President Barack Obama said on Monday that his government is following all legal channels in the case of former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden charged with disclosing secret U.S. surveillance programs, and said he is working with other countries to ensure the rule of law is observed.

Voice of Russia

June 7, 2013

The FISA (aka FISC) court found that the PRISM program was unconstitutional but the decision was kept secret and the Obama administration just went ahead with the program anyway. . .

In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the surveillance at issue was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA's recently-revealed PRISM program.

EFF filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2012, seeking disclosure of the FISC ruling. Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of the opinion, which found that collection activities under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law" and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But, at the time, the Senators were not permitted to discuss the details publicly. Section 702 has taken on new importance this week, as it appears to form the basis for the extensive PRISM surveillance program reported recently in the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Voice of Electronic Frontier Foundation

It's a mix of film, music, power point, and Beatles history you have not heard before. Freiman takes different periods of their career -- Early Beatles/Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (1963), Tomorrow Never Knows/Revolver (1966) and Looking Through a Glass Onion/The White Album (1968) and fills in with so much interesting information, much of it very funny, that you will feel like you are understanding the music for the first time. He has recording studio notes to draw from, and isolates each track so you can really hear everything that went into the recordings. And then he puts it all together and it has a lot more power once you know the details.

A couple of observations about this.

First, this looks like indiscriminate attention-getting behavior from Snowden. I don't see any justification for this, unless he wants to argue the US should not spy on any foreign nationals whatsoever.

Second, could giving sensitive information to North Korea, for example, be treason? So far, I've been puzzled by the accusations of treason, since he hasn't worked at the behest of a foreign government. Of course, now that we know he joined Booz Allen to steal NSA secrets, one wonders if he had an employer.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit over a ruling by the secretive Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). That ruling found parts of a classified Department of Justice (DOJ) surveillance program to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The court's decision only became public after a letter from the NSA to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) mentioned it and EFF's lawsuit is designed to draw attention to the ruling and the government's behavior.

The FISC ruled in EFF's favor the day after former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's massive collection of phone records, making it the first known case in which a non-government entity has prevailed in such a case. DOJ has until July 1 to respond to EFF's request for information on the ruling.

The GOP is seriously trying to stop her as being off topic and have tried and thus far failed.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ....He [Snowden] said that the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data.

Is that true?

ALEXANDER: Well, we have interest in those who collect on us as an intelligence agency. But to say that we're willfully just collecting all sorts of data would give you the impression that we're just trying to canvas the whole world.

The fact is what we're trying to do is get the information our nation needs, the foreign intelligence, that primary mission, in this case and the case that Snowden has brought up is in defending this nation from a terrorist attack.

emptywheel

Ironic.. The Way.. we are using the TAO to catch Chinese terrorists. Who knew I thought all terrorists were Muslim.

By the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009, TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the U.S. intelligence community. "It's become an industry unto itself," a former NSA official said of TAO at the time. "They go places and get things that nobody else in the IC [intelligence community] can."

Given the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains, extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but very firmly warned by senior U.S. intelligence officials not to describe its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts. According to a senior U.S. defense official who is familiar with TAO's work, "The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO] the better."

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog has a great overview, but the gist is:

The specific issue is the scope of the Constitution's grant of presidential power to put an official temporarily into office without Senate approval - a power that arises when the Senate is not on hand to review that appointment.  Answering that could require the Court to define when the Senate, in a legal sense, goes into recess.

The issue goes as far back as recess appointments by George Washington, but it also is as new as the latest partisan jousting between President Obama and Senate Republicans over his appointment power.  The gridlock over Obama nominees has threatened to make one government agency - the NLRB - unable to function.

While the Court will be focusing on constitutional questions, the outcome has real potential for giving either the Senate or the White House real tactical advantages in the ongoing confirmation wars.  It could give a resistant Senate a chance to nearly take away the president's recess appointment authority, or it could give the White House a way to get around filibuster-driven obstruction of nominees.

SNIP

Noel Canning joined the government in urging the Court to rule on its case, but asked the Court to add another question: does the Senate have the power to block any presidential appointments by coming back every three days, during any recess, for pro forma meetings that do little or no legislative business and with only a single senator on hand to swiftly gavel the chamber into and out of session.  

Today a broad majority of the Court reinforced that affirmative action must be strictly reviewed, but it did not outlaw those programs.  In an opinion that required only thirteen pages, the Court explained that a university's use of race must meet a test known as "strict scrutiny."  Under this test, a university's use of affirmative action will be constitutional only if it is "narrowly tailored."  The Court in Fisher took pains to make clear exactly what this means:  courts can no longer simply rubber-stamp a university's determination that it needs to use affirmative action to have a diverse student body.  Instead, courts themselves will need to confirm that the use of race is "necessary" - that is, that there is no other realistic alternative that does not use race that would also create a diverse student body.  Because the lower court had not done so, the Court sent the case back for it to determine whether the university could make this showing.

SNIP

Given how long it took the Court to decide this case (nearly nine months), the seven-to-one vote came as somewhat of a surprise.  Although it may be many years before we know for sure, it seems very possible that the end result was a compromise brokered to break a stalemate:  affirmative action survives at least in theory (which would gain the support of Justices Breyer and Sotomayor), but will be far more difficult to implement in practice (which would gain the support of the Court's more conservative Justices).   But for now, and probably much to their relief, affirmative action is off the Justices' plate - at least until fall, when they will hear oral arguments in a case challenging an amendment to the Michigan constitution that prohibits the use of affirmative action by public universities.

The Sideways star Paul Giamatti is joining the cast of Downton Abbey alongside his fellow US actor Shirley MacLaine.

But Downton fans will have to wait until the feature-length final episode of the fourth series at Christmas for Giamatti's entrance, playing Harold, the "maverick, playboy brother" of Elizabeth McGovern's Cora, Countess of Grantham.

MacLaine, who had a guest starring role in last year's third outing of the hit ITV drama as Cora's straight-talking American mother, will also be back for the Christmas special.

The casting of big-name US talent is a canny move by Downton Abbey's producers with one eye on the American market, where the show is arguably an even bigger hit than in the UK.

It is the highest-rating drama in US broadcaster PBS's 40-year history and has won multiple Emmy and Golden Globe awards.

Other new cast members for this autumn's new series include Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the former EastEnders actor Nigel Harman, Tom Cullen, Julian Ovenden, Joanna David and Gary Carr.

via digby

President Barack Obama's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of "insider threat" give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct....

...millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage....

The Defense Department anti-leak strategy obtained by McClatchy spells out a zero-tolerance policy. Security managers, it says, "must" reprimand or revoke the security clearances - a career-killing penalty - of workers who commit a single severe infraction or multiple lesser breaches "as an unavoidable negative personnel action."

.....Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. "Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting," the strategic plan says....

The Defense Department anti-leak strategy obtained by McClatchy spells out a zero-tolerance policy. Security managers, it says, "must" reprimand or revoke the security clearances - a career-killing penalty - of workers who commit a single severe infraction or multiple lesser breaches "as an unavoidable negative personnel action."

Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. "Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting," the strategic plan says.

"It's about people's profiles, their approach to work, how they interact with management. Are they cheery? Are they looking at Salon.com or The Onion during their lunch break? This is about `The Stepford Wives,'" said a second senior Pentagon official, referring to online publications and a 1975 movie about robotically docile housewives. The official said he wanted to remain anonymous to avoid being punished for criticizing the program.

Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Its formula can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance.

Prosecutor John Guy:

"Good morning. `Fuc*ing punks, these as*holes all get away,'"

Defense attorney Don West:

"Knock knock. Who's there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? Good, you're on the jury,"

LINK

Along with exposing widespread international surveillance, Edward Snowden has revealed how exactly the US is financing its military ambitions, according to Max Keiser.

RT: Surely not even you can make any kind of link between the Snowden saga and the US economy?

Max Keiser: The American economy runs on the confidence, confidence that the world accepts the US dollar as world reserve currency, confidence that the US bond market will remain the standard. And what we are seeing is a sell-off in a bond market and a sell-off in the stock market, because confidence in the US and its ability to maintain a global empire through interest rates and the Central Bank policy is crumbling before the world's very eyes.

What's interesting is that Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen. Booz Allen allegedly along with a few other companies are the masterminds behind LIBOR market rigging, energy market rigging, FOREX market rigging. And this is really the fuel that keeps the American military empire going, because the American economy itself cannot support its military ambitions so they've resorted to market manipulation and the kind of intelligence that Edward Snowden is able to aggregate is key to manipulating markets in ways that make Booz Allen, allegedly, the channel for billions and billions of dollars into America's military campaigns.

And this is really about money, markets and manipulations. It's not about security.  It's not to do with anything that the White House says. Remember, the White House is a puppet of Wall Street, Booz Allen, the hedge funds and the financial interests of the corrupt bankers.      

Former NSA agent Edward Snowden has been accused of treason and is currently the target of an international manhunt. With the U.S. demanding his return to America... Snowden's current options are:

• Set everything right by returning leaked NSA secrets to their original owners

• Flee to a nation with widespread public hostility to the U.S., such as the U.S.

• Found a new country on a piece of land no one has

• Point out to U.S government how expensive court battle would be for both sides

• Cackle and deliver defiant speech at federal agents from inside hall of mirrors, leaving them completely confounded as to which one's the real Edward Snowden

• Apologize to the 254 Americans who actually had a problem with what he did