments in that video sounded awfully good to me until I discovered he is for a 100% socialized health care system (single payer system). At least I appreciate his stand on principle about some of the procedures of limited government. But... I suspect he would not have been so vocal against The Patriot Act if the President had been a Democrat.

[syrakusos]

As for Verizon destroying records after some arbitrary time, I do not know where you got that from, or how you dreamed that up, but I assure you that it is absolutely A is A not true. Restore and Recovery is critical to IT (information technology) infrastructure. Nothing is destroyed on purpose. Archiving costs about 1 cent per gigabit per year. Losing data costs much more.

Michael,

Research on Google is the easiest thing in the world.

Really... come on...

This is from my first Google search. I could do more with one hand tied behind my back:

Cell Phone Location Tracking Request Response – Cell Phone Company Data Retention Chart

Don't you ever feel the least amount embarrassment in tut-tut-tutting when you are so totally wrong and the right facts are so easy to find?

It's simpler to check. That's a great habit to get into, anyway.

Michael

First of all, I do not need to rely on second hand information because this an area that I work in. As for your supposed evidence, read the chart. Retention periods of 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, Unlimited, depending on the data and the carrier. Billing data is held indefinitely. Read your bill: originating number, destination number, length of call, billing rate, other codes.

I agree that not all data is archived by the same methods or according to the same standards. While this says that Verizon stores your text messages, that is backup. Depending on the hardware (LG, iPhone, Samsung, Nokia,...), the text is stored first on your phone to its capacity, like 100 messages or so many characters.

According to this from the ACLU, the NSA could not have gotten much text at all, and - as the news stories all said - only could see origin-destination-length of call. Comically, Verizon insisted that no "individual" data was collected, i.e., they do not know who was actually using your phone at that moment, of course.

[syrakusos]

Edit: On second look, it isn't clear to me whether the "rational empiricist" title above his name is self-description or designation from the blog. If the latter is the case, I withdraw my statement and instead move that he be stripped of said title.

Spoken like a true king. Indeed, you have a TITLE to your home because it is granted by the state, hence "real estate" i.e., ex-state: from the crown. But you are not a real king and we are not your subjects. I surely am not. So, I will keep all the titles that I grant to myself.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

First of all, I do not need to rely on second hand information because this an area that I work in.

Michael,

Arrogance is not a replacement for facts.

Give it up.

You sound like a Randroid evading reality.

Michael

(I gotta admit the the size of your error is embarrassing for someone who works in that area, though. In your shoes, I would probably do the Monty Python black knight routine. also. )

[Robert Baratheon]

Michael,

 

Arrogance is not a replacement for facts.

 

Give it up.

 

You sound like a Randroid evading reality.

 

 

Michael

 

 

(I gotta admit the the size of your error is embarrassing for someone who works in that area, though. In your shoes, I would probably do the Monty Python black knight routine. also.  )

 

 

 

 

Q: How does Michael know I'm a racist? A: Because I'm afraid of minorities!

Q: Have I written anything to indicate that I'm racist and afraid of minorities? A: Well, no, nothing was *written* per se... Racist! A Racist!

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On a serious note, here is a video of Rachel Maddow.

 

I normally can't stand her or her brand of snark, but this time she did a pretty good report.

 

I don't think her intention was to depict the ugliness of crony capitalism as well as she did. Normally the left likes a specific slant--that it's the big evil corporations that corrupt virtuous government. But in this case, the government itself is the main villain, with some serious doubts about the corporations.

 

I, myself, think the sex was consensual and both government and the corporations involved are in bed with each other by choice. And their frame of mind was--and is--sack and pillage.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I should have mentioned something. I'll make a separate post rather than face the HTML nightmare of trying to edit the previous one now that I finally got the non-YouTube video to embed.

I believe the current phone records scandal is not just at the feet of Obama. He went whole hog with it, but it started under Bush. What's more, the giant Internet companies all have dirty faces in this one. too. (Apparently except Twitter.)

It's the same old story. The big companies are looking at potential fat government contracts and law-protected advantages over competitors.

Crony capitalism is the real villain here.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

RB: simply admit you are a racist. It'd be the altuistic thing to do. Thus you will refute the proposition that everybody is selfish, all by yourself.

--Brant

and thus I will selfishly share in your glory but not your sacrifice

oh, nuts! I just detected a contradiction hiding in my prose

[George H. Smith]

I love the way that government spying is now called "data mining." Orwell would have been proud.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is one of the worst criticisms of the Obama administration's abuse of power I have come across, and I say this:

1. As a fan of Ann Coulter (with some restrictions), and

2. In order to make clear a distinction between conservative thinking and libertarian-like thinking on a fundamental point.

Under the banner of bashing the Obama administration as "unbelievably corrupt," Coulter is basically saying that when an immoral person is in the White House (which generally means Democrats in Coulter-speak), trampling on individual rights is an outrage, but when a moral person is in the White House (which generally means Republicans), trampling on individual rights is not only nothing to be worried about, it's to be embraced because the moral ruler is doing good for us all.

Coulter is highly intelligent (Demonic and Mugged are simply brilliant, albeit too partisan), a smartass in a sense I resonate with, sources everything meticulously, and is pretty good generally at promoting freedom, but this time, she gives me the creeps.

http://youtu.be/OOxJgyHuVGg

Ann Coulter can bow to her king.

I don't have good bowing skills.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This speaks for itself:

Leno: ‘We Wanted a President That Listens to All Americans - Now We Have One’

From the monologue:

The White House has looked into our phone records, checking our computers, monitoring oure-mails. When did the government suddenly become our psycho ex-girlfriend?

Michael

[Selene]

Yes indeed Michael.

Ann Coulter is a solid intellectual mind.

Now, retrospectively, and I live in New Jersey, and, supported Christie, and, the third party candidate[think that statement through], she is a huge[again no politically correct statement gain], despite her,...,hmm, pathetic, salacious endorsement of the Morman from Massachusetts, who endorsed economic, moral, ethnic, political and stupidity in the Romney candidacy alleged effort to defeat the marxist. Unfortunately, Ann did not realize that they would stroke her long blond hair[a dyed fool] and manipulate her.

Ann is anyone that I will walk with. I have read a few of her books and she is meticulous with her argumentation and evidence. Hell, this is what I taught.

Christie has me worried. However, I am willing to wait.

A...

[BaalChatzaf]

Ann is anyone that I will walk with. I have read a few of her books and she is meticulous with her argumentation and evidence. Hell, this is what I taught.

Christie has me worried. However, I am willing to wait.

A...

I have one big question about Coulter. Is Coulter X-X or X-Y?

Ba'al Chatzaf