Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Tim Johnson @ McClatchy.com, May 2
[.....] The data is contained in an annual Statistical Transparency Report, which offers details on how the government employs certain national security powers given to it by Congress.
By “targets,” the report says, it refers to individuals, groups or even foreign nations that use a particular telephone number or email address.
One observer of the U.S. intelligence community said the rise in targets – which hit 92,707 in 2014 and 94,368 in 2015 – might reflect an increasingly diverse gamut of adversaries rather than an intensification of surveillance. “It might be that you had to add thousands of Russian hackers that you might otherwise have thought didn’t have intelligence value, but now they do,” said Mieke Eoyang, vice president for the national security program at Third Way, which describes itself as a centrist think tank in Washington [....]
Comments
Diane Feinstein interviewing Comey: "We've got a, I think, a problem and the issue that we're going to need to address is the FBI's practice of searching 702 data using U.S. person identifiers as query terms. And some have called this an unconstitutional back door search, while others say that such queries are essential to assuring that potential terrorists don't slip through the cracks as they did before. "
Yes indeed - we've got a branch of government that's played shell games and whack-a-mole with FISA & other overisight ever since 9/11, but we've spent less energy investigating this game than in multiple hearings over Benghazi or the preceding question, Hillary's emails. And indeed, how much more important did we know by at least July that the 702s affecting thousands/millions of peopleor Russian hacking affecting the election were, vs. a few dozen possibly confidential emails stored on a not-know-to-be-compromised server?
And it's ironic to me that the FBI has been reprimanded by judges for not ahdering to its constitutional limitations, but Comey felt entitled to chastise a Department leader of another branch of government for whom he couldn't actually prove wrongdoing despite a multi-year investigation. (Hirono came the closest to nailing his hubris to the wall).
And no one asks Comey if he was set up to be in this position, if it was carefully planned that he be put in a "shit or get off the pot" quandary just days before the election - he's convinced he didn't blink. I'm convinced he just largely closed his eyes, pretended this was just another "by the books/doing what's right" moment, but I'd hazard the folks behind this knew how he'd respond (and of course how Chaffetz or similar would respond - where' s Comey's investigation into *that*? may be there, but it'll be in the dark for months to come if not forever).
And I'm still pretty convinced that if Buzzfeed hadn't published Steele's dossier "irresponsibly" *2 months after the election*, we'd still be talking about Trump's victory as earned (as many still are) and about the need to suck it up and accept defeat. There would be no impetus to investigate how Giuliani was getting FBI leaks and felt entitled to discuss with impunity on talk shows, among many many other matters.
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/05/2017 - 7:16am
A rather bizarre self-excuse from Comey:
Like we're a bunch of dumb motherfuckers and don't know that this type of software didn't just get written in 3 days for this case, but that it's standard software for legal discovery and diligence, and quite likely they simply just outsourced the task to a company that specializes in it. Just like they threatened Apple to unlock a phone, all the while knowing they had a contractor that could do it anyway. "Our wizards", my ass.
Why didn't Comey say, "our guys gave me a really shitty estimation that made me decide in a completely inappropriate way, and I fired 2 of them for that broad professional incompetence"?
And all of this was over 12 supposedly classified emails that they'd seen before anyway. Instead of feeling "slightly nauseous", he should be puking all over the podium.
[Transcript at WaPo for those who need]
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/05/2017 - 8:16am