Leopold: A bipartisan group of Washington lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could use to "damage" former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's "credibility in the press and the court of public opinion."
From the article: Edward Snowden and Rand Paul have little in common except for one important point: They are gutsy patriots who put their reputations and careers on the line in service of their country.
Hedges: If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.
Kolhatkar: Part of the reason for this confusion is slick propaganda employed by proponents of mass surveillance.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews Julian Assange on the NSA, the TPP, and other current issues. The interview took place on Monday, May 25, 2015. Democracy Now! May 27, 2015 https://youtu.be/ic6YEWrjx5Q https://youtu.be/_5b-99oxCEs Subscribe or “Follow” us on RiseUpTimes.org. Rise Up Times is also on Facebook! Check the Rise Up Times page for posts from this blog More
Hedges: Just as infected as the prisons and the courts are poor neighborhoods, which abound with snitches, many of them low-level drug dealers allowed to sell on the streets in exchange for information. And from there our culture of snitches spirals upward into the headquarters of the National Security Agency, Homeland Security and the FBI.
The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times before—in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11″ and “terrorism” over More
"The search tool, known as ICReach, contains information on both foreigners and millions of U.S. citizens who have not been accused of wrongdoing. It is designed to share more than 850 billion records -- that is more than twice the number of stars in the Milky Way."
The Brennan Center’s Goitein said it appeared that with ICREACH, the government “drove a truck” through loopholes that allowed it to circumvent restrictions on retaining data about Americans. This raises a variety of legal and constitutional issues, according to Goitein, particularly if the data can be easily searched on a large scale by agencies like the FBI and DEA for their domestic investigations.
So we know what you may not yet: they are not your friends and their vision is not your vision, but your data is their data, and your communications are in their hands, and they seem to be rising to become an arm of or a part-owner of the government or a law unto themselves, More
So we know what you may not yet: they are not your friends and their vision is not your vision, but your data is their data, and your communications are in their hands, and they seem to be rising to become an arm of or a part-owner of the government or a law unto themselves, More
Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance April 20, 2012 Democracy Now! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaTv5MODnBk&w=560&h=315] In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after More
