Snowden's Disclosures Inspire More Lawsuits Against NSA and Former Senator Praises Him

Fire Dog Lake reports on more organizations bringing lawsuits against the NSA, because of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing. And former GOP senator Gordon Humphrey praises Snowden's efforts.

Greenwald: The Crux of the NSA Story: "Collect it All."

Glenn Greenwald offers his comments on a Washington Post profile of NSA director, General Keith Alexander.  Originally I was just going to quote a couple of excerpts from Greenwald, but he's too good to pick out just a paragraph or two.  So here's about two-thirds of it:

Aside from how obviously menacing and even creepy it is to have a state collect all forms of human communication - to have the explicit policy that literally no electronic communication can ever be free of US collection and monitoring - there's no legal authority for the NSA to do this. Therefore:

[E]ven his defenders say Alexander's aggressiveness has sometimes taken him to the outer edge of his legal authority."

"The outer edge of his legal authority": that's official-Washington-speak for "breaking the law", at least when it comes to talking about powerful DC officials (in Washington, only the powerless are said to have broken the law, which is why so many media figures so freely call Edward Snowden a criminal for having told his fellow citizens about all this, but would never dare use the same language for James Clapper for having lied to Congress about all of this, which is a felony). That the NSA's "collect it all" approach to surveillance has no legal authority is clear:

"One Democrat who confronted Alexander at a congressional hearing last month accused the NSA of crossing a line by collecting the cellphone records of millions of Americans.

'What authorization gave you the grounds for acquiring my cellphone data?' demanded Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), waving his mobile phone at the four-star general."

 I know this is not as exciting to some media figures as Snowden's asylum drama or his speculated personality traits. But that the NSA is collecting all forms of electronic communications between Americans as well as people around the world - and, as I've said many times, thereby attempting by definition to destroy any remnants of privacy both in the US and globally - is as serious of a story as it gets, particularly given that it's all being done in secret. Here's another former NSA whistleblower, from the Post article, explaining why that is:

"'He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible," said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander's policies, Drake said, would result in the 'complete evisceration of our civil liberties.'"

Numerous NSA documents we've already published demonstrate that the NSA's goal is to collect, monitor and store every telephone and internet communication that takes place inside the US and on the earth. It already collects billions of calls and emails every single day. Still another former NSA whistleblower, the mathematician William Binney, has said that the NSA has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" and that "estimate only was involving phone calls and emails."

That is the definition of a ubiquitous surveillance state - and it's been built in the dark, without the knowledge of the American people or people around the world, even though it's aimed at them. How anyone could think this should have all remained concealed - that it would have been better had it just been left to fester and grow in the dark - is truly mystifying.

Perhaps the coining of a punchy phrase by the Washington Post to describe all of this - "collect it all" - will help those DC media figures who keep lamenting their own refusal to cover the substance of the NSA stories begin to figure out why they should cover the substance and how they can. The rest of the world is having no trouble focusing on the substance of these revelations - rather than the trivial dramas surrounding the person who enabled us to know of all this - and discussing why those revelations are so disturbing. Perhaps US media figures can now follow that example.

High School Physics Teacher Makes NIST Look Silly

He's only a high school physics teacher, but if you watch the youtube video, David Chandler made NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) look silly, first saying that free fall couldn't have happened in the collapse of WTC7, then revising their report and admitting that free fall did occur. Of course, they didn't revise their computer model, which doesn't show free fall, nor explain how it could have happened. So when people say that you must have engineering background before you can doubt the official account of the WTC collapses, perhaps you could suggest that they take a high school physics class.

 See also:

NIST Finally Admits Freefall, Part II

And

NIST Finall Admits Freefall, Part III

Nick Matzke on 9/11 Truthers: Do They Need to Be Experts?

Nick Matke has recently trashed reviewed Stephen Meyer's new book, Darwin's Doubt, and in this post is responding to Casey Luskin's attempt to defend the book. I'm still working my way through the book (one of the very slow readers), and really have nothing to add to the debate at this time. David Berlinski has decided to join the fray. I'll be curious to see if Nick responds. But what did grab my attention was one of Nick's final comments in his response to Luskin:

" This kind of thinking [Luskin's] is no better than 9-11 truther conspiracy thinking, sans knowledge of building engineering and similar necessary background."

The implication is that if one isn't an architect or engineer, then one has no business being a 9/11 Truther.  But as I commented in Nick's post:

Hi Nick,

If by “9/11 Truther” you mean someone who thinks there should be a new, independent investigation of 9/11, then one can be a competent Truther without sufficient knowledge of engineering. One only needs to know that an incomplete investigation was carried out the first time, such as not replicating the molten yellow metal pouring from the South Tower; not replicating the eutectically melted steel found by FEMA; not testing the dust for explosive residues; not explaining how WTC7 fell a [sic]  free fall acceleration for almost two and a half seconds; and not releasing the computer data for NIST’s computer animation of WTC7’s collapse.

In other words, all one needs to know is that the official investigations never did the science that a proper investigation would have required.  Further, one need not base one's suspicions of the offical version of 9/11 on any technical evidence. Jon Gold, for example, offers fifty reasons for a new investigation, none of which deals with technical evidence.

Sometimes I wonder if people such as Nick Matzke hide behind accusations of 9/11 Truthers not having the expertise necessary to support their suspicions, because they do not want to deal with the possibility that the truth of 9/11 is far more sinister than they thought.  For if 9/11 was an "inside job," then nearly all of our government's foreign policies since then, and many of its domestic policies (including spying on its citizens), have been based on a lie.   And that is a truth that would be very difficult to live with.

What Makes Edward Snowden Different from all other NSA Whistleblowers?

Thom Hartmann reports what others also have reported: Edward Snowden's release of classified documents indicating that the NSA has been spying on Americans has removed a number of hurdles to several pending lawsuits against the NSA. There have been other NSA whistleblowers in the past: William Binney, Thomas Drake, Russ Tice, and others. But none of them went so far as to make public actual classified documents supporting their accusations that the NSA has been spying on us. By refraining to do so, they stayed within the boundaries of the law, and though the U.S. government tried to bring legal action against them, and made their lives very difficult, in the end they were not able to successfully prosecute them. Snowden has crossed the Rubicon, so to speak. He has released classified documentation to the press. Officially, this makes him a lawbreaker and subject to prosecution. Yet without his actions, it's very unlikely that any legal action against our government spying on us could be upheld in court. That may change now. And for that, Snowden deserves our gratitude and moral support.

The Sunset Limited

I recently watched the very good film, The Sunset Limited, that I recommend to just about anyone who isn't contemplating suicide. It stars Tommie Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson has just rescued Jones from an attempted suicide and now the two of them are back in Jackson's apartment, where a discussion of the meaning of life takes place. I'm not completely happy with the way it ends, but it's still worth watching. It's written by Cormac McCarthy, whom I am told also wrote "No Country for Old Men," and "The Road." I saw a movie starring Jones and Jackson back in the late 90s. They play off each other very well and make this film a must see (unless you're thinking of stepping in front of a train).  I think you can find a decent version of it on youtube somewhere.

UPDATE:  Maybe I should add a teaser:  Jackson plays a convicted murderer who had a jailhouse conversion to Christianity, and Jones plays an atheist. 

UPDATE #2:  From a friend:  "AFyi, I was searching and discovered that the link you sent is of lesser quality that a broken up posting by "Bagelboy615." When you type in "Sunset Limited Part 1,"  part 2, etc., it comes up."  

Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Right to Leave the U.S.

From The Huffington Post:

"Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said on Monday that he supports Edward Snowden's decision to flee the United States."  [His statement]:

I hope Snowden's revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning's conditions as "cruel, inhuman and degrading." (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

But Snowden's contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives -- still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.