Note that since it wasn't immediately apparent to me what or when the data was collected, this is about bulk collection of financial data in order to combat ISIL. Given the timeline of the report, https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/..., it makes it sound like they looked into activities in the 2014 timeframe.
Perhaps if that's the case the ACLU (or you) should provide some evidence of that instead of dressing up the most mundane incidental collection I've heard in my life.
It doesn't matter what information they were looking for:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[2]"
No, this isn't the FISA stuff (which, while still unconstitutional, claims authority from the FISA Amendments Act, and, yes, the secret rubber stamp FISA court), this is worse: this is the CIA doing something completely unrelated via an executive order interpretation.
This doesn't even go to the FISA court, and they didn't tell the congressional oversight committees about it (all of whom have clearance to know/hear).
It always bothers me that people claim it's terrible because it's a "rubber stamp court". But I've dealt with government procurement, and if you're undergoing a massive project applications process, then you do the due diligence to make sure your application is likely to pass. Time spent making applications that aren't going to pass is time wasted.
"Likely" in your sentence seems like something orders of magnitude below the 0.03% fisa court stamp rate though. A fail rate that low means the exact opposite of what you're saying, which is that it would be a waste of time to be so careful because making a mistake and having to redo it 1% of the time would be overall faster (and that's still assuming the government only targeted entirely "correct" cases)
In my experience 0.03% is below rate of form-filling / typographical errors that don't get caught even with several proofreaders.
> Note that since it wasn't immediately apparent to me what or when the data was collected, this is about bulk collection of financial data in order to combat ISIL.
The second statement does not logically follow from the first.
> "it was not immediately apparent, so I did some research and it was x. Now you don't need to do the research."
If OP had written that, I'd have understood.
> And the CIA is mandated to produce such reports, while they could add malware it'd likely be more of a liability than a benefit.
I had a passing paralysis of paranoia. I'm not normally prone to paranoia about the CIA, but the topic is bulk surveillance, and the URL isn't exactly https://cia.gov/report/about-that-bulk-surveillance Its path is `.../63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...pdf` Along with a half understood comment that sounded like "Relaaax everyone! No big deal. It was all about ISIL! Look at this liiiink."
The elephant in the room is the ability for the President to issue executive orders that can more often than not impinge on liberties that should be protected by the Constitution.
The CIA will always want more power, that is the nature of the secret services but if the people are bothered, why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Legal and criminal responsibility for actions while governing leads to a situation commonly seen in a number of republics, most prominently ancient Rome, which the creators of the American constitution desperately wanted to avoid. While in office, you're safe to some degree with the powers of the office. Once out of office, you're an immediate legal target and all the lawsuits get filed. Solution? Don't leave office. Avoiding that is the basic logic behind immunity in political office; stable transfer of power breaks down when you know your successor is going to imprison you.
My guess would because the president is also technically the chief law enforcement officer? Not saying I like it, but that’s how it is I think.
Impeachment is what exists to hold presidents accountable, and then voting is what holds the senate accountable, when they choose not to hold the president accountable.
I think the president can be prosecuted for criminal offenses though when they’re out of office, since what I said above would no longer apply.
This is all correct. The issue is that we've gotten in the mode of not prosecuting our political enemies once they're out of office. That's actually a very important political precedent that has largely served us well. The peaceful transfer of power from the Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans was a huge deal in 1800 and it guaranteed that subsequent transitions (mostly) followed the same model. The problem is, there were no tripwires: what was too far for a president to go? Ford pardoned Nixon, which may have been the right move at the time (I'm mixed), but it became mixed up with the peaceful transfer of power tradition and basically was interpreted as a free pass.
I think we may be about to see the the end of the tradition of get out of jail free cards for former presidents, but I don't know what the long term consequences will be.
Because they /all/ do it. Every single president. To prosecute looks political but more importantly if the current president prosecutes, they'll be the defendant next time the other side is in and they'll be guilty as sin.
Why do they all do it? Might be a better question to ponder.
If every president (or other leader, this isn’t just about the USA) genuinely needs the power to do certain things which are against the constitution of their nation, the correct solution is to change the constitution to reflect reality.
If a government allows its employees to get away with doing things which are against that government’s own rules for their own operation, then a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.
If you need government spies secretly looking on certain citizens without the targets being aware of it via a warrant, make sure they can’t ever be used like Nixon. If you need government assassins, you definitely don’t want them used the way Nixon used government spies.
the cynical take is: that’s the whole point of the presidency in the first place. Have one guy who is technically in charge of the machine, the machine commits countless crimes, then after 4/8 years you pin all those crimes on the single guy you selected, go “whoops! bummer about the drone strikes!” and then pardon him.
What is "unconstitutional"? It's what the Supreme Court says it is.
The Court has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to rule that this domestic spying is unconstitutional, and has declined to do so. Ergo, for all practical matters, it's legal.
Everyone in office takes an oath to uphold the constitution. The Supreme Court gets the final say, but it is still the responsibility of everyone to do what they know to be correct.
To gain the presidency it is all-but-mandatory to have the enthusiastic backing of a big chunk of voters and the tacit or explicit approval of around half of them. Combine mass popular support with executive power and there isn't a lot practically that can be done.
Furthermore it appears that most of the US politicians have some sort of borderline-corrupt activity going on if not being actively involved in something illegal (Epstein springs to mind, various scandals that turn up around presidential elections). People in glass houses are cautious in their stone throwing.
And a final and decisive stroke - there is plausible uncertainty about whether the action is illegal. These are people who write the law, they are not expected to be stay-inside-the-legal-lines types because they all have different opinions on where the lines should be and are usually in the process of drawing them. They appoint the people who determine what the words mean and that leads to occasional creative reinterpretations. There isn't time to prosecute over every detail that someone objects to given the range of objections there are.
Because it sets a bad precedent. The former used his presidency to push as many buttons as he could to see just what the extent of the President's powers are. Sure there are some legal rumblings now, but I'd wager he will never see a prison. Ever.
Read the EO, it isn't secret, and doesn't seem to directly impinge on liberties, it is just the vague charter of what various agencies should be doing. I don't see any problem with the intent.
The problem is when you have a bureaucracy directed to "go collect intelligence" there is going to be a large grey area where there needs to be oversight, and there will always be people in a large org that need to be reigned in.
Anyway, the EO isn't the problem, it is the more boring challenge of oversight and managing large orgs.
>why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Because the Presidents job is to distract from - and take the heat for - the crimes of the nation.
The nation has crimes it is keeping secret. These are national secrets, the revealing of which would harm the security of the nation.
Whether you think these national secrets being revealed would be a catastrophe, or indeed a badly needed justice for the inhumanities being committed in your name - it is the Presidents job to make sure the nation stays safe during the discussion.
Which is why CIA powers are not discussed until the weight of public opinion itself, threatens the 'security' of the secret-keepers/nation.
why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
This is why impeachment exists. We impeached the last idiot-in-chief twice. Unfortunately, we get the Congress we deserve (ie, if we elect authoritarian-minded lackwits, we shouldn't be surprised when they refuse to convict).
No, this is not why impeachment exists. A president is impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors". If the Prez is acting legally, I can't see how he could be impeached for it.
Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one. Trump was impeached twice, yet no legal charge was ever filed. All that is required is a willing house of representatives.
The impeachment is a political process but the impeachment proceeding is the legal process and Trump was essentially found not guilty in that process, although it was split among political lines so you could say they brought politics into a legal process.
Impeachment IS the process of brining charges against a sitting President. The House acts a very rough equivalent to a grand jury. The Senate trial is the court-room with Senators as jurors. The Senate chose not to convict, but charges were absolutely brought.
DOJ regulations pretty much prohibit bringing criminal charges against a sitting President.
Whether or not people think the impeachment process is a political sham is a different question/problem. Recently, it largely has been - both with Clinton and with Trump, for very different reasons. Even more so now with GOP members threatening to immediately impeach Biden (for what, I can't quite figure out) should they win back Congress.
>why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
Executive orders don't give Presidents unilateral power. They are subject to judicial review and cannot legally violate the Constitution, or exceed Presidential authority as defined in Article 2 of the Constitution, unless specific authority is granted by Congress. Also Congress can overturn a legislative order, either through legislation or simply denying funding. Although, when the legislative and judicial branches don't really want to stand up to the President for whatever reason, that's a moot point.
Also, there is always plenty of talk - from the party not currently in control of the White House. Executive orders are always tyranny when the other side writes them, and a necessary bulwark against tyranny when your side writes them.
The problem is that judicial review takes time and only important cases get heard. For example Biden quite literally said that he issued a executive order extending the moratorium on evictions knowing that the courts would over turn it, but he said at least it would buy more time for people so he would do it anyways. Knowingly doing something that will get overturned still isn’t enough to impeach someone is very odd. If we look at the count of executive orders issued by each president, the current president has issued more in 1 year than the last 6 presidents issued in their entire 4 year terms. The problem is having the Supreme Court review those would take a review of a new order every single week of the year.
If there is one thing I've learned on the Internet it's that reading the article is not a prerequisite for having a strong reaction and commenting on it.
I'm not sure actually reading the PCLOB report is very informative. I certainly don't have the context to understand it fully, and of course a lot of it is blacked out. Reading these sorts of disosures and putting them into context requires a LOT of domain knowledge that I don't have.
Wyden being pissed about it is a decent sign that it's something to be worried about though, he's spent a lot of time on this stuff.
The letter from Wyden and Heinrich explains it a bit. The issue is that other foreign bulk collection has some oversight from Congress and the judiciary. Bulk collection authorized under FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is reviewed by the FISC (a special secret court) and every so often the court will find that the NSA or FBI has messed up and needs to fix its procedures around US persons. Those programs are also briefed to the House and Senate intelligence committees who can, at least in theory, exercise oversight, even if in secret.
This CIA program has no particular statutory authorization and is being justified under an executive order from the 80s. It wasn't disclosed to anyone in Congress. It isn't being even notionally overseen by the FISC. It's just a bunch of CIA people justifying their own procedures to themselves.
They describe it as structured and unstructured data, with the latter examples being "emails, spreadsheets, word processing files, or other electronic documents"
The former is likely database files, JSON, XML, etc. and anything that has a "common format", but I don't think specifics are given.
Saw the title, thought "This is probably Wyden," clicked the link... Yup. Say what you will about the guy he's remarkably consistent on this sort of thing. I think that's admirable.
I would rank that coolness as way cooler than Kazakhstan but equally as cool as the Brazilian dictatorship? Still haven't got a chance to check out the CIA torture footage, but seeing as one of the people who ordered the torture and authorized the destruction of the tapes was put in charge and just left office a year ago, it turns out that discussion doesn't mean much.
edit: I guess it teaches us that we shouldn't expect more consideration from the current regime than the past one, seeing as they've not only gone entirely unpunished, but were rewarded. If we had never heard about the transgressions of the past, we wouldn't be fooled into expecting better out of the current crop.
edit: Am I the only one who read Brasil: Nunca Maís? Did the Church Committee change anything? It's actually reprehensible that we can talk about this stuff openly while parading the people who did it as experts on what we should do next.
edit:
"The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved."
> eventually legally declassified and discussed openly
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
It took multiple whistleblowing attempts in the span of over a decade to get it widely accepted that the government is conducting illegal mass surveillance on an internet scale. That for sure keeps people from having faith in the current classification system, and for good reasons.
It's important in this instance to distinguish how wolverine876 thinks the system should function and how the system is intended to function. It's possible for it to simultaneously be the case that you hate the system and that the system is working as intended.
In the US the people elect a government, the government passes laws creating rules (or passes laws delegating rule-making authority which is functionally the same thing) for, among other things, how information gets declassified. That information then gets declassified or not in accordance with those rules.
> we don't know what we're missing.
That is literally always true, it's impossible to prove that the government isn't hiding something.
Considering that voting rates are around 60%, eligibility rules are often a joke, and most of those votes are typically wiped out by FPP anyway, it's more like some people elect a government...
This said, the US declassification system is as good as it gets. Most countries on the planet don't have anything comparable, and anything deemed a state secret will forever remain as such in those countries (at least officially, bar revolutions). Not even Western Europe is particularly good in that regard. Somewhat ironically, and particularly on Cold War matters, us Europeans are often keeping secrets that would otherwise embarrass the US government, which wouldn't be possible if US agencies kept them on their books.
As intended by the people in power? By the time this stuff comes out, everyone involved is retired or dead or past statute of limitations.
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
He spoke out against it publicly and even threatened to veto should it make it through Congress.
It was him speaking out against it (and the abuses of it by intelligence agencies) that discouraged both Democrats and Republicans from pushing it through.
Trump didn't like the IAs and they didn't like him.
The Trump administration delivered a letter to Congress in August 2019 urging them to make permanent three surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act. The provisions included section 215, which enables domestic call-record collection as well as the collection of other types of business records.
From Wiki - “On March 10, 2020, Jerry Nadler (D) proposed a bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and it was then approved by the majority of US House of Representatives after 152 Democrats joined the GOP in supporting the extension. The surveillance powers of the Patriot Act needed renewal by March 15, 2020, and after it expired, the U.S. Senate approved an amended version of the bill. After President Donald Trump threatened to veto the bill, the House of Representatives issued an indefinite postponement of the vote to pass the Senate version of the bill; as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired.”
I still wonder if I should be happy or mad at Rep Nadler. On one hand he tried to reauthorize the Patriot Act, on the other because he tried to do it as a Democrat he guaranteed that Trump would never support it.
You just made me realize classified government secrets are more reasonable and accessible than copyrighted works. The insanity of copyright never ceases to impress.
I like the 14 + 14 a lot better even though I think it is still too long.
> The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
Yes, that is much better. I still think that's way too much time but under that system everything I grew up with would already be public domain which is a fair outcome. These corporations have already made their fortunes several times over, there's absolutely no need for them to have a virtually perpetual monopoly on anything.
I believe coliveira is saying the government is keeping things classified longer than they legally are allowed to, and no one gets in trouble for that, but they should.
> “Once an MDR request has been submitted to an agency for the review of a particular document, the agency must respond either with an approval, a denial, or the inability to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of the requested document.”
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
In principle I am against nuclear weapons. In practice I believe a deterrent state (at least two adversarial countries maintaining an active nuclear stockpile) is probably better than just one country maintaining an active stockpile.
I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?
If the Incheon landings [0] had been a failure during the Korean War in 1950, it's hard to see how nuclear weapons wouldn't have been employed, especially as China was neither involved nor had their own.
And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.
Eventually some idiot in some small country with nukes gets pissed and fires, and we have this generations Franz Ferdinand - except none of us live long enough to pick up a rifle.
The US has had quite a few proxy wars with nuclear armed countries. I think it prevents an all our war like WWI and WWII, but not war in general. Less war? Perhaps. We seem to be doing our damndest to have at least one going on at all times though.
If Assad had had a nuclear weapon most probably it would have fallen in the hands os Islamists (ISIS, more likely) during the recent civil war in Syria, not a very bright perspective.
"The Atomic Energy Commission is in a unique position in that it is perhaps the only permanent agency of the Government which has operational intelligence responsibilities comparable to that of the State, War, or Navy Departments. It is difficult at times to distinguish operational intelligence from actual operations and it is found that the Commission, without recognizing it as such, -----------------------------------------------------------------------"
so everything that should not show up later will be put as "nuclear secret":
e.g. bulk collection of telephone data for nuclear safety, financial data bulk collection for nucear safety, etc. ;-)
Knowing what the CIA has done in the last 60 years, it’s hard to credit a system of government that thinks partial declassification every 40 years or so counts as supervision or any kind of meaningful corrective.
Letters like this don’t signify anything cool unless they lead to meaningful action, and they usually do not. I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate the system for such things. This is like having a fancy PnL dashboard that’s updated too late and nobody with power looks at it anyway.
It's troubling that those that would openly break the law face no consequences, I guess having a place that doesn't equally apply the justice system to everyone be visible about it is better than being invisible about it.
They're supposed to enforce the laws equally against everyone, though, so the fact that certain powerful organizations in government are exempt and open about it is a little bit more terrifying than if they were exempt but quiet about it.
It's a bit of a flex.
There's literally a part of the US government that can torture people, get caught, get investigated by US Congress, hack into official congressional computers to delete evidence, get caught doing that, and then... face no consequences whatsoever.
If that isn't the most powerful organization in the world, I sincerely don't know who else might qualify for that title.
It's not really much different from White Collar vs Blue Collar crime is it though?
Not to quote a certain poet,[0] but you mug someone on the street and you could face life in prison, but if you mug a whole community, the worst that might happen is you lose your job
Not withstanding his breaks with the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln had a relevant quote: "When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
It would be better to have a system of checks and balances instead of the government sweeping stuff under the rug for a decade or so to "let things simmer"
Yes, that would be better. But it is also nice that, despite not having that, we do have a system where we can see what was done.
Obviously it's tricky. By delaying things people can mentally bias towards "that was then". It wasn't that long ago that the US government was kidnapping and forcibly drugging US citizens, but "that was then".
But it's also really important that at some point that information does make it out.
From a government standpoint it's better to control the release of this kind of information rather than a Snowden type disclosure. Reminds me of how the Obama administration CIA disclosed they had secret assassination kill-lists which included American citizens. This was done through a Friday release of a NYT page 6 article that casually mentioned this in a single sentence buried in text.
I know because I read that single sentence on page 6 of a NYT article. This must have been 2010, back when people bought printed newspapers. I followed civil liberties pretty close back then and it was the first I heard it discussed.
That's part of the plan. Those WaPo articles carry a different tone if it's breaking news vs following up on a already broken story.
and nobody goes to jail, except for people like Assange who expose it. This is more of a power flex than any sort of consequences for their illegal activity
The best of both worlds; we have a police state that only after the fact accepts accountability and never in a way that disrupts whatever it is presently doing, and yet we still can condemn the other police states by pointing to this same process.
Does it matter if there are no legal consequences? That is even worse in my opinion. And it doesn't make government look bad if people just find it "cool".
It'll become cool when the perpetrators get punished. Otherwise it is like robber admitting robbery and then walking away from it in the open laughing all the way to the bank. And doing it again and again.
From CNN (for what it’s worth) regarding Kennedy data:
“The vast majority of the almost 1,500 documents released by the National Archives as new appear to be duplicates of previously released documents with only a few redacted words now revealed…Some have no changes whatsoever.
The release still leaves more than 10,000 documents either partially redacted or withheld entirely”
The 9/11 data is in a similar situation. Much unreleased/classified data.
It doesn't matter how the public votes or what people think- they're going to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and because it's all secret, there will never be any accountability for it. Vote all you want, the CIA is impervious to democracy.
This executive order was signed in 1981… Shows how afraid people are to mess with the CIA. They shouldn’t even be allowed to operate in the United States let alone collect information on American citizens.
One thing I’ve always wondered is why Snowden exposed the NSA mass surveillance, but didn’t say a word about the CIA despite having worked for both agencies. It is, of course, possible he didn’t know about the CIA collecting data, but I find that pretty hard to believe.
> Shows how afraid people are to mess with the CIA. They shouldn’t even be allowed to operate in the United States let alone collect information on American citizens.
I think it's incredible that politicians haven't cracked down on three letter agencies ages ago. The threat to themselves seems like it should have been obvious. As long as they're sucking up data on US citizens (including presidents and congressmen) it would make it very very easy for those with that data to control anyone. When the NSA can lie to congress and face no consequences is it because the government if fine with that or because they are too afraid to do anything? It makes the highest offices of our government seem very weak and vulnerable. If they're terrified to do anything about them, what possible chance could the rest of us have?
McCarthy is a pretty unique figure in US history in that he was infamous for propagating the second "red scare" in the US. That's not to discredit these reports by any means, but it's not like he was do-gooder either. He was a vicious politician that didn't hesitate to accuse his enemies of being communist, which sometimes resulted in arrest and prosecution. [0]"McCarthyist" anti-communist (i.e. opposition political organization) laws were passed that were later struck down by the Supreme Court.
His ability to accumulate power this way made him a major political target, which isn't quite the same as someone just trying to reel in the 3 letter agencies.
> I think it's incredible that politicians haven't cracked down on three letter agencies ages ago.
It only goes to show that the "Deep State" is real. But, of course, because it came from the "wrong guys" the idea got ridiculed to the Moon and back, all while the people writing about it had colleagues or close family working for said "Deep State" institutions.
> It only goes to show that the "Deep State" is real.
Sure -- this kind of "Deep State", the apolitical (or, if anything, authoritarian-right-leaning) one.
> But, of course, because it came from the "wrong guys" the idea got ridiculed to the Moon and back,
No, it got deservedly ridiculed because it claimed the existence of a left-leaning liberal "Deep State". Since fucking when is the military-industrial / spook-and-spy / government assassin community made up of leftie librul pinko commies?!? These are people who either don't give a shit about party politics, or if they care, tend to be right-wing hardliner God-and-country semi- (or full-on) Nazis.
> all while the people writing about it had colleagues or close family working for said "Deep State" institutions.
Sure... [Roll-eye emoji]
The leftie librul pinko commie writers (obviously rightly) denied the existence of the capital-D-Democratic leftie librul pinko commie "Deep State" that the right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi writers were gibbering about, and which you bought and are spouting forth here. (Wisen up and stop that shit, please. Thank you.)
The leftie librul pinko commie writers would probably be the first to admit the existence of the actually existing apolitical or right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi "Deep State", if that were ever up for debate, but ironically the right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi writers (and you?) would of course out-screech each other denying that.
The data is compartmentalized, he probably did not have an easy way to exfiltrate it. He had a good portion of NSA data available without too much suspicion, due to his position. Most CIA or NSA employees did not ever get that much access. There's probably a motivation factor as well.
We know Snowden took a LOT of documents related to spying on US citizens. I only remember seeing a few things that were released publicly. Is there still a lot more stuff he's going to release, or has released, just without much fanfare?
I'm genuinely curious because I remember people on both sides really freaked out about what he was going to release and I just haven't seen the supposed troves of information he was going to release.
Is it mainly just because its irrelevant so many years on now?
> Is there still a lot more stuff he's going to release, or has released, just without much fanfare?
According to the The Snowden Archive[0] about 400 documents were published through publications out of a total 50,000 documents Snowden collected. As for the rest—First Look Media (parent company of The Intercept) shut down access to its archive, as well as the team set up to handle them, in 2019:
"First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had “ceased reporting on it years ago,” The Intercept had decided to “focus on other editorial priorities” after expending five years combing through the archive.[1]"
Very cool! Poitras and Greenwald apparently retain full copies, as well as the outlets that received them in the first place I'd assume.
As a last note I'll leave a medium post by Barrett Brown[2], an excellent reporter whose series of columns in the Intercept received the National Magazine Award—incidentally he burned it on a livestream in protest against First Look Media's decision to shut down their Snowden archive (got to see it live, the YouTube video is private now though unfortunately)
> First Look Media (parent company of The Intercept)
> Poitras and Greenwald
Yeah, back then they all used to be among the good guys. One thing I haven't quite understood, though: When and why, exactly, did they turn into raving loony pro-Putin mouthpieces? Or is the plural unfair; is it just Greenwald?
This reminds me that, despite the prissy and offended denouncements from the Air Force and DOD (War Department?), the only fiction in Dr. Strangelove is the characters. All of the systems depicted were built.
It was worse than that: in Doctor Strangelove, General Buck Turgidson was at least waiting for Truman's say-so before doing anything irrevocable. In real life, there's this anecdote about Curtis Lemay:
SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” Sprague was shocked. “But General,” he countered, “that’s not national policy.” Sprague remembered LeMay responding, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
It's funny because the open source arms control community (like Martin Pfeiffer[1]) works really hard to inform people of how few safeguards our nuclear policy has. But even those anemic safeguards (the idea that only the president can arbitrarily launch nukes) have frequently been illusory!
I genuinely think we way-under-rate how closely we escaped nuclear annihilation in the last 100 years.
Note for the record that this outcome/letter/press release is because they spied on Americans (which they are ostensibly not supposed to do).
Now imagine how unrestrained they are when spying on the other 96% of the human population that resides on this planet, and that anything that Google, Apple (iCloud, iMessage), Facebook (WhatsApp, Instagram, including DMs), or Microsoft knows about you, they can know about you.
Not just CIA, the overall surveillance state from national to state agencies to local law enforcement is so pervasive, all-encompassing and hidden (or under-reported), it's pretty terrifying. And that's just the technically "legal" stuff without all the rampant abuses of using private sub-contractors, other government's agencies (Five Eyes), gag orders, etc to get around "inconvenient" limitations.
i'm going to be real with you, almost nobody on earth cares about their government spying on foreign nationals. if the CIA has any popular legitimacy it is because they spy on foreign nationals.
Yeah. These people violate the rights of their own people and the principles their own goddamn country was founded upon. There's really no limit to what they'd do to a foreigner.
Wouldn’t be that the %96 should be doing their counter intelligence? I don’t see how CIA has an obligation over non-US citizens.
I tend to believe that EU’s privacy stance is primarily to do that. They are trying to forge a framework where free market can operate but keep the Europeans data in EU, under the EU jurisdiction.
Europe and US are allies but they are also competitors. It’s not wise to let foreign entities run you communications.
When the US fir the first time encountered that with TikTok, the first instinct was to ban it, I.e. the China way.
As a mere undergraduate in the early '90s, reading about Omnivore (and later Carnivore and later Total Information Awareness and its subsequent refinements) and the ineffectual vituperations against them, I thought that the retrenchment was only apparent, a moving back to take yet another run at the dream of omniscient preemption and thereby control.
Today, nothing dies. Everything simply becomes more subtle. There is no single head to urge into the guillotine. Is there a way out, or be there no exit?
What's left to do? Knock over one's king man on the board? How's that for cynicism?
edit: for the down-voting Panglosians: give me your reason rather than mouse-clicks.
We'd have every movement that could possibly benefit people infiltrated by the FBI. They would pose as Nazis during protests or try to instigate people to break the law in order to illegitmize the movement. Then we'd have a government controlled media only focusing what the provocateurs initiated.
Source? I know many cops and informers are actual nazis, and i've witnessed first-hand (in France) active collaboration between nazi groups and cops to repress demonstrations, but i'm not aware of cops pretending to be nazis to infiltrate social movements (where they would probably be kicked out for being nazis?!).
> try to instigate people to break the law in order to illegitmize the movement
Sure that happens, but that's a tiny phenomenon, except for anti-terrorist investigations where the so-called criminal activities are either legit protests (eg. pipeline sabotage) or plots outright invented by secret services (see also Haymarket affair, Eric MacDavid, COINTELPRO).
Many people are legitimately angry and want to burn institutions down. To be honest, i find that your line of thinking is more delegitimizing, because it suggests attacking the source of our problems and misery (eg. banks, homelessness) is immoral, and we should have hope in the institutions (who created this suffering in the first place and directly benefit from it) to solve the situation in a rational manner.
The law is a flexible thing based in a social context (and balance of powers), and if it was not for countless heroic acts of braving unjust laws, there would certainly have been no abolition of slavery, no anti-nazi resistance, no birth control rights... Not just in the USA, but pretty much in every country these progresses took countless acts of sabotage and resistance which were criminalized at the time.
They're discussing the infiltration of pro-Nazi demonstrations, which definitely did happen. COINTELPRO for example devoted 15% of it's resources to targeting White hate groups, leading to things like an FBI agent bombing a Baptist church and murdering a civil rights activist.
I think most of their other lines are reasonable and can easily be expanded upon with some sources.
Whether or not your ability to travel or have a job being tied up in bureaucracy is an unethical thing is kinda dependent on your perspective. As someone who grew up undocumented and who's had to deal with massive bureaucratic headaches whenever I got a job (even though it was legal), I'm quite critical of that.
As for the state-run media point... I'll try to do this without quoting Chomsky's Five Filters, but I do want to point out that what we consider state-run media in other countries is often much more independent than we realize and what we consider corporate media in the US is often much more heavily influenced by the state than we realize (an easy example might be Fox News' direct ties to the GOP).
But if you really want to see how much of a propaganda powerhouse the US really is, you'd have the best luck looking outside of the US. Read up on the International Broadcasting Bureau or the US' numerous state-controlled foreign media outlets like Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty, or just the CIA's massive worldwide propaganda network:
> We don’t have a state media, and I guarantee you that whatever corruption people know about, there is some media member talking about it.
You can't be that naive. You think every piece of corruption has been exposed? Usually when corruption is exposed it's about something that's been going on for years. Yet somehow you think all corruption as of right now has been exposed?
When the government calls for censorship of all media that oppresses their narrative and the media hires former CIA agents and parrots their talking points, you might as well have state run media.
> You can't be that naive. You think every piece of corruption has been exposed?
I don’t think that every bit of corruption has been exposed, and indeed I didn’t say that.
I do not believe “the media” is actively working to hide corruption. Whoever “they” employ, there are simply too many media outlets for one to reasonably believe it is remotely state controlled.
Further, I find it laughable to believe, in the age of information, that any calls to censorship that you claim exist are remotely effective.
> and the media hires former CIA agents and parrots their talking points
To be fair (And Balanced), they also hire people who applied to CIA and were "rejected". Being the son of a Voice Of America director probably helps too.
That's the difference between state funded media, and state run media.
State funded media are news orgs that 100% run themselves, but are funded by the government. This is great for achieving good journalism because they're not incentivised to write clickbait or take advantage of outrage and bias generating sales to people that agree with the bias.
State run media is a terrible idea, for obvious reasons.
Plenty of well functioning democracies have the former, and it's important to identify if there's ever an attempt by the government to turn it in to the latter.
That might be true, but I suspect in reality it works out because:
"Good" governance doesn't want to meddle with the state funded media, and the existence of the state funded media results in a better informed population who continue to vote for governance that doesn't meddle with the state funded media.
If a new government did start meddling with the state funded media word would get out pretty quickly because all the people it's staffed with are used to not being meddled with and someone would blow the whistle.
Or phrased in another way: state funded, but not state controlled media is a symptom of quality governance as much as it is a reinforcing factor of quality governance.
They're critical at the surface but when it comes to the government's cute agents they are in lock step. They're really pushing anti Russia propaganda right now for example.
How do you classify something as anti Russia propoganda vs just reporting on things that Russia is doing? Russia is not exactly a good actor in global politics (or towards their own citizens), so obviously reporting on their actions is going to be negative a lot of the time.
Why would a person leave that reply? Unless people are supposed to read it and think "gosh, I guess fascism isn't so bad, after all", which I doubt was the intention, it seems pointless.
I think what you both really mean is "imagine these tools in the hands of authoritarians", it doesn't really matter if they're fascism flavored authoritarians or communism flavored authoritarians.
This is pretty gross holocaust revisionism. Equating the Nazis to the people that were responsible for 7/10 Nazi casualties.
But hey, capitalist Russia today is a much nicer country than the USSR right? With lower infant mortality rates, higher literacy, better gender equity in things like pay or education?
McCarthy's spirit truly never left the public American psyche
Not really, no. The USSR has its own history of genocides, especially against muslim communities. And both USSR and the nazis were strongly opposed to any form of social protests: the nazis called opponents "terrorists" or "judeo-bolshevik", while the USSR called them "leftists" or "counter-revolutionaries" (see also: Cronstadt uprising, Makhnovtchina).
Let's not forget also that Hitler and Staline had an alliance at some point. There are quite a few differences between national socialism (nazism) and authoritarian communism, but they can't exactly be presented as opposites, as they occupy the same half (authoritarianism) of the political compass.
Disclaimer: i'm advocating for libertarian communism (self-organization, not bureaucracy). I believe defending tyrannical regimes in the name of communism does not help the cause. In fact, i would even argue the USSR killed all chances of communism when the Bolsheviks started slaughtering the real revolutionaries (anarchists and anti-authoritarian marxists alike), and that they never tried to go beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat which was presented as exceptional/temporary measures against counter-revolutionary activities on the road to communism (stateless, classless society). Having a central State dictating your life and bureaucrats overseeing your work is not communism: it's State capitalism (or as Mussolini called it referring to fascism: corporatism) at its finest.
"Right wing violence and extremism are the real world threat in America..." let me just ask you can you tell us how many people died in 2021 due to right wing violence and extremism? Meanwhile, in Chicago, "According to the department, 2021 ended with 797 homicides. That is 25 more than were recorded 2020, 299 more than in 2019 and the most since 1996. And there were 3,561 shooting incidents in 2021, which is just over 300 more than were recorded in 2020 and a staggering 1,415 more shooting incidents than were recorded in the city in 2019." https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/2021-ends-as-chicagos-...
Ehh, nobody would tolerate it if we just say "bulk collection". How about "analytics"? It sounds much nicer that way, and there is zero collusion required as long as the economic reward makes the optimized outcome inevitable http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mus...
I think this is the report that was declassified. It's pretty heavily redacted (and long). It's talking about a program collecting bulk financial records, targeting ISIS.
