NSA

The view is from room 300, level 3 of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. The sunlight has long vanished, leaving the twinkling lights of the old castle quarter, Hradčany, to do their magic outside the windows. The students funnel in. The chalk is waiting to be used. The topic is something that is already wearing thin, not because it lacks weight, but because it has begun to disappear into the ether. What effect did Mr. Edward Snowden have, notably in states with a previous history of massive surveillance?

Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)

Sunday, November 30, Ferguson, Missouri. The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency on November 17, and this is what’s been happening in Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri:

There's been some dispute about what S. 2685, the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2014 would have done and not done to protect American citizens from the excesses of an unaccountable national security state. Since it won't become law-- the Republicans successfully filibustered it Nov. 18-- I guess we don't have to dig too deeply into the fine points. Actually not all the Republicans filibustered it.

President Barack Obama has always been quick to censure detractors when it comes to his regime spying on the public. His common retort always involves some sort of no-nonsense, Freudian super-ego-ish condescension, like, “I’m sure the NSA doesn’t care about what you’re doing on your computer.” And then he drones on, indulging himself in his awfully homiletic and providential presidential address.

President Obama, who is just now un-ending again the ending of the endless war on Afghanistan, has never made a secret of taking direction from the military, CIA, and NSA. He’s escalated wars that generals had publicly insisted he escalate. He’s committed to not prosecuting torturers after seven former heads of the CIA publicly told him not to. He’s gone after whistleblowers with a vengeance and is struggling to keep this Bush-era torture report, or parts of it, secret in a manner that should confuse his partisan supporters.

Yesterday the USA Freedom Act was blocked in the Senate as it failed to garner the 60 votes required to move forward. Presumably the bill would have imposed limits on NSA surveillance. Careful scrutiny of the bill’s text, however, reveals yet another mere gesture of reform, one that would codify and entrench existing surveillance capabilities rather than eliminate them.

A couple of days ago Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who directed the movie Citizenfour, gave an interview to the Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad. For those in the audience who don’t speak Dutch there’s a rough English translation available at Cryptome.

By Alex Sinha | ACLU | November 10, 2014 The chilling effect of surveillance may be spreading across the Atlantic. We learned last week that GCHQ – the U.K. equivalent of the NSA – permits its employees to target the communications of journalists and lawyers. That revelation has serious implications for the work of both […]

When news broke of Silk Road 2.0’s seizure by law enforcement a lot of people probably wrote it off as an isolated incident. Silk Road 2.0 was the successor to the original Silk Road web site and like its predecessor it was an underground bazaar for narcotics, fueled by more than $8 million in Bitcoin transactions and operated as a hidden service on the Tor anonymity network.