Background:
Amanpour On Iraq: Where were the journalists?
So Wrong for So Long: Greg Mitchell on How the Pre...
Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When L...
Bush's Legacy: A Bill Moyers documentary exploring...
Do Fox News People Even Watch Their Own Channel?
GOP-Republican's Southern Strategy EXPOSED
Case for Indicting The GOP for Treason
"We had an FBI consultant on the picture and he told me that 1 in 5 phone calls that we make are recorded and logged and I laughed at him and then he played back a phone call I had had two years prior to joining the picture." Shia LaBeouf
Today, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) insisted the NSA has not been recording Americans’ phone calls under any surveillance program, and that any claim to the contrary was “misinformation.” Rogers’ comments countered remarks from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who said he was told in a House Judiciary Committee briefing by FBI Director Robert Mueller that private firms contracted by the NSA could listen to phone calls made by American citizens.
Since Nadler’s comments were reported by CNET, he has issued a subsequent statementbacktracking on his original remarks: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”
The full transcript of Nadler’s exchange with Mueller shows the FBI director claiming that “a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone and that particular individual” is required for the FBI to retrieve the content of any American’s call.
However, in a May 1 interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett– well before the scandal over NSA spying sent the White House and its allies into damage control mode – a former FBI agent named Tim Clemente made a startling revelation. According to Clemente, an April 18 phone call between Boston bombing perpetrator Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife was retrieved by the FBI as part of its surveillance of bulk US telecom data.
This is where all that info is stored:
Here is... A BIG BUILDING FILLED WITH ALL OF MY AND YOUR DATA! ...
What the Federal Government is doing is destroying the 4th Amendment:
A good article explaining this nonsense:
Whether in celebrity culture or in our Facebook-mediated interactions, we live in the age of the human being as a public brand. So there's nothing surprising about the reaction to this week's disclosures about the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program. In our cult-of-personality society, that reaction has been predictably — and unfortunately — focused less on the agency's possible crimes against the entire country than on Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed the wrongdoing.
Almost universally, the government officials, pundits and reporters who comprise Permanent Washington have derided Snowden and those who helped him disseminate his disclosures. For instance, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., bashed him for committing "treason" while Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called for the arrest and prosecution of the journalists who broke the NSA snooping story. Likewise, establishment pundits from CNN's Jeffrey Toobin to the New York Times David Brooks loyally defended government's national security agencies by respectively assaulting Snowden as a "narcissist" and a loser who "could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school." Meanwhile, plenty of Obama loyalists — many of whom criticized the Bush administration for much less invasive surveillance — took to Twitter to berate Snowden as an attention-seeking traitor.
Though they failed to show that Snowden's disclosures endanger national security, these attacks do tell an important story — not about the whistleblower, but about America.
First and foremost, the backlash reveals that Permanent Washington doesn't work for We the People — it works to protect itself. We know this because whereas Snowden is vilified for disclosing information that's inconvenient to Permanent Washington, those who leak classified information that is advantageous to Permanent Washington are left alone.
Yes — most of those slamming Snowden expressed no outrage when the White House recently leaked Obama-glorifying information about the president's assassinations of alleged terrorists.
Same thing when it came to John Brennan. As Reuters' Jack Shafer notes, after the president's counterterrorism adviser leaked administration-defending information about a terrorist attack, "instead of being prosecuted for leaking sensitive, classified intelligence, Brennan was promoted to director of the CIA" — and few of those now complaining about Snowden expressed any outrage.
"The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers' rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden," Shafer correctly concludes.
Of course, Permanent Washington's self-interested assaults on Snowden will inevitably find some support among the general public. The question is: why?
This gets to the second way that this week's events expose far more ugly truths about us than about Snowden.
In a democratic society, as Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald put it, "we're supposed to know virtually everything about what (government officials) do: That's why they're called public servants." That's why, until given reason not to, we should naturally sympathize with — and support protections for — whistleblowers like Snowden.
But that's the thing: Our core notions about transparency and self-governance have been under withering assault by Permanent Washington. Over time, that assault has succeeded in convincing many Americans to embrace the authoritarian view that says whistleblowers are a bigger problem than the government crimes they expose.
To understand what's wrong with that attitude, consider the critics through the prism of history.
Those castigating Snowden probably would have insisted that the biggest crime of the Vietnam War was Daniel Ellsberg publishing the Pentagon Papers. They likely would have also said that the biggest crime of Watergate was Deep Throat blowing the whistle.
It is the same authoritarian argument against Snowden today — and until we wake up to the real agenda at work, Permanent Washington will continue undermining civil liberties and America's democratic ideals in any way it can.
NOTES TO UNDERSTAND THE DEMOCRATIC &CONSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENTS ABOVE:
Democracy & Despotism: 1940s Encyclopedia Britannica Films
by Maria Popova
Vintage lessons in civic harmony, or how small-scale common courtesy paves the way for large-scale peace.
In 1945 and 1946, immediately following the end of World War II, Encyclopedia Britannica’s films division produced two educational short films, one on democracy and one on despotism, exploring how societies and nations rank on the spectrum from democracy to despotism by measuring the degree to which power is concentrated and respect for individuals restricted. More than half a century later, these analyses remain a compelling metric of social harmony and discord, in an era when we’re still struggling to understand the psychology of riots in a global political climate where the tension between despotism and democracy is in sharper focus than ever.
Despotism (1946 Encyclopedia Britannica educational film)
The Information Scale
A community rests low on the information scale when the press/media is controlled by a few people and when citizens HAVE TO accept what they are told.
If students are not taught critical thinking skills (with a well rounded education so they have basic knowledge of history, politics, sophism, economics etc.) THEN despotism has a good chance of establishing itself.
By keeping students unable to think critically, you get adults who can't think critically (or have any ability to evaluate facts from lies). These adults will accept whatever thier chosen authority source tells them.
This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people...
Secret Government - The Constitution In Crisis (FULL)
The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine. The significance of the documentary is probably greater today in 2007 than it was when it was made. We now have a situation in which these same forces have committed the most egregious terrorist attack on US soil and have declared a fraudulent so-called "War on Terror". The ruling regime in the US who have conducted the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are now banging the war drum against Iran.
An Example of Hypocrisy:
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