Obama Administration attempts to defend its war on investigative journalism

The Obama Department of Justice continued its attack on news reporters trying to protect their confidential sources with regard to stories based on government leaks. Before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is a case concerning NYT reporter James Risen, who has refused to respond to a federal subpoena demanding that he provide the source of information on which he based a story about a botched CIA plot against the Iranian government. Oral arguments occurred this morning. Fortunately, several of the judges were not receptive to the arguments of the Obama Administration that there is no such thing as a "reporters' privilege." Why is this issue critically important? James Risen explains in this Huffpo article by Michael Caldeone and Dan Froomkin:

"They've said in that there is no reporter's privilege," Risen said. "I think they want the court to rule on a fundamental constitutional issue of whether or not there is a reporter's privilege in a criminal case, which makes this case kind of have a broader import than it might otherwise have." "That's why I think it's become a pretty important case," he continued. "It's a fairly basic constitutional issue for the press, whether or not there is a reporter's privilege. It's something a lot of people outside the press don’t really understand, don't really care about. I think the basic issue is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive investigative reporting and I don't believe you can. So that's why I'm fighting it."
The hardline stand against reporter's privilege -- the DOJ briefs always put the term in quotation marks -- is a hallmark of the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown over leaks. So is trying to throw the book at the alleged leakers.

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Inventing terrorists

America's alleged "protectors" are costing us an enormous amount of money. So much so, that a majority of Americans are willing to cut the "Defense" budget. Uh oh. Those good guys better go find and prosecute some of those alleged bad guys trying to destroy America. But what if those bad guys are too rare, or two hard to find? Rolling Stone's Rick Perstein makes it clear that if you can't find real bad guys, the next best thing would be to create them:

Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them. Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did. The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. . . . In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage
. Complementing America's elite entrapment teams are America spying teams. The following passage is from Rachel Maddow's new book, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power:
The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay. The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.
At least there will be plenty of domestic drones to keep an eye on those protesters, as reported by Tim Watts of The Intel Hub:
Did you know that a bill, HR 658, the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act, has just passed both the House and the Senate that authorizes the use of 30,000 spy drones over America? Like the anti-Posse Comitatus NDAA legislation that passed in November, this bill was not widely reported by the mainstream media. Do not feel bad for not knowing about this, because, similar to the anti-Constitutional NDAA legislation, they purposefully tried to hide this from the American public. The corporate controlled mainstream media was once again complicit and was an integral accessory in this crime against “We the People.” The corporate mainstream media failed us all miserably once again. Think about the enormity of this for a second… 30-THOUSAND drones flying overhead surveilling the US. If you divide that by 50 states, that is 600 drones per state!
I think that Rachel and Tim are getting a bit carried away, of course because this huge mushrooming industry is an antidote to the unemployment problem. We are quietly employing America's people by hiring them to spy on each other. Perhaps we'll soon reach a happy equilibrium where there's one American spy for every American non-spy. Or something like that. Or perhaps I'm overstating my case. I can't actually prove that American law enforcement/military personnel are spying on U.S. citizens or that they are doing this from the United States. James Bamford of Wired explains:
For example, NSA can intercept millions of domestic communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still be able to say it has not “intercepted” any domestic communications. This is because of its definition of the word. “Intercept,” in NSA’s lexicon, only takes place when the communications are “processed” “into an intelligible form intended for human inspection,” not as they pass through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses. Complicating matters is the senseless scenario made up for the questioning by Congress, which makes it difficult to make sense of his answers, especially since many seem very parsed, qualified, and surrounded in garbled syntax. That scenario involved NSA targeting U.S. citizens for making fun of a President Dick Cheney for shooting a fellow hunter in the face with a shotgun, and then the fun-makers being waterboarded for their impertinence. Asked whether the NSA has the capability of monitoring the communications of Americans, he never denies it – he simply says, time and again, that NSA can’t do it “in the United States.” In other words it can monitor those communications from satellites in space, undersea cables, or from one of its partner countries, such as Canada or Britain, all of which it has done in the past.

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Precursor to newest Constitutional Amendment: Only the government may own cameras

Long Island police make mother of three pay for taking photos of decorative helicopter in front of airport. This case involving Nancy Genovese is but one of many cases where law enforcement officers have been exposed for harassing and hurting people who are guilty of absolutely nothing. It's a long trend here in the United States. The government can spy all it wants, while the people are increasingly prohibited from expressing themselves or even from being curious. A lot of people are squeamish about Wikileaks, but it Wikileaks is an organization that does nothing different than the New York Times claims to be doing, yet the United States has illegally forced it into submission. And although Nancy Genovese did not claim to be doing serious investigative journalism, the American Vision News reports that she was was acting as a citizen journalist:

Nancy Genovese stopped her car on the side of the road across the street from the airport in an area that is open and accessible to the public, and crossed over the road to the airport entryway that is also open and accessible to the public to take a picture of the helicopter display. While still in her car, she took a picture of the decorative helicopter shell with the intention of posting it on her personal “Support Our Troops” web page.

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Permanant war and meaningless chatter

What's on the table for this election season? Glenn Greenwald explains:

But like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.
Greenwald pointed out that some mainstream writers are starting to take note of America's endless state of war and surveillance. For instance, the following excerpt is the writing of Fareed Zakaria:
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people. The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government's powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

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Proposed new federal law would invite thousands of paranoid strangers to secretly read your most private thoughts

Its sponsors call it the "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act" (HR 3523), but its main function is to invite Big Brother into all aspects of what you assumed to be your private online existence. Perhaps you are thinking, "I have nothing to hide." Good for you, but what about the fact that this horrifically vague proposed law would force you to share all of your most private online communications with the hyper-paranoid geek-goons and geek-thugs of the NSA? Under CISPA, the Federal Government will have the right to look at that emotional email you just sent to your mother last week. The government, including many thousands of people with security clearances, will have access to the pin numbers and passwords for your bank accounts and investments. After all, you do use the Internet, and all they want is anything connected with or associated with the Internet. They want to know what your read and what you buy. It will be like they are sitting right next to you while you use your computer. CISPA is a blatant attempt to shred the Fourth Amendment, while offering offenders explicit immunity for their misconduct. Even if they use your private writings merely to show sympathy for the political goals of someone the U.S. is attacking with drones. You can read the bill here. Here's how Free Press sums up the main provisions in its call for action:

  • CISPA would allow companies and the government to bypass privacy protections and spy on your email traffic, comb through your text messages, filter your online content and even block access to popular websites.
  • CISPA would permit companies to give the government your Facebook data, Twitter history and cellphone contacts. It would also allow the government to search your email using the vaguest of justifications — and without any real legal oversight.
  • CISPA contains sweeping language that could be used as a blunt weapon to silence whistleblower websites like WikiLeaks and the news organizations that publish their revelations.
  • CISPA would create an environment in which we refrain from speaking freely online for fear that the National Security Agency — the same agency that has conducted "warrantless wiretapping" online for years — could come knocking.
The centerpiece of this bill is that federal agents will only read your private information for purposes of "national security." We've heard that word over and over and over for the past ten years. It has justified anything and everything for the federal government, including spying, maintaining secrets from the People who supposedly run this country, torture and endless war at a cost of billions of dollars per week. This bill invites the government to spy on every American for no damned good reason. [More . . . ]

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