Something Truly Terrifying: Chris Christie's Fear-Mongering Over Terrorism

I know many people were focused on the Donald Trump moments from the FOX GOP debate last night, and, given the entertainment value inherent in many of them, I can understand that.

But I found this exchange between Chris Christie and Rand Paul the most electrifying of the night:




That "Get a warrant!" response from Rand Paul to Christie resonated with me.

I'm sick of these politicians fear-mongering, using 9/11 and terrorism to subsume more and more power into the government to control and record every aspect of our existence.

Paul followed that "Get a warrant!" response to Christie with this:

.@ChrisChristie's disregard for the Constitution sets a dangerous precedent & ignores wisdom of our Founding Fathers. http://t.co/U2WCdnkJ1V

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 7, 2015

.@ChrisChristie will fear monger and violate your Constitutional rights. And for what? pic.twitter.com/jSDompb6h3

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 7, 2015

We can fight terrorism and protect the Bill of Rights.

— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 7, 2015

Indeed we can fight terrorism and protect the Bill of Rights.

In fact, what would be the point of "fighting terrorism" if we have to shred our Constitutional rights to do it?

Christie's wrapping himself in the Twin Towers and 9/11 last night was lame, his attack on Paul backfired (as it gave Paul a chance to launch the "Obama/hug" line) and the exchange over the Fourth Amendment and NSA surveillance between Christie and Paul just one more reminder of what an authoritarian bully Chris Christie is and what a disaster he would be as president.

Want to hear something truly terrifying - imagine Chris Christie with the power to indiscriminately spy on every American without a warrant.

Daily News: De Blasio And Thompson Would Try To Give Parents The Right To Opt Out Of InBloom

Great news:

At least two of the three leading Democratic mayoral candidates are set to nix plans for handing sensitive student data, including test scores and discipline records, to private companies.

The move against the $100 million inBloom project — if former Controller Bill Thompson or Public Advocate Bill de Blasio win in November — could spell the end of the already faltering data-sharing plan and set off a showdown with the state.

“Like any parent, I know that private student data should never be bought and sold without explicit parental consent,” said de Blasio in a statement. “As mayor, I will protect students’ privacy and stop this needless invasion of privacy.”

Thompson spokesman John Collins, said, if elected, “Bill Thompson will make sure parents consent before personal information about their children is shared with a private company.”

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the third leading Democrat for mayor, has staked out a slightly more conciliatory position, expressing “concern.”

InBloom, funded primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was originally conceived of as a joint project for multiple states. Of the nine states that originally expressed interest, five have now backed away.

The idea is to format student data — including attendance, test scores, learning disabilities and disciplinary records — in a way that can be used by educational tech companies to improve classroom instruction and aid students in danger of failing.

The companies would not be allowed to sell students’ data, but concerned parents fear the information could be compromised or stolen.

“Parents demand that their children’s personal information be pulled out of inBloom and that we should have the right to decide which companies have access to the information,” said Shino Tanikawa, a public school parent with NYC Kids PAC, which has championed the privacy issue.

It’s not clear whether New York state officials will allow future mayors to have a say.

The inBloom system is expected to be ready this fall, and state officials don’t plan to allow parents or districts to opt out. They say the information is required by law, most data have been submitted for years, and inBloom is a required part of the federal Race to the Top grants.

“In order to fulfill the Race to the Top commitments, we will be providing a statewide data set ,” said Associate Commissioner Ken Wagner, who noted the project aims to boost security standards for districts around the state.

“We do have state-of-the-art protections built into this project.”

Notice the rhetorical horse hockey from the state - "state of the art protections" are built into the project.

 

What the hell does that mean?

 

The fact is, all of this data is going to be collected, tracked and handed over to private companies to use for commercial purposes by a "non-profit" run by a man whose former for-profit computer company helps the federal government spy on U.S. citizens.

If the state won't let parents or districts opt out, then parents and districts will sue them.

Having a mayor in City Hall who will fight to give parents the right to opt out of this system will go a long way toward killing it.

The more people who opt out, the more the beast gets starved of its data.

More than half of the state that were in it this thing are out already.

Microsoft And The Gates Foundation: Your Privacy Is NOT Their Priority

From The Guardian story about the Internet companies that are offering up email content, live chat transcripts, download logs, and other Internet activity to the U.S. government comes this gem:

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Yeah, all these companies are evil, but let's face it: there's a special place in hell for Buffalo Bill Gates and the Microsoft barbarians.

You can't make this stuff up:

Microsoft is first to offer up the data and information to the government, then pulls out the old "Don't worry, we've got your privacy covered" ad campaign.

Just another reason why children's personal information and data ought not to be given over to the Gates Foundation for any reason.

Neither Gates entity - Microsoft nor the Gates Foundation - can be trusted with anything so personal.

Obama And Surveillance

OK, so now we know that the Obama administration has taken the Surveillance State they inherited from the Bush administration and expanded it exponentially:

The Obama administration has presided over the most thorough expansion of the domestic surveillance state of any U.S. presidency. Even as the nation was still absorbing the news, broken by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on Wednesday night, that the National Security Agency has been routinely collecting phone call records for millions of Americans, the Washington Post and the Guardian published articles revealing even broader government snooping powers: Since 2007, the NSA and the FBI have had the power to watch nearly every aspect of our online life as well.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The nine companies are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. (PalTalk, according to the Post, “hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.”)

The program is code-named PRISM, and while it was created during the administration of George W. Bush, the Post reports that it has experienced “exponential growth” under Obama.

This is the surveillance that we know is taking place.

You can be sure there is more that we don't know about.

Today, Obama said he wants to expand the technology in schools so that teachers can know what is going on in the brains of their students, moment to moment, and second to second.

I wrote this earlier, but I want to write it again:

Given the news about the abuses of power and domestic spying the Obama administration has engaged in, why would anybody trust any technology Barack Obama wants to put into schools?

Would this increased bandwidth and so-called technological tools really be meant to help students or would it be used to track both students and teachers?

Barack Obama, Warrantless Surveillance And Classroom Technology

Two stories about Barack Obama I want to look at today.

The first is an education story:

President Barack Obama imagines a country where teachers know what's happening in their students' brains.

He wants "teachers to have an ability to assess learning hour by hour and day by day," a senior White House official said Wednesday. "That vision ... is really not possible with the connectivity we have today."

That's why on Thursday Obama will speak at a school in Mooresville, N.C., to unveil an initiative that aims to give 99 percent of America's public schools high-speed connectivity over the next five years.

The project, called ConnectED, also seeks to get devices into the hands of teachers and students so they can experience digital lessons and software designed for the classroom. Districts will be in control of their own purchasing. The plan would also use existing money within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to fund professional development to "help teachers keep pace with changing ... demands," according to a background memo provided by the White House.

The second story is this:

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. 

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers. 

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. 

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.” 

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where. 

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy. 

Does anyone else see the connection between the Obama education policy, the data tracking, the technologizing of everything, and the Obama surveillance system?

Mr. Obama can keep his ESEA money for increased technology and bandwidth.

At this point, given the realities of data tracking both by private enterprise and the federal government, I'll take a couple of bucks for pens, pencils, paper and chalk, thanks.

I Guess They Won't Have Time To Get NCLB Re-Authorized Now

From Politico:

No contemporary American politician has benefited more from the power of good storytelling than Barack Obama. He vaulted from obscurity to the presidency on the power of narrative — invoking his biography and personal values to make a larger point about how he would lead the nation.
So presumably no one understands more vividly than Obama and his close aides just how toxic and potentially paralyzing his situation has become this spring, as four distinct ethical and policy controversies have simultaneously converged.

Obama’s critics now have a narrative — a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch.

And for the first time, this anti-Obama storyline is being presented in a way that might seem reasonable to people who are not already rabid anti-Obama partisans.

The narrative is personal. The uproars over alleged politicization of the IRS and far-reaching attempts to monitor journalists and their sources have not been linked directly to Obama. But it does not strain credulity to suggest that Obama’s well-known intolerance for leaks, and his regular condemnations of conservative dark-money groups, could have filtered down to subordinates.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.

To stain reputations, presidential controversies usually need some kind of powerful connection to the style and values of the person occupying the Oval Office. Watergate was not a random scandal — it flowed directly from President Richard M. Nixon’s paranoia and contempt for law. No one who knew Bill Clinton in the decades before he became president would have been surprised that his second-term scandal involved weaknesses of the flesh. Under George W. Bush, the misjudgments at the outset of the Iraq War reflected an instinct for certitude and a disdain for dissenting views that started at the top.

In Obama’s case, the narrative emerging from this tumultuous week goes something like this: None of these messes would have happened under a president less obsessed with politics, less insulated within his own White House and less trusting of government as an institution.

Yeah - not going to be a lot of time to get RttT 3.0/Higher Education edition or NCLB Jr. through.

Not with all these scandals.

Questions For The DOJ and FBI In The Bloomberg Spying Scandal

From a comment in an earlier post:

Were any civil laws broken with the unauthorized surveillance?

Did this activity violate any wiretap laws?

Were any criminal laws violated?

Was the information gathered for the use of insider traders?

How long has this unauthorized surveillance taken place?

Who knew about this surveillance using the Bloomberg monitors?

Is their a culture of illegal snooping taken place at Bloomberg ?

What other unauthorized surveillance capabilities does Bloomberg news have at its disposal?

Have any records or documents been destroyed?

Is Bloomberg like Murdoch unfit to manage a major corporation?

Were any financial losses incurred by those who were spied upon?

And from another commenter:

Federal Wiretap Laws prohibit the interception of voice, wire or electronic communications. There are criminal penalties for wiretapping that is not authorized by a court order. It seems that the Bloomberg employee surveillance falls within the purview of Federal wiretap laws since the Bloomberg employees were engaged in the unauthorized interception of electronic/wire data and communications.

More clients are asking questions about what Bloomberg reporters were doing:

With new concerns emerging about practices at its news division, Bloomberg L.P., the sprawling financial services company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, scrambled to shield its lucrative terminal business and appease nervous customers.

The report on Friday that a Bloomberg reporter had used the company's financial data terminals to monitor a Goldman Sachs partner's logon activity has set off a ripple effect of inquiries from other worried subscribers, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the European Central Bank.

The revelations now stretch back to 2011, when UBS complained after a Bloomberg Television host alluded on air to his monitoring of the London-based rogue UBS trader Kweku Adoboli's terminal logon information to confirm his employment status at the bank. Then, last summer, executives at JPMorgan Chase questioned Bloomberg reporters' techniques after they were among the first to report on the trader Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale. ''I'm unaware of any record of a complaint from either bank on this issue,'' said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman. The fallout continued on Monday. Bloomberg has now received roughly 20 inquiries about whether reporting practices violated the company's policies about getting access to subscriber information, including one from Bank of America. The bank also contacted Bloomberg to raise questions about the security of its employees' private information, people briefed on the matter said.

CNBC reports Bloomberg may have some legal problems over this:

The company also began to discuss possible legal ramifications. While people close to the company doubted that clients would threaten legal action, Bloomberg hired outside lawyers on Friday to steer it through the crisis. The lawyers, according to the people close to the company, have assured Bloomberg that there is no basis for a lawsuit, since the subscribers did not suffer any damages and the information obtained was more trivial than confidential. An early analysis conducted by Bloomberg further suggested that reporters rarely, if ever, published stories based solely on information gleaned from the terminals.

The people close to the company also noted that Bloomberg's sales agreement with subscribers disclosed that company employees had access to certain private information. While the agreement did not specify that Bloomberg News reporters were among those with access, the journalists are technically employees of Bloomberg L.P.

But some bank executives said the snooping could have violated a common confidentiality clause in their contracts with Bloomberg. In the clause, Bloomberg promises to keep large swaths of information ''in confidence,'' meaning that it won't be shared with ''third parties.''

One Wall Street executive, who asked not to be named because of a firm policy prohibiting employees from speaking to the media, said his company was involved in a sensitive situation last year and he now wondered if reporters were monitoring his activities.

''Looking to see who is in or not is sleazy but hardly earthshaking,'' he said. ''But if they knew what stocks I was clicking on and what yields I was looking at, that is spying.'' (Bloomberg officials have repeatedly said the functions used by reporters did not provide information on specific trades or securities.)

Another top Wall Street executive, who also asked not to be named, said although he did not know if his firm would take action, he planned to raise this issue with his board. ''I don't like it when something happens that hasn't occurred to me, and this had not occurred to me,'' he said. ''I feel violated.''

Of course the Obama DOJ may not be able to investigate the Bloomberg spying allegations because they are too busy spying on journalists themselves, as the Associated Press alleges.

Rupert Murdoch's Hacking Scandal Widens To Classified Government Material - NY Post Remains Silent On Its Own Company's Scandal

From the NY Times:

LONDON — Britain’s hacking scandal was reported on Tuesday to have broadened significantly into areas of national security with police investigating whether private detectives working for the Murdoch media empire hacked into the computer of a government minister responsible for Northern Ireland.

...

The report said police had warned Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary from 2005 to 2007, that his computer and those of senior civil servants and intelligence agents responsible for the British province may have been hacked by private detectives working for News International.

News International — whose chairman is James Murdoch, the 38-year-old son of the octogenarian mogul Rupert Murdoch — is a British subsidiary of News Corp., the Murdoch-owned global media empire.

The British outpost has been at the center of a controversy convulsing public life here over the use of private detectives to hack into the voice mail of celebrities and less well-known people thrust into the spotlight of the news by personal tragedy.

But the latest reports suggest that the scandal may be widening if it is established that classified material was also hacked from computers. British news reports on Tuesday said Mr. Hain’s computer may have contained information about informers within Northern Ireland’s factions.

...

The hacking scandal has spurred the government of Prime Minister David Cameron to set up a full-blown inquiry into the practices and ethics of the British and its relationship with the police and politicians.

In recent days, the inquiry has heard testimony from a procession of celebrities ranging from the actor Hugh Grant to J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, chronicling episodes of intrusion into their private lives by reporters. While the scandal revolved initially around phone hacking, it has since broadened into the realm of interference with computers by people using so-called Trojan Horse viruses for remote access to their target’s computers.

What is the Rupert Murdoch-owned NY Post covering these days as the criminal activity of its parent company, News Corporation, becomes more and more evident over in Britain?

Why how Comptroller John Liu, mired in a campaign fund-raising scandal, is a criminal who isn't fit for office.

Never mind that at least 16 News Corp. employees have been arrested in the phone hacking scandal, the criminal activity that News Corp. employees have been alleged to have engaged in ranges from phone and computer hacking to bribing the police to blackmailing lawyers with damaging (and false) material in the newspapers to conspiracy to cover up crimes and now government espionage.

The details of some of this are really sordid.

The Guardian is reporting that Charlotte Church was threatened by News Corp. employees to sing at Rupert Murdoch's wedding to Wendi Deng in 1999, waive the 100,000 pound fee News Corp. was offering for the event, and receive "favourable" press from the Murdoch papers.

If she refused to sing or refused to waive the fee, the Murdoch papers would print unfavorable stories about her.

Church was 13 at the time of the blackmailing.

Church acquiesced, but in the end, News Corp. reneged on the deal anyway and ran damaging material on her, including one story entitled

"Church's three in a bed cocaine shock". The report said: "Superstar Charlotte Church's mum tried to kill herself because her husband is a love rat hooked on cocaine and three in a bed orgies."

Now as bad as the Charlotte Church and other celebrity hacking/extortion/blackmail allegations are, the espionage allegation against the Murdoch papers is really beyond the pale.

If it is found the be true, Rupert Murdoch needs to be forcefully extracted from his News Corp. empire.

And yet, there is nary a word from the NY Post about any of this.

Or any word.

Just editorials about the evils of John Liu and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Never mind that so much of the evil in this world actually exists inside Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire.

Much of it seems to reside right in the center of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers.

And the locus seems to be right in the heart of the Murdoch family.

No Wonder ATT Thinks The Gov't Will Approve Their Purchase Of T-Mobile

Partners in domestic spying have to look out for each other, you know...

DOE Promoted Administration Spy Cams With Link On Website

Big Brother Bloomberg, at it again:

Every school administrator knows that if you turn your back on these kids for one second you'll have a "Kick Me" sign plastered on your back and a thumbtack waiting on your chair. That's perhaps why the principal at the SEEALL Academy in Brooklyn may face an investigation for using school funds to purchase a $490 hidden camera pencil sharpener. An Education Department spokesperson tells the Daily News the special commissioner for investigation has been asked to look into the spying, but investigators won't have to dig too deep to figure out where the principal got the idea to buy the camera. The there was a link to it on the Education Department's website portal.

The city has since removed the link, because secret cameras may violate school rules that forbid taking photos of kids without parental permission. NYCLU director Donna Lieberman says, "When you have 5,000 police in the schools, why on earth do principals feel like they have to do their own crime solving?" Well, because what if the police are in on it? The NYCLU has for years been calling on the Education Department to reduce the number of cops in schools, and eliminate metal detectors.

The website that the department linked to had almost 50 undercover spy devices for sale, including a teddy bear with a built-in camera and neckties that double as "spy-ties." A principal at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens reportedly purchased a $200 hidden camera Exit Sign after the theft of laptops two years ago. That had at least one teacher infuriated: "It means to me that [the principal is] ... spying on ... what are we doing in the hallways and in the classrooms and in the teachers lounge."

Soon all this spying will be rendered needless when Bill Gates gets cameras into every classroom in the country for "accountability purposes."

You know, the stuff that's happening in the Mideast, with the people in the street rising up and overthrowing the oligarchs?

Maybe we should try it here.

It's Like He's Cheney Or Something

Gee, I don't remember President Accountability mentioning he was going to expand the Bush/Cheney domestic spying apparatus.

And yet, he is:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau's authority. "It'll be faster and easier to get the data," said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. "And for some Internet providers, it'll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL."

...

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is "incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting," said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. "You're bringing a big category of data -- records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information -- outside of judicial review," said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

That doesn't sound hopey/changey, does it?

Not to me it doesn't.

Just another move to the right by President Accountability and the merry band of public school privatizers, war profiteers, and hedge fundies/corporate whores he has inhabiting his administration as part of his "meritocracy."