Showing posts with label NSA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NSA. Show all posts

05 March 2019

NSA Halts Mass Unconstitutional Surveillance U.S. Domestic Phone Records



Disputed N.S.A. Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says

The National Security Agency has shut down a controversial program that collects domestic phone and text records, a senior Republican congressional aide said.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times


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The National Security Agency has shut down a controversial program that collects domestic phone and text records, a senior Republican congressional aide said.CreditCreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans’ domestic calls and texts, according to a senior Republican congressional aide, halting a program that has touched off disputes about privacy and the rule of law since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The agency has not used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not ask Congress to renew its legal authority, which is set to expire at the end of the year, according to the aide, Luke Murry, the House minority leader’s national security adviser.
In a raw assertion of executive power, President George W. Bush’s administration started the program as part of its intense pursuit for Qaeda conspirators in the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and a court later secretly blessed it. The intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden disclosed the program’s existence in 2013, jolting the public and contributing to growing awareness of how both governments and private companies harvest and exploit personal data.
The way that intelligence analysts have gained access to bulk records of Americans’ phone calls and texts has evolved, but the purpose has been the same: They analyze social links to hunt for associates of known terrorism suspects. . . .


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html


Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)

09 December 2016

Obama Directs All U.S. Intelligence Agencies "Full Review" And "Deep Dives" Of Cyber Attacks And Foreign Intervention In 2016 Election To Report Before Leaves Office 20 January 2017 To Share Results With Lawmakers And Others

     Friday, 9 December 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C. - President Obama this past Tuesday, 6 December 2016, delivered a major national counterterrorism speech in the works for months recounting his administration's efforts and successes and referring to a 61-page report released the day before on Monday, 5 December 2016. The President spoke at MacDill Air Force Base, the Tampa, Florida home to both the U.S. Central Operations Command and the U.S. Special Operations Command each of which have undertaken operations central to Obama's role as Commander-In-Chief during the term of his Presidency and thus an appropriate venue to seek to defend his legacy in this area.
     Obama doubtless also now will wish to take whatever possible further opportunity arises to try to educate, inform and prepare his "unexpected" successor President-elect Trump. This dutiful most serious effort made perhaps to appear more casual and thus more palatable to Trump despite the extremely responsible President Obama's well-founded deep concern and probable consternation if not growing alarm as to what if any advice or intelligence no matter how compelling of which President-elect Trump cares to avail himself. Trump presently appears more committed to using his valuable transition time holding further "campaign" rallies of no apparent productive purpose rather than concerning himself overly with the nuances of intelligence he publicly has dismissed and national security daily briefings he has mostly missed not to mention apparently President Obama's long-prepared speech on United States counterterrorism efforts.
     The unusually reportedly unambiguous U.S. government intelligence that President-elect Trump has continued to disparage, discredit and dismiss despite it being of the most immediate and escalating public and congressional concern including as it further evidences broad ongoing cyberthreats to national security has already been warned of by the DNI and Department of Homeland Security both directly having taken the very rare step of specifically issuing statements calling out Russian highest-level government malfeasance before the election specifically identified as computer hacking and theft of and dissemination of confidential communications intended to damage Democrats in particular and/or otherwise interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential electoral process.
     This was accompanied by an unprecedented unspecified but definite retaliatory threat from Vice-President Biden nevertheless still followed by Russian meddling later affirmed by the NSA's Admiral Michael Rogers and now seemingly confirmed by every other U.S. intelligence agency as well as members of Congress particularly including those on intelligence committees requesting that confidential intelligence be declassified so that it can be made public. Even despite White House assurance as to the "integrity" of the election results now at least publicly as of today, President Obama himself who has said that he had previously spoken to Vladimir Putin and told him there would be "consequences" for and to "cut it out" as to Russian meddling in the 2016 electoral process Obama nevertheless also has found it necessary to put further steps in motion to more thoroughly examine the nature and extent of Russia's hostile actions.
     At an event today homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco informed reporters that President Obama has put these further steps in motion that will result in a report for distribution to lawmakers and "other stakeholders." She said that while working as a senior FBI official that she was aware of "malicious cyber activity" related to both the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Ms. Monaco said that in 2008 the FBI had notified then-Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns that their computer systems had been infiltrated by the Chinese. She said she did not know if the cyber attacks in the 2016 election just held had "passed the threshold" of the earlier attacks.
     Asked whether President-elect Trump had shown sufficient concern about the Russian hacking and interference, since he has not publicly retracted his complimentary mentions of Vladimir Putin during the campaign nor retracted his invitation for Putin to hack and steal Hillary Clinton's emails Ms. Monaco said it was "too early to tell" in Trump's incoming administration was sufficiently concerned about any threat from Russia.
     Another source from the Obama administration said the review was sparked in part by a demand from lawmakers for further information about what response had been taken against Russia. The lawmakers as previously reported in an earlier post here also requested that the Obama administration review information of the Russian election hacking and interference and determine what intelligence could be declassified so that it could be disclosed to the public.      
     Specifically President Obama now has directed all U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct a "full review" of cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election. White House deputy spokesman Eric Schultz said that President Obama wanted a "deep dive" that would look back for a pattern of such behavior continuing over a period of several years. He said that President Obama wanted the review completed "under his watch." Schultz emphasized that "[t]his is a major priority for the president of the United States."
     Readers interested in more information about President Obama's counterterrorism speech reviewing efforts and successes through his administration as well as the current state of affairs and more can go to the first link below. Those readers interested in more information regarding the announcements and information from Obama administration officials and spokespersons giving some apparently new background on past presidential election hacking as well as the significant broad "deep dive" and "full review" announced today to be done by all United States intelligence agencies to deliver a report to President Obama before he leaves office to be shared with lawmakers and other "stakeholders" as well as unclassified information to be disclosed to the public can go to the second link below.
     Readers interested in more information on the above from the publication which hosted the event where the intelligence review of election tampering was announced by the Obama administration homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco can go to the Christian Science Monitor article at the third link below. Readers interested in watching a brief video of White House deputy spokesman Eric Schultz' press statement on the above with links to the accompanying Washington Post articles can go to the fourth link below.
   
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/us/politics/obama-in-major-national-security-speech-to-defend-counterterrorism-legacy.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/u-usa-election-cyber-idUSKBN13Y1U7

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/1209/Obama-orders-review-of-US-election-amid-Russian-hacking-concerns

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/obama-orders-review-of-cyber-attacks-on-presidential-election/2016/12/09/aa2b9e9c-be43-11e6-ae79-bec72d34f8c9_video.html

Copyright 2016 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

11 November 2016

Trump Is Russia's "Useful Fool" C.I.A. Former Director Charges As U.S. Spy Community Dreads Briefing Tweeting Trump On Nation's "Deepest Secrets"

       Friday, 11 November 2016, WASHINGTON, D,C. - UPDATED - While former CIA acting director Michael Morrell asserts that Russian former KGB/FSB Vladimir Putin "has cleverly recruited" President-elect Donald Trump as an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation" it appears that Putin's actions and words vis-a-vis the "post-truth" Trump are more predictably opportunistic than "clever" better described as consistent with Putin's routine modus operandi of thinly veiled but tenuously deniable essentially obvious "covert" attempts to leverage Russia's increasingly limited resources by intruding on including by often brutal disruption of world affairs.
     Such attempts including with disinformation, propaganda and "fake news" regularly are sought to be obscured consistent with decades-known former Soviet practices with which previously KGB/FSB Putin is well indoctrinated as he deploys them going to any length to again make Russia appear to be a meaningful player including even so far as to committing atrocities on a global scale as deemed necessary in this pursuit. Meanwhile Putin in order to survive can only succeed personally by continuing to distract the Russian people with cheap propaganda from the unfolding domestic economic and social disaster he has overseen and ignores at home even as Putin himself has operated his faux "democracy" in actuality a kleptocracy by means of which Putin has stolen and enriched himself at the expense of the Russian people robbing them of former State industry assets in an amount reportedly estimated to be at least $252 billion. These may turn out to be a rather unmanageable amount of stolen funds to hide indefinitely from western intelligence agencies assessing "retaliatory measures" including repatriating the funds or at least exposing their existence to the Russian people from whom they have been stolen.
       Putin's "clever" bromance with Trump has been called out by many ranging from late-night television host comic monologues to an unusually stark unambiguous public calling out of Putin cyber-meddling hacks made by U.S. intelligence agencies. These include the Department of Homeland Security ("intelligence" notably no longer applying to self-righteous FBI Director James Comey (who Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) calls a "Republican operative" who cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election) and his rogue FBI "Trumpland") and further including even the rare public definitive statement of Russian malfeasance by James R. Clapper Jr. Director of National Intelligence who oversees them all. Trump nevertheless ignored and in fact rejected the warning of the Nation's most knowledgeable intelligence officials. Trump relied instead on his "gut" completely uninformed by any meaningful knowledge of foreign affairs and blissfully unencumbered by any context one might assume informed the usual United States president gained from, e.g., reading something more than the "Breaking News" at the bottom of the FOX-TV screen.
       Trump certainly has not hidden his admiration and astoundingly naive belief that his "soul mate" Putin regardless of his growing portfolio of atrocities and  increasingly vast human rights abuses probably is a great guy with whom Trump and his staff of cronies actually may have more, perhaps a lot more, in common than the American people might even suspect. Russian diplomats already certainly have wasted no time even as early as yesterday trying to broadcast that information, misinformation and/or disinformation. Who knows or even really cares at this point given Trump's own profoundly troubling campaign statements including publicly encouraging Russia to spy on the United States in order for Trump to gain some perceived political advantage over his rival on the basis of stolen information. (Call to mind any past criminal Republican U.S. president?)
       Moreover former NSA (1999-2005) and CIA (2006-2009) director Michael V. Hayden goes so far as to identify Trump as what the Soviets called a "polezni durak" which means the "useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited".  Hayden admits that that is a "pretty harsh term" but concludes that it is the "most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now". President-elect Donald Trump reportedly this week has commenced briefings by United States intelligence analysts with a "read-through" of the President's Daily Brief providing Trump with the same "sensitive compartmentalized information" (SCI) being the United States most highly classified information of real-time top level intelligence and national security developments including operations and capabilities which are reported by U.S. intelligence analysts to President Barack Obama each day.                
       Concerned readers interested in more information as to why the United States intelligence community "dreads" providing Trump with more detailed intelligence and national security information including the Nation's "deepest secrets" can go to the Washington Post links below. The first link provides more detailed information on the scope and depth of the intelligence and national security communities' fears about Trump and the reasons therefor. The second link is to former NSA and CIA director Hayden's opinion piece in that same publication. Both links further provide additional links to more information on and related to this matter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-trump-about-to-learn-the-nations-deepest-secrets-a-sense-of-dread-in-the-intelligence-community/2016/11/09/e4206810-a676-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop_b

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-cia-chief-trump-is-russias-useful-fool/2016/11/03/cda42ffe-a1d5-11e6-8d63-3e0a660f1f04_story.html?tid=a_inl

Copyright 2016 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

03 July 2015

GCHQ Amnesty International Spying Outrage As British Investigatory Powers Tribunal Court Admits Prior GCHQ Spooks "No Spying" Determination A Lie

     Friday, 3 July 2015, LONDON - Amnesty International the globally recognized human rights organization has called for an independent inquiry after the "outrageous" revelation on Thursday that Amnesty International was lied to by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) monkey court in a ruling last month that the already wildly out-of-control British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) mass surveillance conducted (lin conjunction with and/or sharing data with the N.S.A.) seemingly no longer with any apparent relationship to any legitimate national security concerns whatsoever but without any meaningful consideration invading the most intimate privacy without limitation of any foreign or domestic friend or foe maybe even itself and having extended GCHQ spying in addition to other lesser known human rights groups also now admitted further to include spying on Amnesty International despite previous denials including an impossibly improbable claimed "determination error" even by those ostensibly "overseeing" the GCHQ  spy agency.
     The GCHQ was described by whistleblower Edward Snowden in the movie "CitizenFour" as even more invasive than the N.S.A. which presumably would be out of all proportion to its unbridled violation of civil rights which it only could marginalize by capitalizing on people's fear of terrorism disrupting the measured governance of a free society. (Incidentally the exact aim of "terrorists".) IPT President Sir Michael Burton said the IPT "wished to apolgise for and correct an error in its Determination of 22 June 2015" in which the GCHQ oversight Monkey Court incredibly after 18 months of litigation apparently was unable to determine that the GCHQ was spying on Amnesty International although the IPT did figure out (wrongly) that the GCHQ was not following proper internal procedures in spying on another human rights Egyptian organization which the GCHQ in fact never had been spying on at all.
     To add insult to injury the Amnesty International secretary general Shalil Shetty in a statement of outrage which interested readers can read in some length by going to the first BBC link below emphasized that, "If they hadn't stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to, we would never even have known. What's worse, this would have been considered perfectly lawful."
     Mr. Shetty's outrage further was ignited by the fact that the UK (and likely partner N.S.A.) government mass surveillance jeopardized the very work of Amnesty International and other human rights groups by compromising their "confidential communications" with "human rights defenders and victims of abuse" which they now could "credibly believe" after these revelations of GCHQ spying "was likely to end up in the hands of governments" presumbly interfering with and/or negating critical humanitarian efforts of Amnesty International. Mr. Shetty's full reported statement of outrage linked to below as mentioned above concluded that "[t]he revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies of the UK's surveillance legislation."
     It would seem so given that extraordinarily invasive powers apparently bestowed by the UK government on the outrageous spying activities of the GCHQ likely conspiring with its twin partner in crime the unconstitutional illegally operating N.S,A, for purposes intended to be focused on fighting terrorism instead being diverted instead or also to human rights organizations unbelievably including Amnesty International long recognized as one of the if not the most important and effective private organization working to protect human rights worldwide.
     As if to highlight the ignorance of the UK government regarding the misdirected uncontrolled mass surveillance predator it is allowing the GCHQ to become and the UK government's apparent ignorance of the either total intentional ineptitude and/or criminally willful ignorance of the IPT Monkey Court which apparently serves some essentially non-existent oversight role serving only to prolong the gross abuses of the GCHQ the UK government at the time of the original untruthful "Determination" of the IPT Monkey Court exalted it as the "IPTs confirmation that the interception by GCHQ in these cases was undertaken lawfully and proportionately."
     The horrendous cost in resources that are desperately needed for actual national security and the protection of human rights of this eighteen month matter are astounding considering that it would seem apparent to any rational person that the action originally brought in this matter by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Amnesty International if truthfully addressed with integrity could have been avoided altogether or resolved with the pertinent simple questions swiftly answered with a few communications among the responsible parties. However readers apparently must keep in mind the necessity of absolute secrecy in the "decision-making" of the IPT Monkey Court which apparently can span lengthy periods of time gathering the "facts" especially when for example as in this case there were two. In fact the IPT seems much like it may be the impaired cousin of the "FISA" Monkey Courts in the U.S. which is saying very little indeed.
     Those readers interested in an earlier most significant IPT Monkey Court decision predicate to the present one originally made in error can go to the second BBC link below to the "Determination" reported 5 December 2014 that the GCHQ's "Tempora" huge mass surveillance program unsurprisingly did not violate human rights reportedly encouraging the GCHQ as a glorious "emphatic victory". Alas with no degree of contortion can the present "Determination" be characterized no matter how small the Amnesty International victory may be for the moment although urged by its resounding cries of outrage clearly much needed revisions to surveillance litigation by the UK government and serious enforceable overhaul to the GCHQ's oversight are put in place to reign in an agency and program apparently badly off course.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33370406

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30345801

Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

01 July 2015

FISA Secret Monkey "Court" Rubber Stamps Illegal NSA Resumption Under So-Called "Patriot Act" Of Bulk Phone Data Collection In Superficial Mock Ruling Rejects The Federal Court Of Appeals For The Second Circuit Decision That Trash "Patriot Act" Never Authorized Illegal NSA Spying On Americans

     Wednesday, 1 July 2015, WASHINGTON- The federal government announced Tuesday that it disgracefully had gone to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) secret monkey rubber stamp court which is authorized only to rule on matters of national security which cannot be made public in order that the Obama administration illegally could get around the lengthy well-reasoned decision of the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit finding NSA mass phone data collection has been illegal since its inception in 2001 as the so-called "Patriot Act" granted the NSA no such authority to engage in its spying activities on Americans.
     Nevertheless although no such national security situation requiring secrecy existed at present the federal government went to the FISA secret monkey rubber stamp "court" before the FISA monkey judge retreated into hiding so as first to get a predetermined ruling worthy of an morally intellectually bankrupt idiot obediently issued by FISA monkey Judge Michael W. Mosman that the so-called "Patriot Act" allows the State to resume illegal surveillance of Americans by bulk phone record collection for the next six months until the so-called "Freedom Act" initiates a new procedure whereby Americans' phone records will be kept by their phone carriers so the federal government will have to go first to the same FISA court which in its history has never denied nearly any secret unopposed request for anything from the federal government in order first to get monkey rubber stamped warrants to get Americans' phone records.
     The Obama administration's shameless Department of Justice (DOJ) expressed through spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle who actually did not speak but wrote of DOJ's obvious "agreement" with the federal government's blatantly illegal unconstitutional use of the FISA monkey Judge Michael W. Mosman rubber stamp court to get the decision it implicitly directed the FISA monkey rubber stamp court judge to give so that the NSA now can resume its illegal unconstitutional mass collection of Americans' phone records without regard or respect for the authority of the actual constitutional true regular real federal judicial system. To those troubled by the Obama administration's obviously unconstitutional use of the FISA monkey rubber stamp court it has been suggested that they as necessary heretofore just change one letter in its acronym and think of it as the Domestic Intelligence Surveillance Court (DISA) to encompass such uncontested secret rulings such as the present rancid stinking monkey court rubber stamp decision unconstitutionally purporting to legitimize mass domestic illegal unconstitutional surveillance by the NSA.
    This matter represents a dangerous expansion of the illegitimate "power" of the unconstitutional now not-so-secret FISA monkey rubber stamp court in a most grievous despicable precedent that is a foul and rank travesty of justice since the matter obviously should constitutionally have been left with the actual real federal courts as everybody already knows what the monkey court hijacked case is about. Other secret FISA monkey court rubber stamp judges (using the term "judges" very loosely) who have weighed in on various aspects of this matter obediently following their orders on how to rule have invariably sided with the unconstitutional and illegal positions for which the Obama administration has sought unlawful validation include secret FISA rubber stamp court monkey Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV as well as extra monkey Judge Rosemary M. Collyer by secret monkey rubber stamp court special invitation who otherwise serves as a United States Federal District Court real judge in a regular real federal court where she presumably is allowed to make her own decisions in public with opposing parties present consistent with the provisions of the United States Constitution which actually really did create that court making its decisions legally enforceable unlike those of the FISA monkey judge rubber stamp court to which the People never granted any power at all rendering all of its monkey rubber stamp decisions unconstitutional and therefore illegally enforced against the People without any lawful authority.
     Readers interested in more information on the above can go to the Reuters and/or the New York Times articles linked to below.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/30/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKCN0PA2G220150630?feedType=RSS the &feedName=topNews

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/us/politics/fisa-surveillance-court-rules-nsa-can-resume-bulk-data-collection.html?ref=us

Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

                  

28 June 2015

Pentagon "Backpack Nuke" Spy Chief Undersecretary Of Defense Michael G. Vickers USD-1 Despite Career Of Failures Highest Civilian Military Intelligence Official "Quietly Retires" Under Obama New Defense Secretary Ashton Carter

     Sunday, 28 June 2015, WASHINGTON - Perhaps but doubtfully intentionally on the internationally recognized day on which Socialism is celebrated worldwide, on Thursday, 1 May 2015 United States Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD-1) chief Michael G. Vickers "quietly retired" from a position that most Americans including New York Times reporters apparently unsurprisingly have no idea is the highest-ranking civilian military intelligence position which oversees the Pentagon's $80 billion largest portion of the United States "intelligence community's" (publicly known) annual spying budget and also manages the nation's largest number of about 180.000 "intelligence people".
     Considering the responsibility of Vickers' position for imposing a major financial burden on the most unfairly heavily burdened taxpaying effectively chronically poverty-stricken portion of the country due to the government's obscenely wastefully unnecessary so-called "defense" spending not to mention the untold numbers of killings Vickers had overseen and ordered worldwide in the American people's name Vickers' reported departure from the Pentagon received very little publicity there with a low-key goodbye and curiously little coverage in the press.
     The New York Times article linked to below reporting Vickers' future plans simply confined itself to relate the uninformative news that Vickers himself provided that he intended to "sleep" claiming often having been woken up during his Pentagon service as Vickers told it on his special apparent "Batman"-type phone (reminiscent of the 1960's telephone drama "Batman" special red phone) presumably to authorize drone strike kills as well as other murders and so on which now allegedly had had its line "cut" along amusingly quaintly as told accidentally with his lined phone and cable service laughably claimed to have "cut him off" from the world as if he relied on technology for Pentagon communications from roughly a century ago.
     The Pentagon apparently had not heard this anecdote as it told the Washington Post at the same time that Vickers future assignments had not been ascertained although with his common drone strike kill experience he may find himself in some future assignment with the seemingly reassigned to disappearance CIA's "the Wolf" aka "Roger" aka "Mike" both of whom regardless of the atrocities for which they may have been responsible at least along with the CIA agent responsible for the "Argo" f*ck yourself mission have been portrayed in feature films although neither is known likewise to have received the "Intelligence" star.
     As to his curious career journey earning him such positions of enormous responsibility including for at least $80 billion of the taxpayers' money Vickers hardly distinguished himself in high school focusing his energy instead on lifting weights while maintaining a "gentleman's" (had he been attending Harvard which he did not) C+ average although a high school teacher oddly inexplicably did introduce him (according to the exceedingly sparse obviously slanted Wikipedia article also linked to below suspiciously seemingly poorly written by a friend) to the "realities of International Relations and the CIA's Secret War in Cambodia."
     The vision of the CIA's illegal activities killing foreigners in their homes overseas in undeclared war in a failed effort to achieve unobtainable objectives apparently resonated with Vickers and allegedly ignited a lifelong interest in Vickers in "International Relations" apparently as used in the loose sense by organizations such as the CIA as assassinating and killing people rather than as might be otherwise recognized in more established academic settings although Vickers would later use his contacts to get into these institutions for which he clearly was academically unfit in his "off years" to falsify a pedigree of "scholarship" much like a Bush might at Yale.
     Somehow being admitted to Pierce College where after being beat out for quarterback by Mark Harmon (later to become the star in the television drama "NCIS" and apparently enjoying a significantly more successful career at least by objective standards than Vickers) Vickers joined the Green Berets where he had the opportunity to prepare for his now "ideal occupation" of being in the C.I.A. Vickers reportedly scored 160 points on the Army's "Intelligence" test whatever that might be being the highest score possible and excelled at "Special Operations" training and hand-to-hand combat with many other similar extraordinary accomplishments apparently attributed to him in Wikipedia by an apparent admirer of equal academic ability given the misuse in this section of the Wikipedia piece of words more commonly confused by elementary school students such as the use of the word "through" for "throw".
     Sometime after this as a Green Beret during Cold War 1.0 Vickers reportedly either "volunteered to parachute" or depending on which version one prefers actually with a team infiltrated the borders of Warsaw Pact countries to place "backpack nukes" in those countries which as described in the Wikepedia article linked to below (there described under "suitcase nukes") were a later generation of portable nuclear weapons first developed by the C.I.A. and placed by Navy SEALS in North Vietnam in the early 1960's although never detonated. Although Vickers seemingly allegedly claimed his team actually "detonated" the weapons brought into Warsaw Pacts countries this seems an extremely unlikely claim as the portable nukes hidden in Warsaw Pact countries' populated or strategic areas might have been magnitudes more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and presumably someone would have noticed the large thermonuclear explosions with WWIII ensuing.
     (Today many do believe that the United States and the Russian Federation may still have powerful portable nuclear devices hidden in one another's countries left over from Cold War 1.0 near population centers as confirmed by one Russian spy defected to the U.S. but never found in the Shenandoah Valley that can be triggered on command of considerably more concern again as the United States and the Russian Federation effectively now have entered Cold War 2.0 with the "Atomic Clock" nearly as close to zero as ever. The portable devices reportedly incidentally also have been developed by the Israelis should this help calm anyone's nerves about global security.)
     What is particularly curious about Vickers' ever-advancing career is that it appears that almost all subsequent major covert military operations in which he participated or commanded in an intelligence capacity eventually proved to be spectacular failures ending in disastrous unforeseen consequences to the United States such as the creation and/or empowerment through funding and weapons supplies in the CIA's wildly expensive "Operation Cyclone" establishing the Taliban and al-Qaeda as obviously major later threats which succeeded in inflicting great harm to the U.S.
     Vickers bad judgment apparently continued after a lengthy sabbatical from "service" to the U.S. which later came to include later colossal failures such as the policies Vickers enthusiastically supported against Iraq now seen as being largely directly responsible for the circumstances allowing for the creation of ISIS incidentally totally unforeseen by Vickers both in his major "think tank" paper with web address below for interested readers as well as his Johns Hopkins' PhD. 1,000 page thesis on the need for aggressive action against Iraq presumably available upon request from that institution.
     In other words not very intelligent "Intelligence" at all with a remarkable inability to foresee the horrible consequences of the mistakes in which he played a leading role regardless of Vickers' alleged "perfect 160" score on his Army "Intelligence" test but seemingly more consistent with his high school C+ average suggesting he might have been better qualified for a less responsible position than the Undersecretary for Defense (USD-1) for which position President Obama unbelievably appointed Vickers after he was brought back into the federal government first for consultation by not-really-elected Cheney lapdog "President" George "litttle shrub" Bush after an apparent self-imposed period of decades of exile following his failures.
     It was during this period of exile that Vickers somehow got his Masters from Wharton followed by what sounds to be his bogus PhD. from Johns Hopkins with the adviser Eliot A. Cohen who sounds as if he should have been a certified lunatic apparently obsessed with the fanatical belief that the U.S. should go to war with Iraq simply because "Iraq had tried to assassinate Bush's father". This view which apparently deeply influenced Vickers in the writing of his 1,000 page PhD. thesis as well as his later "think tank" paper available as noted to interested readers somehow through the web address provided below.
     Vickers apparently after being taken care of at the private think tank was taken back into the federal fold of idiots willing to buy into the the Bush-Cheney obsession with attacking Iraq. Also of course actual cerebral intelligence clearly was not a qualification required for any senior position in the not-really-elected Bush-Cheney administration thus catapulting he new "scholar" Vickers in 2007 to the major Pentagon position of Assistant Undersecretary for Defense serving as adviser to the Secretary of Defense in such matters as "counter-terrorism" and other "operational activities". As mentioned above President Obama unbelievably retained him upon becoming President seemingly inconceivably naming him Undersecretary of Defense (USD-1) replacing James A. Clapper who became the Director of National Intelligence with blanket oversight of all intelligence operations.
     Vickers finally cemented his ineptitude in 2013 when along with the Snowden disclosures of the N.S.A. which he oversaw he appeared before the Armed Services Committee jointly predicting with the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency "future risks" that completely missed the imminent explosive emergence of ISIS. Previous to this Vickers was implicated but ultimately exonerated apparently for leaking information to the producers of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" over which the CIA essentially required script-review authority over in order to make sure it implied torture was "successful" in the ongoing efforts of Bush-Cheney Administration including top CIA officials to avoid prosecution for war crimes against humanity in return for assisting the producers with the film much as the police chief of Los Angeles had years earlier in requiring pre-review of scripts of the television drama "Dragnet" in exchange for assisting the producers of that show with the use of official Los Angeles Police Department personnel and equipment. Interested readers can find more information on this in the appropriate link below.
     According to the Washington Post article linked to below for interested readers Vickers did state at a recent conference that there was not so much one over-riding security threat to the United States today but rather those caused collectively by Russia, Iran, North Korea, terrorism and cybersecurity risks. There apparently are those who might not agree as referenced in last Saturday night's airing of the HBO program VICE devoted to what has become known due to the growing threat of NATO conflict with Putin's Russian Federation as Cold War 2.0 which as noted is reflected in the least time remaining until nuclear annihilation on the infamous "Atomic Clock" since the time of the Cold War. In any case it looks as if Vickers may be batting close to .999 in wrong predictions perhaps making him a likely candidate for yet another top military security position in the disastrous case of "Latino"  Jeb Bush 2016 should he become the third Bush to seek to destroy the country whether by Presidential win or coup d'etat.
     Readers interested in the above can go to various links provided below for more information with commentary on certain links which appear either incomplete and/or to contain significantly different information from one another.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_G. Vickers - surprisingly little information on him in Wikipedia considering especially the last position in which he served, as highest ranking civilian, former Green Beret, special forces, CIA, Afghanistan operation Cyclone, Wharton business masters, and Johns Hopkins PhD under Eliot A. Cohen apparent Iraq war fanatic because Iraq tried to "assassinate Bush's father" and notably Vickers PhD adviser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_A._Cohen - Vickers PhD. thesis adviser appears to be an idiot fanatic for war against Iraq since 2001 including because Iraq tried to "assassinate Bush's father". Query how could Obama let Vickers continue in his Bush position then advanced in 2011. His credentials in Afghanistan sound ultimately like a failure and his PhD adviser an idiot for war in Iraq which Vickers later echoed in calling for smaller force as in Afghanistan to win in Iraq after it already clearly was a disastrous war started with lies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/us/a-secret-warrior-leaves-the-pentagon-as-quietly-as-he-entered.html?_r=0 - Vickers responsible for largest share of U.S. $80 Billion annual (claimed) intelligence budget which goes to Pentagon not to the CIA nor any other agency

http://www.govexec.com/defense/2015/04/pentagon-intel-chief-retires-citing-no-wrongdoing-zero-dark-thirty-leak/111514/  - Vickers denies on "retiring" allegations of leaking information for "Zero Dark Thirty" re which there are other CIA-prroducer conference calls and meetings re CIA review of script for film. Vikkers admits he missed ISIS threat. Makes clear his future plan is not just to "sleep".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuke - Vikker was Green Beret responsible for placing portable nuclear weapons in Warsaw Pact countries during Cold War 1.0. Were these actually not yet placed as New York Times reports or already placed as indicated in Wikepedia article link internally here.  Claims his Green Beret teams infiltrated Warsaw Pack countries with "backpack nukes" to detonate them.

https://fas.org/irp/congress/2013_hr/022713vickers.pdf -Unclassified report by Vickers and head of DIA in early 2013 complains of "budget cuts" to defense and intelligence while reporting over 100, 000 employees and list current national security risks for Armed Services Committee in open hearing and completely miss coming threat of ISIS with no mention at all of ISIS, its formation or even recognizing a potential for its formation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/03/1c9/mike-vickers-longtime-senior-intelligence-official-and-former-cia-strategist-to-leave-pentagon/ - Vickers spent from 1980s to 2006 out of work perhaps because of involvement with massive buildup of future Taliban and Al-Qaeda funded by CIA and DOD in obsession to drive USSR from Afghanistan in massively long-term failure Operation Cyclone. Vickers later oversaw DIA, NSA and other "intelligence" agencies. His departure follows by just a month the appointment by Obama of new Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. Obama kept Vickers as a holdover from the Bush Administration.

Vickers "Think Tank" Paper:

file:///home/chronos/u-7a51b375f12f0369d925e36ea5039d09383d6cb2/Downloads/2004.12.01-Revolution-in-War.pdf - go to this address for Vickers' paper at CSBA about predictions of future warfare and budget-economic issues (in conservative think "how to get rich off war" tank)

http://www.muckety.com/Michael-G-Vickers/165727.muckety - Vickers has more connections to influential people than 93% of Americans according to this source perhaps explaining his later "higher education" and official appointments.

Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

27 May 2015

UPDATED: Obama Betrays U.S. Constitution And Electoral Base Presses Congress Keep Illegal Mass Surveillance Metadata Collection After Lying To People "50 Terror Plots" Thwarted When In Fact "Zero" Have Been Per CNN

     Wednesday, 27 May 2015, WASHINGTON, D.C. - President Obama this week continues to betray the United States Constitution and his electoral base with the increasingly falsely transparent Obama urging the U.S. Senate and all Congress to continue unconstitutional adjudicated illegal federal government mass surveillance of all Americans essentially continuing the most repugnant illegal provisions of the so-called "Patriot Act" then later passing off metadata collection to private telecommunications firms which will doubtless "securely" store all Americans' private communications for later use by the State under the so-called "USA Freedom Act".
     Obama national security agency mostly criminal directors and officials unsurprisingly faithfully have voiced a weak chorus of urging for the endorsement by those in Congress of their continuation of unconstitutional illegal practices which to date have accomplished nothing at all in protecting Americans from any terrorists whatsoever [UPDATE] even while President Obama outright has lied to the American people that "50 Terror Plots" have been thwarted when in fact CNN on air confirmed Friday, 29 May 2015 that President Obama now has been forced to admit the that the true number of terror plots thwarted in fact is "zero" even as the president still attempts to fan false terror throughout the nation without regard for the great cost to core essential American constitutional liberties. Meanwhile crybaby FBI Director James B. Comey badgers on for the endorsement of illegal unconstitutional "roving" wiretap activities of his agency plus a couple of others including strangely unused but nevertheless claimed essential authorities under the non-existent what the Obama administration calls "noncontroversial" provisions of the legally discredited so-called "Patriot Act".
     Not to be outdone in showing further her rote loyalties right out of the gate to her new boss Obama the presumably spoon-fed rantings of new Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch continued her threats that without the use of unconstitutional illegal authorities a "serious lapse in our ability to protect the American people" would result even as a senior Obama administration official unbelievably went so ridiculously far as to accuse the recessed Congress of "playing national security Russian roulette."
     One wonders to what hysterical heights White House terrorspeak rhetorical garbage might ascend were the country actually facing some real acute danger as the Obama administration appears prepared to wager a great many unfounded scare tactics on getting its way in just this week alone. Perhaps President Obama might be better advised to review the record of his claimed hero President Franklin D. Roosevelt before allowing his administration to continue to spout such obvious nonsense accomplishing little but discrediting the Obama administration now and in the future especially in a time of real crisis.
     The so-called "Patriot Act" must be allowed to expire 1 June 2015 and Congress reject any new unconstitutional criminal legislation such as the so-called "USA Freedom Act" which hardly has been debated in any meaningful way for such momentous legislation so seriously impacting core constitutional rights. False flag cries of desperation or Armageddon if no replacements are put in place of such illegal trash legislation as the "Patriot Act" by week's end are rightly disregarded as the Republican controlled Congress continues to demonstrate it has apparently neither the aptitude nor desire to engage in meaningful debate which cannot be replaced by last-minute horsetrading and dealmaking robbing the American people of the deeply thoughtful and comprehensive debate which Congress must have and the American people deserve and demand before the State take any action impacting these hugely significant areas to the future of our nation and the principles upon which it was founded.
     President Obama now repeatedly has done little but continue Bush administration illegal "national security" and law enforcement priorities despite pledging to do otherwise while at the same time allowing key Bush-Cheney administration torturers and other criminals to go completely unpunished and/or even giving them continued federal employment still engaging in existing and expanded illegal unconstitutional federal government encroachments on the People. The Obama legacy domestically in critical areas of promised change appears more and more to be little but an extension of the criminal Bush-Cheney administration policies with few lessons learned by key figures in a State run amok. The federal government intrudes further and further with dangerous challenges of the People's rights with the State's unconstitutional illegal actions anathema to the United States Constitution which the State continues to betray at its peril.
     Readers interested in more information on the above can go to the first two links below. Those readers interested in more background with extensive source links can go to the earlier Ninth Amendment 26 June UPDATED "Patriot Act Illegal Section 215" post where it first was published below on 9 May 2015. Readers further interested also can go to the last link below a very large collection of sources covering different aspects of NSA surveillance programs.    

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/us/politics/obama-urges-senate-to-renew-phone-record-collection-program.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congress-playing-national-security-russian-roulette-in-patriot-act-debate/2015/05/27/61262566-04c0-11e5-8bda-c7b4e9a8f7ac_story.html?tid=hpModule_f8335a3c-868c-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z9

https://www.tumblr.com/search/nsa%20surveillance%20program

Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

09 May 2015

MAY 27 UPDATE: Patriot Act Illegal NSA Section 215 Bulk Collection Of Phone Records N.Y. Federal Appeals Court Rules Has No Legitimate Legal Authority

     Saturday, 9 May 2015, NEW YORK, NY - In an extraordinary vindication for National Security Agency (N.S.A.) whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden massive secret dragnet U.S. government mass surveillance and metadata storage privacy invasions perpetrated by the N.S.A. revealed to the public in 2013 by documents that Mr. Snowden provided to the press have been found to be illegal since their 2001 inception by a momentous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. The Court ruled Thursday that the N.S.A. dragnet bulk collection of telephone records is illegal and cannot be justified under any reading no matter how tortured, contorted and convoluted of the widely despised Section 215 of the so-called "Patriot Act". The Court issued this decision without regard for repeated rulings since 2006 by the totally bogus unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) secret federal court hack monkey judges repeatedly rubber-stamping the illegal N.S.A. activities on the alleged authority of the Patriot Act the government hoping to give the illegal and unconstitutional N.S.A. abuses of the People some stink of legitimacy so as to keep all involved out of prison. In response to thousands of lawsuits brought following the Snowden revelations lower authentic real federal district courts have been split issuing contradictory decisions on the authority granted or not granted the N.S.A. by the Patriot Act Section 215.
     The dragnet bulk collection of Americans' telephone records first was undertaken illegally by the not-really-elected Bush-Cheney Administration in October 2001 as part of a larger group of Orwellian programs of indiscriminate dragnet mass surveillance and data collection the month after the horrific 11 September 2001 U.S. attacks without regard for the acknowledged lack of any statutory nor any other legal authority making it clearly illegal to perpetrate such an "unprecedented" power grab against the People's privacy in this country's past two hundred and fifty years. The Bush-Cheney administration unconstitutionally illegally expanded enormously the State's secret invasion of all Americans' privacy rights allegedly in order to hunt for hidden terrorist cells none of which have ever been found in the U.S. by the N.S.A. but also at the same time throwing into the Patriot Act a foul bubbling Macbethian cauldron of other draconian executive branch "wish list" police state powers having nothing at all to with terrorism which already repeatedly had been rejected by Congress in more more measured thoughtful times for example when not unbearably pressured by howling "national security" White House generated hysteria to pass a several hundred page stack of Bush-Cheney administration garbage legislation ink still wet on the page without reading it delivered at dawn all amid a backdrop of fears Congress at any moment might come under an anthrax attack therefore desperate to escape the Capitol building as soon as possible.
     Such a failed strategy consuming enormous amounts of money on the virtually useless outrageously expensive acquisition and operation of enormous amounts of technological equipment should long ago have been replaced largely by security efforts implemented with all immediate haste with a redirection of funding to appropriate domestic law enforcement authorities adapting to evolving terrorist threats for example just one suggested by a former Navy SEAL who had participated in a valuable discontinued operation in which U.S. special forces were tasked with setting up a "mock" terrorist cell with specifics unknown to the government and proceeded in their adapted "terrorist" mindset to identify "soft" and "hard" targets that actual terrorist cells or remotely "self-radicalized" individuals would be most likely to hit so that appropriate precautions presumably including surveillance could be put in place by the government.
     Should this sound naive to some perhaps readers may feel differently when informed that just one example of potential targets the special forces "mock" terrorist cell identified was not taking down "hard" target airliners but instead the "soft" targets at airports they identified as the long lines of persons corralled waiting to get into airport security checkpoints and perhaps worse yet also what the SEAL mock "cell" identified as often completely unprotected baggage claim areas where crowds of as many or more people than even are on one plane but actually from several planes often are gathered crowded together distracted and unwary in very close quarters which warnings the government still apparently largely has not heeded.
     These areas of potential high risk actually repeatedly were communicated to the world on CNN and are here repeated to an infinitesimally smaller audience the editorial board of the Ninth Amendment must emphasize emphatically only with the intention of promoting the safety and security of the American people encouraging the thoughtful and reasoned deployment rather than indiscriminate wasting of finite "national security" resources as best able to protect all and to call attention to the fact that while so many of this country's resources for "national security" are diverted increasingly to exotic and obscure seemingly unrealistic endeavors of agencies increasingly far removed from the reality of the streets that such potential targets as identified by the Navy SEAL on CNN (hopefully better protected by now in the wake of the CNN worldwide report months ago and if not readers are urged to demand whatever law enforcement authorities are available locally do so) and other commonsense precautions which often seem overlooked and/or underfunded while outfits such as the N.S.A. are consuming enormous amounts of U.S. taxpayers' money accomplishing virtually nothing at all to prevent domestic terrorism while simultaneously effectively in the process tearing to shreds the U.S. Constitution they are sworn to uphold and presumably dedicated to protect which is the sole basis of any legitimate power they may have and is the foundation protecting and preserving the continued existence of the United States.
     In any case back to the claimed objective of the not-really-elected Bush-Cheney administration to capture or kill terrorists and so commence U.S. aggressive participation in an enormously expensive armed conflict in both Afghanistan (to become the longest conflict in U.S. history) and the U.S. totally unprovoked "false flag" conflict started with an unprecedented "first strike" on Iraq (which Bush temporarily more confused than usual mistakenly thought that the U.S. had "won" having read "Mission Accomplished" on a banner strategically placed where he could read it from the deck of an aircraft carrier) and U.S. (with the dragging participation of coalition forces such as the British who did their best to stay back out of harm's way) invasion then gradually degrading into an apocalyptic nightmare in Iraq inuring to the enormous monetary profit of torture enthusiast "Pigheart" Dick "Criminal Notorious" Cheney while destroying their lives as they knew them for most of the rest other the others involved in the Iraqi conflict excluding Cheney's and other psychopathic opportunists who live to exploit the spoils of such turmoil and misery.
     Most significantly in addition to accomplishing no stated U.S. goals whatsoever after instigating and engaging in these enormously totally needless conflicts which caused the deaths and wounding of tens of thousands of American and  "coalition" soldiers as well as untold numbers of others including thousands of Iraqi civilians hit in the initial U.S. war armament industry "guaranteed precision bombings" of Baghdad and later events including the recently reported here in the Ninth Amendment massacre by Cheney Blackwater "Blackdeath" murderous psychopaths of unarmed civilians while caught in a traffic circle the Bush-Cheney Administration of course never was able to locate Osama bin Laden the accused "mastermind" of the horrific 11 September 2001 attacks. Bin Laden later was found allegedly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (another CIA victory racked up along with "Argo") and killed in Pakistan under the current administration of President Barack Obama.
     Today Afghanistan appears destined to be retaken by the Taliban whose origins in part are an unintended consequence of the CIA initiating the spending of billions of U.S. dollars on Operation Cyclone in the arming of the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets while also likely tangentially funding Osama bin Laden and the nascent al-Qaida later responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the U.S. Meanwhile today Iraq is occupied widely and under threat by the demented and depraved ISIS another U.S. unintended direct consequence in its the case of its "good fortune" resulting from the stupendously idiotic actions of the Bush-Cheney administration which with the most powerful armed forces in the world at its disposal managed to "save" both the U.S. and Iraq from non-existent fabricated threats by virtually destroying Iraq with wanton and willful lack of concern for human welfare breaking apart a tenuously held together country of diverse peoples and often conflicting interests.
     The Bush-Cheney administration travesty further succeeded in alienating a large part of Iraq's population after experiencing such things as the deadly mayhem of the Baghdad hell zone left for everybody else outside the U.S. tightly protected "Green Zone" enclave so dispersing into groups of armed insurgents making Baghdad a virtual civilian populated war zone. Such a surrounding uncontrolled environment overseen by no authority left by the totally unprepared U.S. forces led for one thing to the monumentally tragic al-Qaeda claimed bombing bringing down the Canal Hotel assassinating while killing many others as well the United Nations General Secretary's Special Representative in Iraq Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello thought to be a likely candidate for UN-Secretary General who had chosen to maintain U.N. operations outside the "Green Zone" which he rejected in order to preserve some semblance of legitimacy to the original espoused reasons for the outside world's descent upon the beleaguered Iraqi people ostensibly to work with and help them rather than live in bunkered fear of them. In the catastrophic bombing de Mello who was buried alive after several hours of frantic efforts to save him died under the rubble of the former building.
     Meanwhile in other catastrophic Bush-Cheney Administration U.S. blunders Iraq's newly "disbanded" and suddenly "unpaid" against the pleading of senior Iraqi military commanders (by proclamation of a new U.S. administrator of Iraq apparently fresh from her U.S. State Department cubical who had absolutely no idea of how she single-handedly was putting into motion monumentally destructive seriously deadly forces still greatly at play in world affairs today in her first disastrous day on the job alone) immediately fired the entire career professional Iraqi army with long combat experience from a particularly vicious ten-year war against Iran.
     The quickly alienated Iraqi officers and other soldiers knowing exactly where they were stockpiled departed with most of Iraq's armaments as U.S. troops watched with orders to do nothing. A few years later they returned with their new "friends" to collect the brand new armaments the U.S. had bought and left behind when it departed for the use of the newly-trained Iraqi army which abandoned the U.S.-supplied armaments and allowing the former Iraqi professional army to continue to provide for itself and its families having formed presumably the military core of the newly emerging demented and depraved ISIS terrorists who now allegedly represent a threat to a growing number of countries inconsistently rumored to include this country based on varying sources. It now has been determined that the Bush-Cheney ISIS legacy they left now represents a "national security" threat which Iraq never did.
     In any case for those readers remaining through the above digression the subsequent history of the Bush-Cheney secret illegal domestic spying initiative started in October 2001 essentially is that the N.S.A. mass surveillance and related activities came to be called part of the program called "Stellarwind" (such operations being named by failed aspirants unable to find more lucrative employment in the pharmaceutical industry making up new names for new medications) and for each component of the that program a legal basis as put charitably by the New York Times "evolved" (not how the law works) including after a mere five years of apparently unsuccessful efforts (an incredible feat given the readily available compliant FISA court rubber stamper judges) in 2006 the bulk phone records collection component of the Stellarwind program finally was rubber stamped by some FISA hack monkey judge willing to "legally legitimize" it "based on the idea that Section 215 could be interpreted as authorizing bulk collection." A rigorous legal analysis indeed: "could be" but apparently was not interpreted. It subsequently has been rubber stamped approximately every 90 days likewise by FISA monkey judges.
     Alas the federal appeals court in Thursday's unanimous decision did not agree with the FISA monkey court's "legal analysis" that the Section 201 authorization of the collection of records found to be "relevant" to a national security case meant collecting all records possible of every person in the United States and later figuring out if something in there were "relevant" to national security without "analyzing" others although apparently reading them. In its unanimous decision Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote for the Court that Section 215 "cannot bear the weight that the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program." The Court's ruling that the program is illegal noted that Congress was capable of writing a bill that clearly provided a legal basis for such an "unprecendented" program although the Court did not go on to reach the issue of whether or not it then would find any such bill unconstitutional as also had been argued before the Court against the program by the American Civil Liberties Union. Specifically,, Judge Lynch wrote: 

“Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans. Perhaps such a contraction is required by national security needs in the face of the dangers of contemporary domestic and international terrorism. But we would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language.”

     The federal appeals court decision without other federal government action yet known to have been taken in response appears to express the Court's determination that since 2001 all N.S.A. dragnet indiscriminate collection of Americans' bulk telephone records has been illegal and establishes for the time being that there is no legal basis for the continued collection of such records. The court however did not issue an injunction prohibiting that practice but instead remanded the case to the district court below it to figure out what to do. The legal status of the decision further is complicated by the issue of concurrent FISA Court determinations that Patriot Act Section 215 does authorize bulk collection of telephone records and that the FISA court has its own FISA appeals court where one might predict the outcome with some confidence. In the meantime the federal government could appeal the regular real federal court decision here to the U.S. Supreme Court.
     The editorial board of the Ninth Amendment joins many in applauding this long overdue federal court of appeals decision unanimously declaring the illegality of the government's dragnet indiscriminate bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the so-called "Patriot Act" which perhaps serendipitously coincides with a  great many immediate circumstances coalescing in just the type of debate for which the above decision calls.
     Current reports are that the debate this past week ranged from the House of Representatives bipartisan backing of the proposed fake-reform USA Freedom Act supported by the White House and apparently the N.S.A. and by F.B.I. Chief James B. Comey which would limit government requests for phone records stored by phone carriers to those based on "reasonable suspicion" to at least a handful of others opposed who appear likely to lose at the far right of the spectrum led by the "defiant" Senate majority leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard M. Burr (R-NC) both of who want the Patriot Act Section 215 to remain as is extended to the year 2020 both "dismissing" the Court's decision with Burr essentially calling the Court's determination "a joke".
     The Ninth Amendment due to near constant incidents often reported in posts here of private entities' either violation of privacy laws and/or in other ways often failing adequately to protect consumers' personal data which are are as bad or even worse than the government in its N.S.A. overloaded servers or wherever that it is neither safe nor advisable to entrust the nation's private phone carriers to store private personal consumer telephone records for the government on demand as provided in the proposed USA Freedom Act. The editorial board of the Ninth Amendment joins the American Civil Liberties Union position that the State's domestic dragnet indiscriminate mass surveillance and metadata collection that had been illegally based on the Patriot Act Section 214 under any circumstances is unconstitutional and moreover that rather then being legally required to store Americans' personal private telephone records carriers in fact should follow just the opposite practice and be prohibited from doing so under penalty of prosecution for privacy and other violations.
     Readers interested in more information about the above particularly details about and links including to the 97-page decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit can go to the first link below. Readers interested in the above also can go to the second link below which provides more recent information about the fallout from the Court's decision affecting government decision-makers especially now facing tight deadlines with Section 215 of the Patriot Act if unchanged expiring on June 1 but Congress having a scheduled recess next Friday 22 May 2015 for the Memorial Day holiday. Finally interested readers can go to the third link below for Reuters report on the above.
     [RE-UPDATE] Readers interested in more information on the above can go to the added Washington Post forth link below reporting that the White House is urging passage of the proposed fake-reform USA Freedom Act reportedly enjoying bi-partisan support and expected to pass the House of Representatives as early as Wednesday with the director of national intelligence and the attorney general expected soon to issue letters of support stating that they do no believe the USA Freedom Act will undermine national security while claiming the reforms it proposes will "enhance" Americans' privacy. The latter is an absolutely misleading lie by the Obama administration and its agencies.
     This fallacious White House position supporting the USA Freedom Act (which itself is absolutely objectionable to the Ninth Amendment editorial board just as it is to the entire New York Times editorial board as previously posted here) is knowingly based on a false proposition which does not bear its weight in that at the moment given as reported above the only real actual federal court to opine has been the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which has issued a decision finding the language of Patriot Act Section 215 presumably since 2001 neither has bolstered national security such that it now can be "undermined" by any new legislation purporting to weaken it nor could the ineffective Patriot Act Section 215 likewise in any way legitimately reduce Americans' privacy such that it needs to be "enhanced".
     Similarly the Obama administration's reported "conclusion" that the fake-reform USA Freedom Act offers the State the best way to "maintain its power" to obtain terrorist records with "some measure of speed" is equally specious given that the Court's decision finds that the the Patriot Act Section 215 language no matter how fairly (or unfairly) read confers no such power upon the State. In fact even given the proposition that having wrongfully assumed such a power under Patriot Act Section 215 the government actually has meaningfully obtained any terrorist records of significance particularly with the use of anything beyond previously existing powers seems more and more highly questionable upon more closely subjecting such claims to greater scrutiny.
     In fact most recently the much self-congratulatory degree of "transparency" of the Obama administration both in its actions and in the words of President Obama himself and his spokespersons has shown itself to and seems likely to stray even further as more facts become known from that characterization which President Obama would wish history to confer upon his administration not to mention his own legacy seemingly now better described as a growing concerted intentional opaqueness ranging through a disturbingly increasing scope of matters of great consequence and lasting concern to the American people.
     [UPDATE III] Readers interested in more recent updated information on the above can go to the added bottom three links with the Obama administration most recently "begging" that surveillance authority is "vital" as F.B.I. Director James Comey calls continued unconstitutional illegal current law enforcement roving wiretap non-existent legal authority "critical" to law enforcement and brand spanking new but not necessarily improved U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch immediately toes the Obama administration cynically bogus Obama (BOGUSPOTUS) line using a late CNN on-air scare as the usual fright manipulation forum for her threat that "loss" of unconstitutional non-existent mass surveillance authority poses an "increased risk to safety" of Americans without Lynch making any reference whatsoever to the countervailing invasion and violation of Americans' constitutional privacy and other civil rights (the last being the one long-forgotten except for "special occasions" D.O.J. department). [UPDATE IV] Readers interested in more recent information on the above can go to the added two links below. [UPDATE V] Because of the failure of the U.S. Senate either to extend nor to replace the Patriot Act before adjourning on Saturday, 23 May 2015 the so-called "Patriot Act" currently remains scheduled to expire automatically under its "sunset" provision on Monday, 1 June 2015. The U.S. Senate now is scheduled to re-convene on Sunday, 31 May 2015 in an attempt presumably either to extend or replace the Patriot Act before the Patriot Act's scheduled self-termination at midnight of that day. Readers interested in the latest information on the above can go to the added bottom link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/us/nsa-phone-records-collection-ruled-illegal-by-appeals-court.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/us/politics/court-ruling-on-nsa-data-collection-jolts-both-defenders-and-reformers.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/08/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKBN0NT29720150508?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-backs-bill-that-would-curtail-nsa-collection-of-phone-records/2015/05/11/aa96ee50-f7ec-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html?hpid=z10

UPDATE III links below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/us/politics/nsa-phone-data-collection-extension-splits-senate.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/opinion/rand-pauls-timely-takedown-of-the-patriot-act.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-is-playing-chicken-with-nsa-spy-program-white-house-says/2015/05/22/796e3574-00af-11e5-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html?tid=hpModule_ba0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z10

UPDATE IV link below:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/23/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKBN0O729C20150523?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

UPDATE V link below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/25/senate-nsa-vote-underscores-rift-in-2016-field/

UPDATE VI link below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html

Copyright 2015-2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved