| 4th July: Open Letter to US Law Enforcement!

Open Letter to US Law Enforcement ~ Joe Giambrone, Activist Post.

Who are you, really? And what exactly is your role in the bigger picture?

This is not an academic question, but goes to the heart of who is in charge and if they themselves are on the right side of the law. With numerous whistleblowers from the National Security Agency coming forth, as well as from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all of them exposing crimes committed by those in charge, you should pay special attention to what these individuals are saying about current so-called “leaders.”

Former President Richard Nixon once said, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

How many law enforcement officers would accept this excuse today? How many have already accepted it as a fact of the current United States system of “justice?”

The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, is explicitly clear that a “warrant” is necessary to invade the personal effects of civilians. We are all mandated by the highest law in the land to be “secure” in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Government officials swear an oath of office to defend this Constitution, as you yourself have also probably done.

To knowingly, flagrantly and systematically violate this oath – in secret no less – is a grievous crime against the United States. To do it with impunity and protection from prosecution, however, is something else entirely. A government that does not respect the laws that it publicly swears to defend is a fraud and a tyranny.

To casually throw away the 4th Amendment, a bedrock freedom, the cornerstone of a free and open society, is not only unacceptable, it is Treason; the waging of a war against the People of the United States. By what right can Constitutionally guaranteed rights be deleted? These protections have served us for more than two centuries, and yet in the age of technology they are to be dismissed without debate, by secret decree? By memos that are classified “Top Secret” because they directly violate the Supreme Law of the Land?

Armies of police are to enforce these secret decrees as law and to assist the surveillance state without question?

Are we a nation of sovereign citizens or of human drones who execute instructions?

On April 19th of this year, the federal government “crossed the Rubicon” suspending the Constitution in Boston and ordering nearly 10,000 heavily armed troops to “lockdown” a major metropolitan city. Homes were searched without warrants and invaded at gunpoint by squads and platoons of officers, many of them from the local force who had been militarized and placed under the command of federal authorities. All this was done to apprehend a single injured suspect.

A Supreme Court decision already decided that the Constitution cannot be suspended no matter how inconvenient it may be perceived by those in power. In Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Court wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

By testing this new suspension of the Constitution in the wake of the latest terrorism event in Boston, a cynical calculated play was made to convince people that the government somehow possessed the right to do so, when clearly no such right exists. This outright subversion of Constitutional protections was tested that day to see if it could set a precedent and be sold to the public on the basis of allegedly protecting them. This ploy used public perception as a means to subvert the law and to overturn the established restrictions on the government’s exercise of force here domestically against its own citizens in their homes!

This July 4th, 2013, it’s time to wake up and smell the clear felonies coming out of Washington DC. Crimes of this scale and sweeping nature threaten to turn America into George Orwell’s Big Brother police state. And law enforcement officers are not immune to the surveillance. Their privacy is no more protected than mine. Nor is the privacy of a Congressman or a Supreme Court Judge or even the head of the CIA, David Petraeus.

A high-level NSA whistleblower, a satellite analyst named Russell Tice, revealed:

[NSA] went after lawyers and law firms… They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand… They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House — their own people.

We are now a society wide open to blackmail. We are without privacy, and can be hacked at the will of secret, often private contractors, such as Edward Snowden’s recent employer. Mr. Snowden, remember, wasn’t working for the US government in an official capacity, but at the time was employed by a private corporation: Booz Allen Hamilton. Right now thousands of privately-paid computer “analysts” can wiretap anyone at their own discretion.

Edward Snowden said:

Any analyst at any time can target anyone. …I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from YOU or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.

That means you, the reader, are also vulnerable. Your life is an open book, and should you in the future need to be coerced and blackmailed into silence or into acting in a particular manner, that can easily be arranged. Information from your digital presence and history across telephone, web, credit card and any other channel is now stored indefinitely by this emerging, unconstitutional surveillance state.

That is not freedom. That is not Constitutional governance. That is not the America I was taught about in school, as were you.

That is why the flag flies upside down here today.

_________________________________________________________________________

 

Related articles

• Open Letter to US Law Enforcement (activistpost.com)
• Repeal the 4th Amendment! (and a few other quick & dirty items) (prodigalpaul.com)
• How Unreasonable Searches of Private Documents Caused the American Revolution (juancole.com)
• Open Letter to US Law Enforcement (globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com)
• U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
• U.S. Postal Service Is Logging All Mail For Law Enforcement (outsidethebeltway.com)
• American police now “Israeli-DHS trained,” precursor to dictatorship (presstv.ir)
• The Fourth Of July And The Fourth Amendment (outsidethebeltway.com)
• The Digital Self: Can the 4th Amendment fit in 140 characters? (digitaltrends.com)
• U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (blacklistednews.com)

| Exceptional Hypocrisy: The Good Germans in Government!

The Good Germans in Government ~ Robert Scheer, TruthDig.

“Treason is a word that dictators love to hurl at dissidents, and when both Cheney and Feinstein bring it back into favor, you know that courageous whistle-blowers like Snowden are not the enemy.”

What a disgrace. The U.S. government, cheered on by much of the media, launches an international manhunt to capture a young American whose crime is that he dared challenge the excess of state power. Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation.

Yes, Snowden has admitted that he violated the terms of his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton, which has the power to grant security clearances as well as profiting mightily from spying on the American taxpayers who pay to be spied on without ever being told that is where their tax dollars are going. Snowden violated the law in the same way that Daniel Ellsberg did when, as a RAND Corporation employee, he leaked the damning Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War that the taxpayers had paid for but were not allowed to read. 

In both instances, violating a government order was mandated by the principle that the United States trumpeted before the world in the Nuremberg war crime trials of German officers and officials. As Principle IV of what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

That is a heavy obligation, and the question we should be asking is not why do folks like Ellsberg, Snowden and Bradley Manning do the right thing, but rather why aren’t we bringing charges against the many others with access to such damning data of government malfeasance who remain silent?

Is there an international manhunt being organized to bring to justice Dick Cheney, the then-vice president who seized upon the pain and fear of 9/11 to make lying to the public the bedrock of American foreign policy? This traitor to the central integrity of a representative democracy dares condemn Snowden as a “traitor” and suggest that he is a spy for China because he took temporary refuge in Hong Kong.

The Chinese government, which incidentally does much to finance our massive military budget, was embarrassed by the example of Snowden and was quick to send him on his way. Not so ordinary folk in Hong Kong, who clearly demonstrated their support of the man as an exponent of individual conscience. 

So too did Albert Ho, who volunteered his considerable legal skills in support of Snowden, risking the ire of Hong Kong officials. Ho, whom The New York Times describes as “a longtime campaigner for full democracy [in Hong Kong], to the irritation of government leaders of the territory,” is an example of the true democrats around the world who support Snowden, contradicting Cheney’s smear.

But U.S. Democrats have also been quick to join the shoot-the-messenger craze, ignoring the immense significance of Snowden’s revelations. Take Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. Fool me once and shame on her, fool me dozens of times, as Feinstein has, and I feel like a blithering idiot having voted for her. After years of covering up for the intelligence bureaucracy, Feinstein is now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and clearly for some time has been in a position to know the inconvenient truths that Snowden and others before him have revealed.

Did she know that the NSA had granted Booz Allen Hamilton such extensive access to our telephone and Internet records? Did she grasp that the revolving door between Booz Allen and the NSA meant that this was a double-dealing process involving high officials swapping out between the government and the war profiteers? Did she know that the security system administered by Booz Allen was so lax that young Snowden was given vast access to what she now feels was very sensitive data? Or that private companies like Booz Allen were able to hand out “top security” clearances to their employees, and that there now are 1.4 million Americans with that status?

As with her past cover-ups of government lying going back to the phony weapons of mass destruction claims made to justify the Iraq War, Feinstein, like so many in the government, specializes in plausible deniability. She smugly assumes the stance of the all-knowing expert on claimed intelligence success while pretending to be shocked at the egregious failures. She claims not to have known of the extent of the invasion of our privacy and at the same time says she is assured that the information gained “has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks. …” If so, why did she not come clean with the American public and say this is what we are doing to you and why?

Instead, Feinstein failed horribly in the central obligation of a public servant to inform the public and now serves as prosecutor, judge and jury in convicting Snowden hours after his name was in the news: “He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s treason,” she said.

Treason is a word that dictators love to hurl at dissidents, and when both Cheney and Feinstein bring it back into favor, you know that courageous whistle-blowers like Snowden are not the enemy.

Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book,“The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.”

Keep up with Robert Scheer’s latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/robert_scheer.

________________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• | Spy-leaker Edward Snowden asks Ecuador for asylum! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Contractor fires Snowden from $122,000-a-year job (usatoday.com)
• Booz Allen, the World’s Most Profitable Spy Organization (businessweek.com)
• Robert Scheer: The Good Germans in Government (huffingtonpost.com)
• Booz Allen Hamilton: Far Worse Than Blackwater (dprogram.net)
• Snowden May Have Been a Deliberate Infiltrator for Liberty (globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com)
• Snowden took job to get spying evidence (bigpondnews.com)
• Robert Scheer: Praise the Whistle-Blower (truthdig.com)
• The Terror Con by Robert Scheer (lissakr11humane.com)
• So When Will Dick Cheney Be Charged With Espionage? (rinf.com)

| Snowden Becomes Eighth Person to Be Indicted for Espionage by the Obama Justice Dept!

Snowden Becomes Eighth Person to Be Indicted for Espionage by the Obama Justice Department ~ Kevin Gosztola, FDL.

A sealed criminal complaint indicting former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden on two counts of espionage has been filed by federal prosecutors. He was charged with willfully communicating national defense information to a person that was unauthorized to receive it. He was also charged with “theft” and “conversion of government property.” The Washington Post further reports that the complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Not only is this jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, happens to be headquartered, but it is also where key prosecutions for espionage have been filed under President Barack Obama. It is unknown what section of the Espionage Act Snowden was charged with violating, but what is indisputable is that he is the eighth person to be indicted under the Espionage Act. This is more than all previous presidential administrations combined. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was indicted for espionage in April 2010 after he communicated information on surveillance programs to a Baltimore Sun reporter. For disclosing classified information on FBI wiretaps to a blogger, FBI translator named Shamai Leibowitz was indicted under the Espionage Act in May 2010. Pfc. Bradley Manning was charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act in July 2010 after disclosing US government information to WikiLeaks. Stephen Kim, a former State Department contractor, was indicted in August 2010 for revealing classified information on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen. (Rosen was labeled an “aider, abettor and co-conspirator” in the leak.) In December 2010, a former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted under the Espionage Act after he communicated with New York Times reporter James Risen about Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s. (The Obama Justice Department has fought in the courts to have a judge require Risen to testify against Sterling.) John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was indicted under the Espionage Act in January 2012 after he shared information related to a rendition operation with reporter Matthew Cole. A much lesser-known individual, James Hitselberger, a former Navy linguist, was indicted for espionage for providing classified documents to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The Espionage Act charges were dropped in the cases of Drake, Kiriakou and Leibowitz. Manning has pled guilty to lesser offenses but not the espionage charges. Hitselberger, Kim and Sterling’s cases are all still pending. Both Drake and Kiriakou’s cases went through the Eastern District of Virginia. Sterling’s case is pending in the same jurisdiction. This law is a law from 1917 that was intended to criminalize individuals who engaged in spying, not leakers or whistleblowers. It was not initially used to prosecute government employees who passed on information to a reporter or a media organization. But, under Obama, the Justice Department has exercised wide discretion and interpreted the law as one that can be used to criminalize government employees who blow the whistle on corruption or share information on operations, policies or programs with the press. Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack, a director of the Government Accountability Project’s national security and human rights division who has defended national security whistleblowers, and her colleague at GAP, Kathleen McClellan, have written: These “leak” prosecutions send a chilling message to public servants, as they are contrary to President Barack Obama’s pledge of openness and transparency. The vast majority of American citizens do not take issue with the proposition that some things should be kept secret, such as sources and methods, nuclear designs, troop movements, and undercover identities. However, the campaign to flush out media sources smacks of retaliation and intimidation. The Obama administration is right to protect information that might legitimately undermine national security or put Americans at risk. However, it does not protect national security interests when it brings cases against whistleblowers who divulge information that communicates important information to the public; sparks meaningful dialogue; or exposes fraud, waste, abuse, illegality, or potential dangers to public health and safety. A free and open democratic government welcomes debate. Stifling information violates that democratic principle. The Justice Department does not have to identify or prove that any harm to national security has occurred. They only have to prove that a person had ”reason to believe information could be used to the injury of the United States.” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer highlighted, when Drake was still charged with violating the Espionage Act: …Because reporters often retain unauthorized defense documents, Drake’s conviction would establish a legal precedent making it possible to prosecute journalists as spies. ‘It poses a grave threat to the mechanism by which we learn most of what the government does,’ [Mort] Halperin [of the Open Society Institute] says… That shows what these “leak” prosecutions can do to freedom of the press. President Barack Obama came into office committed to “protecting” whistleblowers. Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process. However, when Congress passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, the White House coordinated with Congress so that employees at national security or intelligence agencies would not be covered. That means, when Obama had the opportunity to make it easier for employees to go through proper channels when exposing corruption or wrongdoing, he did the exact opposite. As for the theft and conversion of “government property” charges, the charge is probably under United States Code 641 or a code against the “embezzlement of government property.” This is also a code that Manning is accused of violating multiple times. The defense in Manning’s case has argued that the prosecutors must prove that the information disclosed without authorization was a “thing of value” and Manning intended to deprive the government of the use or benefit of this “property” in order for him to be convicted of this offense. Snowden is still in Hong Kong. He has reportedly considered seeking asylum and/or citizenship in Iceland. There have been reports about a businessman connected to WikiLeaks being willing to fly Snowden on a private jet to Iceland. However, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir has urged Snowden not to board any private jet to Iceland. “I have worked with asylum seekers in Iceland. I would not recommend that path for #Snowden. Citizenship offers the only real protection,” she tweeted. She added that Iceland had a “terrible track record when it comes to turning back asylum seekers.” And, “There is much general support for Snowden among the general public in Iceland, thus it is still an option to seek citizenship.” But she hoped he would not take any risks with jets. Going forward, a very real problem the United States government may have is that Snowden has been charged with espionage. This could terribly backfire as it may send a signal that this is a political case. Whether he remains in Hong Kong or somehow ends up in Iceland, a government is more likely to push back on an extradition request because the indictment is not limited to the charges of theft and conversion of government property.

________________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• Snowden faces execution as sealed complaint charges espionage (rt.com)
• Assange: Obama ‘corrupted the presidency’ (rt.com)
• Assange: Wikileaks brokering asylum for Snowden (tv.msnbc.com)
• U.S. charges Snowden with espionage (washingtonpost.com)
• Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. (dancingczars.wordpress.com)
• Ex-NSA Leaker’s Advice To Snowden: “Always Check Your Six” (zerohedge.com)
• Has Obama Ever Praised A Whistleblower? (huffingtonpost.com)
• What Happens to Snowden Now? 5 Government Whistleblowers Under Attack From Obama (alternet.org)
• Assange: Obama ‘corrupted the presidency’ (hangthebankers.com)
• Edward Snowden: The man who redefined Obama’s legacy (dailypaul.com)

| Police State: Another Truth-Teller Steps Forward!

Another Truth-Teller Steps Forward ~  Ray McGovern, Common Dreams.

Edward Snowden, the person who disclosed top-secret documents on the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs, is reportedly in Hong Kong and seeking asylum from countries that value openness and freedom, conditions seen as slipping away at home.

Before the U.S. government and the mainstream media engage in the customary character assassination of truth-teller Edward Snowden – a fate endured by Pfc. Bradley Manning and others – let’s get on the record the motives he gave for releasing the trove of information on intrusive eavesdropping by the National Security Agency.

Edward Snowden, who revealed himself as the leaker of top-secret documents related to the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance. (Photo/UK Guardian)

Why would someone like Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of national-security contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, jeopardize what he calls “a very comfortable life” in order to blow the whistle on the U.S. government’s abuse of power?

If what he did sounds weird, this is only because there are so precious few like him who will stand on principle and risk everything. Snowden explained that if the public does not know about these intrusive programs, there is no room for citizen input regarding how they square with our constitutional rights.

Snowden, who was living in Hawaii with a promising career and a salary said to be about $200,000 a year, told the London Guardian: “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom, and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re now building.”

He added that he wanted to reveal the “federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world I love. … What they’re doing poses an existential threat to democracy.”

Snowden enlisted in the Army in 2003 and began training to join the Special Forces. He told the Guardian: “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.” He quickly found, though, that, in his words, “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.” Snowden broke both legs in a training accident and was discharged.

In several key respects, the experiences of Snowden resemble those of Bradley Manning. Both took the enlisted person’s oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As a condition of employment, both signed a promise not to disclose classified information; and both witnessed at close hand flagrant abuses that their consciences told them they needed to expose.

All this required them to go back on their secrecy promise, in order to achieve a greater good. What they were able to understand, and act on, is what ethicists call a “supervening value.” [See Daniel C. Maguire’s The Manning Trial’s Real Defendant” regarding the moral balancing act between democracy’s need for information and government insistence on secrecy.]

It didn’t require a law degree for Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to understand how the Bush and Obama administrations were playing fast and loose with key provisions of the Constitution of the United States.

‘Safety’ Before Constitution

As for the current President, he seems to have been editing the oath he took to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Few caught it when he preached on national security on May 23, but Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post that Obama defined his commander-in-chief role as requiring him to tilt toward national security and away from civil liberties – clearly prioritizing the latter out of a warped zero-sum mindset.

Obama said “constitutional issues” must be “weighed” against “my responsibility to protect the American people.” Got that? He was even more explicit last Friday about how he sees these choices. “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. … There are trade-offs involved.”

Regarding his priorities, he said: “When I came into this office I made two commitments … Number one, to keep the American people safe; and Number two, to uphold the Constitution. And that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties.”

Thanks for tacking on that last sentence, Mr. President, but your defense of the incredibly wide and intrusive programs – alien to Fourth Amendment protections – strain credulity well beyond the breaking point. You lost me when you described the recently revealed eavesdropping programs that suck up data on billions of our communications daily as “very narrowly circumscribed” and “very focused.”

In July 2008, when Congress passed and President Bush signed a law making government eavesdropping easier and granting immunity to telecommunications companies, which had already violated, together with the Bush administration, our Fourth Amendment rights, this seemed to me a watershed. What possible incentive would the telecoms now have for abiding by the Constitution, I asked myself.

When I heard that then-Sen. Barack Obama had flip-flopped on this vote – as he was burnishing his national security “cred” for his White House run – I wrote him an open letter. He had said he would vote against the bill, before he decided to vote for this major revision of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

I gave my open letter the title “It’s a Deal Breaker for This Intelligence Officer.” Here’s the main part:

“July 3, 2008

“Dear Senator Obama,

“I speak from 30 years of experience in intelligence work. I don’t know who actually briefed you on the eavesdropping legislation, but the bill is unnecessary for intelligence collection and POISON for our civil liberties — not even to mention the unconscionable retroactive immunity provision.

“You have made a big mistake, Senator, in indicating you intend to vote for it. There is still time to change your mind. That’s what big people do. Your ‘explanation’ was unworthy of one who has sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States (including the Fourth Amendment).”

 ‘Turnkey Tyranny’

The consequences of this law are what Snowden ended up warning us against in the video arranged by the Guardian, after he reviewed some of what he had seen from his vantage point. His window into the National Security Agency and its management no doubt provided unflattering insight into the behavior of its leaders and their nodding, dismissive acquaintance with any limitations in existing law.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden who saluted smartly when ordered by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to discard what had been known as NSA’s “First Commandment – Thou shalt not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.” The rubric-justification was: “After 9/11, everything changed” – including any need to pay much attention to the law. Like the telecom corporations, Hayden was not only held harmless and forgiven but lauded for his patriotism

And if you think his successor, Army General Keith Alexander, feels constrained by his own oath of office, think again. It is a felony to lie to Congress. He did. In olden days it would have been an embarrassing, career-ending story. Not for Alexander. The “mainstream media” has lionized him rather than holding him accountable. And he now sports four stars and not only directs NSA but also is Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.

It’s a long but instructive story: In December 2005, top New York Times executives belatedly decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

The Times had learned of this several months before the presidential election of 2004 but acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information. However, in late fall 2005, Times correspondent James Risen prepared to publish a book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping anyway. Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.

It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’s trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print. (The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, later branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with President Bush on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least – in 11 days.

Gen. Alexander Out of the Loop

Unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old dishonest talking points in assuring visiting House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.

Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie brazenly to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.

What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the President of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee and likely would have passed the House if Nixon had not chosen to resign on Aug. 9, 1974.

Yet, far from expressing remorse or regret about his warrantless wiretaps, President Bush bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The President also said: “Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”

On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered:

“We have had discussions with Congress … as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.” Impossible? Regarding that time, James Risen quipped: “In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.”

It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program, soon to be given the respectable label of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” was of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it would have elicited public outrage.

Almost All the News Fit to Print

Like the giant telecoms, the New York Times never had to issue a mea culpa for hiding the crass violations of our Fourth Amendment rights until after the 2004 election and another year for good measure.

The issue arose again in a curious way on Sept. 13, 2010, at a large event at the New York Times hosted by then-Managing Editor Jill Abramson in honor of Daniel Ellsberg for his release of the Pentagon Papers, which the Times and others published in June 1971. (Dan invited me to come along; better late than never, we thought.)

Abramson alluded in a matter-of-fact way to a particularly egregious episode in which theTimes did not cover itself in glory. But one would not have gleaned the latter from Abramson’s casual mention of how the Times had published “the story about the NSA’s eavesdropping program.”

Abramson: The issue [of government pressure] became salient once again after 9/11, when the Times and other publications were the recipients of requests from the Bush White House to occasionally withhold publication of stories that involved secrets and national security issues. Probably the most famous one involved our publication of the story about the NSA’s eavesdropping program.

Ellsberg: By the way, as the only non-Times person up here, I shouldn’t refrain from saying, I’ve been very publicly very critical of the Times’ decision to withhold the NSA wiretap story — not only, for a whole year, but very critically, past the election of 2004. I think it’s quite possible that the revelation that the president had, for three years, been blatantly violating the law …

Abramson (interrupting): Although in truth, it wasn’t known in real time at the election, the gravity of the legal issue was not.

Ellsberg: The legal issue, perhaps. …

Abramson: So —

Ellsberg: The — a whole year. I think that did make a difference.

Abramson: The thing is when the government says — you know, by publishing a story you’re harming the national security, you’re helping the terrorists. I mean there are still people today who argue that the NSA program was the crown jewel, the most valuable anti-terrorism program that the Bush administration had going, and that it was terribly wrong of the Times to —

Ellsberg: And the Times went ahead.

Abramson: — publish.

Ellsberg: In the end, that’s what I’m saying.

Abramson: In the end, we did go ahead. But I’m saying these are not cavalier decisions.

Anyone want to guess why Ed Snowden chose the Guardian of London (and also theWashington Post) over the “paper of record” for his disclosures?

The Need for Truth-Tellers

In September 2004 Daniel Ellsberg and I drafted an appeal to those who might have been thinking of what Bradley Manning and now Ed Snowden have had the courage to do. It is included below as a reminder that blowing the whistle on war crimes and on gross violations of the U.S. Constitution is a laudable form of patriotism. The last time I checked the professional help promised in 2004 was reaffirmed.

September 9, 2004

APPEAL TO: Current Government Officials

FROM: The Truth-Telling Coalition

It is time for unauthorized truth telling.

Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the facts—for example, the facts that have been wrongly concealed about the ongoing war in Iraq: the real reasons behind it, the prospective costs in blood and treasure, and the setback it has dealt to efforts to stem terrorism. Administration deception and cover-up on these vital matters has so far been all too successful in misleading the public.

Many Americans are too young to remember Vietnam. Then, as now, senior government officials did not tell the American people the truth. Now, as then, insiders who know better have kept their silence, as the country was misled into the most serious foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.

Some of you have documentation of wrongly concealed facts and analyses that—if brought to light—would impact heavily on public debate regarding crucial matters of national security, both foreign and domestic. We urge you to provide that information now, both to Congress and, through the media, to the public. …

There is a growing network of support for whistleblowers. In particular, for anyone who wishes to know the legal implications of disclosures they may be contemplating, the ACLU stands ready to provide pro bono legal counsel, with lawyer-client privilege. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) will offer advice on whistle blowing, dissemination and relations with the media.

Needless to say, any unauthorized disclosure that exposes your superiors to embarrassment entails personal risk. Should you be identified as the source, the price could be considerable, including loss of career and possibly even prosecution. Some of us know from experience how difficult it is to countenance such costs. But continued silence brings an even more terrible cost, as our leaders persist in a disastrous course and young Americans come home in coffins or with missing limbs. …

We know how misplaced loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm’s way. We urge you to act on those higher loyalties. … Truth telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for speaking out is now.

SIGNATORIES

Appeal from the Truth-Telling Coalition

Edward Costello, Former Special Agent (Counterintelligence), Federal Bureau of Investigation

Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Daniel Ellsberg, Former official, U.S. Departments of Defense and State

John D. Heinberg, Former Economist, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor

Larry C. Johnson, Former Deputy Director for Anti-Terrorism Assistance, Transportation Security, and Special Operations, Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism

Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski, USAF (ret.), who served in the Pentagon’s Office of Near East Planning

John Brady Kiesling, Former Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, Athens, Department of State

David MacMichael, Former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency

Ray McGovern, Former Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency

Philip G. Vargas, Ph.D., J.D., Dir. Privacy & Confidentiality Study, Commission on Federal Paperwork (Author/Director: “The Vargas Report on Government Secrecy” — CENSORED)

Ann Wright, Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and U.S. Foreign Service Officer

An earlier version of this article first appeared at Consortiumnews.com

 

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

_______________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• Another Truth-Teller Steps Forward (consortiumnews.com)
• | Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Edward Snowden has exposed both the ambition and the incompetence of Obama’s security state (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• NSA whistleblower steps forward (salon.com)
• Edward Snowden: more conscientious objector than common thief (guardian.co.uk)
• Four Things To Know About Surveillance Leaker Edward Snowden (swampland.time.com)
• Edward Snowden: from Hawaii to Hong Kong, the trail of a whistleblower on the run (telegraph.co.uk)
• Snowden’s cautious approach to Washington Post reporter (straitstimes.com)
• Why Edward Snowden Is A Hero (newyorker.com)

| Digital Blackwater: Meet the contractors analyzing your private data!

Meet the contractors analyzing your private data ~  TIM SHORROCK, Salon.

Private companies are getting rich probing your personal information for the government. Call it Digital Blackwater.

(Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who’s actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

Well, on Sunday we got part of the answer: Booz Allen Hamilton. In a stunning development in the NSA saga, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed that the source for his blockbuster stories on the NSA is Edward Snowden, “a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.” Snowden, it turns out, has been working at NSA for the last four years as a contract employee, including stints for Booz and the computer-services firm Dell.

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector  – a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon – contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA’s high-speed interception software, to CSC, the “systems integrator” that runs NSA’s internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world’s largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it’s probably much more than that.

“The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,” says Michael V. Hayden, who oversaw the privatization effort as NSA director from 1999 to 2005. He was referring not to the NSA itself but to the business park about a mile down the road from the giant black edifice that houses NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. There, all of NSA’s major contractors, from Booz to SAIC to Northrop Grumman, carry out their surveillance and intelligence work for the agency.

With many of these contractors now focused on cyber-security, Hayden has even coined a new term — “Digital Blackwater” – for the industry. “I use that for the concept of the private sector in cyber,” he told a recent conference in Washington, in an odd reference to the notorious mercenary army. “I saw this in government and saw it a lot over the last four years. The private sector has really moved forward in terms of providing security,” he said. Hayden himself has cashed out too: He is now a principal with the Chertoff Group, the intelligence advisory company led by Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of Homeland Security.

One of NSA’s most important contractors may be Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing that makes a key telecommunications software that allows government agencies and corporations to monitor huge amounts of data flowing over fiber-optic cables. According to Bill Binney, one of four NSA whistle-blowers who’ve been warning about NSA’s immense powers, one Narus device can analyze 1,250,000 1,000-character emails every second. That comes to over 100 billion emails a day.

“Narus is the one thing that makes it all possible,” Binney told me over the weekend, of the Verizon surveillance program unveiled by the Guardian. “They probably pick up 60 to 80 percent of the data going over the [U.S.] network.” The Narus technology, he added, “reconstructs everything on the line and then passes it off to NSA for storage” and later analysis. That includes everything, he said, including email, cellphone calls, and voice over Internet protocol calls such as those made on Skype.

NSA’s use of the Narus technology first came to attention in 2006. That was when an AT&T technician named Mark Klein went public with his discovery that NSA had hooked Narus devices to AT&T’s incoming telecom stream in San Francisco and set up a secret room that allowed NSA to divert AT&T’s entire stream to its own databases. Binney believes the equipment was hooked up to as many as 15 sites around the country.

The Narus devices can’t pick up everything, however, because large amounts of traffic (such as domestic calls and Internet messages) don’t go through the switches. That’s why NSA apparently decided in 2006 to create the PRISM program to tap into the databases of the Internet service providers such as Yahoo and Google, Binney says. “Even though there’s so many Narus devices collecting on the Net, they don’t get it all,” he explained. “So if they go to the ISPs with a court order, they fill in the gaps from the collection on Narus.”

But once the data is downloaded, it has to be analyzed. And that’s where Booz and the other contractors that surround the NSA come in.

Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the NSA’s most important and trusted contractors. It’s involved in virtually every aspect of intelligence and surveillance, from advising top officials on how to integrate the 16 U.S. spy agencies to detailed analysis of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical collections technologies. I first introduced Booz’s intelligence business in a 2007 profile in Salon when President Bush appointed Michael McConnell, a Booz veteran and former NSA director, to be director of national intelligence (he’s now back at Booz).

Among other secret projects, Booz was deeply involved in “Total Information Awareness,” the controversial data-mining project run for the Bush administration by former National Security Adviser John Poindexter that was outlawed by Congress in 2003.

Another major presence at NSA’s Business Park is SAIC. Like Booz, it stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry. Of its 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it one of the largest private intelligence services in the world. “SAIC provides a full suite of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and cybersecurity solutions across a broad spectrum of national security programs,” it claims on its website.

Despite its grandiose claims, however, SAIC is also known for several spectacular intelligence failures, including NSA’s ill-fated Trailblazer project to privatize its analysis of signals intelligence. Other companies acting as pillars of NSA’s SIGINT analysis team include Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, CACI International, and hundreds of smaller companies scattered around the Washington Beltway (you can read detailed explanations of what they do for NSA in my book “Spies for Hire”). They, in turn, are surrounded by a small army of “big data” companies that are hired by NSA to sift through data for suspicious patterns and map the creation of “illicit networks” that can be followed or investigated.

In April, I wrote about one of those companies, Palantir Technologies Inc., in Salon. It sells a powerful line of data-mining and analysis software that maps out human social networks that would be extremely useful to NSA analysts trying to make sense of all the telephone and Internet data downloaded from Verizon and nine Internet companies that was described in the latest blockbuster stories in the Guardian and the Post.

“Their bread and butter is mapping disparate networks in real time,” a former military intelligence officer who has used Palantir software told me. “It creates a spatial understanding that can be easily used by analysts.” (See the detailed profile of Palantir I posted on my website last Friday.)

But how did NSA, long considered the crown jewel of U.S. intelligence, become so privatized in the first place?

In the late 1990s, faced with a telecommunications and technological revolution that threatened to make the NSA’s telephonic and radar-based surveillance skills obsolete, the agency decided to turn to private corporations for many of its technical needs.

The outsourcing plan was finalized in 2000 by a special NSA Advisory Board set up to determine the agency’s future and codified in a secret report written by a then-obscure intelligence officer named James Clapper. “Clapper did a one-man study for the NSA Advisory Board,” recalls Ed Loomis, a 40-year NSA veteran who, along with Binney and two others, blew the whistle on corporate corruption at the NSA.

“His recommendation was that NSA acquire its Internet capabilities from the private sector. The idea was, the private sector had the capability and we at NSA didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Hayden, who was the NSA director at the time, “put a lot of trust in the private sector, and a lot of trust in Clapper, because Clapper was his mentor,” added Loomis. And once he got approval, “he was hell-bent on privatization and nothing was going to derail that.” Clapper is now President Obama’s director of national intelligence, and has denounced the Guardian leaks as “reprehensible.”

Hayden was relentless in shifting NSA from an agency that relied on in-house experts for its technology to one of the most privatized agencies in government today. His first action, a project known as Groundbreaker, outsourced all of NSA’s internal communications system. In one fell swoop, hundreds of longtime NSA employees left their government jobs one day and walked in the next morning wearing their green badges from CSC and its many subcontractors.

“To this day, the IT at Fort Meade is owned by a private sector company,” Hayden boasted recently. “That worked. That was a really good idea.” CSC remains the head of the “Eagle Alliance” consortium, and is now one of NSA’s biggest suppliers of cybersecurity services.

But Hayden’s master project, the grandiose Trailblazer project to private NSA’s analysis of signals intelligence flowing over the Internet, didn’t fare so well.  Managed by SAIC in a consortium that included Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen Hamilton, it burned through over $5 billion without producing any actionable intelligence, and was canceled in 2005.

Despite the scandals and massive amount of money spent on private intelligence contractors, however, the mainstream media has been slow to report on the topic. It took until 2010, years after the spending spree began, for the Washington Post to highlight intelligence outsourcing in its famous series on “Top Secret America.” The paper, despite its work on the PRISM story, is stillbehind the curve.

On Monday, it reported for the first time the 70 percent figure I discovered back in 2007 and wrote about for Salon. But no credit was given to me or this publication for that blockbuster finding. Maybe next time.

_________________________________________________________________

Related articles

• “Digital Blackwater”: Meet the contractors who analyze your personal data (salon.com)
• We Call a Top NSA Whistleblower … And Get the REAL SCOOP on Spying (zerohedge.com)
• Two Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged US Telecom for NSA (championshipsubdivision.com)
• Booz Allen Hamilton: Edward Snowden’s US contracting firm (guardian.co.uk)
• If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA? (slate.com)
• Meet Edward Snowden, the FISA, NSA whistleblower (pumabydesign001.com)
• Edward Snowden Makes Himself an Even Bigger Problem to the Officialdom (nakedcapitalism.com)
• Defense contractor Booz Allen says it employs confessed NSA leaker Edward Snowden (al.com)
• Edward Snowden Worked For NSA Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
• “Digital Blackwater”: Meet the Contractors Who Analyze Your Personal Data (alternet.org)

| Dronin’ On ~ Eye in the Sky Spying on Americans!

Eye in the Sky Spying on Americans ~ Stephen Lendman

 

Money power runs America. So do lobbies representing all corporate and other interests.

 

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) represents dozens of influential companies.

 

They include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Bell Hellicopter Textron, Sikorsky Aircraft, Goodrich, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hill & Knowlton, and many more promoting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone technology.

 

Against targeted countries, it’s America’s newest sport. From distant command centers, operators kill by remote control. They use computer keyboards and multiple monitors. UAVs stand ready round-the-clock for missions.

 

Predator drones perform sanitized killing on the cheap compared to manned aircraft. Independent experts believe militants are hit about 2% of the time. All others are noncombatants, despite official disclaimers.

 

In 1995, Predator drones were used for the first time in Bosnia. In 2001, the Global Hawk drone was used in Afghanistan. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Pentagon used various type drones for combat and spying missions.

 

In Libya, Obama authorized Predator drones. They operated throughout the war. They’re also used in Yemen, Somalia, and wherever Washington designates targets to kill.

 

US citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi was assassinated this way. So can anyone anywhere on America’s hit list, including perhaps domestically before long.

 

Washington plans escalated drone killing, as well domestic spying on Americans. Currently, around one in three US warplanes are drones. One day perhaps they’ll all be unmanned.

 

Domestic Drone Spying in America

 

On January 10, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Jennifer Lynch headlined, “Are Drones Watching You?” saying:

 

EFF sued the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for information on domestic drone use. Who’s flying UAVs it asked?

 

Drones carry surveillance equipment, including video cameras, infrared ones, heat sensors, and radar for sophisticated virtually constant spying. Newer versions carry super high resolution “gigapixel” cameras. They enable tracking above 20,000 feet. They can monitor up to 65 enemies simultaneously, and can see targets up to 25 miles away.

 

Predator drones can eavesdrop on electronic transmissions. A new model’s able to penetrate Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone calls covertly.

 

Even domestically, drones may be weaponized with tasers, bean bag guns, and other devices able to harm or perhaps kill.

 

Currently, the US Customs and Border Protection uses UAVs for surveilling borders. State and local law enforcement agencies also use them to investigate “cattle rustling, drug dealing, and the search for missing persons.”

 

Flying above 400 feet requires FAA certification. Information’s unavailable on who obtained authorizations for what purposes.

 

FAA comes under the Department of Transportation (DOT). It failed to respond to EFF’s April 2011 FOIA request. EFF attorney Lynch said:

 

“Drones give the government and other (UAV) operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities.”

 

“As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”

 

Drones “could dramatically increase the physical tracking of citizens – tracking that can reveal deeply personal details about our private lives. We’re asking the DOT to follow the law and respond to our FOIA request so we can learn more about” what the public has a right to know.

 

The Supreme Court hasn’t been people friendly on many issues, including privacy. In United States v. Place (1983), the court held that sniffs by police dogs trained to detect illegal drugs aren’t searches under the Fourth Amendment.

 

They’re sui generis, intended only to reveal the presence or absence of narcotics. In other words, Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply to non-human searchers. As a result, privacy rights are on the chopping block for elimination. Already, in fact, they’re gravely compromised under institutionalized Bush administration surveillance policy.

 

In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorized spying through the National Applications Office (NOA). It was described as “the executive agent to facilitate the use of intelligence community technological assets for civil, homeland security and law enforcement purposes within the United States.”

 

With or without congressional authorization or oversight, the executive branch may authorize state-of-the-art technology, including military satellite imagery, to spy on Americans covertly.

 

Though initial plans were delayed, eye in the sky spying ahead potentially will monitor everyone everywhere once full implementation’s achieved. Included will be thousands of Big Brother drones watching.

 

On February 3, the FAA Reauthorization Act (HR 658) cleared both houses of Congress after differences between Senate and House versions were resolved. Expect Obama to sign it shortly.

 

It authorizes domestic drone spying under provisions to test and license commercial drones by 2015. Estimates of up to 30,000 UAVs could overfly America by 2020. Privacy advocates are concerned. Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said:

 

“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities.”

 

According to Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Amie Stepanovich, “Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates.”

 

Changing the rules changes the game. Expect it. It’s coming once Obama signs HR 658. UAV proliferation already is expanding rapidly. A July 2010 FAA Fact Sheet said in America alone, “approximately 50 companies, universities, and government organizations are developing and producing some 155 unmanned aircraft designs.”

 

America’s expected to account for about 70% of global growth. In 2011, Congress, DOD, state and local governments, as well as AUVSI pressured the FAA to review and expand its current “Certificate of Authorization or Waiver (COA)” program related to unmanned aircraft (UA).

 

The agency’s also examining its own rules for small UAs. It’s expected to authorize expanded COA use shortly.

 

ACLU Concerns

 

On February 6, the ACLU headlined, “Congress Trying to Fast-Track Domestic Drone Use, Sideline Privacy,” saying:

 

In fact, Congress already authorized expanded domestic drones. Obama’s poised to sign HR 658 into law. Provisions in it include requiring FAA:

 

(1) to simplify and accelerate permission for drone operations. The agency’s already working on loosening regulations by spring 2012.

 

(2) to establish a pilot project within six months for six test zones to integrate drones “into the national airspace system.”

 

(3) create a comprehensive plan within nine months “to safely accelerate the integration of civil (privately operated) unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.”

 

(4) after submitting a comprehensive plan, publish final rules within 18 months to allow civil operation of small (under 55 pounds) drones in America’s airspace.

 

On December 15, the ACLU published a report titled, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft,” saying:

 

They’re coming to America. Privacy may be seriously compromised. Protections are urgently needed. The report recommends that “drones should not be deployed unless there are grounds to believe that they will collect evidence on a specific crime.”

 

“If a drone will intrude on reasonable privacy expectations, a warrant should be required.” The report also urges “restrictions on retaining images of identifiable people, as well as an open process for developing policies on how drones will be used.”

 

Overflying America with drones unrestrained changes the game. A “surveillance society” will be institutionalized to monitor, track, and record “our every move.”

 

Given a bipartisan penchant for spying, expect the worst. Privacy, like other civil and human rights, is fast disappearing under policies in place or coming to destroy it.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.