Last Saturday I joined a small group of urban explorers (I just joined this group on meetup.com). The location: Bethlehem Lutheran Church in North St. Louis. You can't help but think of all of the people who have stepped into this massive building on all of the emotional occasions. And today, there are a few more of us, admiring what this building once was. Here are a few photos glorious but sad building.
What are the odds of you dying in a terrorist attack. Extremely, absurdly low. You are NINE times more likely to die by choking in your own vomit. Six times more likely to die due to hot weather. 87 times more likely to die of drowning. We can easily fix most of our terrorism problem is we merely fix our innumeracy problem. Related topic: Here are eight ways to allow 3,000 people die.
You hear this so often: I have nothing to hide (so it's OK for the NSA to read my email). Really? What if they spy on you without any probable cause, find out that you possess drugs, then they turn this information over to the DEA, which pretends it didn't get this information from the NSA, then recreates the path necessary to put you in prison? Far fetched?
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.What else could happen to those of you who have never committed a crime? How about identity theft? How about some NSA contractor stealing your passwords to your financial institutions? This is an agency with no accountability, with hundreds of thousands of employees with the technical ability to read all of your most private information. How about screwing up your computer as they search through it with the viruses they manufacture? Far Fetched? Why should we be concerned? Check out this video. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/dea-surveillance-cover-up_n_3706207.html
Lee Camp has been on a roll for a long time:
George Orwell must truly be tired of spinning in his grave by now. From Raw Story, the U.S. government has apparently forced the man running a secure email server to shut down. It is thought that this server, Lavabit, was the service Edward Snowden was using will holed up in the Moscow airport. This story also reports that the owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, has been barred, apparently by the U.S. from discussing this coercive action by the U.S.:
An encrypted email service believed to have been used by US leaker Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday apparently as a result of pressure from US authorities. Lavabit owner Ladar Levison posted a message at the website telling users that the he was pulling the plug on the secure email service launched in Texas nearly a decade ago. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison said.Addendum August 9, 2013: How can this be happening, that in our beloved United States of America, "our" government can try to force a company to trample on treasured constitutional rights in a secret appeals court proceeding? This is pure insanity. Here's where we're headed: None of us will be allowed to communicate in any way with each other unless our BIG Nanny government is able to monitor the conversation. That's what they are after, and they are going to get it, because most of us rely on the government's war-cheering stenographer journalists for most of their information. Thus, organized resistance will be virtually impossible, even if 90% of the people favor massive change. This rampant spying has already killed off investigative journalism aimed at government corruption and abuses (who's willing to call or email a reporter any more?). The situation has already become stunningly Orwellian. Along with the thorough corruption of our government with money, this government spying is turning the U.S. into a Third World fascist state, and I don't use that term loosely. Jimmy Carter has it right: ‘America no longer has a functioning democracy." Here's the latest disturbing news, from Glenn Greenwald: What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this: I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on - the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.