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The real answer is Congress, but the President's answer to NSA spying on Americans is to put the guy who lied under oath about spying on Americans in charge of investigating the NSA. Is your head spinning yet? Today, Obama ordered Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to name an outside panel to review the United State's global collection of signals intelligence - meaning its efforts to target phone calls, internet messages, and various forms of electronic communication. And a flashback: DNI James Clapper says that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans

Big headlines last Friday, as President Obama planned, for his news conference announcement. He was naming "a high-level group of outside experts" to probe the nation's entire intelligence apparatus for abuses to boost transparency and reassure Americans worried about their civil freedoms in a new era of vast government surveillance technology. Obama said he himself was absolutely confident no abuses exist. But fears had been stoked by the Snowden leaks and revelations of the immense scope of NSA snooping on civilian society in the name of fighting terrorism. "It’s not enough for me, as President, to have confidence in these...

Last Thursday, Texas based email provider Lavabit suddenly shut down their encrypted email service, leaving behind a message for its customers on the company's website. The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levinson, intimated that the company had received a secret search order from the government and shut his business down to avoid being "complicit in crimes against the American people."

...Remember on Friday how one of President Obama's efforts to get people to trust the government more concerning the NSA's surveillance efforts was to create an "outside" and "independent" board to review it all?... ...Except, that was Friday. Today is Monday. And, on Monday we learn that "outside" and "independent" actually means setup by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper--the same guy who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the program, and has received no punishment for doing so. This is independent? From this we're supposed to expect real oversight?!? This is from the letter sent to Clapper:...

The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years. Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the current program that collects the metadata of millions of American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even more statistics about US citizens. In early June, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden...

Spying scandal sets back U.S. chances for fighter jet sale to Brazil By Anthony Boadle and Alonso Soto BRASILIA (Reuters) - U.S. hopes of landing a coveted deal worth more than $4 billion to sell 36 fighter jets to Brazil have suffered a setback with recent revelations that the United States collected data on Brazilian Internet communications. When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sits down with Brazilian officials in Brasilia on Tuesday to prepare a state visit to the White House by President Dilma Rousseff, the sale of the warplanes will not be on the agenda, a Brazilian source...

Senator Rand Paul is one of a handful of members of the Congress that possesses a set of principles. He stands for the principles of the American Revolution -- put simply, human liberty. The result has been vicious attacks by leaders of the Republican side of the ruling cartel. Epic fail presidential candidate John McCain has referred to Senator Paul as a "whacko bird," and Senator Lindsey Graham, who has said he's "glad" that the NSA is spying on every American's calls and emails, has called Senator Paul's concerns for civil liberties "ridiculous." The latest attack has come from Governor...

The Mainstream (Establishment) Media is trying to once again do the Republican vs Democrat thingy: that Obama has proposed some serious (cough, laugh) changes to the NSA spying program, and those wascally wepubs (Rep. McCaul and Peter King (R-GOP-e) are trying to thwart him. I never thought that I would see a recent liberal rally where hundreds marched (not reported by the MSM-e) where a person would be carrying a sign that said Snowden, patriot and Pelosi, traitor. And even the New York Times (Editorial Board, June 6th: Obama administration has lost all credibility on the issue of the NSA...

Trust Google? The National Security Agency, which routinely collects its data, does. After all, it’s one of the companies from which Washington apparently routinely pulls data about what Americans are reading, doing, seeing, researching, hunting and contemplating. So an entrepreneur says he has started an alternative service, which offers encryption services to keep your details, well, your details. Out of Google’s files. And away from the NSA. The website is called Zeekly.com and founder Jeffrey Sisk explains it doesn’t retain search history, and also runs on 2048-bit SSL encryption to keep private what Internet users don’t want public.

White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the National Security Agency's spying activities saying that “only a small percentage of Internet traffic is being monitored.” “Is there any question that the vast majority of what people do on the Internet is mindless drivel?” Carney asked. “I mean, the number one topic is porn. Only a tiny fraction of the activity represents matters of interest. That's the activity we've got every right and obligation to monitor.” One of the “tiny fractions” Carney maintained merits scrutiny “is the communications of persons hostile to the Government—including so-called Tea Partiers. Let me remind you...

The website Ars Technica points us to this rare release by the NSA that seeks to justify its snooping. It is obviously self serving, and I find it strange that they would use the numbers dodge to try and reassure us about surveillance. It doesn't matter how little or how much of the internet they "touch." What matters is who they touch and why. On the same day that President Barack Obama spoke to the press about possible surveillance reforms--and released a related white paper on the subject--the National Security Agency came out with its own rare, publicly-released, seven-page document...

The Talk Shows August 11th, 2013 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Steve King, R-Iowa; Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Anu Bhagwati, executive director, Service Women's Action Network.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Reps. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., and Peter King, R-N.Y.; Michael Hayden, a former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency.THIS WEEK (ABC): Edward Snowden's father, Lon; Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.; Reps. Ed Royce, R-Calif., Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and Louie Gohmert, R-Texas; Donald Trump.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN):...

Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

Having declared an end to the War on Terror, the US president no longer has any clear idea of his country's global role The West can no longer rely on American leadership in the world. For the remaining duration of the Obama administration, Washington’s judgment and effectiveness in foreign policy cannot be trusted. It is quite an achievement for the one remaining superpower to appear as ineffectual and wrong-footed as the United States has managed to do in the past week. But there it is. The president’s global strategy in his second term was based on two resounding premises. First,...

Ladar Levison, 32, has spent ten years building encrypted email service Lavabit, attracting over 410,000 users. When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was revealed to be one of those users in July, Dallas-based Lavabit got a surge of new customers: $12,000 worth of paid subscribers, triple his usual monthly sign-up. On Thursday, though, Levison pulled the plug on his company, posting a cryptic message about a government investigation that would force him to “become complicit in crimes against the American people” were he to stay in business. Many people have speculated that the investigation concerned the government trying to get access...

Sarah Palin joined Eric Bolling on Fox News this morning to take a mini-victory lap over some Democrats suddenly embracing the idea she put forth years ago over health care “death panels.” Palin felt somewhat vindicated, but didn’t want to “condone them… for trying to jump off the Obama train wreck.” She told Bolling that rationing was in the health care law from the beginning, and the Democrats who didn’t notice it until now did not want to look like “buffoons.” Palin also took the media to task for wasting an opportunity at President Obama‘s big press conference to grill...

(CNN) - The government has until September 4 to make its first response to a civil lawsuit filed by Jill Kelley, the Florida woman caught up in the scandal which led to last year's resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. Kelley filed suit against the federal government in early June alleging her privacy had been violated by employees of government agencies. Last week a federal judge granted a request to give the government 30 additional days before responding to Kelley's complaint. The government cited the length of Kelley's suit and the need to confer with multiple government agencies. Kelley's defense...

WikiLeaks founder: Obama surveillance changes vindicate Edward Snowden By Keith Laing - 08/10/13 10:40 AM ET The founder of the WikiLeaks website said on Saturday that President Obama’s announcement of changes to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program this week vindicated Edward Snowden’s release of information about the program. “Today the President of the United States validated Edward Snowden’s role as a whistleblower by announcing plans to reform America’s global surveillance program,” WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange said in a statement. “But rather than thank Edward Snowden, the president laughably attempted to criticize him while claiming that there was a...

In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans, and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.” “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said. When then asked...

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) recently expressed his concern about Sarah Palin someday becoming president and having control over the information gathered by the U.S government about Americans citizens. In an interview with Shark-Tank.net, Rep. Grayson said he has introduced a bill, 'The Mind Your Own Business Act,' that would ban the U.S. Department of Defense from gathering Internet, phone and other personal information about U.S. citizens without probable cause or evidence of a criminal offense, which is what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to do. Rep. Grayson explained how 'The Mind Your Own Business Act' was modeled "very closely after...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Lives-Others-Martina-Gedeck/dp/B000OVLBGC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376090994&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lives+of+others

Vid at link

In a recent development eerily resembling a combination of both George Orwell’s custodian surveillance-state novel “1984,” and Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” in which individuals simply refuse to participate under a corrupt system, a Texas based e-mail provider announced to its customers yesterday that it would terminate operations, rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” The decision was abrupt, and surprised many. Industry insiders are speculating that Lavabit has not provided more details, as contact from the Federal Government may have included a so called, “gag order,” preventing Lavabit’s owner, Ladar Levison, from providing his clients with...

<p>The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.</p>

The highly encrypted email service reportedly used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has gone offline - and its administrator claims the company is legally barred from explaining why. On Thursday, the homepage of Lavabit.com was changed to a letter from the company’s owner announcing that the site’s operations have ceased following a six-week long ordeal that has prompted the company to take legal action in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Now in the midst of an escalating fight from the federal government aimed at cracking down on encrypted communications, one of the last free and secure services has thrown...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama quietly met with the CEOs of Apple Inc, AT&T Inc as well as other technology and privacy representatives on Thursday to discuss government surveillance, according to a media report. Google Inc computer scientist Vint Cerf and civil liberties leaders also participated in the meeting, along with Apple's Tim Cook and AT&T's Randall Stephenson, Politico said late Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The session was not included on Obama's daily public schedule for Thursday. The closed-door meeting followed another private session on Tuesday between top Obama administration officials, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates,...

The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance."I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or...

The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security. "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said. The remarks came as...

The e-mail service used by National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden is suspending operations. And they can’t tell us why — although this cryptic post heavily suggests it has something to do with a government request for information: I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I...

I can't for the life of me, folks, figure out WHY Boehner and Congress have not to date used their legal and Constitutional powers of appointing special prosecutors to try corrupt government officials in the Obama Administration over "phony scandals" Benghazi, the IRS Tea Party targeting, NSA and others? This seems especially poignant since Boehner said that it mattered set (IRS) agents would end up in jail over tea party targeting!? Now they act like nothing has happened/Have they gone limp? Maybe it's time to remind Boehner and all that they have this power? (202)-225-0600.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

Once again, Barak Obama stood before the American people and said…nothing. Well, not exactly “nothing”, he spoke for over an hour but after its conclusion one had to ask, “What was THAT all about?” This speech was touted as one that would announce a great economic plan and lay out details for getting the economy booming again. Instead, it was more of a campaign, political speech with nothing but attacks against his opponents and downright anger over what he calls “phony distractions”. Instead of identifying and providing solutions for the problems facing this nation, he once again blamed the “rich”...

n a rare diplomatic snub, President Obama is canceling plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next month. The decision reflects both U.S. anger over Russia's harboring of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and growing frustration within the Obama administration over what it sees as Moscow's stubbornness on other key issues, including missile defense and human rights. Obama will still attend the Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, but a top White House official said the president had no plans to hold one-on-one talks with Putin while there. Instead of visiting Putin in...

Just as the newest bombshell that the National Security Agency has been leaking information to the Drug Enforcement Agency (NSA) through a secret program called Parallel Construction was about to break on Monday, the Obama Administration tried to divert attention by announcing early Sunday morning that “chatter” had been intercepted by the NSA that the al Qaeda terrorist network was plotting to attack on a U.S. embassy and a transportation asset this week. But the uncovering of Parallel Construction’s strategy of consciously lying to defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges is sure to result in a get-out-of-jail-free-card for some of America’s...

President Obama on Tuesday defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs,telling NBC's Jay Leno that: "There is no spying on Americans." "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful." Obama also called the National Security Agency's surveillance a "critical component to counterterrorism," and defended the shutdown of U.S. embassies and travel warnings this weekend...

President Obama tells comedian Jay Leno that "We don’t have a domestic spying program." He made the comment during a taping of Leno's TV show. Obama also says the U.S. is not overreacting by closing some U.S. embassies for a week. The president tells Leno, "The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are a lot lower than they are of dying in a car accident, unfortunately." And the president says of Russia's Putin, "There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality. What I continually say to them and to President Putin, that’s...

Is the recent news concerning U.S. embassy closures in 20 countries and that the NSA program uncovered this, how did they manage to miss the overseas calls from at least one of the Tsaernaev brothers? Will this bolster the case for the NSA? Is this action a result of Benghazi fatigue as some pundits have said on cable news? Swcondly, are McCain and Graham the only U.S. Senators allowed to go to Syria? Where are the Democrat senators? No Dem Senators to go for Obama?

It gets worse: DEA demands that enforcers lie about source of evidence Leaked documents have revealed the existence of a Special Operations Division (SOD) within the Drug Enforcement Agency that receives and distributes tips gleaned by the NSA to arrange arrests, and then hides where that information came from."That's outrageous," Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association, told Reuters. "It strikes me as indefensible." According to documents seen by Reuters, SOD was set up in 1994 to deal with drug cartels and organized trafficking of narcotics, and uses information provided...

A follow-up to yesterday’s post noting that, for all the dark accusations recently that the new threat has been exaggerated to tout the NSA’s terror-bustin’ skills, no one in the government’s claiming that the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs were key in sniffing this out. On the contrary: Officials in the U.S. wouldn’t say who intercepted the initial suspect communications — the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency or one of the other intelligence agencies — that kicked off the sweeping pre-emptive closure of U.S. facilities. But an intelligence official said the controversial NSA programs that gather data...

....The US government’s assertion that the “threats” emanating from this “chatter” were somehow “specific” belies itself because it is contrary to common sense. Any specificity would focus attention on specific people and places rather than eliciting meaningless general measures and warnings. That attention’s effectiveness would depend on secret preparations for counter strokes, not on public displays of fear. This leads reasonable persons to conclude that some enemies of the United States, well knowing that NSA is listening, decided to give it an earful, with a few names and places thrown in by way of example, but not enough to remove...

To call growing concerns about the size, depth, history, ways and operations of our now-huge national-security operation "esoteric" or merely abstract is, simply, absurd. Our federal government is involved in massive data collection that apparently includes a database of almost every phone call made in the U.S. The adequacy of oversight for this system is at best unclear. The courts involved are shadowed in secrecy and controversy. Is it really wrong or foolhardy or unacceptably thoughtful to wonder if the surveillance apparatus is excessive, or will be abused, or will erode, or perhaps in time end, any expectation of communications...

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of a massive spying program siphoning up Americans' personal phone records earlier this year, President Obama declared: "I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy."Shortly thereafter, his administration revoked Snowden's passport and hit him with Espionage Act charges (filed under seal, naturally).That's the thing about the self-styled "most transparent administration in history": Often you can't find out what they're up to until somebody breaks the law to let you know.One suspects Obama "welcomes this debate" about as enthusiastically as Anthony Weiner greets the debate over...

Vague terrorist threats shutting down nineteen of our embassies, Russian strongman Putin thumbing his nose at President Obama, Iran jerking our chain – the U.S. hasn’t looked this cowardly on the world stage since the Jimmy Carter administration. Here at home, too, we’ve gone back to the Carter future; unemployment is high, Keynesian economics are all the rage, our professorial president is increasingly whiny and ineffectual; all that’s missing is a cardigan sweater and that infernal violin. Our recent contre-temps with Russia is a throw-back to the weak-kneed Carter era. President Vladimir Putin has granted temporary asylum to NSA leaker...

With the NSA spying scandal continuing to make headlines in Europe, the German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, has raised the possibility of new, tangible measures to punish corporations that participate in American spying activities. In an interview with Die Welt, the liberal Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger called for the creation of EU-wide rules to regulate the protection of information, and said that once those rules are in place, “United States companies that don’t abide by these standards should be denied doing business in the European market.”Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said that a package of EU measures is required in order to fight “the widespread spying of...

<p>Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate.</p> <p>From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up."</p>

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. "It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up...

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

Obama's part-time nation.

In the “credit where credit is due” department, one thing you can say for Lindsey Graham is that he clearly doesn’t care all that much about politics or future elections. The Senator was trotted out on CNN this morning for a chat with Candy Crowley where they discussed the current terror threat and embassy closings. An important topic to be sure, but Graham couldn’t help himself, it seems, and had to weave some comments on sequestration into the larger story with a side helping of praise for the NSA and the White House. (Hat tip to Andrew Johnson at The...