Dotty Liars and Listeners Testify at Senate Hearings

Breaking (Thu. 7 am): Snowden gets asylum in Russia! He’s moved on. Manning in prison, like Pussy Riot. Ironies abound. While the U.S.Senate and Obama intel agents debate the end of constitutional government, we former citizens, now resident aliens of the USA, must admit that the Internet hasn’t quite worked out. Luddites and poor folk, ancianos and those who opppose technology, were right to avoid the clutches of the mad mad mad world of spy v. spy. As NSA zeroes in, we’ll all be famous for five seconds as an email address–not fifteen Warholian minutes.

How long before Democracy Now is shut down and dissenters cast as critics will be called traitors in the total information awareness age of cops and robbers? Thank god for being trapped in Taos, our own lunatic asylum where nothing makes sense nor is it supposed to.

Greenwald Reveals “XKeyscore”

Manning Judge Promoted

(Editor’s Note: Illegality, Criminality, Mendacity, and Hypocrisy reign down on U.S. Senate Hearings and in the White House, State Department, and U.S. Military. Who can keep up? Google the News and weep for your country.)

Manning

MICHAEL RATNER, on Democracy Now, told Amy Goodman that the judge (Colonel Denise Lind), interestingly enough in the Bradley Manning case  “has been promised or given an appointment to the next highest military court, the appeals court, which I find extraordinary, that in the middle of a trial of the most important whistleblower in United States history, that the judge who’s presiding at it be given a higher position.

“During Daniel Ellsberg’s trial for espionage, which eventually just collapsed under all the government chicanery, hypocrisy, etc., the trial judge in that case was actually offered to be the head of the FBI. Haldeman, from Nixon’s office, went out and sat on a park bench with him, overlooking the Pacific, and said, while the trial is going on, “Hey, Judge, how would you like to be head of the FBI?”

XKeyscore

As the U.S. Senate hearing got under way, “the Guardian published another story about the activities of the NSA. The story, by Glenn Greenwald, derived from material provided by the former NSA contracter Edward Snowden. It details a search program called X-Keyscore.

“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.”

“Greenwald notes that the files address a comment by Snowden that he could access a wide range of materials from his desk. He said in his first video interview: “I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president,
if I had a personal email.”

As Greenwald notes:

“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.”

Connect the Dots

Both democrats and republicans closely questioned Intelligence agents at a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday.

According to reports, “NSA Deputy Director John C Inglis, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce strongly defended the bulk phone records collection. “We must have the dots to connect the dots,” Joyce said.