Baker's Insights on Spying

Bloomberg reported:

James A. Baker III said European leaders shouldn’t be surprised by allegations of American espionage. “We couldn’t find a hotel in Paris that wasn’t bugged,” he said about his time as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. 

Over short ribs and Texas pecan pie, Baker had the company of fellow Texan Randall Stephenson, the chairman and president of AT&T Inc., Henry Kissinger, and David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group.

Baker dined with three people responsible for ensuring America has an endemic spying culture.  AT&T willingly acquiesced and has profited handsomely, as did The Carlyle Group's Booz Allen Hamilton.  Kissinger represents insider power which wants to win at all costs, laws and constitutional rights be damned.  That group continues to run unchecked. 

NSA Looks to Secure Reputation

General Keith Alexander suggested the media not be allowed to run more stories on the National Security Agency and its countless methods of spying on citizens here, there and everywhere.  It's hard to believe, but the Obama administration out-spied Bush/Cheney.  The Freedom Switch is both Blue and Red.  It's ubiquitous.  

Homeland Security Director Loves Drones

America's new Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson cut his teeth as the Pentagon's Chief Lawyer.  There he ensured the "legal basis" for summary execution by drone fired missile.  Think what he can do for Homeland Security with its predicted invasion of the drones. 

Suspicionless Surveillance Widespread

WaPo reported:

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald wrote regarding the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations:

...first-ever recognition of just how pervasive and invasive is the system of suspicionless surveillance being built by the US and the UK. It does not surprise me that authoritarian factions, including (especially) establishment journalists, prefer that none of this reporting and debate happened and that we all instead remained blissfully ignorant about it. But it does still surprise me when people calling themselves "journalists" openly admit to thinking this way. But when they do so, they do us a service, as it lays so vividly bare just how wide the gap is between the claimed function of establishment journalists and the actual role they fulfill.

Journalists' Fourth Estate no longer exists.  It's been acquired by the Second Estate which has the media do its bidding and uses the government to enforce breaches.

Spying Obama

NYT reported (and echoed by HuffPo):

For almost three years the National Security Agency has been tapping the data it collects to map out some Americans' social connections, allowing the government to identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information

The NSA can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data.

This happened under the Obama administration. They can't blame Bush for deepening America's endemic spying regime.  Obama's minions are responsible for heavy handed acts in the President's war on whistleblowers.

As for business opportunity, the typewriter is back for organizations not wanting their communications sucked up by the NSA.

Update 9-29-13:  Next up is U.S. sponsored assassination.  It will be interesting to see criteria, methods and targets. In another surreal revelation, the FBI has employed domestic drones since 2006.  Apparently, the unitary executive and a purchased Congress partnered to look the other way. However, citizens paying attention and asking questions is frowned upon.  One form of retribution is getting slapped with a domestic terrorist label. 

Brazil Schools U.S. on Freedom

The Daily Beast reported:

With Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff leading the day’s speeches at the U.N. General Assembly, she used the opportunity at the podium to shame the United States for spying on her country, saying that cyberspace was turning into a battlefield.

“Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately,” she said in a fiery speech aimed at a room full of world leaders. “Corporate information—often of high economic and even strategic value—was at the center of espionage activity.”

Last week, the Brazilian leader canceled a state visit to Washington, furious over NSA’s reported spying on her country’s communications, including her own personal emails and text messages.

“Without the right to privacy,” she said, “there is no real freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.”

Intelligence Sharing with America's 51st State

The Guardian reported:

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet.

The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

Here's how accountable the Unitary Executive is to the American public:

The Guardian asked the Obama administration how many times US data had been found in the raw intelligence, either by the Israelis or when the NSA reviewed a sample of the files, but officials declined to provide this information. Nor would they disclose how many other countries the NSA shared raw data with, or whether the Fisa court, which is meant to oversee NSA surveillance programs and the procedures to handle US information, had signed off the agreement with Israel.

"Transparent Obama" lies like Bush.  Both cater to Israel, our 51st state.