By: Rod Estvan

Still perplexed by Snowden

After the watching Glenn Greenwald video I am even more perplexed by Snowden. Here is a guy who at the age of 19 joined the army in 2003 and became special forces because as he said to Greenwald: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression."

Talk about naïve, I mean even your average ROTC college student understood the invasion of Iraq and the war at least had something to do with self interest and oil.

From there his bio is typical of a future CIA operative (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance).

I have no real idea what Snowden's motivation was in destroying his own life and Greenwald's explanation that Snowden wanted to make the US population aware of the extend of surveillance being carried out on the total population of the nation seems just crazy. Most of the people who even read the Guardian stories, or watched the Greenwald video already accept the fact that the US government operated a massive security state so there was little revelation there.

The vast majority of our population really doesn't give a good hoot whether or not the CIA has the capability of looking at their emails or listening in of cell phone calls. As long as they can't get people for normal things like tax evasion, drug dealing, and various white collar crimes they could really not care in the least about this access.

The media is concerned because of discussions they may have with various people off the record that may be formal violations of the Espionage Act. Many liberals concerned with civil rights are concerned too. But the bulk of the two million Chicagoans cheering the Blackhawk Stanley Cup win last week probably don't care much at all.

As Greenwald did say Snowden faces a pretty unpleasant future, almost anywhere he lands he will be monitored for years and years by that nation's security forces unless they double cross Snowden and turn his over to the CIA. Clearly if he moved out of Russia back to China he would be effectively a prisoner of the Peoples Liberation Army bureaucracy, if he goes to south American a drug cartel might take him out as a favor for the CIA. Anyway you look at it he faces a nightmare.

Rod Estvan

By: Sean Ahern

Snowden and U.S. socialists

I too am perplexed by Snowden but I am more disturbed by the inordinate attention accorded his "revelations" at a conference of "socialists."

Is the existence of the surveillance state really news to anyone who walks down the street with cameras in full view, with "identity theft" as an everyday concern and with a host of blockbuster movies portraying good guys and bad guys hacking their way through any firewall or so called security system with impunity?

Much of the white 'left' in this country appears to have embraced the "Chicken Little Syndrome" and confounded effective agitation and propaganda with 'the sky is falling' revelations. This is not meant to cast aspersions on the outstanding efforts of investigative reporters such as Greenwald, Scahill, Gonzalez, Goodman, Parry, Scheer, Taibbi, Palast, the crew at Substance News, etc or the truly heroic whistle blowers such as PFC Bradley Manning.

Invoking the "Big Brother" bogeyman or alarms about global warming or hand wringing over the collapse of the "middle class" and the concentration of wealth in the 1% does not move us one inch closer to the constitution of a mass-based alternative to white male supremacist bourgeois domination in the USA today. At best such "revelations" provide us with important details that shit is bad, but of course most of America knows that already from looking at their paycheck, if they are lucky enough to have one.

The problem is of course what to do in a crumbling empire and here is where all manner of scapegoats, explanations and theories contend. It is here, in the what is to be done arena, that socialists must plant their flag, but the flag is nowhere to be seen from what I can tell. Yet while the socialists have their eyes up to the "cloud" proclaiming to all who listen that the 'sky is falling', in the here and now, right in our faces, down on the ground arriving contiguously with the Snowden revelations is the story of the "Klu Klux Kourt" (Palast) and their overturning of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That ruling offers a far more trenchant revelation about the true direction of the US ruling elite pulling back the veil of the Obama presidency and all the blather about the "multicultural" and "diverse" global superpower. For socialists it would seem that denial of voting rights to a significant portion of the US working class would assume central and strategic importance in any effort by the laboring people to constitute themselves as a class for itself, politically independent from the oligarchical parties. Yet the focus on the truly immediate central task is lost at a socialist conference that has more in common with Loosy Goosey and Henny Penny than Nat Turner, Frederick Douglaws Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Hubert Harrison, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Paul Robeson, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hammer and the host of other named and unnamed but not forgotten heroes of the class struggles waged in the past.

By: David R. Stone

Why the leaks matter

This story of government surveillance is much more important than many people realize.

It’s not mainly about Snowden, although people who think the spying is justified would like to distract us with questions about the whistle-blower’s motivations and his possible punishment.

And it can’t be swept under the rug by saying “So what? We already knew the government was spying on us.”

The details of that spying are important:

(1) to wake up the large portion of the public that didn’t know or didn’t care about the extent of the spying, and

(2) so we can figure out how to bring the spy agencies and (all the branches of government that support them) under control.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times [July 6, 2013] shows how Snowden’s leaks prove that the secret FISA Court has replaced the U.S. Supreme Court in deciding crucial Constitutional decisions about spying. (See below.)

-David R. Stone

HEADLINE:

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: July 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”

While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Mr. Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns. In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to get access to an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran’s nuclear program.

In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications. In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of “foreign intelligence” to include “weapons of mass destruction,” was used to justify access to the message.

The court’s use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings had eased access to data on espionage, cyberattacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.

“The definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ is very broad,” another former intelligence official said in an interview. “An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that.”

The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court’s rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. Judges on the FISA court refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.

For the rest of the NY Times article, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0