Europe, SAVE US! Patriot Act author begs for help to curb NSA spying US House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, the lead author of controversial anti-terror law the Patriot Act, has asked the European Parliament for help in taming the NSA. He also called for Europe to put pressure on the US to change its legislation and bring a halt to the spy agency's planet-wide communications data-slurping …
The more fundamental question question is whether democracy still works as intended. Obama promised great transparency and reforms before being elected but didn't follow through on any of it. Is he just a weak president? Or is there a systemic problem that the president just really control the bureaucracy anymore? Or did someone dig up enough dirt to keep him quiet? Nice ground for conspiracy theories.
Will future elected governments be able to fulfill the will of the electorate?
It is good that they stop the NSA. However, I worry if this will end up somehow validating what still sounds like bad legislation.
They already have the necessary law. It is called the Constitution of the United States. That law is crystal clear about what is allowed and what the NSA does is not in the 'allowed' category.
While the constitution provides checks for some of these things, I'm not sure I've seen the part prohibiting the NSA from spying on Merkel - which according to the good senator was the case in point.
Surely you don't think he cares about American citizens?
"Surely you don't think he cares about American citizens?"
Well there's the thing, in the bizzaro world of US Politics, you can't prohibit the NSA from listening in on Chancellor Merkel because that would cast doubt on the efficacy of Silicon Valley's unlimited tracking of the buying habits of 7 year old Angie Merkellino of Cozad, Nebraska.
By weeding out noise from misspellings and Foreign Heads of State many of whom act like 7 year olds the NSA performs a valuable free service for Big Data.
I know you hate Capitalism, are you a Communist or a Muslim ? Oh, never mind.
Actually, it seems that they intentionally created this acronym to mirror the PATRIOT Act that the proposed bill is intended to balance. It is not such a terrible idea in the context (I wonder if anyone has a bit of mockery in mind), thought the original PATRIOT acronym was dismal and if this becomes a habit or tradition... well...
"Some of these legislators must have a team of acronymists working for them."
A pity the same diligence wasn't applied to the actual legislation and it's possible consequences by the idiots that drafted it, and the idiots that voted for it. From four thousand miles away it was apparent to me as a rather disinterested and casual observer that the Patriot act was an unbelievably bad piece of legislation that was going to have a lot of undesirable consequences.
Asking Europe for help is rather pointless when the UK government are similar enthusiasts for mass surveillance, and the rest of Europe can't decide any form of common position on matters of defence, finance, foreign policy (I suppose they did unite to decide to have a currency union, but that's not gone so well really).
If I might offer Sensebrenner a helpful thought: You made this mess. You clear it up.
Old skull trick. Name your horrible legislation something warm and fuzzy that nobody can disagree with. What, you're not a PATRIOT? You don't believe in FREEDOM? You evil anarchist!!!
It's the other side of the coin from Demonizing Your Enemies. Paint your opponents as babykillers and nobody will support them. Goes a long way to obscuring the truth of a debate, therefore used heavily in politics and the press. Grrr...
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What I was going to say is ...
I don't know what you pay MP's, but affording a "team" of matriculants from the London School of Acronomics is entirely out of question on a legislator's salary.
... it will take me a while to stop laughing ...
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What I was going to say is ...
I don't know what you pay MP's, but affording a "team" of matriculants from the London School of Acronomics is entirely out of question on a legislator's salary.
It appears the US has realised it's pretty much over for US service providers if they want to sell to the EU unless they offer a sacrificial goat. But the mess is not a one-man show - it is a whole national infrastructure, and spying is not just performed by the NSA.
The NSA is but one agency - the nation has legally thrown human rights, probable cause and due process out of the window. Unless supervision and transparency are restored and penalties follow (and I mean penalties and jail time, not parking tickets) all this is mere marketing. The US produces world's best BS too, so I am inclined to wait and see - this needs action, not just more words. Personally, I think the EU should cancel the Safe Harbour excuse to start with - that was one of the worst excuses ever not to do things properly.
it's game over, lights out, draw the shades, and pretend everything is all okay, just like it used to was.
No power granted or seized will ever be yielded, voluntarily or otherwise, until the governing body falls. As far as the President of the USA is concerned, he can be likened to the bloke manning the steering oar on a scow adrift down the Mississippi River. He can try to influence the direction but he cannot stop the barge nor take it back upstream. The nation is on a hell-bent course that no existing force can reverse.
Senator Diane Feinstein's intentions, if not her proposed Bill, will prevail, and will become the new controlling authority for U.S. spy agencies. The White House will order a few cosmetic changes, stopping short of throwing the Chief of Staff to the wolves to silence the baying, and the barge will continue down the river.
Don't want the NSA spying on your computer? Air-gap it.
There are plenty of ways to work against these insane machinations:
1.) Take to the streets, Ghandi style. They won't stop 20 million people peacefully marching up to FtMeade. They might show their guns, but they also know they can't shoot millions. See the fall of the GDR.
2.) Use Linux or xBSD. Much more difficult to subvert
3.) Use Ciphers as a matter of principle: GNUpg, openssl, bcrypt or Scherbius2014. The latter one is quite simple to understand for beginners (a symmetric cipher).
3.1) Important: If push comes to shove, RIGHTS ARE ASCERTAINED BY USING THEM. So do not cave in, use crypto by principle. Even for the most innocous message. Do not accept their "right" to read your messages based on some Divine Right Of Kings ("Terrorism", "Kiddo porn") argument.
In case you missed it, William Hague did an attack on the press a couple of days ago. One of the things he admitted was that Ministers and Parliament were kept in the dark about GCHQs surveillance programs, (even as they were debating the Snoopers Charter).
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/nov/10/guardian-nsa-revelations-edward-snowden?CMP=twt_gu
"Hague defended the fact that the full scope of surveillance by GCHQ was not discussed at the national security council or the cabinet. Last month, Chris Huhne used a Guardian article to complain that both bodies were kept in a state of "utter ignorance" about the programmes subsequently publicised by the Guardian,"
" "That is the political and legal framework in which these decisions about intelligence are made. Are they made in much larger groups? Well, no they're not. That's because so much of what we do has to be so secret."
So while Theresa May was telling Parliament that Snoopers Charter was needed because GCHQ needed the metadata, nobody was telling them that GCHQ was already capturing EVERYTHING and most of it on Brits.
You may think your viewing of this article from Britain to elReg in Britain is not spied upon by GCHQ, but look again and you'll see most of the page dressing comes from US servers and hence your viewing of this page and all the identity info it contains, has been logged by GCHQ in direct violation of the law.
Imagine if GCHQ monitored your newspaper viewing to check you didn't hold 'terrorist views' by viewing 'unapproved newspapers' and that is EXACTLY what they are doing by monitoring readers of the Guardian, the BBC or elReg.
William Hague tries to shut down the press, because they told Parliament what he'd done. He's actually defended deception of Parliament.
This link is Theresa May, back before the Snowden leaks:
http://news.sky.com/story/1095766/theresa-may-backs-snoopers-charter-powers
" Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, she said: "I've always been clear that access to communications data is essential for the law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies."
"There is a reducing capability in relation to access to communications data and as far as I'm concerned I think this is a very important thing we need to ensure we are giving our law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies access to the tools that they need to fight crime, paedophiles and terrorists."
See? SHE'S KNOWS ABOUT TEMPORA AND PRISM, BUT SHE LIES ABOUT GCHQ'S NEED OF THE LAW.
GCHQ doesn't need the laws to spy on Brits, it's needs the laws to MAKE THEIR SPYING LEGAL.
Now Theresa May is attempting to get the right to strip suspects of citizenship. Letting her police accuse *anyone* of terrorism, and being able to simply banish them from the UK. They don't need evidence enough to prosecute them, only a claim is needed, and so any Brit can be banishes this way.
This is a person WHO DECEIVED PARLIAMENT trying to get the power to strip people of their citizenship based on nothing but a claim of 'suspect'.
"Hague defended the fact that the full scope of surveillance by GCHQ was not discussed at the national security council or the cabinet"
Wasn't that performance repeated (live and unedited and in squirming awkardness) by Hague on the Andrew Marr show this Sunday morning just gone ?
Theresa May's no better.
@ doronron: "You may think your viewing of this article from Britain to elReg in Britain is not spied upon by GCHQ, but look again and you'll see most of the page dressing comes from US servers and hence your viewing of this page and all the identity info it contains, has been logged by GCHQ in direct violation of the law."
Why do I have to connect to all these sites in order to view a Guardian page? ..
ajax.googleapis.com, scorecardsearch.com, edgecastcdn.net, fastly.net, guim.co.uk, optimizely.com, quantserve.com, resource.guim.net, revsci.net, static.adsafeprotected.com, static.chartbeat.com, wunderloop.net ...
Why do I have to connect to all these sites in order to view a Guardian page? ..
"ajax.googleapis.com, scorecardsearch.com, edgecastcdn.net, fastly.net, guim.co.uk, optimizely.com, quantserve.com, resource.guim.net, revsci.net, static.adsafeprotected.com, static.chartbeat.com, wunderloop.net"
I'm not sure you *have* to, but the Grauniad's traditional business model, which until t'Internet arrived was based on decent journalism selling harcopy papers, has been failing in recent years, as have many other newspapers. Whether the decreased quantity of decent journalism at The Guardian in recent years is cause or effect of the decrease in sales is a different discussion. The web names you list are presumably assorted ad-trackers and the like, because profiled users are allegedly worth more to advertisers (and thus to the Guardian) than random page views are worth. Remember, this newspaper was a "Phorm partner" at one stage.
Sucks, but such is the modern Internet.
You are getting seriously fucked over by your own government, they are creating a shitpile that you will be cleaning up for years.
Amendments, what amendments, your government is simply saying "fuck the amendments, we do as we please".
The American governement has become a disease, let's hope/pray that it doesn't become an epidemic..
Slavery is coming back, in fact it's already here, to the good ol USA, have a quick look at this nice little wealth distribution vid
Knee jerk reaction, of course it is but what the fuck else is it going to take for people to wake up...
Khaptain, thanks for that.
Now, you're headed for trouble from some folk round here who don't like uncomfortable realities rubbed in their faces. But not as much trouble as the US (and UK) economies are headed for.
From the video: "the CEO (in the top 1%) has an income 380 times that of his *average* (not poorest) employee".
I may have marginally misremembered. But it's worth watching the video (although a couple of paragraphs and a few charts would have presented the same information, and been more readily quotable, but these days if it isn't on Youtube it isn't for real).
"Executive Order that US President Obama said he knew nothing about."
Bollocks, bollocks and thrice I say bollocks. This may be a convenient excuse for el presidente however there's no chance it actually happened that way. If someone was lunatic enough to counterfeit the presidential seal then I'm sure we'd know about it.
Here be a cartoon which depicts Obama in the light you are shining on him, Nicho .......... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-12/obama-translated
In fairness to Obama (if I must) wasnt this Order issued by Bush? If so I suspect all an incoming president gets is a spreadsheet listing each active executive order with a one line description.
Not saying he should not have done the due diligence but I can understand how it was overlooked. Especially if the summary deliberately obscures the content.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity... I am willing to make an assumption that Congressman Sensenbrenner did not have universal surveillance society in mind when he drafted the PATRIOT act. I will also give him credit for realizing it was a mistake (or so it seems). But it was his mistake, and he should honestly admit it. The act was anything but "painstakingly crafted" (if it were then what NSA has been doing would be illegal), rather it was hastily and sloppily created, obviously with no clear thought given to what it allows, how the language might be interpreted (and the language is the only thing that matters, the intent matters not at all), and what the potential consequences might be, especially in the worst case scenario. This is not how legislators are supposed to create laws affecting hundreds of millions of people (and that's not counting the billions who wish America well and are punished for it).
Now, Congressman, do say "*I* f..ked up. I intend to fix my mistake. I learned my lesson. I will be really careful this time around." Your voters will respect you more for that.
What he means?
"I fscked up. I wanted them to be spying on all you plebs, because some of you are dangerous lunatics who fly aeroplanes into skyscrapers and plant bombs. It was kinda cool that we could keep tabs on people who simply oppose our gummint as well. But the b*stards aren't doing what we asked them to. They're spying on us as well! They're becoming a law unto themselves!! Soon, they'll mount a coup, round all of us up and shoot us!!!!
Well, if the security and intelligence services do not have media and politicians doing their bidding, with knowledge aforethought of their every action and proposed reaction, then they are obviously not fit for future purpose. And if they are in such present command and control of those primitive assets, then are they in dire straits need of need leadership, programs and scripts for televisual transfer and virtual realisation of intelligent base metadata, for it be quite obvious to even a blind man on a galloping horse, that naked truth is being discarded in favour of alienating spin to produce a reality which will increasingly quickly be collapsed.
And here be another danger today which creates a host of new enemies tomorrow ......
Monsegur secretly turned informant after the FBI tracked him down in May 2011, and he became an agent provocateur, publicly cheerleading for hack attacks against private security contractors and law enforcement agencies. In this way he ensnared Hammond and the other Stratfor hackers, and even got them to transfer their stolen material to an FBI-controlled server. ..... from a Wired tale today ... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/hammond-sentencing-memo/Is that the same as incitement and entrapment and would one be classified in intelligence circles and secret societies as a mole and a traitor and designated vermin for .... well, what is justice and just desserts for such beings?
What sanctions and punishments do working governments and executive administrations seek to apply and supply, or is there reward and/or fame and/or infamy for deceitful encouragement to do as others agree that one does?
9/11 was a necessary precondition for continued, massive money flows to the Military Industrial Complex and at least one False-Flag war.
The real reason for Islamic Terror - the state of Saudi-Arabia - enjoys an uninterrupted, happy life.
The Saudis even have the gall to be "disappointed they bought a war in Syria and the United States does not deliver".
@NSA: If you want to do anything good once in your miserable lifes, then do the same to the Saudi King as you did to Saddam.
Regarding frankgerlach.tai's post ....... Posted Wednesday 13th November 2013 13:17 GMT .... here be a question, for there be always one who leads with everyone else following orders. Well, ok, that be at least four questions to be answered but how else is one to make any sense of what is going on without inquiring about who is doing what and for why?
Are Saudi royals, Israeli puppets, or is Israel a Saudi puppet? .......http://presstv.com/detail/2013/11/10/334048/saudi-arabia-joining-israel-for-iran-war/
And is Uncle Sam/NSA/FBI/CIA/DOD a cuckold and autonomous coward and easily humiliated and remotely controlled?
they call it 'market research'. market research is gathering information about customers so that marketing campaigns can be conducted. these are more successful when they are directed to a selected or 'target' audience.
any type of communication that you participate in can be used to facilitate this 'market research' -- Web, e/mail, social nets, phone systems, ...
an article offered by Bruce Schneier recently suggests that the NSA isn't the real villian but rather has simply started to participate in the process.
Without adding foreign nationals to the bill. So his position is that he will try to do something about snooping within the United States, and it is up to the governments of the rest of the world to raise enough Hell in DC to get restrictions on the foreign intelligence aspects of the NSA's activities.
Patriot Act is b.s. If they (the US Gov) are so eager to fight terrorists, why do they let rich Americans fund terrorists in Canada! That's right USA, you have wealthy people funding groups in Canada that have burned Canadian police vehicles, and threatened Canadian people. All to stop/slow our oil industry.
This is indeed fact, and the Canadian Government is working on "Anti-terrorism law to name ecologists as threat".
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