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So if they're not relying on either FISA or EO 12333, are they simply ignoring any legal restraints on the Agency? It's interesting that the NSA house of cards only crumbled with the announcement of spying on 35 foreign national leaders. Personally, I'd vote for putting the leader of every nation in a glass house, butt naked, and able to communicate with others only through a loudspeaker/broadcast system audible to everyone in the world. Secrecy in government is the problem, not a solution. 

Devastating charts comparing the percentage of Americans in the work force from January 2000 through February 2012.  The most interesting numbers show that the recession began in December of 2007, and ended in June of 2009 - yet it is after that June 2009 date that the % of Americans in the workforce begins to drop like a rock!  This is after the Obmaulous stimulous $1.2 Trillion, the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartels secret $16.1 Trillion, and, the magnificent cash-for-clunkers crap. Meanwhile, back in la la land, Obama thinks the problem is that we all need free contraceptives, free abortions and free sex-change coverage in our health insurance.  The Obama Spend-Borrow-Bail train has left the station.  Next stop?  War with Iran.  More powerful a phony narrative than contraceptives, abortions, and fear of a conservative repubican praying in the White House.  Besides, those bastards are refusing to use the dollar as the settlement currency for their oil sales!  Time to put them in the dirt along with that rogues gallery of tyrants who also defied the Federal Reserve International Bankster Cartel, demanding settlement currencies measured in GOLD instead of paper dollars; gallery includes notables such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and the Shah of Iran. Nothing like the Marines and the Seventh Fleet being unleashed to turn around the dismal poll numbers stubbornly connected to the even more dismal disaster known throughout the hinterland of bitter clingers as the economic truth. excerpt: Is President Obama relying on the Bureau of Labor statistics to manipulate the unemployment numbers to make them look better than they are? The real rate is probably more like 11.5%, and we have seen analyses that indicate that unemployment hasn't actually fallen at all under Obama: So what is going on here? The big problem is that people are giving up. Obama and the Democrats' job-killing regulations and climate of uncertainty are stifling innovation and inv

"Ghouta, Syria - As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week's chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit. ........ continued ............... Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much. The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad's guilt was "a judgment … already clear to the world." However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack. "My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry," said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta. Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a "tube-like structure" while others were like a "huge gas bottle." Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels. A

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

Note that this case was filed with the ECHR in September 2014.  Quote from a prior decision of the ECHR involving Dutch journalists and government surveillance that will give UK government a steep hill to climb in persuading the ECHR to give GCHQ a pass:  "…where, as here, a power of the executive is exercised in secret, the risks of arbitrariness are evident. Since the implementation in practice of measures of secret surveillance is not open to scrutiny by the individuals concerned or the public at large, it would be contrary to the rule of law for the legal discretion granted to the executive to be expressed in terms of an unfettered power. Consequently, the law must indicate the scope of any such discretion conferred on the competent authorities and the manner of its exercise with sufficient clarity, having regard to the legitimate aim of the measure in question, to give the individual adequate protection against arbitrary interference."

"Conflicting Meanings of Freedom For a classical liberal, freedom means that each individual possesses as a human being certain inviolable rights, those being rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property. And that human relationships should be based on voluntary consent and mutual agreement. For my interlocutor, freedom means "empowerment" or the ability to do or achieve certain things, without which "freedom" is not complete. These include a minimum or "decent" standard of living and the ability to attain certain potentials in life, which are everyone's "right" as a member of society. For my fellow conversationalist, society is a shared "community" of human beings each of whom owes certain things to the others, just as the others owe certain things to us. Society might be viewed as an extended family, from this perspective, all the members of which have certain required obligations to support and give assistance to their social "relatives." I suggested that society is a network of human relationships formed between individuals based upon opportunities for mutual betterment, including both the economic and the cultural in the widest sense, the fundamental foundation of which derives from those essential individual rights. The "Social Contract": Individualist or Collectivist? My dinner companion raised the issue of "the social contract," to which we are all participants and benefactors, he said. He referenced the famous French eighteenth century philosopher, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who reasoned that man began as savages in the wild threatened by both beast and other men. Everyone entered into a social contract and formed society for mutual safety and betterment by giving up a portion of their complete and unrestrained "freedom" in that earlier setting of savagery for the order and security of shared community. The freedom given up is compensated by safety and the security of mutual aid, including the modern welf

As the most prominent among law professors concerned with online civil liberties and now specializing in government corruption, if Lawrence Lessig says there are technical solutions for protecting us from online government snooping, I'm all years. He directs attention to technology being developed by Palantir, http://www.palantir.com/

"One presentation claims the XKeyscore program covers 'nearly everything a typical user does on the internet' ................................................................. A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet. The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight. The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10. "I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email". US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do." But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed. XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks - what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One

"But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed. " Note in that regard that Snowden said in an earlier interview that use of this system rarely was audited and that when audited, the most common request if changes were requested was to beef up the justification for the search. The XScore system puts the lie to just about everything the Administration has claimed about intense oversight by all three branches of federal government and about not reading emails or listening to (Skype) phone calls. The lies keep stacking up in an ever-deepening pile.

"Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."

From 2013, not long after the Boston Bombing. I never had much respect for those willing to surrender my liberties so they could feel a bit more secure. "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957).

Giving Capitalism Its Due :: The head of the Kauffman Foundation on the importance of entrepreneurship. "Then there is the question of the public perception of entrepreneurship. In the most recent survey that the foundation sponsored, pollsters found that 63% of respondents "prefer giving individuals the incentives they need to start their own businesses as opposed to allowing the government to create new jobs directly." Conducted last month, the survey also showed that instead of the government's stimulus package, two-thirds of respondents would prefer "reducing legal barriers and red tape for new business development" as a way to jump-start the economy. Finally, 89% of respondents said that "capitalism is still the best economic system for our country." Despite this popular attitude, Mr. Schramm worries that there is a tendency on the part of some citizens to want the government to prevent market chaos. Prior to the financial meltdown this fall, "I think we were in full tide of entrepreneurial capitalism and now there's an introspection, where the vocabulary is all about regulation and the importance of the government to restart the economy," he says. While Mr. Schramm believes that the government has a role to play, he argues that "historically through the last seven recessions it's been entrepreneurs who essentially restarted the economy."

" The Daily Bell Newswire Editorial FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013 What TARP Boss Neil Barofsky Told Me Yesterday Should Shock You By Bill Bonner 8 Bill Bonner The financial news is getting boring. The Dow goes only one way - up. But gold fell below $1,400 per ounce yesterday. Rather than trying to figure it out, yesterday evening we drove down to Zombietown. A friend in Washington had promised to introduce us to Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the TARP program. You remember TARP? It was the feds' $700 billion program to rescue the US economy from a correction. Neil Barofsky was in charge of it. So we decided to go down and ask him how it turned out... Meanwhile, in yesterday's International Herald Tribune was a small note: "Economists agree that spending cuts and tax increases have slowed the US recovery." Readers will recognize this as the usual claptrap. Government spending does not bring a genuine "recovery." C'mon... how many times do we have to explain? You take $5 worth of resources and give them to an armed 19-year-old in Afghanistan. He shoots a round or two into a mountainside... poof... the $5 is gone. Or you have an ATF official. He's idling his motor as he stakes out a house believed to be used by a cigarette smuggler. In a few minutes, or even seconds, the $5 has vanished. Or give the money to a disabled person; he buys a MoonPie and a Coke. Economists may record the spending as part of GDP... But how are you better off? You're $5 poorer, not $5 richer. But GDP growth is something economists feel they can control. So they go to work on it like a sex maniac strangling a prostitute. Nothing good comes of it. But at least they get results. And here comes Paul Krugman with more garroting wire! The New York Times Magazine: Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn't a morality play - that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared

NSA-PRISM-Echelon in a nutshell.  The list below is a short sample.  Each fact is documented, and well worth the time reading. "The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should know…" #1 According to CNET, the NSA told Congress during a recent classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls… #2 According to U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, members of Congress learned "significantly more than what is out in the media today" about NSA snooping during that classified briefing. #3 The content of all of our phone calls is being recorded and stored.  The following is a from a transcript of an exchange between Erin Burnett of CNN and former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente which took place just last month… #4 The chief technology officer at the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following statement back in March… "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever." #5 During a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing in March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the intelligence community has the ability to access emails "as they come in"… #6 Back in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress that the president has the "constitutional authority" to authorize domestic spying without warrants no matter when the law says. #7 The Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that the NSA was not collecting any information about American citizens.  When the media confronted him about his lie, he explained that he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner". #8 The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA has four primary data collection systems… MAINWAY, MARINA, METADATA, PRISM #9 The NSA knows pretty much everything that you are doing on the Internet.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Yahoo article… #10 The NSA is suppose

"Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.  Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.    Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.  There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare.  And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society.  Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally.  Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us.  Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain.  Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world.  The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine..."

"The U.S. Constitution provides impeachment as the method for removing the president, vice president, federal judges, and other federal officials from office. The impeachment process begins in the House of Representatives and follows these steps: The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings and, if necessary, prepares articles of impeachment. These are the charges against the official. If a majority of the committee votes to approve the articles, the whole House debates and votes on them. If a majority of the House votes to impeach the official on any article, then the official must then stand trial in the Senate. For the official to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict the official. Upon conviction, the official is automatically removed from office and, if the Senate so decides, may be forbidden from holding governmental office again. The impeachment process is political in nature, not criminal. Congress has no power to impose criminal penalties on impeached officials. But criminal courts may try and punish officials if they have committed crimes. The Constitution sets specific grounds for impeachment. They are "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors." To be impeached and removed from office, the House and Senate must find that the official committed one of these acts. The Constitution defines treason in Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

"Some thoughts on "Russia's Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election," the newly released declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta's emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge-Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war-is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment. The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin's useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media. 2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation's public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism s

Keep the Web Open and out of the hands of Agenda 21 UN socialists and the tyranny of ACTA. California Representative Darryl Issa has proposed  OPEN - the Online Protection & ENforcement of Ditital Trade Act.  Join the movement to keep the Web Open and sign on today. The background to this urgency is that Obama is trying to run an end around Congress, claiming that he has the authority to sign ACTA: From the Vanguard of Freedom: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is supposed to strengthen intellectual property rights; that is, the rights of artists to protect their creations from being copied and counterfeited, essentially stolen and reproduced without consent. However, many including Congressman Darrel Issa (via his website on this subject) has called ACTA "an unconstitutional power grab started by President George W. Bush and completed by President Barack Obama - despite the White House's January 14 criticism of legislative solutions that harm the Internet and erode individual rights." Says Issa: "…The Constitution gives Congress the power to pass intellectual property legislation - like SOPA and PIPA - and gives the Senate the power to ratify treaties. But the Obama Administration maintains that ACTA is not even a treaty, justifying the exclusion of both American citizens and their elected representatives. It is a practice Vice President Joe Biden decried as a U.S. Senator…" Maira Sutton and Parker Higgins, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an "electronics" rights advocacy organization, say in an article they authored, that "…We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA." Sutton and Higgins write: "…Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens. Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an 'ACTA Committee' to ove