Dems renew Patriot Act in midst of impeachment process

Amid Impeachment Circus, 

Dems Sneak PATRIOT Act 

Renewal Past The American 

People

Authored by Mark Angelides via LibertyNation.com,

House Democrats have voted to keep funding the PATRIOT Act in a flurry of partisan hypocrisy. The surveillance legislation that should have every person fearing for their rights and privacy was recently shoehorned through the House, folded into a resolution to keep the federal government funded for three more months. The spending bill was pushed through with not a single Republican vote.

The PATRIOT Act passed in 2001 during the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, but it was originally conceived by former Vice President Joe Biden as the 1995 Omnibus Counterterrorism Act; the law has long been regarded as a major infringement on civil liberties and a reactionary piece of legislation which has passed its time in the sun.

Hypocrisy

The re-authorization was introduced late and offered lawmakers only 72 hours to read the entire continuing resolution. High-profile members of the progressive “Squad,” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who had previously spoken out against the act, were among those who voted to renew it. On her website, Ocasio-Cortez bemoans the creation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency as part and parcel of the PATRIOT Act and its associated legislation. She opines:

“The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was created in 2003, in the same suite of post-9/11 legislation as the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. Its founding was part of an unchecked expansion of executive powers that led to the widespread erosion of Americans’ civil rights.”

Why, then, would she now choose to cast a vote extending said powers?

A Whiff Of 2020?

Every Democrat in the House of Representatives voted for the resolution bar two, who abstained. The fact that those few who demurred were not brave enough to vote against the extension tells us something of interest: This was a party whip. It appears the upper echelons determined that the spending would go through come hell or high water, and woe betide those who go against the party leadership. Is there perhaps an element of self-interest at play here? Each decision made and vote taken in Congress sets a permanent record for individual members; is it beyond the party machine to lay traps for primary candidates who the management team does not view as “suitable”? Or perhaps the whole exercise was designed to test loyalty to the party line?

For a group that touts itself as being the defender of civil rights, it was a bold decision for Democrats to publically place themselves in the firing line of those who see the PATRIOT Act as an invasive, right-wing Trojan Horse.

An Opportunity For Trump?

If the partisan vote in the Senate matches that in the House, Republicans will decline to pass this resolution. The GOP will get the blame if a budget is not passed by midnight Thursday, in time for President Trump’s signature – but perhaps this could be a vote winner in 2020.

If the president rallies Republican senators to shoot the bill down, he can lay claim to a position in defence of civil liberties and drag along with him the Fourth Estate, which would have a hard time advocating a Bush-era policy that it has argued against for almost two decades. Add in a smattering of social media, and Trump could become the Civil Rights President … at least until the next storm in a teacup is served.

For a group that touts itself as being the defender of civil rights, it was a bold decision for Democrats to publically place themselves in the firing line of those who see the PATRIOT Act as an invasive, right-wing Trojan Horse.

An Opportunity For Trump?

If the partisan vote in the Senate matches that in the House, Republicans will decline to pass this resolution. The GOP will get the blame if a budget is not passed by midnight Thursday, in time for President Trump’s signature – but perhaps this could be a vote winner in 2020.

If the president rallies Republican senators to shoot the bill down, he can lay claim to a position in defence of civil liberties and drag along with him the Fourth Estate, which would have a hard time advocating a Bush-era policy that it has argued against for almost two decades. Add in a smattering of social media, and Trump could become the Civil Rights President … at least until the next storm in a teacup is served.

Obama tells his secret court to ignore the law he just signed

Obama Goes Full Stalin: Tells Secret Court To Ignore Law He Signed 4 Hours Earlier, Extend Illegal NSA Surveillance

Zero Hedge,

9 June, 2015

Just when we thought the absurdity that marks every single day of Obama's reign could not possibly be surpassed, we learned that 4 hours (3 hours and 47 minutes to be precise) after the US president vowed to sign a new law banning bulk data collection by the NSA (named, for purely grotesque reasons, the "USA Freedom Act"), the Obama administrationasked the secret Fisa surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

Or, as the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman, who spotted this glaring page out of Josef Stalin's playbook, summarized it:

June 2, 6:03pm: Obama says he'll sign law banning bulk collection.
June 2 9:50pm: DOJ asks secret court for 180 more days of bulk collection

— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) June 8, 2015

According to Ackerman, this latest travesty by the administration "suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection top."

Or, in other words, the administration "may" give orders that openly flaunt US laws. From the Guardian:

US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.

This is a problem because Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an “orderly transition” of the NSA’s domestic dragnet. However, Carlin "did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May."

So after the second circuit court of appeals already ruled NSA surveillance illegal, and after Congress officially shut down NSA's bulk data collection in its current form, Obama's DOJ decided to singlehandedly order that NSA spying on Americans be extended for at least another 6 months.

Follow the details of how the US Department of "Justice" crushes every semblance thereof:

Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection.

Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained “in effect” during the transition period.

“This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application,but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute”.

The punchline:

The second circuit court of appeals is supposed to bind only the circuit’s lower courts. But the unique nature of the Fisa court – whose rulings practically never became public before whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations – has left ambiguous which public court precedents it is obliged to follow.

Said otherwise, the NSA's espionage activity is above the law, any law.

Amusingly, some still harbor hope that "justice" is still a viable concept in the United States, such as the FreedomWorks conservative group, which is asking the Fisa court to essentially disband itself:

On Friday, the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a rare motion before the Fisa court, asking it to reject the government’s surveillance request as a violation of the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Fisa court judge Michael Moseman gave the justice department until this coming Friday to respond – and explicitly barred the government from arguing that FreedomWorks lacks the standing to petition the secret court.

Which, incidentally, is like asking Wall Street to police itself. A quick reminder of what happened there: after gross market manipulation was taking place for years involving trillions of interest-rate products, the person who witnessed it every single day called it, don't laugh, a "conspiracy theory."

Incidentally, "conspiracy theorists" is precisely what all those who accused the NSA of engaging in mass illegal surveillance even before the Snowden revelations, were branded as. And, we are confident, before all is said and done, the "conspiracy theorists" who dare speak the truth against the surreal Orwellian state that the US finds itself in, will be crushed by the administration, both the current and the one that will replace it, whose every day modus operandi is taken straight out of the Stalin memoirs.

Justice Dept: US to Resume NSA Bulk Surveillance

Issued Memo Just an Hour After Law Was Signed

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/08/justice-dept-us-to-resume-nsa-bulk-surveillance/

After being obliged under law to stop the illegal NSA bulk surveillance over the last weekend in May, President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law Tuesday, setting the stage for the resumption of the bulk surveillance, something the Justice Department is suggesting won’t take long.

Indeed, it took the Justice Department less than an hour after the president’s signature was made to release a memo announcing its intentions to seek a new court order for the “bulk production of tangible things under the law.”

The memo noted that courts had signed off on bulk collection of telephone metadata in the past, and predicted they would do so again under the new law under “a new mechanism” which includes increased cooperation from phone companies.

Though officials have assured us they did so, we really only have their word for it that the NSA surveillance program actually stopped for those 36 hours between expiry and the Obama signature on the USA Freedom Act.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt that, as the FBI kept its own telephone surveillance program going through that period without any legal basis. The NSA program was conducted for years in total secrecy, and it’s not hard to imagine it continued on through last Monday, irrespective of a brief change in the law.

The Patriot Act

No matter what Obama wants and the Senate does, the гsurveillance state is not going away. The NSA is the Hidden State and very probably has the power to (if it has not already) to blackmail anyone in power.

USA Freedom Act vs expired Patriot Act provisions: How do the spy laws differ?

RT,

1 June, 2015

The US Senate is poised to pass the USA Freedom Act now that major surveillance powers vested in the USA Patriot Act have expired. The House-passed bill, representing a slightly less intrusive spying law, will come to a vote on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Goodbye Section 215: Patriot Act key surveillance provisions expire

The Senate let certain parts of the USA Patriot Act lapse, failing to extend then by the June 1 deadline. Among them is the notorious Section 215, authorizing bulk collection of Americans’ telephone data, which a federal court ruled illegal earlier this month. According to government officials, it has been used almost 200 times per year. Other provisions that expired enable the government to conduct“roving wiretaps” of suspects who switch communication devices, or spy on “lone wolf” individuals who are not affiliated with an international terrorism organization.

The National Security Agency used Section 215 of the Patriot Act as the basis for collecting vast troves of phone records of Americans, who weren’t necessarily under official investigation. It was also used to track financial data and to obtain companies' internet business records. The extent of the mass surveillance program was revealed nearly two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Now, the Senate will address a so-called reform bill pushed by opponents of the expiring Patriot Act provisions. The USA Freedom Act, passed by the House in a 338-88 vote on May 13.

Supporters of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate say they are hopeful that the bill will pass this week.

"This is a good day for the American people,"said Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican sponsor of the USA Freedom Act. "I do believe we have the votes. The question is not whether we will get this passed, but when."

The bill, however, would require phone companies to maintain phone records that the government could later search. The legislation also includes provisions for “roving wiretaps” and “lone wolf”surveillance demanded by the FBI and the US Department of Justice.

“This is the only realistic way forward,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday of the USA Freedom Act. McConnell had fought to revive the expiring Patriot Act provisions but was thwarted, in part, by opposition led by Sen. Rand Paul.

The “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (USA PATRIOT) Act was adopted in October 2001, six weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks. Its most recent extension was in 2011.

The law allowed US intelligence agencies to amass bulk collections of various business records that were deemed "relevant" to a national security investigation. Yet, a US Department of Justice Inspector General report released in late May revealed that the FBI “did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders.” That finding was echoed by both the Obama administration's own Presidential Review Group and the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Reminder that Obama's #NSA review board found that Patriot Act's Sec 215 was "not essential to preventing attacks" pic.twitter.com/ZbgCvo3Sks

— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) June 1, 2015

The law's critics, such as Senator Paul, say the Patriot Act's surveillance powers amounted to a deep government intrusion into the lives of innocent Americans.

The USA Freedom Act would move the responsibility of holding phone records to private companies. Intelligence agencies like the NSA would then ask the companies for specific data on an individual allegedly connected to a terror group or foreign nation.

The Act also requires heightened transparency measures associated with government data searches, and it would allow tech companies to be more forthcoming regarding how many times they are tapped for data by government agencies. The bill also offers more access to case opinions made by judges of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has oversight over surveillance of suspects overseas.

The bill was first introduced in 2013 after whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks revealed the Section 215-fueled bulk phone metadata collection program.

Many in opposition to the Patriot Act say the USA Freedom Act is not a meaningful check on government spying capabilities. A leading critic of government surveillance in the US House, Rep.Justin Amash (R-Mich.) described the Freedom Act as a “step in the wrong direction by specifically authorizing such collection in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Others have pointed out that the USA Freedom Act will not address other surveillance powers the government can employ. Should the Senate approve the reform bill, “it’ll be suspicionless spying as usual until the next big surveillance provision, section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act sunsets at the end of 2017," said Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

Edward Snowden revealed the government uses Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to authorize digital surveillance on foreign persons, which, tech experts say has involved exploiting security weaknesses on behalf of the government and, as a result, secretly undermining the protocols meant to protect online activity.

“Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act conceals some of the worst mass surveillance operations,”he said recently. “In basic terms, the government here prefers to ignore that the 4th Amendment prohibits not just the unwarranted search of private records, but also the initial seizure of them as well. I suspect that's likely to haunt not only them, but all of us as well.”

Snowden also pointed to Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which requires government agencies to comply with data requests made by the CIA. He said the order, which has been used to justify the collection of unencrypted material, is a “skeleton in the closet,” but that changing it will be difficult “because the White House argues these operations are simply above the law and cannot be regulated by congress or the courts.”

Several civil liberties advocates are strictly opposing the USA Freedom Act because it does not go far enough in curbing unchecked surveillance.

"The sacrifices made by the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 are unacceptable," wrote several groups and intelligence community whistleblowers in a letter urging a vote against the reform bill.

"The modest changes within this bill, in turn, fail to reform mass surveillance, of Americans and others, conducted under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and Executive Order 12333. Given intelligence agencies’ eagerness to subvert any attempts by Congress to rein in massive surveillance programs by changing the legal authorities under which they operate, the modest, proposed changes are no reform at all."

NSA says it will keep phone records even if surveillance program end

NSA Blackmailing Obama? - 

Interview with 

Whistleblower Russ Tice

Wake up Australians and New Zealanders!!

I don't think this will come as too much of a surprise to most reasonably informed an intelligent Americans.

Rather, it is the people Dow-Under, in New Zealand and especially, right now, In Australia, who are starting to reap the benefit of their own domestic version of the Patriot Act, need to watch this and absorb the meaning.

The events of the past few days in Melbourne should give us cause to pause and reflect about what is REALLY happening

People in this country are way too gullible and need to wake up before it is too late.

FBI Informant Exposes Sting Operation Targeting Innocent Americans in New "(T)ERROR" Documentary

Democracy Now!

We spend the hour with an explosive new film that shines a bright light on the FBI’s shadowy use of informants in its counterterrorism sting operations. 

These undercover operatives are meant to root out would-be terrorists before they attack. Since 9/11, they have been used to prosecute at least 158 people. 

But critics argue they often target the wrong people, "including those with intellectual and mental disabilities, and the indigent." "(T)ERROR" goes inside the world of a particular informant who has played a key role in several major terrorism case. 

It does so while he is in the middle of carrying out his latest sting operation. It came together when two independent filmmakers gained unprecedented access to follow Saeed Torres, whose undercover name is "Shariff," a 63-year-old former black revolutionary turned FBI informant, as he monitors a white Muslim convert named Khalifah al-Akili. Torres knew one of the directors, Lyric Cabral, and after he came out to her as an informant, he agreed to share his story, without informing his superiors. 

As the film unfolds, al-Akili begins to post on his Facebook page that he suspects the FBI is targeting him. The filmmakers used this an opportunity to approach him, and soon find themselves interviewing him at the same time they are also documenting "Shariff" monitoring him. 

During this time each man remains unaware that the filmmakers are talking to the other one. 

We get the rest of the story when we are joined by the filmmakers who co-directed "(T)ERROR," Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, and play part of an interview with al-Akili from federal prison. Al-Akili was arrested just days after he emailed civil rights groups to say he believed he was the target of an FBI "entrapment" sting. 

He is now serving eight years in federal prison for illegally possessing a gun after having previous felony convictions for selling drugs. We are also joined by Steve Downs, executive director of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms. He works with Project SALAM, which published a report last year called "Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution." He is also representing imprisoned Pakistani scientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. 

We are also joined by Marlene, the mother of Tarik Shah, who was arrested in 2005 after a joint FBI/NYPD sting operation that also involved Saeed "Shariff" Torres. She details in the film how Shah thought Shariff was his close friend, but he was actually an FBI informant.

Edward Snowden explains NSA surveillance to John Oliver

This story confirms what we already know – that the vast majority of the population couldn’t give a f...k about what is most important.

Just as someone might become suddenly alarmed when they realised climate change was going to affect their lawn - “They always said that polar bears would starve to death, but they never told us our lawns would look like crap,” imagine how people might react if they realise that pictures of their private parts were being collected by the NSA.

Sometimes humour is the best way to explain what people would otherwise have problems relating to.

Kudos, John Oliver.

John Oliver Flew to Russia to Interview Edward Snowden for One of the Best Clips You’ll See All

John Oliver recently discovered, much to his dismay, that many Americans still don’t know who Edward Snowden is or what he did. And that’s a scary thought given that soon parts of the Patriot Act that allow the NSA and other agencies to look into our personal data are up for renewal. So the “Last Week Tonight” host did what any good political comedian would: He took a trip to Moscow to talk to the whistleblower and have him explain in terms average U.S. citizens can wrap their heads around just how scary and all-encompassing government surveillance is.

The resulting interview is hilarious and informative, but also an important addition to the conversation Americans need to have about surveillance. One of the most interesting parts comes when Snowden explains just how involved companies like Google and Facebook are in helping the government watch over civilians.

But really, the entire somewhat suggestive video is worth watching.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/john_oliver_flew_to_russia_to_see_edward_snowden_best_interview_20150406

In Secret, Senate Panel May Re-Up Vast Surveillance Dragnet

Wired

Spencer Ackerman

Most of Congress is busy debating whether to raise the debt ceiling. But starting Thursday, Danger Room is hearing, a group of Senators meeting behind closed doors may consider renewing a controversial law permitting widespread government surveillance of Americans’ communications.

For the article GO HERE