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Turkey also made a killing. It’s not only the deal with Gazprom; Moscow will build no less than Turkey’s entire nuclear industry, apart from increased soft power interaction (more trade and tourism). Most of all, Turkey is now increasingly on the verge of becoming a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); Moscow is actively lobbying for it. This means Turkey acceding to a privileged position as a major hub simultaneously in the Eurasian Economic Belt and of course the Chinese New Silk Road(s). The EU blocks Turkey? Turkey looks east. That’s Eurasian integration on the move. Washington has tried very hard to create a New Berlin Wall from the Baltics to the Black Sea to “isolate” Russia. Now comes yet another Putin judo/chess/go counterpunch – which the opponent never saw coming. And exactly across the Black Sea. A key Turkish strategic imperative is to configure itself as the indispensable energy crossroads from East to West – transiting everything from Iraqi oil to Caspian Sea gas. Oil from Azerbaijan already transits Turkey via the Bill Clinton/Zbig Brzezinski-propelled BTC (Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan) pipeline. Turkey would also be the crossroads if a Trans-Caspian pipeline is ever built (slim chances as it stands), pumping natural gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, then transported to Turkey and finally Europe.

So what Putin’s judo/chess/go counterpunch accomplished with a single move is to have stupid EU sanctions once again hurt the EU. The German economy is already hurting badly because of lost Russia business. The EC brilliant “strategy” revolves around the EU’s so-called Third Energy Package, which requires that pipelines and the natural gas flowing inside them must be owned by separate companies. The target of this package has always been Gazprom – which owns pipelines in many Central and Eastern European nations. And the target within the target has always been South Stream.

Now it’s up to Bulgaria and Hungary – which, by the way, have always fought the EC “strategy” – to explain the fiasco to their own populations, and to keep pressing Brussels; after all they are bound to lose a fortune, not to mention get no gas, with South Stream out of the picture. So here’s the bottom line; Russia sells even more gas – to Turkey; and the EU, pressured by the US, is reduced to dancing like a bunch of headless chickens in dark Brussels corridors wondering what hit them. The Atlanticists are back to default mode – cooking up yet more sanctions while Russia is set to keep buying more and more gold.

This is not the endgame – far from it. In the near future, many variables will intersect. Ankara’s game may change – but that’s far from a given. President Erdogan – the Sultan of Constantinople – has certainly identified a rival Caliph, Ibrahim of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh fame, trying to steal his mojo. Thus the Sultan may flirt with mollifying his neo-Ottoman dreams and steer Turkey back to its previously ditched “zero problems with our neighbors” foreign policy doctrine. The House of Saud is like a camel in the Arctic. The House of Saud’s lethal game in Syria always boiled down to regime change so a Saudi-sponsored oil pipeline from Syria to Turkey might be built – dethroning the proposed, $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria “Islamic” pipeline. Now the Saudis see Russia about to supply all of Turkey’s energy needs – and then some. And “Assad must go” still won’t go.

US neo-cons are also sharpening their spears. As soon as early 2015 there may be a Ukrainian Freedom Act approved by the US Congress. Translation: Ukraine as a “major US non-NATO ally” which means, in practice, a NATO annexation. Next step; more turbo-charged neo-con provocation of Russia. A possible scenario is vassal/puppies such as Romania or Bulgaria – pressed by Washington – deciding to allow full access for NATO vessels into the Black Sea. Who cares this would violate the current Black Sea agreements that affect both Russia and Turkey? And then there’s a Rumsfeldian “known unknown”; how the weak Balkans will feel subordinated to the whims of Ankara. As much as Brussels keeps Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia in a strait jacket, in energy terms they will start depending on Turkey’s goodwill. For the moment, let’s appreciate the magnitude of the geopolitical shockwaves. There will be more, when we least expect them.

To ground troops and the pilots who perform the mission, the A-10 and the CAS mission are essential and crucial components of American airpower. The A-10 saves so many troop lives because it is the only platform with the unique capabilities necessary for effective CAS: highly maneuverable at low speeds, unmatched survivability under ground fire, a longer loiter time, able to fly more sorties per day that last longer, and more lethal cannon passes than any other fighter. These capabilities make the A-10 particularly superior in getting in close enough to support our troops fighting in narrow valleys, under bad weather, toe-to-toe with close-in enemies, and/or facing fast-moving targets. For these reasons, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno has called the A-10 “the best close air support aircraft.” Other Air Force platforms can perform parts of the mission, though not as well; and none can do all of it. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) echoed the troops’ combat experience in a recent Senate Armed Services committee hearing: “It's ugly, it's loud, but when it comes in…it just makes a difference.”

In 2014, Congress was well on the way to roundly rejecting the Air Force headquarters’ efforts to retire the entire fleet of 350 A-10s. It was a strong, bipartisan demonstration of support for the CAS platform in all four of Congress’s annual defense bills. But in the final days of the 113th Congress, a “compromise” heavily pushed by the Air Force was tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015. The “compromise” allowed the Air Force to move A-10s into virtually retired “backup status” as long as the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office in DoD certified that the measure was the only option available to protect readiness. CAPE, now led by former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller Jamie Morin, duly issued that assessment—though in classified form, thus making it unavailable to the public. In one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel then approved moving 18 A-10s to backup status.

The Air Force intends to replace the A-10 with the F-35. But despite spending nearly $100 billion and 14 years in development, the plane is still a minimum of six years away from being certified ready for any real—but still extremely limited—form of CAS combat. The A-10, on the other hand, is continuing to perform daily with striking effectiveness in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—at the insistence of the CENTCOM commander and despite previous false claims from the Air Force that A-10s can’t be sent to Syria. A-10s have also recently been sent to Europe to be available for contingencies in Ukraine—at the insistence of the EUCOM Commander. These demands from active theaters are embarrassing and compelling counterarguments to the Air Force’s plea that the Warthog is no longer relevant or capable and needs to be unloaded to help pay for the new, expensive, more high-tech planes that Air Force headquarters vastly prefers even though the planes are underperforming.

So far, Congress has not been any more sympathetic to this year’s continuation of General Welsh’s campaign to retire the A-10. Chairman McCain rejected the Air Force’s contention that the F-35 was ready enough to be a real replacement for the A-10 and vowed to reverse the A-10 retirement process already underway. Senator Ayotte led a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter with Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), and Richard Burr (R-NC) rebuking Hagel’s decision to place 18 A-10s in backup inventory. Specifically, the Senators called the decision a “back-door” divestment approved by a “disappointing rubber stamp” that guts “the readiness of our nation’s best close air support aircraft.” In the House, Representative Martha McSally (R-AZ) wrote to Secretary Carter stating that she knew from her own experience as a former A-10 pilot and 354th Fighter Squadron commander that the A-10 is uniquely capable for combat search and rescue missions, in addition to CAS, and that the retirement of the A-10 through a classified assessment violated the intent of Congress’s compromise with the Air Force:

Some in the press have been similarly skeptical of the Air Force’s intentions, saying that the plan “doesn’t add up,” and more colorfully, calling it “total bullshit and both the American taxpayer and those who bravely fight our wars on the ground should be furious.” Those reports similarly cite the Air Force’s longstanding antagonism to the CAS mission as the chief motive for the A-10’s retirement.

By announcing that pilots who spoke to Congress about the A-10 were “committing treason,” ACC Vice Commander Major General James Post sparked an Inspector General investigation and calls for his resignation from POGO and other whistleblower and taxpayer groups. That public relations debacle made it clear that the Air Force needed a new campaign strategy to support its faltering A-10 divestment campaign. On the orders of Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh, General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle—the head of Air Combat Command—promptly announced a joint CAS Summit, allegedly to determine the future of CAS. It was not the first CAS Summit to be held (the most recent previous Summit was held in 2009), but it was the first to receive so much fanfare. As advertised, the purpose of the Summit was to determine and then mitigate any upcoming risks and gaps in CAS mission capabilities. But notes, documents, and annotated briefing slides reviewed by CDI reveal that what the Air Force publicly released from the Summit is nothing more than a white-washed assessment of the true and substantial operational risks of retiring the A-10.

Just prior to the Summit, a working group of approximately 40 people, including CAS-experienced Air Force service members, met for three days at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base to identify potential risks and shortfalls in CAS capabilities. But Air Force headquarters gave them two highly restrictive ground rules: first, assume the A-10s are completely divested, with no partial divestments to be considered; and second, assume the F-35 is fully CAS capable by 2021 (an ambitious assumption at best). The working groups included A-10 pilots, F-16 pilots, and Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs), all with combat-based knowledge of the CAS platforms and their shortfalls and risks. They summarized their findings with slides stating that the divestment would “cause significant CAS capability and capacity gaps for 10 to 12 years,” create training shortfalls, increase costs per flying hour, and sideline over 200 CAS-experienced pilots due to lack of cockpits for them. Additionally, they found that after the retirement of the A-10 there would be “very limited” CAS capability at low altitudes and in poor weather, “very limited” armor killing capability, and “very limited” ability to operate in the GPS-denied environment that most experts expect when fighting technically competent enemies with jamming technology, an environment that deprives the non-A-10 platforms of their most important CAS-guided munition. They also concluded that even the best mitigation plans they were recommending would not be sufficient to overcome these problems and that significant life-threatening shortfalls would remain.

General Carlisle was briefed at Davis-Monthan on these incurable risks and gaps that A-10 divestment would cause. Workshop attendees noted that he understood gaps in capability created by retiring the A-10 could not be solved with the options currently in place. General Carlisle was also briefed on the results of the second task to develop a list of requirements and capabilities for a new A-X CAS aircraft that could succeed the A-10. “These requirements look a lot like the A-10, what are we doing here?” he asked. The slides describing the new A-X requirements disappeared from subsequent Pentagon Summit presentations and were never mentioned in any of the press releases describing the summit.

At the four-day Pentagon Summit the next week, the Commander of the 355th Fighter Wing, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Col. James P. Meger, briefed lower level joint representatives from the Army and the Marine Corps about the risks identified by the group at Davis-Monthan. Included in the briefing was the prediction that divestment of the A-10 would result in “significant capability and capacity gaps for the next ten to twelve years” that would require maintaining legacy aircraft until the F-35A was fully operational. After the presentation, an Army civilian representative became concerned. The slides, he told Col. Meger, suggested that the operational dangers of divestment of the A-10 were much greater than had been previously portrayed by the Air Force. Col. Meger attempted to reassure the civilian that the mitigation plan would eliminate the risks. Following the briefing, Col. Meger met with Lt. Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Air Force Headquarters. Notably, the Summit Slide presentation for general officers the next day stripped away any mention of A-10 divestment creating significant capability gaps. Any mention of the need to maintain legacy aircraft, including the A-10, until the F-35A reached full operating capability (FOC) was also removed from the presentation.

The next day, Col. Meger delivered the new, sanitized presentation to the Air Force Chief of Staff. There was only muted mention of the risks presented by divestment. There was no mention of the 10- to 12-year estimated capability gap, nor was there any mention whatsoever of the need to maintain legacy aircraft—such as the A-10 or less capable alternatives like the F-16 or F-15E—until the F-35A reached FOC. Other important areas of concern to working group members, but impossible to adequately address within the three days at Davis-Monthan, were the additional costs to convert squadrons from the A-10 to another platform, inevitable training shortfalls that would be created, and how the deployment tempos of ongoing operations would further exacerbate near-term gaps in CAS capability. To our knowledge, none of these concerns surfaced during any part of the Pentagon summit.

Inevitably, the Air Force generals leading the ongoing CAS Summit media blitz will point congressional Armed Services and Appropriations committees to the whitewashed results of their sham summit. When they do, Senators and Representatives who care about the lives of American troops in combat need to ask the generals the following questions: Why wasn’t this summit held before the Air Force decided to get rid of A-10s? Why doesn’t the Air Force’s joint CAS summit include any statement of needs from soldiers or Marines who have actually required close air support in combat? What is the Air Force’s contingency plan for minimizing casualties among our troops in combat in the years after 2019, if the F-35 is several years late in achieving its full CAS capabilities? When and how does the Air Force propose to test whether the F-35 can deliver close support at least as combat-effective as the A-10’s present capability? How can that test take place without A-10s? Congress cannot and should not endorse Air Force leadership’s Summit by divesting the A-10s. Instead, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees need to hold hearings that consider the real and looming problems of inadequate close support, the very problems that Air Force headquarters prevented their Summit from addressing. These hearings need to include a close analysis of CAPE’s assessment and whether the decision to classify its report was necessary and appropriate. Most importantly, those hearings must include combat-experienced receivers and providers of close support who have seen the best and worst of that support, not witnesses cherry-picked by Air Force leadership—and the witnesses invited must be free to tell it the way they saw it.

If Congress is persuaded by the significant CAS capability risks and gaps originally identified by the Summit’s working groups, they should write and enforce legislation to constrain the Air Force from further eroding the nation’s close air support forces. Finally, if Congress believes that officers have purposely misled them about the true nature of these risks, or attempted to constrain service members’ communications with Congress about those risks, they should hold the officers accountable and remove them from positions of leadership. Congress owes nothing less to the troops they send to fight our wars.

However the necessary infrastructure to support intra-ASEAN trade growth is lagging behind with a delay in the completion of the Trans-Asia Highway in Cambodia, and vastly inadequate border checkpoints between Malaysia and Thailand in Sadao and Kelantan. Some infrastructure development projects have been severely hit by finance shortfalls within member states. There are a number of outstanding issues concerning the growth and development of the AEC. The ASEAN Secretariat based in Jakarta has a small staff, where the best talent is lacking due to the small salaries paid. The Secretariat unlike the EU bureaucratic apparatus in Brussels relies on cooperation between the member state governments for policy direction, funding and implementation of the AEC. Thus the frontline of AEC implementation are the individual country ministries, which presents many problems, as some issues require multi-ministry cooperation and coordination, which is not always easy to achieve as particular ministries have their own visions and agendas. Getting cooperation of these ministries isn’t easy. There are numerous structural and procedural issues yet to be contended with. At the inter-governmental level, laws and regulations are yet to be coordinated and harmonized. So in-effect there is one community with 10 sets of regulations in effect this coming January 1st. Consumer laws, intellectual property rights, company and corporate codes (no provision for ASEAN owned companies), land codes, and investment rules are all different among the individual member states.

One of the major issues weakening the potential development of the AEC is the apparent lack of political commitment for a common market by the leadership of the respective ASEAN members. Thailand is currently in a struggle to determine how the country should be governed. Malaysia is in the grip of corruption scandals where the prime minister is holding onto power. Myanmar is going through a massive change in the way it will be governed. Indonesia is still struggling with how its archipelago should be governed. There is a view from Vietnam that business within the country is not ready for the AEC. Intense nationalistic sentiments among for example Thais, exasperated by the recent Preach Vihear Temple conflict along the Thai-Cambodian border need to be softened to get full advantage out of the AEC. The dispute in the International Court of Justice over Pedra Branca, and the Philippine rift with China over the South China Sea show the delicacy of relationships among ASEAN members. The recent Thai court decision on the guilt of Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Tun in the murder of two young British tourists may also show how fragile intra-ASEAN relationships can be. The AEC is going to fall far short of achieving its full potential of becoming a major influence in global trade. The AEC is not intended to be the same model as the EEC. The AEC is far from being any fully integrated economic community. The lack of social, cultural, and political integration within the ASEAN region indicates the massive job ahead that Europe had been through decades ago. There is still a lot of public ignorance about what the AEC is, and lack of excitement or expectation for what should be a major event within the region. Respective national media are scant on information about the forthcoming launch of the AEC.

As Izady’s map so strikingly demonstrates, essentially all of the Saudi oil wealth is located in a small sliver of its territory whose occupants are predominantly Shiite. (Nimr, for instance, lived in Awamiyya, in the heart of the Saudi oil region just northwest of Bahrain.) If this section of eastern Saudi Arabia were to break away, the Saudi royals would just be some broke 80-year-olds with nothing left but a lot of beard dye and Viagra prescriptions. Nimr’s execution can be partly explained by the Saudis’ desperation to stamp out any sign of independent thinking among the country’s Shiites. The same tension explains why Saudi Arabia helped Bahrain, an oil-rich, majority-Shiite country ruled by a Sunni monarchy, crush its version of the Arab Spring in 2011. Similar calculations were behind George H.W. Bush’s decision to stand by while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in 1991 to put down an insurrection by Iraqi Shiites at the end of the Gulf War. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained at the time, Saddam had “held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia.”

Of course, it’s too simple to say that everything happening between Saudis and Iranians can be traced back to oil. Disdain and even hate for Shiites seem to be part of the DNA of Saudi Arabia’s peculiarly sectarian and belligerent version of Islam. In 1802, 136 years before oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia, the ideological predecessors to the modern Saudi state sacked Karbala, a city now in present-day Iraq and holy to Shiites. The attackers massacred thousands and plundered the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali, one of the most important figures in Shiite Islam. Without fossil fuels, however, this sectarianism toward Shiites would likely be less intense today. And it would definitely be less well-financed. Winston Churchill once described Iran’s oil – which the U.K. was busy stealing at the time — as “a prize from fairyland far beyond our brightest hopes.” Churchill was right, but didn’t realize that this was the kind of fairytale whose treasures carry a terrible curse.

1) More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped

NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

Glenn Greenwald follow up: When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your communications" - what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content? Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

What are your thoughts on Google's and Facebook's denials? Do you think that they're honestly in the dark about PRISM, or do you think they're compelled to lie? Perhaps this is a better question to a lawyer like Greenwald, but: If you're presented with a secret order that you're forbidding to reveal the existence of, what will they actually do if you simply refuse to comply (without revealing the order)? Answer: Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we're finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception. They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this: I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email. Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate? Answer: Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with. More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal."

Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you? Answer: This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk "RED CHINA!" reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM. Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it. Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption? Answer: Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. 

Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response. This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous "State Secrets" privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency. 

What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?

This country is worth dying for.

My question: given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism. Answer: I imagine everyone's experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress - and therefore the American people - and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

Regarding whether you have secretly given classified information to the Chinese government, some are saying you didn't answer clearly - can you give a flat no? Answer: No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.

So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala Answer: Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

While most journalists have been too intimidated to report details, and media have largely been put under State control, it has transpired that police has dispersed non-violent protests throughout the country. In some cases police used disproportionate violence and water cannons. “The heads of 100 nongovernmental organizations wanted to come and make statements here (in front of the parliament). But now you see, parliament is under blockade, the roads are closed, there is a TOMA (a water cannon vehicle). We are under siege,” said Aykut Erdogdu, a lawmaker of the Republican people’s Party – CHP. He added: “It is very wrong to block parliament on the eve of such an important constitutional change that will be discussed in parliament.” Erdogdu stressed that the CHP’s parliamentary group will attempt to prolong and if possible stall the “constitutional reform” by issuing proposals and non-confidence motions in order to emphasize their opposition. CHP Deputy Group Chair Özgür Özel, for his part, told the press: “We think that the longer this process is going to be, the more useful it will be, the more likely these mistakes will be realized, and the constitutional proposal will be completely withdrawn.” He added that the discussions which prolonged the process in the parliamentary commission were fruitful in that they created awareness about the importance of the amendment. “We will give speeches on the entire constitutional amendment and then on each item. In addition, we may also propose that the material be removed from the text because it is contrary to the constitution,” Özel added. The governing, Islamist AKP Group’s Deputy Chairperson Mustafa Elitaş, for his part, criticized the CHP’s plan to suggest it would appeal the amendments on the grounds that they are anti-constitutional. He noted that: “The parliamentary spokesperson should not issue that contradiction to the constitution proposal because after the constitution has changed, it will become the material of the constitution”.

Semih Yalçın, the MHP deputy leader, also opposed the CHP’s criticism that the amendment would pave the way for a federal system and ultimately the division of the country. Yalçın noted in a written statement that with the efforts of the MHP, the unitary character of the country had been protected and that all the possibilities that would lead to a regime change or division had been eliminated. The AKP and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) block is making a special effort to prevent any defections from their parties in an effort to reach the 330 votes needed to bring the constitution to the referendum. The total number of votes of the two parties reaches 355, but seven lawmakers from the MHP have already publicly declared their opposition to the package. On Monday Filiz Kerestecioğlu, the Peoples Democracy Party (HDP) Group’s Deputy Chairperson, stressed that the HDP would say “no” to the constitution, adding that the HDP would try to make sure that the lawmakers vote in a secret ballot, despite pressures from the ruling party. He added: “We believe that some lawmakers who have the possibility to say ‘no’ will be pressured by other lawmakers; the government will use man-to-man marking.” The HDP now decided to boycott the vote.

It's scary enough to think that the NSA is collecting so much information, but this mass location and metadata tracking at the local level all may be about to change. This week, the ACLU won a historic victory in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (serving Florida, Alabama and Georgia), which ruled that police need to get a warrant from a judge before extracting from your cellphone the location data obtained by way of a cell tower. This ruling will apply whether cops are going after one person, the whole tower and, one can assume, Stingrays. (The case was also argued by the aforementioned Wessler, who clearly is this month’s civil liberties Most Valuable Player.)This case has huge implications, and not just for the Stingrays secretly being used in Florida. It virtually guarantees the US supreme court will soon have to tackle the larger cellphone location question in some form – and whether police across the country have to finally start getting a warrant to find out where your precise location for days or weeks at a time. But as Stanford law professor Jennifer Granick wrote on Friday, it could also have an impact on NSA spying, which relies on the theory that indiscriminately collecting metadata is fair game until a court says otherwise.

You may be asking: how, exactly, are the local cops getting their hands on such advanced military technology? Well, the feds are, in many cases, giving away the technology for free. When the US government is not loaning police agencies their own Stingrays, the Defense Department and Homeland Security are giving federal grants to cops, which allow departments to purchase the gear at the cost of $400,000 a pop from defense contractors like Harris Corporation, which makes the Stingray brand.

Like Stingrays, and the NSA's phone dragnet before them, the militarization of America's local cops is a phenomenon that's only now getting widespread attention. As journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a seminal book on the subject two years ago, said this week, the Obama administration could easily limit these tactics to "cases of legitimate national security" – but has clearly chosen not to.No matter how much President Obama talks about how he has "maintained a healthy skepticism toward our surveillance programs", it seems the Most Transparent Administration in American History™ remains much more interested in maintaining a healthy, top-secret surveillance state.

The decision to hold Zubaydah “incommunicado” was disclosed by the Senate report on torture, which was released last December. But the judicial inaction on his case has received virtually no public attention. In all, Roberts has failed to rule on 16 motions, 13 of which have been filed by Zubaydah’s lawyers. Several of those allege misconduct by the government.

There have been a number of other highly publicised tax evasion and avoidance cases recently. For instance, many cases in the US involved branches or even key individuals working in branches of well-known Swiss and Israeli banks in the US, including UBS, Credit Swiss or Bank Leumi, or alternatively branches of American banks in Switzerland. But these tended to involve private firms. The Swiss government professed to have had no knowledge of such activities. Indeed, Swiss law prohibited Swiss banks, whether domestic or international, from providing any information on their clients to the Swiss state. This is a scandal with a difference. The leaked PricewaterhouseCoopers books imply there has been systemic collusion between companies from all over the world and the Luxembourg authorities in flagrant contravention of EU rules. The documents suggest that preferential tax treatments were guaranteed to these companies prior to their incorporation in Luxembourg.

This is the first case of suspected collusion between a government and a foreign firm in tax avoidance matters that I am aware of. In that sense, the current scandal places Luxembourg on par with Greece whose officials allegedly provided misleading data on Greek national debt to the Commission. More embarrassingly, all this took place during the time when the current president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, served as the prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995-2013. It is difficult to imagine that the prime minister of such a small state was unaware such deals were taking place. There is a difference between the court of law and the court of public opinion. But we know from recent cases that the EU Commission has tended to follow the court of public opinion with criminal investigations of its own, as was the case of Amazon. It is likely that the Commission will now investigate these leaks and may impose fines on Luxembourg. I doubt Juncker can ride this one out.

While corrosion is the No. 1 cause of pipeline spills, a sizable number of pipelines at water crossings have ruptured or been endangered by river scour. Among them: ► The Poplar (Jan. 2015) and Silvertip (July 2011) pipeline failures on the Yellowstone River. ► More than 20 pipeline river crossings in Montana were found to be "dangerously close to exposure" during inspections of nearly 90 pipeline crossings in 2011, according to one report. Many of them have since been reburied significantly deeper. The Poplar pipeline was not among the crossings tagged as being close to exposure. ► Nearly half of the 55 oil and gas pipelines that cross the Missouri River were found to have sections buried 10 feet or less below the riverbed, according to the Wall Street Journal. A study by the U.S. Geological Survey, meanwhile, found that the Missouri riverbed had deepened by nine to 41 feet in 27 places because of severe scouring during the 2011 floods. ► An Enterprise Products Partners LLP pipeline that was uncovered by river scouring and ruptured in August 2011. The line spilled more than 28,350 gallons of a gasoline additive into the Missouri River in Iowa. ► A June 2012 spill in Alberta, Canada, where an oil pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada failed along the Red Deer River and released more than 122,000 gallons of light crude. Investigators concluded that the pipe was uncovered by scour during high flood waters and subjected to vibrations from the river flow that led a weld to fail.

Three Enbridge Corp. crude oil pipelines crossing Minnesota's Tamarac River were exposed by floodwater erosion years ago, and were still exposed in mid-2014. None of the pipes had failed at that point, but one was being propped up by steel legs, according to an MPR News account. Federal regulations aren't much help. The only rule that addresses pipe burial at major river crossings requires petroleum pipelines to be laid at least four feet below the riverbed at the time of construction. Once a pipeline's installed, there are no requirements regarding burial depth. There is no rule requiring exposed pipelines to be reburied, though a spill under those conditions would invite regulatory penalties for leaving the line exposed to hazards. What's more, federal rules put the pipeline companies in charge of identifying all threats that could cause a spill in highly populated or environmentally sensitive areas, and the companies get wide latitude in deciding what to do about them, according to Rebecca Craven, program manager at the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit group that tracks pipeline risks and regulations.

Indeed, the required four-foot minimum initial burial depth for pipelines can be completely eliminated by natural erosion over time or by a single flood event. Active free-flowing rivers can carve with enough ferocity to lower their riverbeds by 20 feet or shift the waterway onto an entirely new path, which can add new stresses to the pipeline or put the river over pipe that has less cover or lacks reinforcement or protective cement casings. The hotly debated Keystone XL oil pipeline project would cross nearly 2,000 rivers, streams and reservoirs in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, according to one estimate. The route takes the pipe across the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, where owner TransCanada has pledged to install the pipeline 35 feet below the riverbeds.

See Also: Ruptured Yellowstone Oil Pipeline Was Built With Faulty Welding in 1950sIce Hinders Cleanup of Yellowstone Oil Pipeline SpillExxon Overlooked, Masked Safety Threats in Years Before Pegasus Pipeline BurstDilbit in Exxon's Pegasus May Have Contributed to Pipeline's Rupture

The Communications Act gives the FCC the authority to regulate radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable communications in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. This includes being responsible for protecting cellphone networks from disruption and ensuring that emergency calls can be completed under any circumstances. And it requires the FCC to ensure that access to networks is available “to all people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” Considering that the spectrum law enforcement is utilizing without permission is public property leased to private companies for the purpose of providing them next generation wireless communications, it goes without saying that the FCC has a duty to act.

But we should not assume that the Baltimore Police Department is an outlier—EFF has found that law enforcement has been secretly using stingrays for years and across the country. No community should have to speculate as to whether such a powerful surveillance technology is being used on its residents. Thus, we also ask the FCC to engage in a rule-making proceeding that addresses not only the problem of harmful interference but also the duty of every police department to use Stingrays in a constitutional way, and to publicly disclose—not hide—the facts around acquisition and use of this powerful wireless surveillance technology.  Anyone can support the complaint by tweeting at FCC Commissioners or by signing the petitions hosted by Color of Change or MAG-Net.