risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

William Binney, NSA whistleblower, says spy agency is
violating U. S. Constitution in gathering phone, email and other digital
information from Americans inside the United States. Binney
worked 32 years for NSA and was considered one of NSA's best
mathematicians and code breakers until he left the agency in protest
after 9/11 and its policy change under Pres. George Bush to spy inside
the U. S. without warrants. William Binney spoke at the 2012 DEF CON
Hacker's Conference, July 26-29, 2012, at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

nsa official off the record...

"certainly we havnt done a think to help protect the american people from terrorism... but we SURE have gotten a leg up on preventing the american people from suscessfully rebeling when they figure out that their country has been auctioned off and is being sold for parts"

You're a cliche held together with a noxious angry attitude and poor self control.

I feel like I am a pair of brown shoes in a closet full of tuxedos

http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/2425523/

The people being interviewed were very senior NSA officials, and they state in agreement that their attempts to work through channels had failed and Snowden's direct approach to the press had worked to bring attention to illegal programs and initiate a national dialog.

Lessen # 2 shooting fish in a barrel.

Pull trigger bullet hits water and deflects & quickly runs out of steam - fish missed.

"Think through what you post, lest you end up proving yourself wrong".

Stalin did it, let's do it!

Can American democracy survive its betrayal by the government?
The unbalance among the three branches of government is threatening democracy.
Last Modified: 03 Jul 2013 08:36
Mark LeVine

Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, and distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh.

Depending on your point of view, the last few weeks have sounded either a very loud wake-up call or the death knell of democracy in the United States, at least for the foreseeable future.

For the first time in generations, American citizens have been betrayed, and indeed, attacked, not merely by one over-reaching branch of government, but by all three. The actions of President Obama and the Congress as revealed in the the Snowden Affair, and the revelations of the NSA's activities it has brought to light, and now the Supreme Court's decision effectively to overturn the Voting Rights Act, show conclusively that Americans today can no longer trust their government to protect their most fundamental rights, either in principle or against the abuse by one or more arms of the state.

Every American child learns about the unique set of "checks and balances" laid out in the US Constitution, which established a tripartite division of power between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. This balance of power, whose history returns (in a much simpler form) to ancient Greece and Rome, was established precisely because the "Founding Fathers" held a deep distrust of the ability of those with political power to use it fairly and according to law, and not arrogate it or otherwise abuse it for their own individual or corporate benefit.

The separation of power and the checks and balances between the three branches of government it established ensured that the functions of making, executing and interpreting the law remained the provenance of the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches respectively. Each branch have always had, as a core responsibility, checking any over-reach by one or both of the other two. At the same time, by placing supreme power at the Federal level, the Constitution (as laid out in Article VI), ensured that individual states could not act to ignore, undermine or violate Federal laws by enacting their own laws that either superseded or contravened them.

...what exists now in the US is a perfect storm of disempowerment of Americans by all three branches of their government when it comes to the most basic rights citizens can possess.

Hedge -- "I would argue ..."

...what exists now in the US is a perfect storm of disempowerment of Americans by all three branches of their government when it comes to the most basic rights citizens can possess.

"For three presidential terms the Executive Branch has been firmly the hands of presidents and officials who believe that the government can contravene the most basic rights of any person - citizen or foreigners - as long as they can justify such actions in the guise of "protecting the American people" and other raisons d'Etat.

Congress, in theory should have checked such untrammeled Executive Power, most recently revealed by Edward Snowden's leaking of NSA and other Executive Branch surveillance and spying policies. But what the Snowden affair reaffirms instead is the reality that Congress has little will to oppose such policies and indeed by and large supports the military-industrial-intelligence behemoth that so threatens the rights of all. Given the corporate control of the Congress and the political process more broadly, there is little incentive for legislators to draft and/or support any kind of legislation that would protect and enhance the rights of individual citizens at the expense of state power or its corporate sponsors."

" the Supreme Court. Here three cases in particular have enabled unprecedented constriction of the power of ordinary people vis-a-vis the political and economic elites who govern--better, rule--over them. The first is the Citizens United decision of 2010, which declared any restrictions on independent corporate campaign spending unconstitutional, thereby giving corporations equal rights and far more power than ordinary citizens. Next was the Clapper v. Amnesty decision this past February, in which the Court ruled in a case involving the surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden that human rights activists and journalists do not have the right to challenge secret FISA wiretaps that might collect their data, since they couldn't prove they were a target (an impossible standard since by definition the authorizations to collect data are secret). This ruling "jettisoned the bedrock requirement of the Fourth Amendment," in the words of Georgetown University Constitutional Law professor David Cole, by allowing the surveillance of individuals without any indication they were involved in wrongdoing. Finally, there is the effective overturning of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, decided last week, which will by most accounts ensure that Republican-controlled states pass legislation whose only result - whatever the putative intent - will be to make it much more difficult if not impossible for millions of citizens to carry out their most important democratic obligation."

"Americans have no one but themselves to rely on to reassert control over a political system that was designed precisely to ensure this kind of stacking of the deck against citizens by their government wouldn't happen."

It's hard to know how Americans can actually "take back their government," as Republicans and Democrats routinely urge them without a hint of irony, utilising any of the political and cultural tools presently available to them. But at least with the events of the last few weeks they can no longer say they didn't understand the full spectrum of forces arrayed against them. If that doesn't generate enough urgency to produce the kind of conversations and grass roots practices that can lead to new political models emerging, then the death knell of democracy as most Americans have for generations understood it has most definitely sounded.

Hedge -- "it's that they're bringing false allegations of illegal/unconstitutional activity."

To equate Stalin's murder of millions of Russians to our collection of telephone metadata is completely senseless.