Category Archives: Terrorism

UPDATED: Putting Lipstick On The Pigs At NSA*

Constitution, Democrats, Homeland Security, Propaganda, Republicans, Technology, Terrorism

We’re doing the right thing; we’re not doing anything illegal,” said Four-Star General Keith Alexander to Fox News’ Bret Baier. An otherwise good reporter, Baier has been asking some poignant questions of the very clever, dissembling, outgoing director of the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional, naturally illicit and all-round reprehensible spying programs. However, Baier, another bright lad, seems to be merely going through the motion; making sure he does journalistic due diligence without any forceful follow-up. A less than obligatory follow-up would be: “I know that what you do is probably ‘legal,’ but is it ‘moral’?”

The occasion of the interview? Obama’s likely bogus “calls for an end to NSA’s bulk phone data collection.”

“What would you do to Edward Snowden if you were alone in a room with him” was more revealing of Baier’s sympathies. Alexander vaporized about the assorted entrapment operations to which hoovering up trillions of messages have led. (More about “The Dynamics of Entrapment.”)

BAIER: Former President Jimmy Carter saying he writes letters instead of sending e-mails because he’s worried that you’re listen — you’re reading his e-mails.

ALEXANDER: Well, we’re not. So he can now go back to writing e-mails. The reality is, we don’t do that. And if we did, it would be illegal and we’d be found, uh, I think accoun — held accountable and responsible. Look at all the folks that have looked at what we’re doing, from the president’s review group to Congress to the courts to the DNI, DOD, Justice. Everybody reviews what we do to see if anybody is doing anything illegal like you suggest. No one has found anything, zero, except for in 12 cases where people did that and we had already reported those.

* With apologies to pretty pigs.

UPDATE (3/26): The great Glenn Greenwald seems surprised that, much like Republicans, Democrats are opportunistic, lying, bottom-feeders. He notes that “what rational people do, by definition, is” this:

if a political official takes a position you agree with, then you support him, but when he does a 180-degree reversal and takes the exact position that you’ve been disagreeing with, then you oppose him. That’s just basic. Thus, those of us who originally defended Obama’s decision to release the photos turned into critics once he took the opposite position – the one we disagreed with all along – and announced that he would try to suppress the photos.
But that’s not what large numbers of Democrats did. Many of them first sided with Obama when his administration originally announced he’d release the photos. But then, with equal vigor, they also sided with Obama when – a mere two weeks later – he took the exact opposition position, the very anti-transparency view these Democrats had been attacking all along when voiced by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.
At least for me, back then, that was astonishing to watch. It’s one thing to strongly suspect that people are simply adopting whatever views their party’s leader takes. But this was like the perfect laboratory experiment to prove that: Obama literally took exact opposition positions in a heated debate within a three week period and many Democrats defended him when he was on one side of the debate and then again when he switched to the other side.

“The Leader is right when he does X, and he’s equally right when he does Not X. That’s the defining attribute of the mindset of a partisan hack, an authoritarian, and the standard MSNBC host. …”

MORE.

24-Hour No-News Nitworks

Homeland Security, Journalism, Media, Terrorism

A pattern has emerged in cable TV malpractice. As critical as I am of the channels as the mouthpiece of neoconservatism, Fox News and Fox Business are the only channels doing news. They diligently cover the major stories of the day. The coverage is news driven. New job numbers, new Obamacare cancellations, counter-responses from the administration, Ukraine, The Issa-Cummings tiff: it’s all there.

Of the two hardcore left-liberal, agenda-driven networks, CNN and MSNBC, the latter will cover a smattering of news, always from a vociferously anti-Republican stance. However, MSNBC will then blow up one or two anti-GOP “scandals,” like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s involvement in the George Washington Bridge closure. Like a mollusk, MSNBC will stick to this one story and not let up. I am convinced they hardly have any viewers left because nobody cares about Christie and his Bridgegate.

CNN, which used to pride itself on its news coverage, no longer pretend to do news. Instead, its anchors wait for the Big Story du jour, or entrust Don Lemon and Anus Anderson with finding a human-interest story that matters most to them, but is not objectively newsworthy. These flavors of the day they use as a shield to ward off the necessity of covering the bad dream that is Obama.

Even though the 24-Hour no-news nitworks have used the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as a cover for their lousy news coverage, only today, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, did the first substantial bit of news about Flight 370 come to light. (The “scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China,” disappeared en route, above the Indian Ocean.)

The report focuses on sabotage.

Aviation and industry officials suspect two different systems were shut off after the plane took off last weekend, one shortly after the other, people familiar with the investigation said. About an hour into the flight, the plane’s transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.

In the ensuing minutes, a second system sent a routine aircraft-monitoring message to a satellite indicating that someone made a manual change in the plane’s heading, veering sharply to the west.

Such a turn wouldn’t have been part of the original authorized route programmed in the flight-management computer that controls the autopilot. Those system-monitoring messages are suspected to have been disabled shortly afterward, according to some of these people.

“Increasingly, it seems to be heading into the criminal arena,” said Richard Healing, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The latest revelations about the investigation, he added, “indicate the emphasis is on determining if a hijacker or crew member diverted the plane.”

Despite the efforts to hide the location of the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, the plane kept broadcasting its location hourly via a satellite communication system for five more hours, according to several people familiar with the investigation. The last of these transmissions was sent from high above the Indian Ocean, according to two of these people.

The international search has drastically expanded its mission westward, with the U.S. Navy and other nations now searching for the plane in a 320,000-square-mile rectangle west of the Andaman Islands.

An official criminal investigation hasn’t been opened, and an international team of investigators hasn’t ruled out the possibility that some type of catastrophic event, pilot error or mechanical malfunction was the cause of the plane’s disappearance.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has looked into the backgrounds of the passengers and pilots, a U.S. official said, but hasn’t found any ties to terrorist groups or other indications they may have tried to hijack or sabotage a plane.

Still, as details emerge an accident appears increasingly unlikely. The first loss of the jet’s transponder, which communicates the jet’s position, speed and call sign to air traffic control radar, would require disabling a circuit breaker above and behind an overhead panel. Pilots rarely, if ever, need to access the circuit breakers, which are reserved for maintenance personnel.

A physical disconnection of the satellite communications system would require extremely detailed knowledge of the aircraft, its internal structure and its systems.

“Everything so far makes it seem as though someone was controlling the airplane” and attempting to fly it somewhere other than its intended destination, said Robert Francis, another former NTSB member. The longer the search goes on, he said, the less it seems to be “what you would expect from a civil-aviation aircraft in trouble.” …

… It’s also possible that the satellite communication gear, rather than being disabled, stopped sending pings because the plane had crashed some time after the final transmission.

MORE.

The Killing Burden Of The Big Man

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Terrorism, The State

US citizen or not: The distinction is immaterial. The US government has no right to kill people in all corners of the world, based on secret evidence and secretive laws and procedures. Yet, once again, to a relatively unexercised press, the Obama administration is considering whether to kill or not to kill abroad.

“Weighing” is how this administration’s deadly deliberation is being termed.

The Big Man is thinking of approving “a lethal strike against a U.S. citizen who is accused of being part of the al-Qaeda terrorist network overseas and involved in ongoing plotting against American targets, U.S. officials said.”

Oh, the burdens of Obama “Bigmanism” (To go by the dictionary, and “within the context of political science, big man, big man syndrome, or bigmanism refers to corrupt and autocratic rule of countries by a single person.”)

Unfortunately, the ACLU also appears to cleave to the citizen-vs.-non-citizen distinction:

“The targeted killing of an American being considered right now shows the inherent danger of a killing program based on vague and shifting legal standards, which has made it disturbingly easy for the government to operate outside the law,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “This new report comes as the administration continues to fight against even basic transparency about the thousands of people who have died in this lethal program, let alone accountability for the wrongful killings of U.S. citizens.”

Mass Surveillance Based On Nothing But Prior-Restraint Argument

Government, Homeland Security, Law, Regulation, Terrorism

Mass surveillance is based on nothing but a prior-restraint argument: Violate everybody’s rights in the hope of nabbing a few terrorists. That’s if you buy the government’s good intentions; its real goal—reflexive inclination, really—is to use every method conceivable to increase its sphere of control.

Glenn Greenwald puts it a little mildly for my taste, but the heroic investigative journalist, also first “to use information given to him by Snowden to break stories of NSA surveillance,” explained a similar concept to CNN’s JAKE TAPPER:

GLENN GREENWALD: “… We could eliminate all sorts of crimes, Jake, like rape and murder and kidnapping and pedophilia if we just do away with the requirement that police officers first get a search warrant before entering our house, or if we let the government put video cameras in all of our homes and offices and watch what we are doing all the time. We make the choice that we’d rather not do that because we’d rather live with a greater risk of crime than let the government invade our privacy. The fact that there’s a half of 1 percent chance that it could have helped a terrorist plot 11 years ago in terms of detection is hardly a reason to do this massive, ubiquitous surveillance program.”

In a new piece for The Guardian, Greenwald looks at the history and dynamics of the NSA scam tactics:

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are “serious questions that have been raised”. They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic “reforms” so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary “safeguards”: a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government’s requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government’s lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee’s heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees “more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols”.
As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA’s in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.
The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well.

The ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero had a line almost as neat as Rand Paul’s “If you like your privacy you can keep it” (and here I add the soundtrack of villainous laughter: “NHAHAHAHAHAHA”). It is:

The president should end – not mend – the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the constitution.