Displacement Syndrome Anatomy

SUBHEAD: USA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses.

By James Kunstler on 20 July 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/anatomy-of-a-displacement-projection-syndrome/)


Image above: Small portion of the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. This facility is reportedly capable of storing all electronic communications in the United States. From (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/07/31/report-utah-cops-get-1m-a-year-to-park-at-nsa-data-center).

“For more than a decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of United States interests.”
— The New York Times

The Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr. Trump’s failure to throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V. Putin of Russia, onstage in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero is expected to do when facing consummate evil.

Instead, the Golden Golem of Greatness voiced some doubts about the veracity of our “intelligence community” — as the shape-shifting Moloch of black ops likes to call itself, as if it were a kindly service organization in Mr. Rogers neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of childhood cancer.

If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger threat to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for instance his alleged “meddling” in US elections.

This word, meddling, absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It has a thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds without specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once did in our history.

The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling include the disclosure of incriminating emails among the Democratic National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of Facebook trolls making sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American electoral politics.

The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of “aggression.” It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it apparently warms the heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole” Crimea from Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the 1700s.

Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship which became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet mega-state in 1990 — and became even more of a problem when the US State Department and our CIA stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of Russia’s only warm water naval bases.

Do you suppose that even an experience American CIA analyst might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give up those assets?

Please, grow up.

Does anyone remember the explicit promise that US Government gave the transitional leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into the countries of eastern Europe formerly under soviet control? NATO now includes the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro.

Is anyone aware that NATO has been staging war games on Russia’s border the past several years? Do you suppose this might be disturbing to the Russians, who lost at least 20 million dead when Germany crossed that border in 1941?

As to the thug-and-murderer charge against V. Putin, has any news org actually published a list of his alleged victims? It’s very likely, of course, that Mr. Putin has had some of his political enemies killed. I wouldn’t take the “con” side of that argument.

But I’d be interested in seeing an authoritative list, if the intel community has one (and why wouldn’t they?).

I imagine it doesn’t exceed two dozen individuals. How many innocent bystanders did President Obama kill during the drone attack spree of his second term, when our rockets blew up wedding parties and sandwich shops in faraway lands. In 2016, The Atlantic published this:

One campaign, Operation Haymaker, took place in northeastern Afghanistan. Between January 2012 and February 2013, The Intercept reported, “U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

I suppose the excuse is that none of this was personal — as V. Putin’s alleged murders were. No, it wasn’t personal. It was worse than that.

It was a bunch of military video-game jocks sitting around an air-conditioned bunker eating hot pockets and slurping slurpees while snuffing out lives by remote control twelve-thousand miles away. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were high-fiving each other with every hit, too.

As for “hacking” of elections, do you suppose for minute that we do not have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of computer techies at our many sprawling NSA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses absolutely everywhere, among friend and foe alike? And that we are not trying to influence the outcomes of their political struggles in our favor?

Go a step further: do you suppose those US “intel community” hackers are not also collecting information about American citizens, including yourself?

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Blood Sports

SUBHEAD: Trump is a more troubling personality than Nixon, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic.

By James Kunstler on 12 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/7571/)


Image above: Donald Trump "wax figure" at Ripley's Odditorium in Orlando, Florida. From what we can tell the wax figures hands have been slightly enlarged and the finger fattened up like Polish sausage.From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rosie-odonnell-in-new-twitter-attack-we-have-three-weeks-to-stop-trump_us_586b2c56e4b0d9a5945c3b9c?slideshow=true#gallery/5826518ee4b0c4b63b0cc448/1).

What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white), the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended in the departure of Mr. Nixon, the designated Prince of Darkness of those dear dead days. Watergate had had a more satisfying finale than The Brides of Dracula.

So, in its current sad state, devoid of useful political ideas, mired in the mostly manufactured conflicts of race and gender, psychologically crippled by the election loss of a miserable candidate to the Golden Golem of Greatness, the Democratic Party is returning full steam to a gambit that worked so well years ago: beating the devil by congressional inquiry.

In President Trump (uccchhh, the concept!), they’ve got a target much juicier even than Old Nixie. It wasn’t for nothing that they called him “Tricky Dick.” He came back from political near-death twice in his career.

The first time, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s veep, he was accused of accepting the gift of a vicuna coat for his wife, Pat, and other secret cash emoluments. He overcame that with one of the first epic performances of the TV age, the “Checkers Speech” — Checkers being the family’s cocker spaniel, who Nixon invoked as a proxy for his own guileless innocence. It worked bigly.

The second near-death was his defeat in the California governor’s race of 1962, following his 1960 squeaker presidential election loss to John F. Kennedy. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” he told the press.

But he rose from the grave in 1968 — after fortifying his bank account in a Wall Street law practice — when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart (and wrecking the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey).

It is not unrecognized that in his first term Nixon functioned as a very capable executive, presiding over social and environmental legislation that would be considered progressive today — though he remained mired in the tarbaby of Vietnam.

But then, in the reelection campaign of ’72, he got a little too cute — or, at least, his campaign show-runners did, hiring a klatch of bumbling ex-CIA errand boys to burgle the DNC offices, who were then caught red-handed at the scene, which was the basement of the Watergate apartment complex… and the rest is history.

What a fabulous inquisition Watergate was! What a colorful cast characters: the wily old “country lawyer” Senator Sam Ervin, the dashing chief staff inquisitor Professor Sam Dash, the fallen Republican knights, Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox, the lonely and heroic bean-spiller, John Dean! And many more.

The Watergate hearings on TV were more thrilling than Downtown Abby. Once Old Nixie went down the path of stonewalling and evasion — covering up an escapade he might not have even known about at the time — he was dead meat.

I remember that sweaty August day that he threw in the towel. (I was a young newspaper reporter when newspapers still mattered.) It was pretty much a national orgasm. “NIXON RESIGNS!” the headlines screamed. A moment later he was on the gangway into the helicopter for the last time.

Enter, stage right, the genial Gerald Ford….

Forgive me for getting caught up in the very nostalgia I castigate. And now here we are in the mere early months of Trumptopia about to hit the replay button on a televised inquisition.

In my humble opinion, Donald Trump is a far more troubling personality than Tricky Dick ever was, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic, but the RussiaGate story looks pretty flimsy.

At this point, after about ten months of NSA-FBI investigation, nothing conclusive has turned up about Trump’s people “colluding” with Russia to gain unfair advantage in the election against You-Know-Who. Former NSA chief James Clapper has publicly stated twice in no uncertain terms that there’s no evidence to support the allegations (so far).

And there remains the specter of the actual content of the “collusion” — conveniently ignored by the so-called “Resistance” and its water-carriers at The New York Times — the hacked emails that evince all kinds of actual misbehavior by Secretary of State HRC and the DNC.

The General Mike Flynn episode seems especially squishy, since it is the routine duty of incoming foreign affairs officials to check in with the ambassador corps in Washington. Why do you think nations send ambassadors to other countries?

The upshot of all this will be a political circus for the rest of the year and the abandonment of any real business in government, at a moment in history when some very weighty black swans circle above the clouds waiting to crash land.

Enjoy the histrionics if you dare, and pay no attention to collapsing economy as it all plays out.

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The Deep State authority crumbles

SUBHEAD: The Deep State is fracturing because its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 24 March 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar17/DS-dominance3-17.html)


Image above: Cartoon by Ben Garrison of NSA mugging Uncle Sam in front of wall of Deep State. From (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/de/c5/87/dec587caa4556d5a2c43de0cced13f4f.jpg).

As data from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased by a hundred fold in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I've been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years.

Amusingly, now that "Progressives" have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker).

In this risible view, there is no Deep State "conspiracy" (the media's favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of "good German" bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire's essential work of undermining democracies that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions the dominant narratives as "fake news," arranging sweetheart deals with dictators and corporations, and so on.

The New Yorker is right about one thing--the Deep State is not a "conspiracy:" it is a vast machine of control that is largely impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American people.

The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.

The typical politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the "concerns" of important corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.

Senior administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings with senior managers and working groups.

Both senior elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives, expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and experience to do original research and assessment.

Narratives create an instant context that "makes sense" of various data points and events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an implicit teleology--because of this and that, the future will be thus and so.

For example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

This teleology leads to the inescapable need to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary, and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq's leader from power.

Politicos and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative.

The experts' conclusion doesn't just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of institutional authority.

So when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive, who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the institution?

We can now define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication channels.

By gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the dominant narrative is the source of power, for once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.

For example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical) views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.

Curation is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets the agenda and the end-game.

The senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture--his image was erased from photos.

This is how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus the accusation that "the Russians hacked our election" has been tabled because it simply doesn't align with any plausible evidence. That narrative has been replaced with variants, such as "the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee." Now that this claim has also been shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor alignment with evidence.

The primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the institutional node cannot be questioned.

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

If various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that "Russia hacked our election" (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd imprecision of the "hacking"--hacking into what? Voting machines? Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e. false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate question.

Once the legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game--in other words, everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it loses its hold on power.

This is why the Deep State is in turmoil--its narratives no longer make sense, or are in direct conflict with other nodes' narratives or have been delegitimized by widening gaps between "definitive" claims and actual evidence.

There is indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of collapse.
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How to drain the Deep Swamp

SUBHEAD: The WikiLeaks files made accusations of Russian hacking, and Trump links meaningless.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 8 March 2017 for the Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/03/how-to-drain-the-deep-swamp/)


Image above: Wired Magazine "Wanted" cover detail from November 2012 subtitled "How  Kim Dotcom outsmarted the FBI and Hollywood to become the hunted man on the internet". Should he be advising Trump. From (http://www.networkagency.com.au/story/wired-magazine-kim-dotcom).

[IB Publisher's note: Just when you thought things could not get crazier... they just have. This Automatic Earth article shows how schizophrenic the Western world has become. We now know that the CIA is competing with the NSA to not only gather all communication data and content between Americans through their electronic devices; but they are also in the business of creating "fake news" and attributing their activity as originating in Russia. Russia is likely doing the same. Trump, the fool, has been a gullible tool of his worst enemies. His selfishness, narcissism and eight year old bully mentality are leading us into real trouble. Those still holding onto a hope that his operations will lead to a more peaceful and prosperous world are delusional. The real enemy of America (and the rest of the "civilized" world is the inability to get off "growth" and fossil fuels that feed it. Hunker down folks, the storm is about to engulf us.]

Obviously, like hopefully many people, I’ve been following the WikiLeaks CIA revelations, and closely. It’s too early for too many conclusions, if only because WikiLeaks has announced much more will flow from that same pipeline.

But one thing is already clear: the CIA is -still- a club that sees enemies behind every tree, and behind every TV set too. Which is not as obvious a world view as it may seem; it’s just something we’ve become used to.

Moreover, as we see time and again, organizations like the CIA and NATO have no qualms about ‘creating’ enemies if they are in short supply. The flavor du jour has now been, for years, Russia, but don’t be surprised if another one is cultivated alongside it. ISIS, China, North Korea, plenty of options, and plenty of media more than willing to aid the cultivation process.

It’s a well-oiled machine geared towards making something out of nothing, a machine very adept at making you believe anything it wants you to.

In this way, our friends can become our enemies, and our enemies our friends.

What gets lost in translation is that this way in reality we become our own worst enemies.

While the upper and most secretive layers of society, filled with folk of questionable psychological constitution -sociopaths and psychopaths-, get to chase their dreams of wealth and power, those who try to live normal decent lives are, for that very purpose, increasingly subjected to poverty, misery and fear. As our economies decline further, this will only get worse.

Who needs your -conscious- vote or voice if these can be easily manipulated? Or do you not think you’re being manipulated? How many of you, American or European, think Russia is an actual threat to you? I’m afraid by now there’s a majority on each continent who perceive Putin as an evil force.

The president of a country that spends one-tenth on its military of what the US does. Trump’s announced military spending increase alone is almost as much as Russia spends in a whole year.

If Putin is really the threat he’s made out to be, to both Europe and the US, he must be extremely smart; merely devious wouldn’t do it. A man who can be an active threat to two entire continents and almost a billion people while spending a fraction on building that threat of what those he threatens do, must be a genius. Or the victim of media-politico manipulation.

But we don’t stop there. As the CIA spying and hacking files once again make abundantly clear, America increasingly seeks its enemies at home. This may be presented in the shape of Donald Trump, or terrorists on US soil, imported or not, but claiming that we can still tell a real threat from an invented one is no longer credible.

We are led along on a propaganda leash 24/7, and the best thing about it is we believe we are not.

That’s why it’s a good idea to pay close attention to what WikiLeaks is telling us.

The most extreme example of the political machinery turning our friends into enemies is probably right there, in the WikiLeaks and whistleblower corner of society. Earlier today I wrote:

The CIA spent a huge wad of taxpayer money on this, and then lost it all. It’s early days to say what this will mean for the agency’s abilities, and the nation’s safety, as well as that of American citizens, but it’s not good. Question is: who’s going to investigate how this could have happened? (Snowden and Kim Dotcom could)… And who’s going to repair the damage done? Anyone could be spying on your phone and your TV by now, not just the CIA -as if that wouldn’t be bad enough.

Then later I saw I wasn’t the only one who had thought of this. Dotcom tweeted:

Hi @realDonaldTrump, you're in real danger. You need good intel on CIA threat. We can help you. Conf with Julian, Edward and myself? RT

Edward Snowden and Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are ‘the enemy’, so say our ‘leaders’. They have received this honorable label for exposing secrets these same leaders were trying to hide from us. Secrets most of us, if we think it over, would say should not be kept from us.

The NSA spying on the American people, or the CIA turning your phones and TVs and cars into objects that can be used against you, these are things that don’t belong in our societies.

Still, as I’ve always said, if they can do it -from a technical point of view-, they will, damn the law. So we will have to make very sure the laws keep up with these developments, or we’re defenseless.

The Obama administration hasn’t been much help with this, and the rest of Washington won’t be either, they’re not just part of the machine, they are the engine that drives the machine. Obama allegedly gave in to the CIA for fear of ending up like JFK and the rest, along with the press, is under control too.

So perhaps Trump is our best chance at putting a stop to this coup, this deep state, from taking over. If we still can. And for that we might well need Snowden and Dotcom and Assange, who are not the enemies they are made out to be, they are the smartest among us, or at least they belong right up there.

And they are not only the smartest, they are the bravest too.

Locking them up would be a huge disservice to our societies, it would be much better to ask them to help us figure out what game the hell is being played.

One thing the WikiLeaks files accomplished is they made all accusations of Russian hacking, and of links between Trump and Russia, utterly meaningless in one fell swoop.

Because the CIA has acquired the capability, both through hacking Russian files and through coding, to leave ‘footprints’ that make it look like the Russians left them. And the only ‘proof’ there ever was for all these accusations was based on these footprints. That’s one narrative that must now be restarted from scratch -just one of many.

All we need now is for Trump to figure out who his enemies are, and who his friends. He already knows the CIA is not his friend, but has he figured out yet that the whistleblowers are not his enemy? And has his crew?

Kim Dotcom is right, Trump is in real danger, he’s been watched, and being watched, 24/7. Whether Obama ordered that or not is not very relevant. There are more urgent matters at hand.

And somewhere along the way he’s going to have to figure out that chasing women and children around the country and out of it is not just ugly, it’ll cost him too much sympathy too.

But so far all protests come from the Democrats and their supporters, who have all been left voiceless and shapeless by the election and now see their Russian conspiracy narratives blown to smithereens too, so why wouldn’t he please his own voters for a bit longer?

Well, for one thing, because he has to start to realize he’s going to need very broad support, and soon, be a president for all Americans so to speak, to fend off the CIA et al, and in what may be the hardest thing to do, he needs to invoke transparency, explain to people exactly what he does, and why, to drain the deep swamp.

If he fails in all this, and for now the odds point in that direction, those who protest him today will feel validated, right, and winners. They will be tragically wrong. Because if Trump loses this, the CIA wins. And then we will all live in 1984 for as far into the future as we can see.

I know there’s a lot that’s not to like about Trump and Bannon and all those guys. However, look at it this way: they are the only ones who can keep the doors of the vault from slamming shut for the rest of our lives, leaving time for y’all to wake up and find a president who doesn’t seek to turn your friends into your enemies.

At least you’ll still have that choice.

With present-day Washington, Democrat or Republican, there’s no such choice. They’re CIA, as are the media. Kim Dotcom tweeted this too today:


Image above: An excerpt from the first chapter of George Orwell's "1984" that begin with "Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan..." Those were the good old days when Ronald Reagan was President. See (http://www.theorwellreader.com/excerpt.shtml).

IB Publisher's end note: This from Wikipedia:
"Kim Dotcom, also known as Kimble^[7] and Kim Tim Jim Vestor,^[8] is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur, businessman, musician, and political party founder who resides in Auckland, New Zealand.^[9] He first rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as a teenage Internet entrepreneur. Dotcom is best known for being the founder of now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload (2005-2012).^[10][11] Earlier, he achieved notoriety in Germany as a teen hacker who was booked 2 years suspended sentence for selling identities that he had siphoned from telephone operators’ client database. After the closure of Megaupload, he has been accused of criminal copyright infringement and other charges, such as money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud, by the U.S. Department of Justice.^[12] Dotcom has denied the charges, and is currently fighting attempts to extradite him to the United States.^[13] On February 20, 2017, a New Zealand court ruled that Kim, as well as co-accused Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato, could be extradited to the US on charges related to Megaupload. Kim and his lawyer will appeal the decision." 

Could this be a reason for his approach to Donald Trump - a pardon?

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Trump "Not Fully Briefed"

SUBHEAD:  Expresses frustration on executive order elevating Bannon to Security Council.

By Nadia Prupis on 6 February 2107 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/02/06/trump-not-fully-briefed-order-elevating-bannon-security-council)


Image above: Recent Time magazine cover photo of Steve Bannon. From (https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/steve-bannon-cover-time.jpg).

New York Times reports the lapse was a 'greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban'.

President Donald Trump reportedly did not realize he was promoting chief strategist Steve Bannon to the National Security Council (NSC) Principals Committee when he signed the executive order dropping intelligence and defense officials from the top government panel and elevating the former Breitbart News chair in their place.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump had not been fully briefed on his own executive order, which became "a greater source of frustration to the president" than the protests and legal actions over his travel ban blocking immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries.

Reporters Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman depicted an administration that's just barely keeping a lid on its internal crises, turf wars, and lack of preparation—and a scheming chief strategist that's successfully taken advantage of it all.

They wrote:

[White House chief of staff Reince] Priebus told Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon that the administration needs to rethink its policy and communications operation in the wake of embarrassing revelations that key details of the orders were withheld from agencies, White House staff, and Republican congressional leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

Mr. Priebus has also created a 10-point checklist for the release of any new initiatives that includes signoff from the communications department and the White House staff secretary, Robert Porter, according to several aides familiar with the process.

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president's dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump's anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

Trump seemingly clarified on Twitter that he calls his own shots, "largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it." He also accused the Times of writing "total fiction" about him.

The executive order promoted Bannon, a white nationalist with no foreign policy or government experience, to a regular seat at some of the most sensitive meetings at the highest levels of government, along with other NSC meetings.

Meanwhile, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who need to be confirmed by the Senate—were directed to only attend meetings when discussions pertain to their "responsibilities and expertise."

The memo led to speculation that the right-wing power grab in the executive branch could be setting the stage for a coup d'état.

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Deep State Division

SUBHEAD: The military may play a role reducing the toxic influence of neocon and neoliberals within the Deep State.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 18 January 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan17/rogue-deep-state1-17.html)


Image above: Mashup by Juan Wilson of split in US intelligence agencies. From (https://www.pinterest.com/explore/central-intelligence-agency/).

Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

Suddenly everybody is referring to the Deep State, typically without offering much of a definition.

The general definition is the unelected government that continues making and implementing policy regardless of who is in elected office.

I have been writing about this structure for ten years and studying it from the outside for forty years.
Back in 2007, I called it the Elite Maintaining and Extending Global Dominance, which is a more concise description of the structure than Deep State. Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007).

I've used a simplified network chart to explain the basic structure of the Deep State, which is the complex network of state-funded and/or controlled institutions, agencies, foundations, university research projects, media ties, etc.

The key point here is you can't separate these network nodes. You cannot separate The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the national labs (nukes, energy, etc.), the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, the National Security State (alphabet soup of intelligence/black budget agencies: CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.), Silicon Valley and the research universities. They are all tied together by funding, information flows, personnel and a thousand other connections.

For the past few years, I have been suggesting there is a profound split in the Deep State that is not just about power or ideology, but about the nature and future of National Security: in other words, what policies and priorities are actually weakening or threatening the long-term security of the United States?

I have proposed that there are progressive elements within the sprawling Deep State that view the dominant neocon-neoliberal agenda of the past 24 years as a disaster for the long-term security of the U.S. and its global interests (a.k.a. the Imperial Project).

There are also elements within the Deep State that view Wall Street's dominance as a threat to America's security and global interests. (This is not to say that American-based banks and corporations aren't essential parts of the Imperial Project; it's more about the question of who is controlling whom.)

So let's dig in by noting that the warmongers in the Deep State are civilians, not military. It's popular among so-called Liberals (the vast majority of whom did not serve nor do they have offspring in uniform--that's fallen to the disenfranchised and the working class) to see the military as a permanent source of warmongering.

(It's remarkably easy to send other people's children off to war, while your own little darlings have cush jobs in Wall Street, foundations, think tanks, academia, government agencies, etc.)

These misguided souls are ignoring that it's civilians who order the military to go into harm's way, not the other way around. The neocons who have waged permanent war as policy are virtually all civilians, few of whom served in the U.S. armed forces and none of whom (to my knowledge) have actual combat experience.

These civilian neocons were busily sacking and/or discrediting critics of their warmongering within the U.S. military all through the Iraqi debacle. now that we got that straightened out--active-duty service personnel have borne the brunt of civilian planned, ordered and executed warmongering--let's move on to the split between the civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the DoD (Department of Defense) intelligence and special ops agencies: DIA, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, etc.

Though we have to be careful not to paint a very large agency with one brush, it's fair to say that the civilian leadership of the CIA (and of its proxies and crony agencies) has long loved to "play army".

The CIA has its own drone (a.k.a. Murder, Inc.) division, as well as its own special ops ("play army" Special Forces), and a hawkish mentality that civilians reckon is "play army special forces" (mostly from films, in which the CIA's role is carefully managed by the CIA itself: How the CIA Hoodwinked Hollywood (The Atlantic)

Meanwhile, it's not exactly a secret that when it comes to actual combat operations and warfighting, the CIA's in-theater intelligence is either useless, misleading or false. This is the result of a number of institutional failings of the CIA, number one of which is the high degree of politicization within its ranks and organizational structure.

The CIA's reliance on "analysis" rather than human agents (there's a lot of acronyms for all these, if you find proliferating acronyms of interest), and while some from-30,000-feet analysis can be useful, it's just as often catastrophically wrong.

We can fruitfully revisit the Bay of Pigs disaster, the result of warmongering civilians in the CIA convincing incoming President Kennedy that the planned invasion would free Cuba of Castro's rule in short order.

There are many other examples, including the failure to grasp Saddam's willingness to invade Kuwait, given the mixed signals he was receiving from U.S. State Department personnel.

Simply put, if you are actually prosecuting a war, then you turn to the services' own intelligence agencies to help with actual combat operations, not the CIA. This is of course a sort of gossip, and reading between the lines of public information; nobody is going to state this directly in writing.

As I have noted before:

"If you want documented evidence of this split in the Deep State--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Nobody in the higher echelons of the Deep State is going to leak anything about the low-intensity war being waged because the one thing everyone agrees on is the Deep State's dirty laundry must be kept private.

As a result, the split is visible only by carefully reading between the lines, by examining who is being placed in positions of control in the Trump Administration, and reading the tea leaves of who is "retiring" (i.e. being fired) or quitting, which agencies are suddenly being reorganized, and the appearance of dissenting views in journals that serve as public conduits for Deep State narratives."

Many so-called Liberals are alarmed by the number of military officers Trump has appointed.

Once you realize it's the neocon civilians who have promoted and led one disastrous military intervention (either with U.S. Armed Forces or proxies managed by the CIA) after another, then you understand Trump's appointments appear to be a decisive break from the civilian warmongers who've run the nation into the ground.

If you doubt this analysis, please consider the unprecedentedly politicized (and pathetically childish) comments by outgoing CIA director Brennan against an incoming president.

Even if you can't stand Trump, please document another instance in which the CIA director went off on an incoming president-- and this after the CIA spewed a blatant misinformation campaign claiming a hacked Democratic Party email account constituted a successful Russian effort to influence the U.S. election--a surreal absurdity.

Let me translate for you: our chosen Insider lost the election; how dare you!

A number of observers are wondering if the CIA and its Deep State allies and cronies will work out a way to evict Trump from office or perhaps arrange a "lone gunman" or other "accident" to befall him.

The roots of such speculations stretch back to Dallas, November 1963, when a "long gunman" with ties to the CIA and various CIA proxies assassinated President Kennedy, an avowed foe of the CIA.

Setting aside the shelfloads of books on the topic, both those defending the "lone gunman" thesis and those contesting it, the unprecedented extremes of institutionally organized and executed anti-Trump campaigns is worthy of our attention.

Given my thesis of a profound disunity in the Deep State, and the emergence of a progressive element hostile to neocons and neoliberalism (including Wall Street), then it's not much of a stretch to speculate that this rogue Deep State opposed to neocon-neoliberalism has Trump's back, as a new administration is pretty much the only hope to rid the nation's top echelons of the neocon-neoliberal policies that have driven the U.S. into the ground.

Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

If you have wondered why academics like Paul Krugman and the CIA are on the same page, it's because they are simply facets of the same structure. Krugman is a vocal neoliberal, the CIA is vocally neocon: two sides of the same coin.

I invite you to study the chart above with an open mind, and ponder the possibility that the Deep State is not monolithic, but deeply divided along the fault lines of Wall-Street-Neocons-Neoliberals and the progressive elements that rightly view the dominant neocon-neoliberals as a threat to U.S. national security, U.S. global interests and world peace.

We can speculate that some of these progressive elements view Trump with disdain for all the same reasons those outside the Deep State disdain him, but their decision tree is simple: if you want to rid America's Deep State of toxic neocon-neoliberalism before it destroys the nation, you hold your nose and go with Trump because he's the only hope you have.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: America versus the Deep State 1/10/17
Ea O Ka Aina: The deepening Deep State 12/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is Deep State tanking Hillary? 10/31/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is the Deep State dumping Hillary? 9/26/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is the Deep State for Hillary?  8/9/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Deep State Long Game 8/12/16

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The Cheeto Cometh

SUBHEAD: Will the Deep State tear the country apart in the attempt to defend all its ill-gotten perquisites and privilege?

By James Kunstler on 16 January 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-cheeto-cometh/)


Image above: Donald Trump looking snacky. From (http://myfox8.com/2015/12/07/trump-ban-all-muslim-travel-to-us/).

I dunno about you, but I rather enjoy watching the praetorian Deep State go batshit crazy as the day of Trump’s apotheosis approaches. I imagine a lot of men and women running down the halls of Langley and the Pentagon and a hundred other secret operational redoubts with their hair on fire, wondering how on earth they can neutralize the fucker in the four days remaining.

What’s left in their trick-bag? Bake a poison cheesecake for the inaugural lunch? CIA Chief John Brennan has been reduced to blowing raspberries at the incoming president.

Maybe some code cowboys in the Utah NSA fortress can find a way to crash all the markets on Friday as an inauguration present.

What does it take? A few strategic high-frequency trading spoofs? There will be lots of police sharpshooters on the DC rooftops that day. What might go wrong?

Civil War Two is underway, with an interesting echo of Civil War One: Trump dissed Civil Rights sacred icon Georgia congressman John Lewis, descendant of slaves, after said icon castigated Trump as “not a legitimate president.” That now prompts a congressional walk-out of the swearing-in ceremony.  

The New York Times is acting like a Manhattan socialite in a divorce proceeding, with fresh hysterics every day, reminding readers in a front-page story on Monday that “[Martin Luther] King’s birthday falls within days of the birthdays of two Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.”

Jeez! Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?

There’s not much Trump can do until Friday noon except tweet out his tweets, but one can’t help but wonder what the Deep State can do after that magic moment passes. I’ve maintained for nearly a year that, if elected, Trump would be removed by a coup d’état within sixty days of assuming office, and I still think that’s a pretty good call — though I hope it doesn’t come to that, of course.

My view of this was only confirmed by Trump’s performance at last week’s press conference, which seemed, shall we say, a little light on presidential decorum.

Perhaps it befits this particular Deep State to go down in the manner of an opéra bouffe. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, old Karl Marx observed.

What does the Union stand for this time? The rights of former SEC employees to sell their services to CitiBank? The rights of competing pharma companies to jack the price of insulin up from $20 to $250 a vial? The rights of DIA subcontractors to sell Semtex plastic explosives to the “moderate” jihadis of the Middle East?

So the theme of the moment is that Donald Trump is a bigger crook than the servants and vassals of the Deep State. He ran for president so he could sell more steaks and whiskey under the Trump brand. He’s in violation of the emoluments clause in the constitution.

Well, I’m not aware that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or Andrew Jackson put their slaves in a blind trust after they became president.

Anyway, at this point in our history, nobody can beat the Deep State for financial turpitude, certainly not a single real estate and hotel magnate.

I guess the big question is whether the Deep State — and, yes, Virginia, the Deep State does exist, unlike Santa Claus — will tear the country apart in the attempt to defend all its ill-gotten perquisites and privileges.

The public at large is restive, eager to get on with the job of deconstructing the matrix of racketeering that adds up to the immiserating culture we live in, a society where health insurance company presidents make $40 million a year while ordinary people lose their homes because a $5,000-deductible health insurance policy doesn’t cover the cost of treating a routine tonsillectomy.

I didn’t vote for the Cheeto-headed sonofabitch, but it will be interesting to see what he does between noon and six p.m. Friday, if he survives the festivities.

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No Fear - No Caution - No Prudence

SUBHEAD: Could it be that America's ruling classes, its Imperial state and the Federal Reserve, no longer rule their own destiny?

By Charles Hugh Smith on 5 March 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/americas-ruling-classes-no-fear-no.html)


Image above:This stunning McMansion is conveniently nearby CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia can be yours for 12.5 million dollars. From (http://dc.curbed.com/2014/12/2/10016304/stunning-mclean-mcmansion-can-be-yours-for-125m).

America's smug ruling classes are supremely confident: they feel no fear, no caution, and exhibit no prudence. I outlined the five ruling classes in America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy.

The Deep State is confident that its Imperial toady Hillary Clinton will win the election, beating the Upstart Crow, paving a smooth path to unhindered Imperial entanglements around the world. Hillary never saw an Imperial entanglement she didn't like, and her track record of abysmal failure doesn't faze her.

The Obama Administration, from the president on down, are confident their thin legacy will remain untarnished, and will provide them a cash-out in the tens of millions in book advances, speaking fees, and all the other rewards that flow to those who served the Financial Oligarchy and the Deep State.
The Financial Oligarchy is also supremely confident.

Obama's complete surrender to the Oligarchy in 2009 enabled a vast expansion of their wealth and power, and Goldman Sachs Hillary stands ready to do her masters' bidding.

The New Nobility (everyone between the .001% and the .05%) is also confident that the Federal Reserve will continue inflating their private wealth by whatever means are necessary--up to and including expropriation of middle class savings via zero interest rate policy and other financial tyranny.

The Upper Caste of technocrats that have skimmed billions in government contracts and stock options in Silicon Valley's Unicorn era are also supremely confident: thanks to the Federal Reserve, they can borrow money for essentially zero interest and use the free money to buy back millions of shares, boosting their own private wealth immensely.

The flim-flam of "innovation" will continue to sell their shares and their gadgets, and their dominance of New Media guarantees they have a lock on the devilishly effective soma of distraction, social media, mindless mobile gaming, etc. that persuades the debt-serf masses that they love their servitude.

The State Nomenklatura is also smugly confident that their privileged spot at the bloated Federal trough of trillions is guaranteed.

- Wealthy lobbyists are buying multi-million dollar McMansions in the cultural wastelands of Northern Virginia (the gaudy ugliness of the homes matching the pretensions of the Nomenklatura).

- Contractors are billing taxpayers billions for questionable services to the National Security State, and public union employees are confident that the Federal government will bail out their unaffordable pension and benefits plans once their local Democratic machines have strip-mined the taxpayers and bankrupted what's left of the local government.

This is hubris on an unimaginable scale. If there was any karmic justice in this Universe, all these classes would be ground into the dust of an era that they thought would last forever--an era doomed by their smug confidence that nothing could ever threaten their privileges, wealth and power.

Here's an interesting chart (courtesy of mdbriefing.com) of financial profits as a percentage of GDP and the ratio of debt to GDP. In the virtuous cycle of rapidly expanding financialization/credit, expanding debt pushes growth as measured by GDP (a misleading measure, but that's another story).

The cycle has reversed and is now unvirtuous: more debt is not pushing GDP higher, hence the declining ratio. Adding debt is not generating growth. Diminishing returns have grabbed the parasitic, predatory monster of financialization by its surprisingly vulnerable neck.

Meanwhile, financial profits are cratering. Wait, how could this be happening? Where's the Federal Reserve? Wave your wands, do some more magic!

Could it be that America's ruling classes, its Imperial state and the Federal Reserve, no longer rule their own destiny? Could their smug confidence be their undoing?

Only two things could upset the ruling class apple cart: a financial crash that the Fed can't stop, much less reverse, and Donald Trump winning the presidency.

Federal Court's NSA smackdown

SUBHEAD: Snowden vindicated as federal judge orders shutdown of NSA illegal domestic spying.

By Claire Bernish 10 November 2015 for AntiMedia -
(http://theantimedia.org/snowden-vindicated-as-judge-shuts-down-nsa-bulk-spying-in-epic-smackdown/)


Image above: D.C. Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon.  From (http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/in-praise-of-independent-judges-from-learned-hand-to-richard-j-leon).

On Monday, a federal judge ordered a halt to the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program in a reiteration and confirmation of a previous ruling that found the practice “unconstitutional” — and even “Orwellian.”

“This court simply cannot, and will not, allow the government to trump the Constitution merely because it suits the exigencies of the moment,” stated Washington, D.C. District Court Judge Richard Leon in his mordant 43-page ruling.

Edward Snowden immediately hailed the decision, pointing out significant passages from the court to his millions of Twitter followers. Of particular importance — and, indeed, at the heart of both known and potentially unknown domestic spy programs — remains the impossible reckoning between Fourth Amendment protections and the government’s claims of a national security imperative.

“Moved by whatever momentary evil has aroused their fears, officials — perhaps even supported by a majority of citizens — may be tempted to conduct searches that sacrifice the liberty of each citizen to assuage the perceived evil. But the Fourth Amendment rests on the principle that a true balance between the individual and society depends on the recognition of ‘the right to be let [sic] alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,’” the ruling stated, with emphasis added by Snowden.

In another tweet, the whistleblower summarized the ruling: “Judge rejects government claim that so long as you aren’t targeted individually, dragnet searches of your life are OK.” xxx

Though Leon’s judgment arrives mere weeks before metadata collection would naturally end under the USA Patriot Act’s Section 215 upon implementation of the newly passed USA Freedom Act, he emphasized potential implications of any undue delay in bringing such spying to a close, stating:

“In my December 2013 Opinion, I stayed my order pending appeal in light of the national security interests at stake and the novelty of the constitutional issues raised. I did so with the optimistic hope that the appeals process would move expeditiously. However, because it has been almost two years since I first found that the NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Program likely violates the Constitution and because of the loss of constitutional freedoms for even one day is a significant harm […] I will not do that today.”

In other words, the judge harshly repudiated the government’s already poorly disguised emphasis on national security to justify bulk collection as wholly secondary to the individual’s right to privacy under the Constitution. Leon’s 2013 ruling was struck down in August this year, when an appeals court found the plaintiff in Klayman v. Obama had not established the legal standing necessary to dispute the constitutionality of the NSA program. Once amended appropriately, the judge was able to make a ruling on the original case and issue an injunction to halt bulk collection.

In this ruling, Leon sharply admonished the appeals court for its reversal, saying:

“Because the loss of constitutional freedoms is an ‘irreparable injury’ of the highest order, and relief to the two named plaintiffs would not undermine national security interests, I found that a preliminary injunction was not merely warranted — it was required.” [emphasis by the judge]

Seemingly irritated at the insult of the government maintaining its position on the necessity of bulk collection while ignoring the preceding twenty-two months to find less invasive means to achieve the same goal, Leon searingly stated:

“To say the least, it is difficult to give meaningful weight to a risk of harm created, in significant part, by the Government’s own recalcitrance.”

Pointing out the painfully obvious, Leon derided fictitious claims the government needs bulk data collection at all, considering the program thwarted exactly zero terror attacks throughout its entire duration. In rebuttal to claims the contentious NSA program remains reasonably effective, the judge flatly stated:

“This is a conclusion I simply cannot reach given the continuing lack of evidence that the Program has ever actually been successful as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”

Pulling no punches, Leon concludes with a scathing challenge to the naïveté and blind acceptance Congress mistakenly presumed the public and court would give the contentiously invasive program:

“To be sure, the very purpose of the Fourth Amendment would be undermined were this court to defer to Congress’s determination that individual liberty should be sacrificed to better combat today’s evil.”

Employing linguistic subtlety which, at times, borders on a verbal smackdown, Judge Richard Leon brilliantly sent the NSA, Congress, and rest of the government a message that couldn’t be denied this second time around:  

Nobody buys your bullshit.

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Top Dems condemn Snowden

SUBHEAD: Via satellite at Bard College Snowden disputed Clinton’s claim that he bypassed whistleblower protections.

By Tom McCartney on 16 October 2015 for the Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/16/edward-snowden-hillary-clinton-false-claim-whistleblower-protection)


Image above: Edward Snowden speaks, via video-conference, at Bard College in New York on Friday. Photo by Beka Geodde. From original article.

Edward Snowden has accused Hillary Clinton of “a lack of political courage” for her assertion during the Democratic presidential debate this week that the whistleblower had bypassed options for disclosing illegal government spying programs that would have protected him and not violated the law.

Speaking via satellite at a privacy conference at New York’s Bard College on Friday, Snowden said:

“Hillary Clinton’s claims are false here.”

“This is important, right?” Snowden told an audience at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. “Truth should matter in politics, and courage should matter in politics, because we need change. Everyone knows we need change. And we have been aggrieved and in many ways misled by political leaders in the past.”

Before Snowden spoke, Clinton repeated the claim on Friday, at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. After a voter said Snowden was “close to a patriot,” BuzzFeed reported, Clinton disagreed and said he could have received whistleblower protections but instead chose to break the law.

“He broke the laws of the United States,” Clinton said at the debate on Tuesday. “He could have been a whistleblower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower. He could have raised all the issues that he has raised.

And I think there would have been a positive response to that.”

Multiple passes at fact-checking Clinton’s claim this week have concluded that “the protections of being a whistleblower” do not exist in the real world and did not apply to Snowden.

A 1989 whistleblower law, for example, does not apply to intelligence community employees. A separate law for would-be intelligence whistleblowers has been deemed a trap because it has led not to protections but to prosecutions.

“There is, I think, in many ways a lack of political courage in the established class that we expect to champion [our rights],” Snowden said at Bard, to enthusiastic applause.

The second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled in May that the dragnet phone metadata collection program exposed by Snowden was indeed illegal.

In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session that lasted the better part of two hours, Snowden also rejected the premise of a question at the debate as to whether he was a hero or traitor. He discussed his Twitter habits, criticized Facebook for taking the side of the government over the side of users, and he praised the unidentified whistleblower who provided documents relating to drone warfare published on Thursday in an exposé by The Intercept.

“Thanks to some extraordinary whistleblower who provided this information to the Intercept, we now know that these drone attacks that claimed the lives of innocents, 90% of the time, nine out of 10 of those killed are not the intended targets,” Snowden said.

He dismissed the hero-or-traitor question, which CNN host Anderson Cooper posed at the presidential debate.

“I reject both [labels],” Snowden said. “Because even though people say being a hero would be a good thing, it’s other-izing, it’s distancing, it’s, ‘This person did something I could never do in that situation’ – that’s absolutely not true.”

Asked about being a privacy advocate who has nonetheless become active on Twitter, Snowden said he uses Tor and other “privacy-enhancing technologies” to protect his personal information when he uses social media.

He did not appear to be a Facebook user. “They’re really unwilling to make a commitment to the user,” Snowden said of the site. “They really need to decide who they work for – the government, or the people who use their services.”

Asked whether he was willing to face charges for leaking classified material, Snowden said that the law under which he has been charged, the Espionage Act of 1917, would not allow him to make the case that he had acted in the public good.

Snowden said he had been in contact with the government – apparently not recently – about how some kind of plea deal would work.

“They said ‘Well, we won’t torture you’,” Snowden said. “‘But we haven’t got beyond that.’”

---

Sanders & Clinton condemn Snowden
SUBHEAD: Both Democratic presidential candidates say Snowden should face criminal prosecution for revealing NSA secrets.

By Sam Thielman on 13 October 2015 for the Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/clinton-sanders-snowden-nsa-democratic-debate)

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders sparred over Edward Snowden during Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate with both calling for him to face trial, but with the Vermont senator saying he thought the NSA whistleblower had “played a very important role in educating the American people”.

Clinton was unmoved by public approbation for Snowden, who exposed the depths of US and UK surveillance to media including the Guardian in 2013.

“He broke the laws of the United States,” she said. “He could have been a whistleblower, he could have gotten all the protections of a whistleblower. He chose not to do that. He stole very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands so I think he should not be brought home without facing the music.”

Snowden has said he did not believe he was granted adequate protection from reprisal under whistleblower laws. Laws protecting whistleblowers in intelligence agencies are written differently from laws protecting others who oppose their employers – including in the government – on grounds of conscience, and are generally considered comparatively weak.

Sanders – Clinton’s main challenger for the Democratic nomination – was more lenient. “I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public,” the Vermont senator said. He, too, said that Snowden had broken the law and suggested that he ought to be tried. “I think there should be a penalty to that,” he said. “But I think that education should be taken into consideration before the sentencing.”

Jim Webb, the Virginia senator and former secretary of the navy, said the decision should be left to the courts, and Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, agreed with Clinton. Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor, was the only candidate to say he would bring Snowden back to the US as a hero; that answer drew a positive response online.

Clinton’s claim that the information Snowden made public “has fallen into the wrong hands” could be reference to a disputed Times of London story that the leak exposed undercover agents. It could also refer to Snowden’s own admission that inadequate redaction of classified images he supplied to the New York Times was “a fuck-up”.

Ewen MacAskill, the Pulitzer prize-winning Guardian journalist who worked on the Snowden story, has pointed out that no evidence has ever been put forward suggesting that the Snowden documents were hacked or that Snowden himself handed the material to any person or agency other than reputable news outlets.


When moderator Anderson Cooper asked Clinton whether she regretted voting for the Patriot Act, she gave a flat: “No.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I think that it was necessary to make sure that we were able after 9/11 to put in place the security that we needed.” Clinton did allow that the act’s notorious section 215, which allowed for essentially unlimited data collection, had been interpreted overbroadly.

The provisions of the Patriot Act, a law broadening the powers of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies passed just weeks after 9/11, have widely been criticized as too broad and being without accountability.

Among them are the expansion of the secret Fisa court system and a framework for the standards for the collection of personal information from citizens who are not suspected or accused of any crime.

Sanders – who voted against the act multiple times, including against its original incarnation in the House of Representatives – said unequivocally that he would end bulk data collection by the NSA.
Clinton demurred. “It’s not easy to balance privacy and security but we have to keep them both in mind,” she said.
.

Fake NSA Reform

SUBHEAD: Little to celebrate as USA Freedom Act passes House with looming Patriot Act Reauthorization.

By John Queally on 14 May 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/14/fake-reform-little-celebrate-usa-freedom-act-passes-house)


Image above: The House of Representatives passed the USA Freedom Act on Wednesday with a 338-88 vote, but experts say that powers of mass surveillance will continue, and even expand, if the bill passes and becomes law. (Image: EFF/flickr/cc).From original article.

With Patriot Act re-authorization looming, end of domestic phone collection program not enough to assuage civil liberty and privacy advocates.

Though the overwhelming and bipartisan passage of the USA Freedom Act in the House of Representatives on Wednesday portends the end of the NSA's mass collection of Americans' private telephone records, civil liberties groups found little else to celebrate as the ultimate passage of the bill, which now heads to the Senate, would re-authorize a number of worrisome programs by extending the life of the controversial Patriot Act.

Following a federal court ruling last week that deemed a provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, as not a sound legal basis for the bulk phone data collection program, H.R. 2048, which passed the House by a vote of 338-88, would put a definitive end to the practice that was first revealed to the American public by documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

However, despite strong objections from critics, the bill reauthorized Section 215 for other uses and would expanded other surveillance mechanisms and powers for government agencies.

See the full roll call of the vote here.

Though some progressive groups found it possible to support the bill for its strong stance against the domestic phone records program, tougher critics said that though they welcome the end of that specific program, the USA Freedom Act's re-authorization of broader Patriot Act powers could not be ignored.

Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU had offered some initial support to earlier versions of the bill, but both groups ultimately withdrew their backing of the law once it reached its final form. Others were never convinced and said true reform would come only from allowing the Patriot Act, and all its varied authorities, to sunset as scheduled on June 1.

“Congress has an opportunity to reform mass surveillance by letting the Patriot Act expire, and that’s what they should do," said Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future, which has spearheaded a coalition opposed to mass surveillance, the re-authorization of the Patriot Act, and specifically Section 215.

Wednesday's vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, said Cheng, would actually "expand the scope of surveillance" by the NSA and others. The USA Freedom Act, she said, "is the opposite of reform. It makes absolutely no sense."

Elaborating on the implications of the bill, she continued:

There is literally no reason for the NSA to be surveilling everyone and their mom in order to go after their targets. Why they aren’t satisfied with the US Constitutional limits on search and seizure and getting a warrant to do so is very suspicious. That’s just rogue and illegal behavior and part of selling a culture of fear. We’re demanding to see them build a case to surveil my mom and millions of Internet users around the world before they get one more peek at our private lives.“

Congress is trying to sell the USA Freedom Act to the American people as reform, but what the bill actually does is extend and expand the government’s power to monitor our communications under the PATRIOT Act. Far from reform, the bill will allow the government to invade even more of our private moments than ever by updating their surveillance powers for the devices and communications platforms we use most often these days.”

This is a fake privacy bill. Corrupt members of Congress and their funders in the defense industry are attempting to package up their surveillance-powers wishlist and misleadingly brand it as ‘USA Freedom.’ This is disappointing and offensive, and we will continue to work to kill this bill and any other attempt to legitimize unconstitutional surveillance systems.”

Within the halls of Congress, however, the climb toward meaningful reform in a Republican-controlled session has been a slog, with civil liberties groups hedging their critiques as well as their enthusiasm. As Russell Berman writes at The Atlantic:

The ACLU, for example, is taking no formal position on the bill even though it sent lawmakers a list of areas in which it didn’t go far enough. [A complex bipartisan] dynamic was on display this week when GOP House leaders rejected a bid by a group of younger libertarian members to offer amendments that would have further restricted the NSA. "This is a very delicate issue,” Speaker John Boehner explained to reporters. “I know members would like to offer some amendments, but this is not a place for people to bring out the wrecking ball.”

Broad majorities of House Democrats and Republicans decided on Wednesday that the Freedom Act was good enough as is, increasing pressure on the Senate to accept their compromise. Yet just how significant would the new law be? Lawmakers in Congress have a tendency to hail just about any bill that gets a bipartisan vote as a landmark achievement. Staunch privacy advocates dismiss it for paying lip service to reform while leaving intrusive surveillance programs untouched. The truth on this one lies somewhere in the middle, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of its Lawfare blog.

“This is a significant reform and rollback of a FISA program,” he told me. But it pales in the context of the extensive collections of NSA surveillance tools and the many, often unrelated provisions of the Patriot Act. Section 215 is, after all, just one section, and the reforms in this bill beyond ending bulk data collection are modest. “This is one, small program,” Wittes said. “It is not the big enchilada, or even one of the big enchiladas of the NSA programs.”

With the bill now heading to the Senate, critics of the House version are still holding out hope that improvements can be made in the upper chamber. As  Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst for EFF, wrote in the immediate wake of Wednesday's vote:

We believe the House missed an opportunity to strengthen the bill in light of the recent Second Circuit decision. We’re urging the Senate to take steps to strengthen the bill. The bill is now sent over to the Senate, where all eyes will be watching. The Senate is expected to take up the USA Freedom Act anytime in the next two weeks, and is likely to vote on it by May 22. The Senate is uniquely positioned to improve the civil liberties protections in the USA Freedom Act by adding additional transparency and oversight provisions, adding stronger limitations on the collection of data on innocent people, and throwing out some of the recently-added provisions to the bill that were included at the behest of the intelligence community.

He added, "2015 can and should be the year for powerful surveillance reform, and we’re urging the Senate to rise to this opportunity."


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Secret law is not law

SUBHEAD: The secrecy of the legal justifications for NSA surveillance violates international human rights law.

By Cindy Cohn on 15 September 2014 for Electronic Frontier Foundation -
(https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/secret-law-not-law)


Image above: An appropriate great seal for the NSA's spying operation. From (http://www.dantynan.com/2013/06/11/love-trees-hate-meat-you-too-may-be-a-terrorist/).

One of the many ways that the NSA’s mass surveillance violates the human rights of both Americans and others around the world is that it teeters on a huge pile of secret law.

Let’s be clear. Under international human rights law, secret “law” doesn’t even qualify as “law” at all.

The Human Rights Committee confirms that law is only law if people know it exists and can act based on that knowledge. Article 19 of the ICCPR, protecting the freedoms of opinion and expression, requires that “to be characterized as a “law,” [a law] must be formulated with sufficient precision to enable an individual to regulate his or her conduct accordingly and it must be made accessible to the public. . . . “1 This same conclusion applies to Article 17, the right to privacy. The European Court of Human Rights similarly notes in the context of surveillance:

[T]he law must be sufficiently clear in its terms to give citizens an adequate indication as to the circumstances in which and the conditions on which public authorities are empowered to resort to this secret and potentially dangerous interference with the right to respect for private life and correspondence.2

This includes not just the law itself, but the judicial and executive interpretations of written laws because both of those are necessary to ensure that people have clear notice of what will trigger surveillance. 

This is a basic and old legal requirement: it can be found in all of the founding human rights documents. It allows people the fundamental fairness of understanding when they can expect privacy from the government and when they cannot. 

It avoids the Kafkaesque situations in which people, like Joseph K in The Trial and the thousands of people on the secret No Fly Lists, cannot figure out what they did that resulted in government scrutiny, much less clear their names. 

And it ensures that government officials have actual limits to their discretion and that when those limits are crossed, redress is possible.

Just how far has the US strayed from this basic principle in its mass surveillance practices? Very far. The existence of the mass surveillance was kept officially secret from the world for over a decade, from when it started in earnest in 2001 until June of 2013 after the Snowden revelations. The surveillance at first had no judicial authorization whatsoever. 

Various pieces of it were brought under judicial authority --  email records in 2004, U.S. domestic telephone records in 2006 and backbone and other content collection in 2007 -- but these court decisions also happened entirely in secret, so the public still didn't know. Even today, large amounts of both the caselaw and the Executive Branch’s internal legal guidance have been kept from the public. 

To the extent we know anything about what the government is doing, this has been based on the piecemeal (and often highly fragmented) release of information as the result of dogged FOIA work and the legal cases brought by EFF plus our friends at the ACLU and EPIC.3

 

The breadth of the secret law is astonishing. For instance, only after the Snowden revelations did the government first admit its legal theories -- that its mass spying relied on outrageous secret interpretations of section 215 of the PATRIOT ACT and section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- neither of which even mentions mass surveillance much less authorizes it. We also now know about the NSA’s domestic telephone records collection and a past program that collected cell location information but we still don’t know the NSA’s full use of section 215. 

In fact, on September 2 the government sidestepped questions from the Second Circuit about whether its legal arguments in support of its telephone records collection could also support the mass collection of all credit card or bank records of Americans (hint: it could).

Nor are these secret, often extremely weak interpretations of otherwise public laws the only problem. Sometimes there’s no “law” at all. The NSA’s foreign collection processes, which are much more extensive than their domestic collections, are only ostensibly justified by an Executive Order, currently Executive Order12333. While E.O. 12333 is public, it’s not law at all and it certainly does not mention mass surveillance of millions of innocent people around the world. 

None of the government’s legal interpretations of it are public either. We've now seen evidence that this non-law with secret interpretations is the basis for the NSA's mass surveillance of communications not just in one place, but at nearly every step of their journey: from remote access to computers, to man-in-the-middle attacks on messages in transit, to attacking direct service providers like Google, to tapping into the undersea cables. Yet the legal basis for these unprecedented intrusions into privacy remains opaque.

To bring the U.S. in line with international law, it must stop the process of developing secret law and ensure that all Americans, and indeed all people who may be subject to its surveillance have clear notice of when surveillance might occur. Terrorists and other criminals already well understand that they can be subject to surveillance during an investigation, so the people who are hurt are the innocent.

Some operational details can and should remain secret, of course, but the law must be sufficiently clear to allow innocent people to understand when and how they may be subject to surveillance and, as they wish, take steps to regain their privacy. Only then will the U.S. fulfill its obligations under international law.

• 1. See UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment no. 34 on freedoms of opinion and expression (Article 19 ICCPR), available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/gc34.pdf. The European Court of Human Rights applied the principles developed under Article 10 ECHR (right to freedom of expression) in Sunday Times in the case of Silver and others v. the United Kingdom, nos. 5947/72; 6205/73; 7052/75; 7061/75; 7107/75; 7113/75; 7136/75, 25 March 1983, paras. 85-86, which concerned the right to privacy of prisoners under Article 8 ECHR.
• 2. Malone v. the United Kingdom, no. 8691/79, 2 August 1984, para. 67.
• 3. All too often the Intelligence Community shamefully elides the fact that its public releases were due to pressure from our work and even then only releases what it decides to release, likely skewing what the public learns.

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