H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Month: May 2014
Why Yes, the NSA is a Tool of the Oligarchy, Why do You Ask?
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas:
The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.
SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
………
In addition, the program is a serious – and perhaps illegal – abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration’s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country’s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.
“It’s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,” says Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. “That they couldn’t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access – that’s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.”
Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.
When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.
One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:
But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home.
Think about it for a moment.
Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .
Your tax dollars at work.
What Sherrod Brown Says
As opposed to buying into the Republican meme that has us throwing momma from the train, the distinguished gentleman from Ohio is suggesting that Democrats should be running on increases in the social safety net:
Word has it that Democrats are set to take a shellacking in the 2014 elections, in part because midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter. So what if Dems campaigned on expanding Social Security, rather than allowing themselves to get drawn into another debate over how much to cut the program?
There’s a hook for this looming: The coming battle over disability insurance, which is a part of Social Security.
Dem Senator Sherrod Brown, a member of the Finance Committee, tells me that GOP Senators have requested hearings into Social Security Disability Insurance this summer. Dems expect Republicans to attack the program as wasteful and fraudulent, in part because conservative media have already done so, and in part because at least one GOP proposal in recent days took aim at the program.
Brown says Dems should seize this occasion to get behind a proposal that would lift or change the payroll tax cap, meaning higher earners would pay more, while adopting a new measure for inflation that would increase benefits for all seniors. Instead of getting drawn into debates about “Chained CPI” and other entitlement cuts, Brown says, Dems should make the case that stagnating wages and declining pensions and savings demand an expansion of social insurance.
Good politics, and good politics.
Needless to say, the “Very Serious People,” in the Democratic Party will hate this idea, because, they are afraid that it might piss off the rich donors who pay their salaries.
It’s the Iron Law of Institutions, “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” (Emphasis original)
WE Just Got Fracked
A new analysis of what was previously considered the largest shale oil formation in the United States has just shrunk by 96%:
Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California’s vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national “black gold mine” of petroleum.
Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.
The new estimate, expected to be released publicly next month, is a blow to the nation’s oil future and to projections that an oil boom would bring as many as 2.8 million new jobs to California and boost tax revenue by $24.6 billion annually.
The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza, reducing the nation’s need for foreign oil imports through the use of the latest in extraction techniques, including acid treatments, horizontal drilling and fracking.
The energy agency said the earlier estimate of recoverable oil, issued in 2011 by an independent firm under contract with the government, broadly assumed that deposits in the Monterey Shale formation were as easily recoverable as those found in shale formations elsewhere.
We are not going to frack our way into energy independence.
The problems that California is not like Texas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, etc. It is highly seismically active, and this action has chopped the shale layer into isolated little pieces.
You have Problem with Corporate Communist Capitalism®©™, Comrade?
North Carolina continues its trip off the deep end.
The Republicans who have control of the state are decided to make it a felony to reveal what fracking oil companies are pumping into people’s drinking water:
As hydraulic fracturing ramps up around the country, so do concerns about its health impacts. These concerns have led 20 states to require the disclosure of industrial chemicals used in the fracking process.
North Carolina isn’t on that list of states yet—and it may be hurtling in the opposite direction.
On Thursday, three Republican state senators introduced a bill that would slap a felony charge on individuals who disclosed confidential information about fracking chemicals. The bill, whose sponsors include a member of Republican party leadership, establishes procedures for fire chiefs and health care providers to obtain chemical information during emergencies. But as the trade publication Energywire noted Friday, individuals who leak information outside of emergency settings could be penalized with fines and several months in prison.
“The felony provision is far stricter than most states’ provisions in terms of the penalty for violating trade secrets,” says Hannah Wiseman, a Florida State University assistant law professor who studies fracking regulations.
The bill also allows companies that own the chemical information to require emergency responders to sign a confidentiality agreement. And it’s not clear what the penalty would be for a health care worker or fire chief who spoke about their experiences with chemical accidents to colleagues.
Seriously.
The Repubicans are beginning to give authoritarian corporatism a bad name.
This is a Good Day for Schadenfreude
Dinesh D’Souza has just pled guilty to using straw donors in violation of campaign finance laws:
Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza entered a guilty plea Tuesday to a charge that he used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, officials said.
The unexpected guilty plea came on the same day the trial for the strident critic of President Barack Obama was set to open in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The single felony count D’Souza admitted guilt on carries a maximum prison sentence of two years, but the plea agreement D’Souza’s lawyers reached with the government says sentencing guidelines applicable to the case call for a sentence of 10 to 16 months.
Judges are not required to sentence defendants in accordance with the guidelines, but usually do. Both sides reserved their rights to argue for a sentence outside that range and D’Souza’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman indicated he plans to ask Judge Richard Berman not to send D’Souza to prison.
The plea deal calls for dismissal of a second charge D’Souza faced if he went to trial: causing Long to file a false report with the Federal Election Commission. That carried a potential sentence of up to five years behind bars.
Atrios has noted that he is feeling far less schadenfreude about this than he expected, despite his being, “One of America’s Worst Humans.”
Me not so much.
This is the guy that has never grew up beyond tacky College Republican guerrilla theater that had classmate Timothy Geithner asking him, “how it felt to be such a dick.” (And that is ignoring his rather idiosyncratic marital life)
This really could not happen to a more contemptible human being.
Because Our Government Has Been Completely Captured by the Banksters
James Kwak asks, “Why Is Credit Suisse Still Allowed to Do Business in the United States?”
Thia has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
On a slightly less glib level, Kwak wonders why, if the financial markets are all better, and the banks insist that they are not to big to fail, why we cannot see fit to suspend the banking license of a foreign bank that has spent decades defrauding the American government.
The fundamental point is that if Credit Suisse really is solvent, then there are no losses that have to be absorbed by someone else (other financial institutions or taxpayers). If its assets really are worth more than its liabilities, then it must be possible to close down the bank without harming anyone else (except shareholders), given enough time. The whole point of capital regulation is to make sure that this can always be done. People would lose their jobs, but the whole premise of the financial sector is that it is providing useful services, which means that those jobs would be recreated elsewhere in the industry (except for the jobs based on tax fraud, which should go away for good).
Our finance system is not just corrupt, it is criminogenic.
We gotta figure out a way to shut this all down in an orderly manner, and replace it with something, you know, sane.
Bummer of a Birth Mark, Bob
In a completely that unsurprising move, District Judge James Spencer has ruleddisgraced former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s trial should proceed:
Virginia’s former governor Robert McDonnell, once a rising star in the Republican Party, failed to persuade a U.S. judge to throw out federal corruption charges against him and his wife, Maureen.
U.S. District Judge James Spencer in Richmond, Virginia, ruled today that U.S. prosecutors sufficiently supported their charges in the McDonnells’ indictment and that the case against them, scheduled for trial in July, should move ahead. Spencer also rejected the couple’s request that their cases be separated.
The McDonnells are accused of accepting vacations, loans, private plane rides and other benefits in exchange for using the governor’s office to benefit businessman Jonnie Williams, who at the time headed Star Scientific Inc. (STSI) and was trying to promote the dietary supplements made by the Glen Allen, Virginia-based company.
I half expect that the jury to, “Find the defendants incredibly guilty,” to quote Mel Brooks.
There is Justice in the World
Asa Hutchinson, one of the ‘Phant ratf%$#s who have pushed voter ID laws to suppress the poor and minority vote, was turned away from the polls because he did not have a voter ID:
Asa Hutchinson, who won the Republican nomination in the race for Arkansas governor Tuesday, forgot his ID when he went to the polls, despite backing the state’s new voter ID law, according to the Associated Press.
Christian Olson, a spokesman for the Republican candidate, told the AP that Hutchinson believed the situation was a “little bit of an inconvenience” and that a staffer retrieved his ID so he could cast a ballot. Olson said the former congressman still believes voters should be required to show an ID.
Hutchinson’s campaign has not responded to msnbc’s requests for comment. This post will be updated when it does.
Tuesday was the first time the state’s voter ID law affected an election, and Arkansas voters were required to show identification at the polls, according to the AP. Last month, a judge struck down the voter ID law, finding it unconstitutional. But the judge said that the law would be enforced during the state’s primary.
I can imaging what was going through his head at that moment, “You cannot stop me from voting, I am white!”
Fabulous!!!!
Not only did a federal judge overturn Pennsylvania’s gay marriage ban, but he cited Antonin Scalia in his opinion:
Upon striking down Pennsylvania’s gay marriage ban Tuesday, a federal judge cited Justice Antonin Scalia’s “cogen[t]” argument that the Supreme Court had essentially paved the way for nationwide marriage equality last year.
Here’s the relevant passage from George W. Bush-appointed Judge John E. Jones III in his 39-page opinion:As Justice Scalia cogently remarked in his dissent, “if [Windsor] is meant to be an equal-protection opinion, it is a confusing one.” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2706 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Although Windsor did not identify the appropriate level of scrutiny, its discussion is manifestly not representative of deferential review. See id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (observing that “the Court certainly does not apply anything that resembles [the rational-basis] framework” (emphasis omitted)). The Court did not evaluate hypothetical justifications for the law but rather focused on the harm resulting from DOMA, which is inharmonious with deferential review.
It was a reference to Scalia’s scathing dissent against the Court’s 5-4 opinion that struck down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The Reagan-appointed justice warned that the majority decision — despite officially staying neutral on whether gay marriage was a Constitutional right — relied upon reasoning that would lead to that conclusion.
I will note that referencing a minority opinion does not seem to me to be a common thing, (Note however, that I an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit*) but this is the 2nd or 3rd time that a judge has cited Scalia in making a decision invalidating a gay marriage ban.
I’m beginning to think that the Federal Judiciary is conspiring to offer a very well deserved f%$# you to Fat Tony Scalia.
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!!!
Huh I Did Not Know This
May is International Masturbation Month.
Not a joke.
In honor of this, I have typed this post with one hand.
Quote of the Day
If your reporting is right, tell them to f#*k off
—Ben Bradley to Kara Swisher in response to push-back from the subject of one of her reports
This is the essence of good reporting.
I Guess that Steve Jobs is Really Dead
Apple and Google have agreed to drop the patent suits that they have filed against each other:
Two giants of the mobile phone industry, Apple and Google, have agreed to drop all current patent infringement lawsuits between them, they said Friday.
“Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform,” the companies said in a joint statement. They have not agreed to cross-license each other’s patents, however.
Apple filed a lawsuit with the U.S. International Trade Commission in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, which was subsequently acquired by Google. Google has since agreed to sell the smartphone business to Lenovo, but the deal has not yet closed.
Many of the lawsuits Apple has filed against other smartphone makers, including Samsung, involve Google’s Android operating system. This deal announced Friday does not affect the Apple-Samsung lawsuit, however.
It’s a limited state step, but it is one that Steve Jobs would have taken.
Reasonable and measured was simply not a part of his DNA.
Seriously?!?!?!?
The Department of Justice has filed charges against members of the Chinese military for spying on American computers.
Really, not The Onion.
Didn’t Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA does industrial espionage?
Why yes, he did.
Seriously, the next time I get a parking ticket, I’m going to use American Exceptionalism as a defense.
Fabulous!!!!!
Gay Marriage is legal in Oregon:
Today Judge Michael McShane struck down Oregon’s discriminatory state constitutional amendment that denies committed gay couples the freedom to marry, ruling that it violates the U.S. Constitution. The ruling is the 17th consecutive victory in state and federal court for the freedom to marry since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Windsor v. United States in June 2013. The ruling is the 13th win in federal court for marriage since June.
The order is effective immediately – meaning that today, same-sex couples across the state will be able to marry!
Because the IRS Cannot Make Campaign Donations, I Guess
A few years back, there was an experiment with allowing private contractors to go after people who owed taxes.
It was a failure, with abusive behavior, indifferent record keeping, higher costs, and lower performance, but the private debt collectors can make campaign donations, so the Senate is looking to bring back this clusterf%$#:
The Internal Revenue Service would be required to turn over millions of unpaid tax bills to private debt collectors under a measure before the Senate, reviving a program that has previously led to complaints of harassment and has not saved taxpayers money.
The provision was tucked into a larger bill, aimed at renewing an array of expired tax breaks, at the request of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is home to two of the four private collection agencies that stand to benefit from the proposal.
It requires all “inactive tax receivables” to be assigned to private debt collectors if the IRS cannot locate the person who owes the money or if IRS agents are unable to make contact within a year.
Some taxpayers would be spared the barrage of notices and phone calls, including innocent spouses, military members deployed to combat zones and people “identified as being deceased.”
But bereaved relatives could find themselves under siege for unpaid estate taxes under the proposal. So could people who incur a tax debt under the new Affordable Care Act — either because they owe a penalty for not buying health insurance or because the government was too generous in estimating the size of their health-care tax subsidy.
As the measure arrived on the Senate floor this week, Nina E. Olson, the nation’s taxpayer advocate, wrote a long letter to lawmakers, urging them to withdraw the proposal.
“Outsourcing the collection of federal tax debts is a bad idea,” she wrote. “It disproportionately impacts low-income and other vulnerable taxpayers, and despite two attempts [in the past] at making it work, the program has lost money both times, undermining the sole rationale for its existence.”
Moreover, “if debt collectors come to be seen as the public face” of President Obama’s health-care program, Olson wrote, “I am concerned that could make the IRS’s job” of administering the new health-insurance program “more difficult.”
But it’s back, like a bad penny.
Do you know why it is back? Because Schumer wants some local firms to to make money off the taxpayers, “$1.2 billion would be paid to the private debt collectors, potentially showering fresh cash on two companies based in Upstate New York: ConServe, of Fairport, and Pioneer Credit Recovery, of Arcade.”
To quote Declan Patrick Macmanus, “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.”
We are F%$#ed
The Western Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, and there is little that we can do to stop it:
The collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet is already under way and is unstoppable, two separate teams of scientists said on Monday.
The glaciers’ retreat is being driven by climate change and is already causing sea-level rise at a much faster rate than scientists had anticipated.
The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world. But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.The two studies, by Nasa and the University of Washington, looked at the ice sheets of western Antarctica over different periods of time.
The Nasa researchers focused on melting over the last 20 years, while the scientists at the University of Washington used computer modelling to look into the future of the western Antarctic ice sheet.
But both studies came to broadly similar conclusions – that the thinning and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has begun and cannot be halted, even with drastic action to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
They also suggest that recent accumulation of ice in Antarctica was temporary.
“A large sector of the western Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat. It has passed the point of no return,” Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at Nasa and the University of California, Irvine, told a conference call. “This retreat will have major consequences for sea level rise worldwide.”
It’s important to remember what is going on with arctic ice, where the decline has exceeded every reputable prediction, so I would start figure that, along with changes in the Greenland ice fields, we could be looking at 1 meter per decade increase in sea level.
Profiles in Cowardice
Because just screams Democratic Judicial Nominee
Obama’s nominee for the district judge in the 11th circuit, (specifically, the noreth Georgia bench) Michael Boggs, has encountered a lot of resistance from Senate Democrats for his antediluvian attitudes on basically everything.
The latest revelation is that he vowed to oppose gays in the Boy Scouts:
New revelations could create more trouble for President Barack Obama’s embattled judicial nominee Michael Boggs.
Boggs, currently a state appeals court judge, apparently ran a staunchly anti-gay campaign for the Georgia state House in 2000. In a flyer from his campaign, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boggs vowed: “I oppose same sex marriages, I oppose homosexual Boy Scout leaders, and I support voluntary prayer in schools.”
He billed himself as “a conservative Democrat with conservative values” who’s running on “Christian values,” and suggested he’d have more power and influence as a Democrat given that Democrats were in control of the majority.
His voting record on LGBT rights, abortion, the Confederate flag, etc. is all far right, but somehow or other, Obama saw fit to nominate him for a lifetime position on the court.
Un-Dirtyword-Believable
OK, Now We Have a Smoking Gun
Bill Stepien, Chris Christie’s former campaign manager has now officially stated that the Governor knew what were going on as it happened:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) told the press that no one on his senior staff had prior knowledge of the plan to close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September. But a lawyer representing Christie’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien now says that was wrong.
The claim was included in a letter sent in early April — and made public Wednesday — by attorney Kevin Marino. The letter was sent to Randy Mastro, the high-priced defense attorney who led the governor’s internal review of the scandal.
The letter demanded corrections to a report produced by Mastro and his team, which cleared Christie of any role in the scandal. Among Marino’s demands: that Mastro retract the portion of the report claiming that Stepien had falsely assured Christie that he had no “prior knowledge of the [GWB] lane realignment.”
“[T]he Report itself acknowledges — albeit obliquely — that Mr. Stepien advised Governor Christie on December 12, 2013, that he (Mr. Stepien) did have prior knowledge of the lane realignment,” Marino wrote, later adding: “When the Governor asked Mr. Stepien directly whether he had prior knowledge of the lane closures, Mr. Stepien truthfully told the Governor that [former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive] David Wildstein had come to him with the idea, to which Mr. Stepien responded that Mr. Wildstein would have to run the idea by normal channels in Trenton (i.e. the Governor’s Office).”
So I guess that it is going to be a Jeb Bush/Hillary Clinton race in 2016. **shudder**
But Remember, By Law this Vote is Non-Binding
Following an abysmal performance, Chipotle shareholders voted against pay raises for senior executives:
Investors in Chipotle Mexican Grill voted overwhelmingly on Thursday against the company’s executive compensation plans, sending a strong rebuke to a company that had awarded more than $300 million to its co-chief executives in recent years.
More than 75 percent of investors voted against Chipotle’s say-on-pay measure, which asked investors to ratify a compensation plan that would continue such payments to Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder, and his co-chief, Montgomery F. Moran, over the next few years. That was the highest vote against any say-on-pay measure among the country’s largest 3,000 companies this year.
Though the vote is nonbinding, Chipotle said it was taking investor sentiment into consideration.
“We take this very seriously,” a Chipotle spokesman, Chris Arnold, said in a statement. “It has always been, and continues to be, a top priority that our compensation programs are driving the creation of shareholder value. We thank our investors for the feedback we have received on this issue and will continue to engage with our investors as we review our compensation programs that build value for all of our investors.”
Shareholder discomfort with Chipotle’s multimillion-dollar executive compensation plans has grown. At last year’s meeting, 27 percent of shareholders voted against the say-on-pay measure. But in recent months, smaller investors, including the CtW Investment Group, have lobbied big institutional investors to join them in trying to rein in Chipotle’s executive pay.
Note however, this is a non-binding vote.
Binding shareholder votes on executive pay are forbidden by US law.
H/t Crooks and Liars.