By Devvy Kidd
Here we go again.
Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal all want to be the next U.S. president. The only problem is, just like the impostor in the White House, Barack Obama (known aliases used: Barry Soetoro, Barry Obama, Barack Dunham and aka Barry Dunham), all three are constitutionally ineligible, contrary to declarations from their campaign managers, ignorant journalists and partisan mouth pieces.
It turns out neither of two statements that held up in the nation’s highest court were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it. Photograph: Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images
If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.
Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.
In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.
It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.
One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as “about” surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” In other words, the NSA doesn’t just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone’s international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.
The Snowden leaks also pushed the Justice Department to admit – contrary to what it told the court – that the government hadn’t been notifying any defendants they were being charged based on NSA surveillance, making it actually impossible for anyone to prove they had standing to challenge the Fisa Amendments Act as unconstitutional.
It’s unclear how much Solicitor General Donald Verrilli knew when he told the government’s lies – twice – to the justices of the supreme court. Reports suggest that he was livid when he found out that his national security staff at the Justice Department misled him about whether they were notifying defendants in criminal trials of surveillance. And we don’t know if he knew about the “about” surveillance that might well have given the ACLU standing in the case. But we do know other Justice Department officials knew about both things, and they have let both lies stand without correcting the record.
Lawyers before the supreme court are under an ethical obligation to correct the record if they make false statements to the Court – even if they are unintentional – yet the Justice Department has so far refused. As ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer explained, the Justice Department has corrected the record in other cases where it was much less clear-cut whether it had misled the court.
The government’s response, instead, has been to explain why it doesn’t think these statements are lies. In a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall that only surfaced this week, the government made the incredible argument that the “about” surveillance was classified at the time of the case, so it was under no obligation to tell the supreme court about it. And the Justice Department completely sidestepped the question of whether it lied about notifying defendants, basically by saying that it started to do so after the case, and so this was somehow no longer an issue.
But there’s another reason the government wanted any challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act dismissed without being forced to argue that it doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment: it has an extremely controversial view about your (lack of) privacy rights, and probably doesn’t want anyone to know. As Jaffer wrote here at the Guardian earlier this week, the government has since been forced to defend the Fisa Amendments Act, and it’s pretty shocking how they’ve done it. Here’s what the government said in a recent legal brief:
The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated, when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States.
This is an incredibly radical view of the right to privacy. We already know the government does not think you have any right to privacy when it comes who you talk to, or when, or for how long, or where you are while you’re talking. Now the government has said, in court, that you don’t have any right to the content of private conversations with anyone who is located outside the United States – or to any domestic communication remaining private if it is, at some point, transmitted overseas, which happens often. Jaffer explained the consequences of this view:
If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.
Intelligence director James Clapper’s infamous lie to Congress – in which he claimed just months before Snowden’s leaks that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans – will certainly follow him for the rest of his career even if it never leads to his prosecution. But while Clapper almost certainly broke the law, the senate committee members in front of whom he spoke knew the truth regardless.
The Justice Department, on the other hand, convinced the supreme court to dismiss a case that could have dramatically curtailed the NSA’s most egregious abuses of power based on false statements. And now all of us are forced to live with the consequences of that.
The Daily Sheeple
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals may have just dealt a serious blow to the U.S. Constitution.
In a unanimous decision earlier this month the Court determined that law enforcement officers are not required to present a warrant or charges before forcibly entering a person’s home, searching it and confiscating their firearms if they believe it is in the individual’s best interests.
The Daily Sheeple
Nearly two years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts deemed the ACA’s individual mandate penalty a “tax” and saved Obama’s signature law.
But did he really save it – or did he doom it?
Many legal experts have disputed the classification of that provision of Obamacare as a “tax” – the ACA itself refers to it as a “penalty”.
Ilya Shapiro, an attorney and senior legal fellow at the Cato Institute, calls the a tax a “‘unicorn tax,’ a creature of no known provenance that will never be seen again.” In a column for Forbes, Shapiro explains that the tax that Justice Roberts “invented” is unconstitutional based on the Origination Clause:
The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.
SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstlook.org …
Three protesters are escorted out of the meeting by guards, as Chairman Tom Wheeler calls for order.
“The purpose of what we’re doing here today on the open Internet is to make sure that we hear from everyone and that we start a process that fully opens the doors for comment by the American people,” Wheeler said after the protestors left. “We’re going to move through that process today, and disruption doesn’t help getting to the point where the American people can provide input into the process.”
Hillary Clinton was a “team player” in Team Obama’s attempt to maintain the fiction that the threat posed by al Qaeda, and by global terrorists generally, has receded significantly. As a result, her image is taking a hit and her bid for the presidency (if she makes one) may suffer.
James Comey, the new head of the FBI, does not intend to take any hit to his image (which he also zealously protected during the Bush years). Comey has made it clear, via the New York Times, that he doesn’t buy President Obama’s line, delivered last year in a speech to the National Defense University, that “the scale of the threat resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
Family Security Matters
Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media and the political establishment to protect Barack Obama, they can no longer hide the incompetence and criminality of the most divisive and sordid administration in American history.
Former National Security Council Spokesman Tommy “dude, this was like two years ago” Vietor is the poster boy of the Obama Administration; a collection of inexperienced, emotionally immature ideologues, whose “the ends justify the means” mentality permits them to tell any lie, violate any law and indifferently sacrifice lives as long as it serves their political objectives.
This bungling and scandal-prone gaggle of amoral nitwits, led by a talking teleprompter, survives only because the extent of their dishonesty is matched by that of the political-media establishment and the public’s inexplicable willingness to tolerate it.
It is, in fact, explainable. Just as certain banks were “too big to fail,” Barack Obama is, quite simply, too corrupt to fail.
The search for the missing plane off Western Australia. Photo: AFP
The Sydney Morning Herald
One of the most influential figures in Malaysia’s ruling party claims information about flight MH370 is being hidden and the Australian-led search for the plane off Western Australia is a waste of time and money.
Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said the plane’s disappearance on March 8 was “most likely not an ordinary crash after fuel was exhausted”.
“The plane is somewhere, maybe without MAS [Malaysia Airlines] markings,” he said. “It is a waste of time and money to look for debris or oil slick or to listen for pings from the black box.”
Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, pictured in 2003. Photo: Reuters
Dr Mahathir, 88, who was prime minister for 22 years from 1981, wrote in his personal blog he could not imagine that “the pilots made a soft landing in rough seas and then quietly went down with the aircraft”.
Socialism is not the Answer 