Imagine the Administration Lying to Congress about the Dragnet
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In a piece bemoaning the possibility that the dragnet programs created in secret might be scaled back now that citizens know what they entail, Ben Wittes lets his imagination…
US: "Never Mind That Guy Eating a Heart, We Have Handwritten Receipts For the Guns"
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Lethal aid. Nonlethal aid. Moderate groups. Radical Islamist groups. Light weapons. Anti-aircraft weapons. We have been…
Fund Unchained Journalism of Emptywheel: It's All Because Of You
[Note from Jim: There have some issues with the PayPal buttons taking you to PayPal's main page instead of the page set up for Emptywheel donations. Please use the link below and it will give a functioning button. On my machine and browser,…
Obama's James Clapper's Committee To Make You Love the Dragnet Has a Kiddie Table
Spencer Ackerman has a review of how the first two meetings of Obama's Non-Tech Tech Review panel have gone. And while they went about as horribly as I suspected -- certainly there was no talk of actually fixing obvious problems with the dragnet…
NSA's Corruption of Cryptography and Its Methods of Coercion
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I want to return to last week's Edward Snowden related scoop (Guardian, ProPublica/NYT) that the NSA has corrupted cryptography. Remember, there are several reasons the story…
BrEaKiNg! In NYT Op-Ed, Vladimir Putin Fails to Disclose PhD
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As you've no doubt already read, Vladimir Putin published an op-ed in the NYT last night, one in which he lectured Obama (in Christian terms) that no one should think of theirs as an exceptional…
Information Sharing with Israel Raises Questions about Efficacy of NSA's Minimization Procedures
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The Guardian's latest Edward Snowden story yesterday reported that an information sharing Memorandum of Understanding written sometime after March 2009 laid…
CIA Joins Obama's Dissembling on Date Death Squads Sent Into Syria
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I still don't quite know what the angle is for this particular obfuscation, but given the efforts first from Obama himself and now from the CIA, both with planted leaks, the Obama administration is…
Working Thread: Section 215 Dragnet Document Dump, Part II
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This is part of a working thread on yesterday's Section 215 dragnet. Part I is here. The documents are here.
IG Report
(i) Note that the cover letter was signed…
Keith Alexander's Ignorance By Design
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One of the most publicized lines from yesterday's FOIA disclosures comes from Keith Alexander's declaration to Reggie Walton on how the Section 215 dragnet went so…
Journalists Grope Blindly Around Syria CW Destruction Without Discovering Need for Ceasefire
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In my post yesterday morning on the French move to submit a United Nations Security Council resolution…
Imagine the Informants You Can Coerce When You Can Spy on Every Single American
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Two years ago, I noted a chilling exchange from a 2002 FISA suit argued by Ted Olson. Laurence Silberman was trying to come up with a scenario in which…
How Many People Are Included in Contact Chaining with 27,090 Numbers?
I've decided that if I could have a nickel for every time I've said "I told the apologists so" as I've read these documents, I'd be Warren Buffet. But I don't get a nickel for predicting the NSA is as bad as it is. So I could use your help to…
Stupid Smartphones and Their Lying Lies
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My Twitter timelines across multiple accounts are buzzing with Apple iPhone 5s announcement news. Pardon me if I can’t…
Shorter NSA: That We Discovered We Had No Fucking Clue How We Use Our Spying Is Proof Oversight Works
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James Clapper's office just released a bunch of documents pertaining to the Section 215 dragnet. It reveals a whole slew of violations which it attributes to this:
The compliance incidents…
American Dirty Hands and Chain of Command
[Tenet] called for initiating intelligence contact with some rogue states such as Libya and Syria that he said might be helpful in trying to destroy al Qaeda. For the CIA to obtain helpful information against the terrorists, they might have…
France to Take Kerry's Accidental Diplomacy to UN
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The Russian gambit to take accidental diplomat John Kerry up on his offer of an "impossible" scenario…
Emptywheel Fundraiser -- Halfway There
We're halfway done with the Emptywheel Two Millionth Visitor Fundraiser. We've had a great response so far, but that number represents just a fraction of regular readers. If you value what we do, please consider a donation.You can donate via…
James Clapper's Financial War on the World
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Yesterday, TV Globo published details of NSA spying on Brazil's oil company, Petrobras, SWIFT, and financial organizations. Besides revealing that man-in-the-middle attacks are sometimes…
Did Kerry's "Impossible" Diplomatic Demand Just Get Met? Update: Now Possible?
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Okay, this is breaking very rapidly and could turn out to be nothing, but it is amazing and would even be hilarious if it weren't…