Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Disclaimer:
The views and/or opinions posted on all the blog posts and in the comment sections are of their respective authors, not necessarily those of Dandelion Salad.
All content has been used with permission from the copyright owners, who reserve all rights, and that for uses outside of fair use (an excerpt), permission must be obtained from the respective copyright owner.
"But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power." -- Howard Zinn
If you take the left, then I will go to the right; or, if you go to the right, then I will go to the left —Genesis 13:9As soon as you begin to live the life of faith in God, fascinating and physically gratifying possibilities will open up before you. These things …
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives will vote on whether or not to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If passed, FISA will essentially extend the powers of the government and give the authorization to wiretap Americans without a warrant. As of now it is unknown exactly how many Americans are being spied on, but the question is how many more Americans will be scrutinized because of this legislation. RT Producer Adriana Usero joins us with more.
Coleen Rowley, one of three whistleblowers chosen as persons of the year for 2002 by Time Magazine, will speak about her experiences in the FBI and broader issues of official surveillance and massive data collection. When Coleen Rowley was an FBI agent in Minneapolis, her office got a lead just three weeks before 9/11 that a known extremist had paid $8.000 for lessons to fly a Boeing 747. Her office arrested him, but, her superiors would not allow a full investigation. (more…)
ACLU Argues Dragnet Surveillance of Americans Is Unconstitutional
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The government today asked the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that allowed the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitutionality of a law that gives the government unprecedented authority to monitor international emails and phone calls by Americans.
Investors at the CIA and Google are backing a company called “Recorded Future” that monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. The news comes amidst Google’s so-called “Wi-Spy” scandal, that refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private WiFi networks over the last three years.
Bush wiretapping ruled illegal! More on CIA use of LSD and assassinations. Attorney Jon Eisenberg returns to our program to discuss his legal victory against the NSA wiretapping under Bush. Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the government and the Obama team’s legal ploys. Eisenberg explains the ruling, possibility of an appeal and his view of our prospects for regaining our 4th Amendment rights.
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them‘- – Paulo Freire
The illegal domestic wiretapping of all Americans, the invasive search practices at every airport directed at every single US passenger, the compilation of all data on all citizens in not only one but multiple government databases, the unreasonable and warrantless search and seizure practiced on US masses facilitated arbitrarily by the FBI, are among many known and unknown government practices directed at the entire population of the United States of America.
Mark Klein on Obama’s continuation of Bush’s massive domestic wiretapping operations. Klein is the heroic phone technician who exposed the secret room in San Francisco where the NSA diverts all phone calls and emails in clear violation of the 4th Amendment. This is another installment in the Boiling Frogs series, co-hosted by Sibel Edmonds. Klein talks about how he learned of the eavesdropping and its huge scope, how the media and Senators took his confidential information to the government, and how the Obama administration continues the interceptions and obstruction of justice. Please share this with as many people as you can, and visit Sibel’s new website, http://www.boilingfrogspost.com Klein’s book, Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine…and Fighting It is available only at amazon.com.
The real face of our two-party but one-establishment system of politics seems to have made a rare appearance again with Obama’s speech last Tuesday. That is, to those among the wannabe gullible majority, since a small fraction have known this true face for a while. The good news is that finally we are seeing a significant number of apologists who are coming to the realization of being taken for a ride during this last election. The not so good news has to do with the depth of this new realization, thus the extreme vulnerability of being misdirected and exploited again, over and over, as has been done for decades.
Last May I put forth a discussion topic on the issue of casting votes based on the ‘lesser of two evils’ decision-making process. Here are the questions I posed back then, which I am posing again now that we have more people waking up to smell their new Whitehouse Roses: (more…)
I want to revisit a topic which happens to be extremely important to me, both personally and politically, and even more important to our civil liberties.
Some of you have already read my brief piece on Richard Horn & the CIA dishing out $3 million to buy silence in this narco scandal. Those of you who have not read it click here and read it – because this story also goes to the heart of a very significant and ongoing issue: The State Secrets Privilege.
My recent heads-up piece on Horn focused mainly on the CIA’s attempt to hush another narco scandal where the agency was directly and actively involved. Although I introduced Horn as ‘another recipient of the government’s State Secrets Privilege invocation’, I didn’t delve into the significance of this case on this repeatedly used and abused draconian privilege. This was partly due to wrongly assuming that the media, at least the alternative media, would have gotten all over it since lately the SSP has been a quite fashionable and talked about topic among the wanna-be progressive community. Well, I was wrong. Despite the scandalous nature of the case, and despite the massive implications to SSP, those who’ve been publicizing themselves and cashing in using SSP did not touch or mention the case.
In Part one of my piece, I attempted to explain the nature and scope of the US Warrantless Wiretap Program and the growing Surveillance Regime being built in this country. In Part 2, I will compare and contrast the growth and structure of the aforementioned Surveillance Regimes with other countries’ corresponding Systems of surveillance and control. I will also spotlight the International Surveillance Industry and its efforts to market its products by offering this technology to governmental power centers around the world.
Broadcasting live here and simulcast on • Roots Up Radio and Jerva Westerort Local Community Radio – 91.1 Stockholm, Sweden
Richard “Ishmael” Scott, a writer at Sibel Edmonds website Boiling Frogs Post.Ishmael acquired his moniker hunting submarines for six years as a Destroyer Sonarman and specialist on Anti-Submarine and Anti-Surface Warfare. As a member of Nuclear Weapons Handling Teams, he participated in Nuclear Weapons Acceptance Inspections, Nuclear Technical Proficiency Inspections and Technical Surprise Inspections. He then spent thirty years in the belly of the Telecommunications beast as a technician specializing in all phases of Broadband Carrier Network Operations for A.T. &T., Qwest, Level3, Allegiance and others. He was personally responsible for keeping A.T. &T.’s long distance service working out of San Francisco in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake disaster. H[is] research for Boiling Frog Post focuses on telecommunications privacy and nuclear weapons issues. We will discuss his article “An Analysis of Warrantless Wiretapping-Part I“
So the questions I have are this. 1. Why is such an overarching, intrusive, draconian wiretap program necessary? 2. What mechanisms are there in place to prevent government-sourced private information from being shared with corporate entities? 3. Is the NSA positioning itself to take control of all telecommunications in the event of a national emergency?” 4. What national emergency might provide a trigger mechanism for the assumption of such control?”
Definition of Terms & Analysis of Klein’s Affidavit
This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.
President Barack Obama instructed Justice Department attorneys to argue last week in San Francisco before Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker, that he must toss out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Shubert v. Bush lawsuit challenging the secret state’s driftnet surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications.
This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
[...]
The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.
