Month: July 2014

Why Not to Trust the Good Inteition of the US State Security Apparatus, Part Gajillion

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It turns out tha the FBI monitored Nelson Mandela as a potential communist threat in the 1990s:

The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.

The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).

The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.

Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.

Note that this is after Mandela was released, but pretty much, by force of habit, the FBI continued to stalk him, because ……… Communism!1!1!

We cannot trust any of these guys to control themselves.  That’s why we need aggressive civilian authority and oversight.

Pusillanimous Police, Prosecutors, Punt Penis Pix

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Well, it looks like DA and the Cops in Manassas have backed down on their demand to a photograph of a teens genitalia in a sexting case:

Manassas City police said Thursday they would not serve a search warrant seeking to take photos of a 17-year-old boy charged with “sexting” an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend earlier this year.

The teen is facing felony counts of manufacturing and distributing child pornography. As the case was headed to trial last week, Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors said in juvenile court that they had obtained a warrant to photograph the teen’s erect penis, in order to compare with the video he allegedly sent in January, according to the teen’s lawyers. When defense lawyer Jessica Harbeson Foster asked how they would obtain a photo of her client while aroused, she said police told her they would take him to a hospital and inject him with a drug to force an erection.

On Thursday, Prince William authorities decided to drop that plan. Lt. Brian Larkin of the Manassas City police said, “We are not going to pursue it.” He said the police planned to allow the search warrant, obtained last week, to expire. He would not say why the decision had been made to abandon the warrant or discuss the reasons for the search.

They would still be going for this, except for the fact that it got ink.

Sunlight is a disinfectant to this sort of vile behavior, and here’s hoping that this destroys a few careers in law enforcement.

Uh-Oh

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You know about short selling?

The nickel tour is that it is a way to bet against an asset, and you make money if it falls in value.

Well, short selling has hit a 7 year low. In fact it hit the lowest level since the Lehman Brothers implosion that initiated the financial crisis:

Hedge funds have sharply scaled back their bearish bets that the value of stocks is about to fall, with the proportion of shares earmarked for short selling at its lowest level since before the financial crisis despite warnings of renewed market exuberance.
The percentage of stocks that have been borrowed by short sellers – who try to profit from a company’s share price falling – has dropped to the lowest level in the US, UK and the rest of Europe since the years before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to data compiled for the Financial Times by Markit.

The fall in short selling comes as Wall Street and markets in Europe trade at near record and multiyear highs, indicating that while some high profile hedge fund managers have warned of excessive market euphoria the industry is still unwilling to bet against the rally.

Put your cash in something safe and liquid, because we are in for a bumpy ride.

Well Played

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Have you heard the feud in the Senate between Senators Begich (D-AK) and McKiskill (D-MO)?

The language has gotten quite heated:

Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), one of the more vulnerable Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections, was unusually harsh last week when he criticized his fellow Democrat, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), for scrutinizing the federal contracts of Alaska Native Corporations despite his “repeated attempts to reason with her.”

It was an uncharacteristically abrasive tone for Begich to strike with another Democrat. But in the context of his re-election race, it makes more sense. His campaign’s message has focused on Alaskan issues — like energy and fishing policy — and battling another Democrat is never a bad look for a Democrat in a otherwise red state.

Now a follow-up letter sent by Begich on Tuesday and the accompanying statement from McCaskill suggests that McCaskill, while legitimately pursuing an issue that she’s studied for six years, is also content to let Begich score a few political points at home.

Both sides win: McCaskill assumes the oversight role that the former state auditor relishes, and Begich gets to publicly fight on behalf of a popular program back home.

………

McCaskill’s office had previously declined to respond to Begich’s public rebuke. But asked by TPM about the letter, McCaskill called her colleague a “problem” in a prepared statement. Though, to Alaska’s voters, he might not sound like much of a problem at all.

“I’ve fought for six years to change the law in regard to Alaska Native Corporations,” she said in the statement. “There has consistently been one problem—Mark Begich. He single-handedly protects Alaska and the ANCs.”

McKaskill and Begich both win.

Begich gets points at home for fighting his own party for a program that benefits Alaskans, and McKaskill gets to present a facade of fiscal probity.

I believe that this called “Political Kabuki”.

The Answer is Price Controls, Not Generics

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The New York Times has a story showing how consolidation in the generic drug market led to skyrocketing prices:

The first sign of trouble came when Dr. Barry Lindenberg, a cardiologist, received a three-page insurance form in January, demanding he get preapproval to prescribe one of the oldest known heart medicines.

His patient had been on the drug, digoxin, for many years. A mainstay of treating older patients with rapid rhythm disturbances, it was first described in the medical literature in 1785. Millions of Americans still use it every day, and many had long paid just pennies a pill.

“I wrote on the form: ‘ARE YOU KIDDING ME?’ ” said Dr. Lindenberg, who practices in Schenectady, N.Y.

What the cardiologist did not know then was that the price of generic digoxin was rapidly rising. The three companies selling the drug in the United States had increased the price they charge pharmacies, at least nearly doubling it since late last year, according to EvaluatePharma, a London-based consulting firm.

………

Large price increases in the United States for vital medicines for the young, such as vaccines, have been mirrored by similar rises in some of the most basic treatments for older patients, like digoxin. Though there are many newer types of drugs to treat heart disease, for some patients there are no effective substitutes; digoxin is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.

………

But increasingly, experts say, the costs of some generic drugs are going the other way. The prices paid by pharmacies for some generic versions of Fiorinal with codeine (for migraines) and Synthroid (a thyroid medicine) as well as the generic steroid prednisolone have all more than doubled since last year, EvaluatePharma found. In January, the National Community Pharmacists Association called for a congressional hearing on generic drug prices, complaining that those for many essential medicines grew as much as “600, 1,000 percent or more” in recent years. The price jumps especially affected smaller pharmacies, which do not have the clout of big chains to bargain for discounts.

Digoxin provides a telling case study. There was no drug shortage, according to the Food and Drug Administration, that might explain the increase. There was no new patent or new formulation. Digoxin is not hard to make. What had changed most were the financial rewards of selling an ancient, lifesaving drug and company strategies intended to reap the benefits.

Though generic medicines are far cheaper to bring to market than brand-name drugs because they involve little research and development, they also are priced lower because generics typically face intense competition. But Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of health economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted, “Studies show it is not until you have four or five generics in the market that the prices really are down.”

By late 2013, a number of generic manufacturers had largely stopped producing and distributing digoxin, then a cheap medicine whose use had declined, leaving only two companies dominant in the market. Both businesses — the Lannett Company and Global Pharmaceuticals, a division of Impax Laboratories — are small companies whose bottom line can rise and fall on the sales of a single drug.

It’s very simple.

The drug companies, or for that matter most companies, competition is not a good, but it is cross that they have to bear.

If you have 5 products, and one has a highly competitive market, you are inclined to leave the market and move to more lucrative one.  It’s Econ 101.

It also f%$#s the rest of us.

We need a dose of government interference in this market.

Glenn Greenwald Reveals that NSA Spied on Americans for the Crime of Being Muslim

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Greenwald, and Murtaza Hussain, reveal that the NSA spied on hundreds of Americans with no justification:

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

………

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

………

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”



The vast majority of individuals on the “FISA recap” spreadsheet are not named. Instead, only their email addresses are listed, making it impossible in most cases to ascertain their identities. Under the heading “Nationality,” the list designates 202 email addresses as belonging to “U.S. persons,” 1,782 as belonging to “non-U.S. persons,” and 5,501 as “unknown” or simply blank. The Intercept identified the five Americans placed under surveillance from their email addresses.

Here is the kicker:

Last week, anonymous officials told another news outlet that the government did not have a FISA warrant against at least one of the individuals named here during the timeframe covered by the spreadsheet.

(emphasis mine)

For the past year, every time someone speculates about what the US state security apparatus does, we get a ferocious denial from the various three later acronyms (TLA).

And then, a few weeks later, some more Snowden docs get released, and we discover that they are lying through their teeth to us.

Both the White House and the Congress have completely failed in their duties to direct and oversee our surveillance industrial complex.

In This Case, it is Appropriate to Use Porcine Metaphors to Refer to Law Enforcement

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You know the story, girl sexts boy, boy sexts girl back, and the police and district attorney demand a photo of boys erect penis:

A Manassas City teenager accused of “sexting” a video to his girlfriend is now facing a search warrant in which Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors want to take a photo of his erect penis, possibly forcing the teen to become erect by taking him to a hospital and giving him an injection, the teen’s lawyers said. A Prince William County judge allowed the 17-year-old to leave the area without the warrant being served or the pictures being taken — yet.

 The teen is facing two felony charges, for possession of child pornography and manufacturing child pornography, which could lead not only to incarceration until he’s 21, but inclusion on the state sex offender data base for, possibly, the rest of his life. David Culver of NBC Washington first reported the story and interviewed the teen’s guardian, his aunt, who was shocked at the lengths Prince William authorities were willing to go to make a sexting case in juvenile court.

 ………

 Foster said the case began when the teen’s 15-year-old girlfriend sent photos of herself to the 17-year-old, who in turn sent her the video in question. The girl has not been charged, and her mother filed a complaint about the boy’s video, Foster said. The male teen was served with petitions from juvenile court in early February, and not arrested, but when the case went to trial in juvenile court in June, Foster said prosecutors forgot to certify that the teen was a juvenile. The case was dismissed, but police immediately obtained new charges and also a search warrant for his home. Police also arrested the teen and took him to juvenile jail, where Foster said they took photos of the teen’s genitals against his will.

 The case was set for trial on July 1, where Foster said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Claiborne Richardson told her that her client must either plead guilty or police would obtain another search warrant “for pictures of his erect penis,” for comparison to the evidence from the teen’s cell phone. Foster asked how that would be accomplished and was told that “we just take him down to the hospital, give him a shot and then take the pictures that we need.”

(emphasis mine)

This is beyond contemptible.

This is a profound abuse of prosecutorial discretion.  In fact, I would argue that this is a credible threat of torture, as well as conspiracy to produce child pornography.

This is profoundly and deeply unethical, and the local bar should be apprised of this behavior.

If there were justice in the world, that evil ratf%$# attorney would be flipping burgers for a living.

I Think that the Worm is Turning on IP

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Ten years ago, 90% of the population did not know what a patent troll was, and now popular effort sinks the nomination of a patent troll supporter to run the USPTO:

The Obama Administration has changed its mind over a plan to name pharmaceutical executive Phil Johnson as head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to multiple sources. The reversal is a victory for the technology industry and other proponents of patent reform.

The plan to appoint Johnson surfaced in late June, and was met with outrage on social media, where critics claimed the choice reflected hypocrisy on the part of President Obama, who had called for fixes to the patent system in his January State of the Union address.

Johnson, a longtime attorney for Johnson & Johnson, was a controversial nominee in part because he helped lead opposition to a bipartisan bill, which died in May, that would have made it easier for companies to challenge bad patents and to seek legal fees from so-called “patent trolls.” He has also publicly scorned previous attempts to reform the patent system.

News of the White House’s decision to backtrack on the appointment came via a person close to the Administration, and was confirmed by several industry sources. The final decision to pull the plug may have occurred after Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vocally declared his opposition to Johnson. Schumer, who was one of the authors of the failed reform bill, has regularly blasted the harm the current patent system is inflicting on start-ups and young companies.

It would have literally inconceivable that someone like Johnson would have been shot down by a bunch of people objecting to the legal fine points of the purpose of IP.

While IP protections have their place, are a form of rent seeking, and for a just and prosperous society, it behooves us to minimize the level of rent seeking to the absolute minimum level to encourage artistic and technological production (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution).

This is baby steps, but if it is the start of a trend, it constitute a seismic shift from the (completely ahistorical, United States industry was built on IP appropriation) view that ever more expansive protections to IP are essential to economic well being.

Now if only we can convince the US Trade Rep to chill out.

This is Like GM Breaking into Ford’s Dearborn Headquarters to Steal the Plans for the Edsel

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Chinese cyperspies are targeting US think tanks:

On Tuesday, reports emerged that U.S. Middle East experts at major U.S. think tanks had been hacked by a Chinese cyperespionage group with links to the Chinese government. The hacker group, known as “DEEP PANDA” by security researchers, left few clues as to why specifically it targeted these U.S. targets, but it is likely that the incident could overshadow the looming U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Cyber issues are coming to the fore in U.S.-China relations and the U.S. government is growing increasingly wary of government-sponsored cyberespionage originating from China.

According to the Washington Post’s report on the incident, the “latest breach follows a pattern identified by experts of Chinese cyberspies targeting major Washington institutions, including think tanks and law firms.” Following this breach, we are left to speculate on the motive. Security researcher Dmitri Alperovitch, cited by the Post notes that his firm noticed a “radical” change in DEEP PANDA’s activity on June 18, “the same day witnesses reported that Sunni extremists seized Iraq’s largest oil refinery.” Although Alperovitch did not disclose specifically which experts or think tanks were affected, the motive prima facie appears to be interest in learning what U.S. experts know about the ongoing situation in Iraq. The hackers may have been attempting to gain access to to non-public information that these experts were privy to.

The idea that the Chinese are using finite resources to troll the the ideas of people like Jim DeMint (Heritage) and the Koch brothers (Cato) worries me not one whit.

While you are at it, how about you just get the North Koreans to kidnap all their employees, and take them to Pyongyang.

The Depressing Thing is that this is a Close as a Googler will Ever get to Being as Cool as John Belushi.

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You know the story, a man, a femme fatale, injected heroine, and death:

Police have arrested a 26-year-old high-priced call girl from Georgia who is suspected of injecting heroin into a Santa Cruz tech executive on his yacht and then fleeing when he overdosed

Alix Catherine Tichelman and 51-year-old Forrest Timothy Hayes found each other online and had met a few times before their Nov. 26 encounter on Hayes’ 50-foot yacht, Escape, at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor, said Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark.

Tichelman provided heroin for Hayes, a Google executive, while they were inside the yacht, police said. A surveillance video from the boat shows that Hayes was “suffering medical complications” and lost consciousness, Clark said. She made no effort to help him, and instead gathered her belongings and even gulped a glass of wine before she drew a window blind and left, the video shows.

I am the worst person on the internet today, but the parallels to the death of John Belushi are striking.

Who Says That Irony is Dead?

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Remember the now debunked story about Senator Bob Menendez and a Dominican Prostitute from Tucker Carlson’s so-called news site Daily Caller?

Well, it turns out that they were not making it all up. The Daily Caller was used as a stooge for an intelligence operation carried out by Cuba:

Sen. Robert Menendez is asking the Justice Department to pursue evidence obtained by U.S. investigators that the Cuban government concocted an elaborate plot to smear him with allegations that he cavorted with underage prostitutes, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In a letter sent to Justice Department officials, the senator’s attorney asserts that the plot was timed to derail the ­political rise of Menendez (D-N.J.), one of Washington’s most ardent critics of the Castro regime. At the time, Menendez was running for reelection and was preparing to assume the powerful chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

According to a former U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of government intelligence, the CIA had obtained credible evidence, including Internet protocol addresses, linking Cuban agents to the prostitution claims and to efforts to plant the story in U.S. and Latin American media.

The alleged Cuba connection was laid out in an intelligence report provided last year to U.S. government officials and sent by secure cable to the FBI’s counterintelligence division, according to the former official and a second person with close ties to Menendez who had been briefed on the matter.

The intelligence information indicated that operatives from Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence helped create a fake tipster using the name “Pete Williams,” according to the former official. The tipster told FBI agents and others he had information about Menendez participating in poolside sex parties with underage prostitutes while vacationing at the Dominican Republic home of Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor, donor and friend of the senator.

A spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which functions as the island’s U.S. diplomatic outpost, did not respond to requests for comment.

The allegations against Menendez erupted in public in November 2012, when the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, quoted two Dominican women claiming Menendez had paid them for sex.

The FBI investigated the prostitution claims but was unable to corroborate them. Last year, three Dominican women who had initially claimed to reporters that they had been paid to have sex with Menendez recanted their story.

BTW, the inestimable Charlie Pierce notes some additional irony here.

You noticed the name of the source that misled Tucker Carlson and His Evil Minions™?

Well, the name Pete Williams has a history:

And, it appears that the Cuban spooks may well have a more finely honed sense of humor than we previously have noticed. Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a senator from New Jersey named Harrison Williams.Senator Williams was a Democrat of decent instincts,but he also was something of a grab-it-all and, one day, a phony Arab sheikh in the employ of the FBI dropped in on him with some money the sheikh said he’d like to share in exchange for Williams’s help in buying the output of a defunct titanium mine. This bit of American Hustle landed forced Williams to resign from the Senate and landed him in the federal sneezer for three years.

As it happens, because his given name was Harrison Arlington Williams, Jr., his friends all called the senator, “Pete.”

“Pete Williams.”

Well-played, Cuban spies. Very well-played indeed.

I think that I can authoritatively state that the schadenfreude drought is officially over.

Quote of the Day

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Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.

—Joseph Heller

H/t Atrios.

First as Tragedy, then as Farce*

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Paul Wolfowitz is boosting Ahmed Chalabi as the next Prime Minister of Iraq:

Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who helped spur the U.S. invasion of his country, would be viable as its next prime minister though close ties he established with Iran pose an impediment, said Paul Wolfowitz, a top American national security official when the war launched.

“The man is a survivor,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capitol with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “That’s impressive. I think he wants to succeed in what he does, he’s smart; maybe he’ll figure out a way to do it.”

Chalabi, 69, currently serves in Iraq’s Parliament as government forces battle insurgents who have destabilized the country and prompted calls for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s resignation.

Chalabi’s political group, the Iraqi National Congress, supplied Wolfowitz and others in President George W. Bush’s administration with information that tied then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and alleged he was developing weapons of mass destruction — the justification for the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The information was later discredited and in May 2004, U.S. soldiers raided Chalabi’s house and offices in Iraq to investigate allegations of fraud and grand theft against him.

Why are we listening to these people after all that they have screwed up to completely?

The fact that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, etc. are viewed as anything but a punchline is a complete indictment of our media.

* The full quote, ascribed to Karl Marx, is “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

German ‘double agent’ is arrested on suspicion of spying for the U.S.

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An agent at the BND, the German intelligence service, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US:

German detectives have arrested a man suspected of spying for the United States in what could prove the ‘biggest scandal involving a German-American double agent since the Second World War’.

 The 31-year-old German citizen was being questioned today on suspicion of snooping on Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA affair.

 According to one German newspaper, he was first arrested amid suspicions he tried to make contact with Russian intelligence, only to confess he was in fact spying for the Americans.

………

The man has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, two politicians, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

Both lawmakers are members of the nine-person parliamentary control committee, whose meetings are confidential, and which is in charge of monitoring German intelligence.

The parliamentary committee investigating the NSA affair also holds some confidential meetings.

(emphasis mine)

First, let me state the obvious: Allies spy on each other. It’s a fact of life.

In a properly run intelligence service, this tends to be low key, and it’s confined to items of direct security interests, things like divining the relationship with other states, basic positions in negotiations, potentially military technology, etc.

This is not this. This is the CIA/NSA/etc. spying on an official parliamentary inquiry because they are worried that the revelations might embarrass them personally.

This is stupid, and, as I have noted many times before, it is indicative of an intelligence apparatus that is completely out of control of either our defense and diplomatic establishment, to say nothing of the the President.

This is insane.

And finally, Glenn Greenwald comes very close to saying that the origins of this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden, so there is necessarily a 2nd  leaker as its source:

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.

Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.

The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.

Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That’s particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”

Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.

“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don’t believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there’s a second leaker out there.”

Seriously, this is a bureaucracy to run amok, and the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of leakers to provide any oversight scares the hell out of me.

Time for Some Schadenfreude

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There was an open carry demonstration in Richmond, VA, and only two people showed up:

More than 300 people were invited on Facebook to walk down Cary Street on July Fourth with handguns, rifles and other so-called “long guns” proudly displayed.

 Two showed up — and they were the organizers of the midday event in the family-oriented Carytown shopping district.

 “I don’t know why,” said organizer Jason Spitzer, 29, when asked to explain the low turnout for what he described as an Independence Day demonstration to “spread Constitutional awareness” of Americans’ Second Amendment right to bear arms.

 “But even if nobody came I’d still walk,” the Chesterfield County steel mill worker said, holding a large American flag in his hands, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a holstered handgun on his hip. “It’s the Fourth of July and I love my country.”

 But with turnout so low, the shoppers and diners along Cary Street weren’t quite sure what to make of the two-man march, which might very well have gone unnoticed were it not outnumbered by two television crews and a photographer in tow.

BTW, I’m with the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life on the appropriate response if some of the open carry terrorists show up to your school/restaurant/laundromat, leave the area immediately without making an effort to pay:

The questions that concerns me now is how we bystanders should react when people come into a store with guns. There really is no legitimate way of determining intent. Even if the people with guns are carrying a sign claiming to be activists (which they do not do), they could be lying, just setting us all up for slaughter. And since there is no way to know what is on their minds, all we have are our instincts, but as we all should know, our instincts are often racist, classist, and frequently mistaken. So, what should we do?

My proposal is as follows: we should all leave. Immediately. Leave the food on the table in the restaurant. Leave the groceries in the cart, in the aisle. Stop talking or engaging in the exchange. Just leave, unceremoniously, and fast.

But here is the key part: don’t pay. Stopping to pay in the presence of a person with a gun means risking your and your loved ones’ lives; money shouldn’t trump this. It doesn’t matter if you ate the meal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just received food from the deli counter that can’t be resold. It doesn’t matter if you just got a haircut. Leave. If the business loses money, so be it. They can make the activists pay.

Following this procedure has several advantages. First, it protects people. Second, it forces the businesses to really choose where their loyalties are. If the second amendment is as important as people claim, then people should be willing to pay for it. God knows, free speech is tremendously expensive. If it weren’t, I’d be reading this on ESPN during prime time, not posting this on Blogger.

Third, this proposal has the added advantage of taking the activists seriously. Most gun-rights activists describe a world of tremendous dangers. Guns, they repeatedly tell us, are the only thing between home invasion, rape, murder, and government intrusion. Okay, well if that’s true, then we bystanders should be equally afraid, and react instantaneously to keep away the chaos and the violence. We learned to be afraid from the gun-rights supporters. They have gotten everything they wanted.

This is an unbelievably appropriate response.

Yes, Snowden Could have Used Channels to Raise His Concerns ……… Not

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Jeffrey Scudder had his career destroyed by the CIA because he filed Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify historical documents:

His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

 It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.

 To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.

 His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.

What were these documents?

The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles “Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor” and “Soviet Television — a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers.”

 Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA’s Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency’s archives for materials — often decades old — that can be released without posing any security risk.

(emphasis mine)

BTW, the CIA has since closed the Historical Collections Division, claiming “budget concerns.”

This is how the US state security apparatus addresses an attempt to hasten the declassification anodyne historical documents.

What do you think would have happened if Edward Snowden had gone further with his complaints?

He would still have had to flee the country for his own safety.

This is Going to get a Lot Worse Before it Starts Calming Down

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We have worries on both sides about more abductions of children and teens, and Hamas and the IDF exchanging love notes full of explosives:

Jewish and Muslim parents here kept their children indoors Monday, as anxious residents formed neighborhood watch groups and monitored social media, alert for revenge attacks following the recent abductions and killings of three Israelis and a Palestinian, all teenagers.

“It is the time of the ambush,” said Ahlam Kawasmi, 36, a mother of five who cares for the elderly. She was walking on the nearly deserted streets in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

“I tell my kids, ‘I don’t know if you leave if you will come back,’ ” she said. The family is avoiding public parks and outdoor evening celebrations during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Among Jewish residents of Jerusalem, warnings circulated on text-messaging services such as WhatsApp asking citizens to report suspicious cars, strangers and activities.

“Pay attention,” a typical message began. “We have received information from the police that there are Arabs in Jerusalem who are opening doors and pretending they are police. . . . Send this message to as many people as possible.”

The Israeli police issued a statement saying that none of the messages were official. Residents said the atmosphere in the city was beginning to remind them of the tension and distrust that marked the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.

In Israel’s south, meanwhile, residents were dealing not with rumors but with sirens warning them hourly to seek shelter.

Since the abduction of three Israeli students last month, mortar rounds and rocket shells have been fired at Israel almost daily from the Gaza Strip. Almost 100 were fired Monday, and sirens sounded in 10 towns, the military said, adding that Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense system shot down a dozen rockets. The security cabinet had warned earlier that Israeli forces would retaliate with a major sustained salvo in the event of such a barrage.

This is depressing.

At the end of this, nothing will have changed, and some more people will have died on both sides.