On Laughter and Forgetting Our EU Spying
I've long been intrigued by the response to the discovery of CIA spies in Germany, starting last week when seemingly everyone wanted to admit that the alleged spy was CIA's. Unlike the Pakistani, Mexican, Afghan, and other precedents, the government…
Did They Call Wiley Gill "Mohammed Raghead" Before Claiming Videogame Was a Flight Simulator?
The ACLU is suing the Federal Government for the standards it uses in Suspicious Activity Reports, which can record completely innocent actions. A lot of people are citing James Prigoff -- an 86-year old photographer and retired business executive,…
PapaDick and BabyDick Try to Sustain the Terror Industry
PapaDick and BabyDick Cheney are at it again. They've got a piece in the Weekly Standard trying to renew the magic power of terrorterrorterror.
The intelligence claims they make are so batshit crazy they're even being debunked in the WSJ…
Kerry, UN Fail to Resolve Afghan Election Crisis
Three short weeks from tomorrow marks the date on which Afghanistan's new president is to be sworn in. The problem, though, is that Abdullah Abdullah refuses to believe that he could have beaten Ashraf Ghani by a million votes in the first…
NSA Only Finds 59% of Its Targeting of US Persons
This will be a minor point, but one that should be made.
The Privacies and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on Section 702 included this little detail:
In 2013, the DOJ undertook a review designed to assess how often the foreignness…
Pakistan Operation: 800,000 Displaced, Army Claims Zero Civilian Deaths, Barber Aided Taliban Escapees
Today, Pakistan's military escorted selected members of the media through Miramshah, which had been ground zero for militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan and the focus of the heaviest fighting in the Zarb-e-Azb offensive undertaken by…
Colleen McMahon Kicks the Administration's Ass
Back when we last saw Judge Colleen McMahon in the ACLU/NYT drone killing FOIA, she reluctantly shut down those FOIA bids. Since then, of course, the government kept blathering about its drone programs -- including releasing a white paper so…
Anonymous Pushback Emphasizes that Surveillance Leads to Informants
I've already suggested I suspect the government falsely claimed it didn't have a a FISA warrant on CAIR's Executive Director Nihad Awad in an attempt to gain an advantage in EFF's suit challenging the phone dragnet.
The conflicting denials…
All These Muslim Organizations Have Probably Been Associationally Mapped
The Intercept has published their long-awaited story profiling a number of Muslim-American leaders who have been targeted by the FBI and NSA. It shows that:
American Muslim Council consultant Faisal Gill was surveilled from April 17, 2006…
Eric Holder's Step Four: Fictional Efforrts Countering Violent Extremism
Eric Holder has attracted a bit of attention for lecturing the Europeans that they should engage in entrapment stings like our FBI, specifically to prevent Europeans from going to fight in Syria.
The second part of our comprehensive strategy…
WaPo and PCLOB Agree: NSA Does Not Comply with Its Minimization Procedures
There are a number of issues with Marc Ambinder's interpretation of the WaPo's analysis of the content of NSA's 702 collections as a "bust." Ambinder:
Overstates the specificity of the certifications, particularly in light of the general…
Keith Alexander Has Finance Worried about Being Zeroed Out, Just Like President's Review Group
Keith Alexander's clients in the finance industry are proposing what he proposed to them: a government-finance industry council to protect against cyberthreats.
Alexander had been pitching Sifma and other bank trade associations to purchase…
Abdullah Supporters Reject Preliminary Results, Urge Parallel Government
A few numbers will serve to highlight both the rage of Abdullah Abdullah's supporters and the extent of the fraud which they believe to have been perpetrated on behalf of Ashraf Ghani in Afghanistan's presidential election. In the first round…
Stewart Baker's IM-y Numbers
Stewart Baker accuses Bart Gellman and colleagues of inventing a phony statistic when they note that 89% of the communications collected under Section 702 were non-targets. He does some math to prove why they're wrong in their interpretation…
Center for Democracy and Technology's James Dempsey on "the Wall," Then and Now
Remember "the wall" that used to separate intelligence from criminal investigations and was used as an excuse for intelligence agencies not sharing intelligence they were permitted to share before 9/11?
It was demolished in 2001 -- when the…
FBI Disclaims Material Support for Terrorism Prosecutions -- for White People
Tara McElvey wrote a piece for the Beeb coming close to espousing a very (dangerous, IMO) British view: that the FBI should criminalize white supremacists' speech the way they have Islamic terrorists'.
[Frazier Glenn Miller's] writings are…
NYT Mischaracterizes PCLOB Report While Transcribing NSA Pushback to WaPo
The NYT has a story transcribing Administration efforts to "play down new disclosures" from the WaPo showing that the bulk of people whose communications were collected in a sample provided by Edward Snowden were not targets. The key claim…
The Unaudited Tech Analyst Access to US Person Data
In addition to its exposure of the sheer senselessness of much of the spying NSA engages in, yesterday's WaPo story also shows that the government's assurances that Edward Snowden could not access raw data have been misplaced.
For close to…
NSA's Spying: Medical Records, Resumés ... and [about] Obama
The WaPo has been working for months to understand a chunk of incidentally collected data Edward Snowden took from the NSA. They discovered the bulk of people being spied on -- who were for the most part incidentally collected -- were innocent…
Happy Fourth!
I'm heading out to Ann Arbor for festivities today, and I may well leave the laptop home...
I was going to wax politic about our Constitution. And oh, what the heck -- why not quote from the end of John Roberts' decision in Riley v. California…