Why I subscribe to the Washington Post, despite its flaws. Brian Fung, “The NSA is giving your phone records to the DEA. And the DEA is covering it up.”
A day after we learned of a draining turf battle between the NSA and other law enforcement agencies over bulk surveillance data, it now appears that those same agencies are working together to cover up when those data get shared.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. Tips from the NSA are added to a DEA database that includes “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.” This is problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counterterrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations.
Because the SOD’s work is classified, DEA cases that began as NSA leads can’t be seen to have originated from a NSA source.
So what does the DEA do? It makes up the story of how the agency really came to the case in a process known as “parallel construction.” …
Of course, we will be piously reminded, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about it. Or, as St. Reagan’s Attorney General once said, “… [T]he thing is, you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”
spudvol
The Washington Post is the Amazon Post now.
Botsplainer
Having trouble pulling up the article on my phone. Is there an actual source with a name, or is this just more panty-wetting Guardian oogity boogity bullshit?
burnspbesq
As a general matter, U.S. District Judges don’t react favorably to having smoke blown up their asses by law enforcement. A lot of cases are going to get dismissed
Belafon
Wasn’t that the point of DHS in the first place, to break down the barriers of the two groups? Wasn’t the complaint after 9/11 that the two groups were not interacting at all, and were unable to share information that would have put more focus on the hijackers?
Anne Laurie
@Botsplainer: Reuters “oogity boogity”.
Belafon
@burnspbesq: The reuters piece has a description of how this would work. The office would send out something to a local law enforcement person like “At this time, be at this place. When you see this truck, come up with a reason to stop it and do a search.”
Anne Laurie
@Belafon: The FBI is not the DEA. Even the center-righties (especially the marijuana-friendly ones) concede a difference between ‘keeping us safe from terrorists’ and ‘giving the narcs tips for moar drug busts.’
kc
It’s OK, I trust Obama’s DEA to always do the right thing.
Baud
This should have been included in the excerpt. I thought the article was too vague to give us any real insight. I hope there is follow-up
cathyx
@kc: I can’t wait for Obama’s IRS to also get in on the action. Then they can go after tax cheats.
fuckwit
Does anyone really stop to consider that the solution to this is simply to end the drug war, legalize pot and a bunch of psychedelics, and increase funding for treating people with addictions to other drugs?
The problem isn’t surveillance. The problem is our stupid laws. Remove them, and they are not there for law enforcement to enforce.
In other words, the threat and the problem is not law enforcement, it’s the laws themselves.
Hooray, in a democracy, we get to change the laws. Oh wait, that’s hard and takes a long time; but bitching about the police state is easy.
It annoys the fuck out of me when right-wingers complain about the government as if they weren’t the government, it also annoys me just as much when people on the left do it. It’s our government, these are our police, they’re our servants. Change the laws and then they’re working for us, not against us.
Ted & Hellen
Anne Laurie, why do you hate the Obama Administration and the U.S. which are exactly the same thing?
burnspbesq
@Belafon:
Which is a perfect description of fruit of the poisonous tree.
Thomas
@Botsplainer: I imagine all of it seems oogity boogity when your tribe is in power.
Baud
@Baud:
I just read the Reuters article, which is more detailed. Seems like the only connection with the Snowden stuff is that the NSA is involved with SOD also. SOD has been going on since 1994, so well before the 9/11 changed everything.
max
@Anne Laurie: The FBI is not the DEA. Even the center-righties (especially the marijuana-friendly ones) concede a difference between ‘keeping us safe from terrorists’ and ‘giving the narcs tips for moar drug busts.’
One can just imagine what the feebs have been up to.
(Actually, of course, I don’t have to – imagine getting email from the FBI (really!) demanding to know who I was based on the fact that I was trying to calm someone down who had been watching too much Fox and had concluded that Al Qaeda nuking Tampa Bay and everyone in the region getting EMP’d was something that was actually going to happen.)
max
[‘This story is just the tip of the iceberg.’]
Bill in Section 147
@kc: You sure you don’t want to blame Jimmy Carter?
I used to not be amazed by Obama…better than McCain or Romney but he has always been pretty much a mainstream centerist. But how can I not be inspired by his ability to control all of the levers of government and master-manage every detail in a bureaucracy the size of the United States. He is also completely manipulating or directly in control of most multinational corporations and several foreign governments.
I used to think Carter was the greatest human who ever lived based on the far reaching and lasting effect he had on America. GW even was running against him in 2000. Hillary Clinton is a contender for at least a DC Super Hero… but Obama has transcended them.
Anonymous
Wow, what a shock, I can’t hardly believe…. well, no. Not a shock.
The fact that this activiy by super-secret squirrels is totally illegal, that these “law enforcement officers” are obviously going to have to perjure themselves to get a search warrant, much less to get a conviction, never mind that!
They’re perverting the judicial system, planning and conspiring to refuse to provide all information to defence attorneys, to lie to judges about how their investigation began. They are planning to be more criminal than the druggies they will be attempting to prosecute.
But none of that matters, because think of all the damage drugs do… they can lead to A-Rod losing his chance to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame… oops, is that part of the NSA DEA conspiracy?
Is there any drug defendant who can’t use this as a way to get some reasonable doubt? There shouldn’t be, but given how terrible it is to use some drugs, there will be.
Our shining city on the hill is so far gone there’s no seeing the way back, is there? I bet just posting this comment could get people (me?) in trouble. I don’t use illegal drugs. I just oppose the war on some drugs – how illegal is that? Maybe we’ll find out.
And my comment is awaiting moderation!? WTF!?!
Citizen_X
SOD? Stormtroopers of Death are reading my emails?
cathyx
@Bill in Section 147: Really. I bet they all want a pony from Obama too.
Betty Cracker
@max: I would see that mushroom cloud on the horizon and mourn Ybor City. No more Tampa Bay Brewing Company! Boo!
But half-seriously, I have made one concession to possible NSA spycraft: I hate my home insurance agency because they are rude and stupid and make me do their goddamn job, like taking pictures of my house to update policies. But I’m too lazy to switch to another, so years ago, I passively aggressively designated them as “Al Qaeda Insurance” in my phone contacts. I changed it lest “contacts” be designated “meta-data” and get me flagged in some database somewhere, exposing my LOLCATS and recipe exchanges to prying eyes.
Villago Delenda Est
@fuckwit:
The problem is that there are a whole lot of parasite assholes in law enforcement that need the drug war to justify their phony-baloney jobs.
The entire thing is grifting on a massive scale.
Putting those funds toward drug treatment and counselling is directing those funds to the WRONG PEOPLE. No, we want to punish!
A police state is a state run by criminals.
Bill Arnold
@Bill in Section 147:
You can’t deny his known superpower, that his opponents tend towards self-destruction.
Well sure. Also, engineering Hurricane Sandy to save his re-election.
Baud
@fuckwit:
Despite the recent hullabaloo about the NSA, we’ve given up more of our Fourth Amendment liberties fighting the war on drugs than we have fighting the war on terror.
It’s also interesting that all this NSA stuff is going on at the same time NYC’s “stop and frisk” policy is under judicial review. Yet you don’t seem to see the some groups of people talking about that practice.
ETA: With the exception of the ACLU, FSM bless their souls.
JWL
The occasional piece of eye catching journalism is reason enough to maintain a subscription to an otherwise disreputable rag.
The hell of it is that the Post shredded its own reputation, almost in the blink of an eye. Still, it remained a paper that has always printed writings from high caliber political talent, if on an increasingly irregular basis. Its editorial page has long been the paper’s own version of a Paulie Shore movie. Its sports page was excellent, last time I looked anyway.
The paper will make a statement, and for the better, if they quickly show Krautheimmer the door.*
*Disclaimer: When I give him any thought at all, I tend to resent the miserable prick.
ericblair
I’d be more than happy to get rid of the DEA. It’s redundant with state and local law enforcement, the FDA, the ag department, probably HHS and state and local health services. Worse than that, it’s a whole agency based on a specific problem, so resolving the problem makes the agency useless: therefore, using normal bureaucratic impulses, the agency will make sure that the problem never gets resolved.
MomSense
O/T and I do apologize but I have a major feline conflict going on here. I have no idea how this started but there is a squirrel or chipmunk (I can’t see it, can only hear it chirping) stuck in the gutter drainpipe. I have two crazed kittehs trying to figure out how to get this thing out (one was even on the roof trying to force it to exit. All of a sudden our new neighbors’ orange tabby came in to the yard, obviously curious about the squeaking, only to have my Maine Coon Cat rush it from behind a rock–puffed up like I have never seen and now my two cats have a squirrel pinned in the drainpipe and an orange tabby up the tree in front of my house.
There are three cats making all sorts of warning noises and a freaked out squirrel/chipmunk who is chirping frantically and sliding down the pipe, panicking, and furiously climbing back up. I went out to try and get my cats but there is no way they are going to let me pick them up. One dashes away from me when I give chase and the other immediately circles in to take his place. Then I try to get that one only to have the other circle back in.
Developing…
raven
@MomSense: Hose em down.
John
@Baud:
Indeed, we have given up nearly all privacy. How many people are aware that you can’t drive east or west from El Paso, Texas without being searched by the Border Patrol? Every vehicle on I-10 is inspected before being allowed to continue on to the rest of the USA.
They don’t need a warrant to search your vehicle and your person. The Constitution doesn’t apply to the Border Patrol, just ask them.
What 4th amendment? What probably cause?
And if they uncover a violation of state law, not federal law, they can incarcerate you, call a local law enforcement agency, and hold you until Texas lawmen show up to deal with you, how ever long that takes, in a cell with no privacy.
Statistics about those Border Patrol stops show that they provide lots of the budget for the Texas county (counties? – I’m not sure) their little stop-and-frick base is located in. Who could be against that?
How American is stop and frisk everyone? Everyone!
How the mighty are fallen!!! I’m just glad I’m probably too old to see the real bottom of this curve, I don’t believe it will ever turn around.
If it took a Constitutional Amendment to ban alcohol consumption, why didn’t it take one to ban smoking Pot? How can a state hold an election to legalize pot, and the Feds can still bust people for a common weed?
I’m not going to use my usual nom-de-commentariat or email address, because I believe it would endanger my freedom. How bad is that? First amendment, gone too…
MomSense
@Anne Laurie:
If you are really interested in following the mess that is the “war on drugs”, narconews.com has been covering this for much longer and more diligently.
MomSense
@raven:
Ooh, good idea.
Botsplainer
Sad – the Feds killed the freedom of kiddie porn aficionados to rub one out to images of six year olds being abused. David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald must be sobbing over the heavy handedness of it all.
http://gawker.com/dark-net-busted-wide-open-after-child-porn-arrest-1030239391
Bill in Section 147
@Bill Arnold: Wow. Cannot believe I forgot the powers he gained over matter when he was caught in an Intrinsic Field Subtractor in issue 10-12.
@cathyx: Personally I will accept nothing less than sparkle pony and rainbow unicorn.
Botsplainer
@MomSense:
Break out sheets and “net” your cats.
different-church-lady
@MomSense: Sounds like a job for a lawn chair and a cocktail.
beltane
@Baud: The War on Drugs ushered in a whole lot of police state tactics yet only now, 40+ years on, is anyone but the ACLU taking notice. The only thing that shocks me about all this is the breadth and depth of Americans’ naivete.
ericblair
This is nothing new, it’s been around for decades, and the Supremes decided a while back that border searches within 50(?) miles of the border are just tinky-boo, thankyouverymuch. Pissed me off when I lived in southern AZ that I’d have to go through border patrol to get from Sierra Vista, AZ, USA to Tucson, AZ, USA.
Here, you’re being a weensy bit paranoid. Bitching about the border patrol is nothing new either and we’re all still (*#*$(*^%(#NO CARRIER
Southern Beale
Kinda boggles the mind that we live in an age when one person has amassed so much personal wealth they can just buy a national newspaper the way someone else would buy a new pair of shoes.
We haven’t been in this place since the age of the robber barons.
Rex Everything
@Botsplainer (formerly Todd):
I’m sure the Bots are infinitely grateful to have a beautiful human being like you on their side. Thrilled.
Elated.
Botsplainer
@Southern Beale:
See the inherent goodness of tax cuts? The overall wonders they produce for society?
Instead of coordination and collaboration among other people for ideas and solutions, we get to live according to the grand vision of someone who is essentially a Bond villain, and if his plan turns out to create catastrophe, he can be replaced by another Bond villain.
Think of Goldfinger being replaced by Stavros…
Corner Stone
Yawn. Known. Burger.
srv
@John: It’s good that we have a Constitutional Law scholar as President to make sure everything is on the up-and-up.
Corner Stone
@Belafon: Are you for fucking real man?
Yatsuno
@beltane: It’s never affected most Americans in their daily lives. That makes the tactics of the DEA (which are very heavy-handed) easy to ignore. Hell they had a reality show at one point that pretty much just glorified their work.
Corner Stone
@kc:
I agree. This seems questionable to me, but I believe these uses are probably in our overall best interest.
Anne Laurie
@Botsplainer: Shorter Botsplainer: “If you bitch about Tha Gubmint snooping into everyone’s data, you are objectively pro-kiddy-porn.”
If you weren’t so open about your torture-pr0n fetish, I’d think you might be getting paid to derail, or at least getting paid by some wing of the “security” network.
different-church-lady
@Southern Beale:
Corner Stone
@fuckwit:
Come again? Say what now?
different-church-lady
@Anne Laurie: Wait, I’m completely losing track of who the pedophiles are here.
Corner Stone
@Anonymous:
You are a little bit too far out there for me, man. How can this be illegal? I’m sure they had a general warrant of some kind or other first. And really, if you haven’t done anything wrong, then what’s the problem?
Ahh says fywp
@Baud: I say de-escalate the DEA and beef up the FDA. More ppl being killed by big pharma’s products these days than street drugs.
Opioid users need treatment, not prison. Cocaine abuse is its own punishment. The shit is basically cough syrup, should be as legal as sudafed. Pot should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol. Yeah, there is still a black market for both but it has been marginalized.
Meth sucks but I think it’s just the new hotness in black market trades for desperate people. Maybe if we did more to help children succeed and young families, like Finland’s baby boxes, we wouldn’t have so many people seeking the oblivion of a really nasty drug habit. At any rate, I dont see why extraordinary powers, property seizure withoit trial and all that is necessary unless youre a crooked lawman.
Mino
Well, shit, if they can’t get Wall Streeters for financial crimes. they ought to be able to get those high rollers on drug charges.
Corner Stone
@Anne Laurie: Hmmm. Don’t you have to delete this comment now?
Burnspbesq
Good news is never off-topic.
Suck on this, Governor Walker.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/federal-judge-again-blocks-wisconsins-new-abortion-law-b9967923z1-218162671.html?ipad=y
Corner Stone
@Mino: I say we do some secret listening in and see who is the next Client #9.
What’s the harm?
Botsplainer
@Anne Laurie:
Muchas smoochas to you too, sweetums! (To poorly grab a Calvin and Hobbes phrase).
Given your relentless criticism of me, does this mean that we’re Internet married? And no, I will not get off the couch and make myself useful!
different-church-lady
@Botsplainer: There, you see, we can all get along!
Burnspbesq
@Corner Stone:
All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
mclaren
Wait. It gets worse.
J-3 SOD is part of the JSOC in the Pentagon’s E-Ring.
The Pentagon has five rings, A through E. The outer and most important ring is the E-Ring, where the most secret black ops get planned and executed.
JSOC stands for Joint Special Operations Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff anti-terrorism operations, and J-3 SOD is a group of black operators whose activities are compartmentalized from the other operational commands in the Pentagon.
J-3 SOD consists of groups like the SEALs and the Detal Force and the Army Rangers, and ever since 9/11 JSOC in the Pentagon has deployed J-3 SOD to unconstitutionally conduct murder and kidnapping and demolition operations in foreign countries against high-value drug targets which have conveniently been reclassified as terrorists — cartels in Mexico and Colombia, opium growers in Afghanistan and Thailand and Burma, superlabs in Costa Rica and Guatamala and other central American countries.
Now J-3 SOD is moving into black ops inside America.
This is not just a case of the NSA sharing sigint with the DEA. It’s a case of the NSA being tasked by J-3 SOD to provide sigint for JSOC black ops in coordination with the DEA.
Welcome to the fully militarized police state, ladies and gentlemen.
Martial law has effectively arrived in America.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: That’s great! Now do the Zapruder film.
Baud
@Burnspbesq:
Really off topic. We’re talking about FREEDOM in this thread.
Mino
@Corner Stone: Indeedy do. NSA intercepts are also going to Justice. What next? Juvenile Court?
Ahh says fywp
Ha ha, Tormaggedon couldn’t be happening to a more deserving pack of assholes.
FlipYrWhig
NSA shouldn’t be doing this, precisely because of the foreign/domestic distinction in the second paragraph. Otherwise we might as well have the policy be that The Government wiretaps all phones and passes along anything even slightly hinky to a relevant enforcement agency, from the SEC to ATF to EPA.
Corner Stone
Just like Snoopy Doggy Dog said in the song while his murder trial was ongoing, “I’m innocent! I’m innocent! I’m innocent!”
Wait…that may not be the best example to use in a thread with the DEA involved.
Never mind.
Burnspbesq
@mclaren:
I’m sure you can provide links to multiple credible sources that will corroborate every factual allegation contained in your comment.
No?
Well, shoot.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: You’re having one of your really good days.
Corner Stone
@Mino: Hells yeah. That little bitch thinks she can blow off her 10:00pm curfew? Come get a taste, little missy.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
Well dammit. What should they be doing then?
Corner Stone
@different-church-lady: Who are you again?
Tedium Twin powers unite!
Form of, an Apologist!
Ahh says fywp
@beltane: Are u kidding? Teh evil druglords and urban supercriminals were coming for ur kids and ur woman.
People _cheered.
MomSense
Ok that was pathetic. The one time I could use some help–everyone is out of the house.
Frantic hose spraying and chasing. Result — two wet pissed off feline overlords with very swishy tails and a soaking wet feline servant. Orange tabby climbed higher in the tree and now the squirrels/chipmunks in the tree are also chirping. Squirrel/chipmunk in downspout is now I think wedged in and perhaps stuck at the U-bend. I can actually see the outline from the outside of the gutter. I think my dog is laughing at me and probably my neighbors, too.
This is almost as bad as the time I was dog sitting a friend’s lab and took that lab and mine out for a “walk” together. I ended up being dragged through my neighborhood doing a combination pasodoble double dutch routine that is still discussed at gatherings.
Plan B: lawn chair and cocktail.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Foreign intelligence, and sharing widely within the gov’t only the information related to catastrophic international threats. That’s their beat. The NSA doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have anything to do with pr0n or drugs or racketeering or shady banking or etc., etc., and ad nauseam. Other agencies do that stuff, and have to be consistent with laws and civil liberties in pursuing them, and The Government can’t leverage the scary rights-suspending threat of terrorism and push those already-sketchy methods into all corners of law enforcement and intelligence-gathering.
The Moar You Know
It’s just metadata, right guys? LOL. That excuse has fallen by the wayside pretty quickly.
That this would be happening under any other Democratic president is no comfort. That a Republican president started it, and that any future Republican president would gleefully abuse the shit out of the system doesn’t make them worse than the Democrats on this.
Plainly put:
Fuck you, Obama, for letting this shit go on and not even saying a word, much less trying to, you know, stop it.
FlipYrWhig
@FlipYrWhig: Or, if they do it anyway, someone should be suspended or fired for breaking (what I understand is) the law. IANAL of course. Could redistributing classified information to another government agency be considered a form of espionage?
Arclite
Free subscription to WaPo with Amazon Prime!
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Yes, that’s the way to accept a compliment, old bean!
raven
@MomSense: sorry
MomSense
@raven:
No I think it would have worked with a helper–oh well. I provide much entertainment for my neighbors.
Omnes Omnibus
@John: Why don’t you donate to the ACLU, write your legislators, visit your legislators and bitch, run for office, or start a revolution. If you think things are that bad, fucking do something other than bitch on the internet about the inevitable police state. Jesus fuck. Stop whining and take some action.
cahuenga
@Baud:
“The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security
And…
One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.
“I was pissed,” the prosecutor said. “Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you’re trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court.” The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.
Source
FlipYrWhig
The Reuters story (linked by AL above) actually sounds a bit different, and doesn’t seem to suggest that whatever is going on here has that much to do with the NSA’s Big Data in particular. There’s a mention that the SOD agents are using “overseas NSA intercepts,” but that isn’t the same thing as the “bulk collection” effort exposed by Greenwald-Snowden, is it? I still think it’s bullshit for a foreign intelligence agency to league up with anti-drug efforts and other domestic crime-fighting initiatives, and the Reuters story takes that view as well. But this database doesn’t seem to be the same as, or even related to, the NSA database that started it all.
different-church-lady
@FlipYrWhig: Stop trying to put a sharper edge on the velcro ball.
MomSense
@FlipYrWhig:
Oh the irony of this is that my friends at narconews covered this story years ago and there was actually a dust up between Al Giordano and Glenn Greenwald about it.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/salons-glenn-greenwald-writes-the-field
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Here ya go, someone took action:
“Two people killed and three wounded in a shooting at a town meeting in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, a police official says.”
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Were they starting a revolution over the incipient police state?
ETA: If not, I don’t think it will help with John’s worries.
ETAA: I get tired of despair-mongers.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Who knows?
kc
@Corner Stone:
Smarter people than us have reviewed this activity and approved it, and besides, anyone who didn’t already know about this is BLIND.
Mino
@FlipYrWhig: LOL Give it a day or so. We have to allow time for it all to be explained away. Then the other shoe drops.
beltane
@MomSense: Wow, that exchange is very telling.
Josie
@MomSense:
I’m sorry, I know you are frustrated, but I am laughing out loud at your description. Where are all those strong young men when you need them? You may have to grease that squirrel up to get him to slide out of the downspout.
ETA: I am really getting sick of having to type everything twice because I forget to enter my nym and e-mail address every time I comment on a thread.
cahuenga
@FlipYrWhig:
The details are superfluous. “Parallel construction” is perjury, period.
FlipYrWhig
@Mino: All I mean is that this is a different shoe, not the same shoe dropping again. The info being shared doesn’t seem to be the info from PRISM, the Verizon call metadata, or all that stuff. “Intercepts” sounds like a different kettle of fish. It’s still a trainwreck for civil liberties because that distinction between foreign intelligence and domestic investigations is supposed to be meaningful. (A trainwreck full of shoes and fish kettles? Got to get my metaphors un-mixed.)
cahuenga
@FlipYrWhig:
“Intercepts” sounds like a different kettle of fish.
I honestly don’t know how you can pull that much information from one word
FlipYrWhig
@cahuenga: I agree with that. But is it evidence that the programs Snowden blew the whistle on are being exploited? IMHO it’s a new revelation about the perils of resource-sharing between foreign intelligence and domestic crime investigation. So it’s properly part of the same thematic discussion about civil liberties and their abuses. But I can’t tell from the Reuters story that “the NSA is giving ‘your’ phone records to the DEA,” to quote how the embedded story begins, because “your” suggests bulk collection, and the Reuters story doesn’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@cahuenga:
No disagreement here, but you may note that your statement has nothing to do with Flip’s comment.
MomSense
@Josie:
I made a martini and am laughing at myself, too! One of my boys came home and he got the orange tabby down. He tried to free the squirrel from the downspout by gently squeezing it. The squirrel slid down and he could see his tail at the bottom but then he freaked out imagining the squirrel jumping out on his face–so we are just going to wait it out. It’s dark now so I can’t tell where my cats are but I’m sure they are surveilling that downspout!
cahuenga
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep, my bad… Errant click
Josie
@MomSense:
And possibly planning your demise for hosing them down.
MomSense
@Josie:
Ha!! No doubt!
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: To put it another way: is this bad? Yes, sure seems like it. What’s the connection to the Snowden NSA revelations about bulk collection? We’ll see. The Reuters story at least doesn’t imply that the info the NSA is wrongly sharing is the info it amassed from bulk collection. The WaPo bits quoted above do, but Reuters doesn’t, IMHO. And that’s not a defense of the NSA at all. Breaching that foreign-domestic firewall like this is awful on its own terms.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. It also doesn’t breed a lot of trust that the NSA is doing the other things right.
Mandalay
@Botsplainer:
Really?
I think creepy posters who gratuitously post irrelevant articles about kiddie porn on a thread about the DEA are much more likely to be impacted.
lojasmo
I am not in favor of this, but…first world problems, for the most part.
Justice should get up in this.
If not, I blame Obama…of course.
lojasmo
@Mandalay:
Not one fuck given about your opinion today.
Bob In Portland
I am not surprised at all. Historically the NSA was a branch of the CIA before it was split off. The DEA was initially stocked (under Nixon by E. Howard Hunt) with CIA people.
I’m reading Dark Alliance now, that’s the book by the San Jose Merc reporter who uncovered the CIA’s arms for guns work at the Latin end of the Iran-contra thingie. The DEA routinely stayed away from the Nicaraguan freedom fighters who were moving cocaine in exchange for weapons. The DEA has to know who are the good drug dealers versus the bad drug dealers so they have to have the information.
By the way, that guy Bosch who’s involved in the Biogenesis scandal is part of the anti-Castro Florida milieu and a blood relative to Orlando Bosch, who had a lot of blood on his hands. Jeb got George to get Orlando a pardon for all the good work he did killing socialists.
Yatsuno
@Omnes Omnibus: Sounds like it’s time to scream at the Congresscritters. Time to nip this shit in the bud once and for all.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yatsuno: Okay, but I was really jonesing to gin up a revolution. I see myself as a sort of James Otis figure.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
I lost you here, sport.
So it’s ok if it doesn’t breech into the torpid waters of a GG claim?
My eyes hurt from trying to deparse all this apologia bullshit.
I am not a kook
@MomSense: Pour some extra virgin olive oil down the spout to dislodge the squirrel :)
Corner Stone
And for some god damn reason the blockquote feature keeps fucking up.
Corner Stone
@Mino:
On it!
Yatsuno
@Omnes Omnibus: Remember the last revolution our ancestors did? Turned out quite bloody and lost sight of its ideals rather quickly.
different-church-lady
@Yatsuno: Oh, I don’t think the sexual revolution was all that bad.
michelle
Between Anne Laurie and her pal Corner Stone, this thread is unreadable.
Cole certainly set a new level of antagonism and insult this past weekend.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Speaking from personal experience, it didn’t go far enough.
Thomas F
@michelle: Anne Laurie has done nothing but upset the cookie cutter Obama bots who frequent this blog to snigger about Republicans. They get pissed when they’re forced to take the thumb out of their mouths and actual face critical thoughts.
Cole said what is obvious to all intelligent people: anybody who owns a pitbull is a societal menace with a loaded gun, and your dog should be forcibly exterminated.
ruemara
@Belafon: Actually, yes. It seems that memories are much shorter than one would think.
Mino
Have to wonder if someone is going over medical records to see if a goat can be counted on to wrap things up with a bow. Or am I counting on precedent too much?
Omnes Omnibus
@ruemara: And does anyone remember why foreign and domestic were separated to begin with? It’s like a sine wave.
Mino
@Omnes Omnibus: While other countries may have their constitutional protections of privacy spelled out, we don’t have to respect them. We fake it over here.
Corner Stone
@ruemara:
God damn but that’s some funny shit.
Yeah, WE’RE the ones with the short fucking memory! Right up to Jan 2009.
Go FY.
Corner Stone
@michelle: Hey Cassidy, if you don’t like it, you can take the train.
Your boring sock puppetry is boring.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
I wondered when “michelle” was going to be unmasked as a sock-puppet for The Small Deranged Troll That Couldn’t.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Come on, man. How many comments above did I already make _explicitly_ saying that this was bad? What I wanted to raise in addition to that is the specific matter of the relation of this particular story to NSA bulk collection. WaPo appears to be suggesting a relationship, and I understood Anne Laurie to be too. But Reuters, although linked by Anne Laurie, did not seem to be.
michelle
@Thomas F: Newbie, Corner Stone has Anne Laurie in his pocket. You want more NSA/anti-Obama posts? Talk to Corner Stone.
michelle
@NickT: I have been banned here several times by Anne Laurie. You can ask her if I am a sock puppet. If she is honest, she will tell you no.
If you ask her why she is a puppet for Corner Stone, I’d say don’t trust her response. They have a history and it involves racism.
Ted & Hellen
@michelle:
Pearls clutched.
Couch fainted upon.
michelle
@Ted & Hellen: I honestly don’t know who is worse, you or Corner Stone.
It’s close race with John Cole, given what you all have said about others.
I wonder how John Cole sleeps at night, but you two are no wonder to me. You are just vicious provocateurs, trying to shut this blog down before the next election. You’ve got your orders, execute them. It will probably work this time and even John Cole will switch sides again.
mclaren
@Burnspbesq:
Yes.
Naturally, Senator Ron Wyden is “deranged” and “delusional” and “off his meds.” We now pause for the obots to scream the usual smears at a United States senator for stating inconvenient facts.
Moving on, we come to the Washington Post:
Let’s summarize:
J3 SOD tasked to the DEA with NEA sigint is a component of JSOC. And JSOC has been given the latitude by U.S. presidents to decide which targets to kill all on its own; from the article, JSOC also assassinates U.S. citizens. Lastly, JSOC operates all over the world with zero supervision except the Vice President and the J3 SOD commander in the E-Ring.
We already know for a fact that U.S. citizens have been kidnapped by J3 SOD – Jose Padilla.
This means we know for a fact that J3 SOD is not only assassinating U.S. citzens, but operating on U.S. soil.
Evidence enough?
Oh…wait. U.S. senator Ron Wyden is “ranting” and “raving” and the Washington Post is “hallucinating.” Well, that solves all our problems.
We now return to the regularly scheduled fantasyland in which the Obots explain to us that a secret army of 25,000 extrajudicial extralegal assassins run out of the Pentagon and tasked to assassinate U.S. citizens and capture or kill high value targets including U.S. citizens on U.S. soil isn’t actually in violation of posse comitatus.
Any more than the effective state of martial law which was declared after the Boston marathon bombing, in which the streets were cleared of all but patrolling military units, was a violation of posse comitatus.
No, no, nothing to see here folks, move along. Just elements of the U.S. military assassinating and kidnapping and detained indefinitely without a trial and without an arrest warrant U.S. citizens. Just units of the U.S. army declaring a lockdown in an entire city and patrolling the streets. Nothing to worry about. No martial law here, no siree. Just business as usual.
Dream on, obots.
mclaren
@michelle:
TRANSLATION: “Inconvenient facts and inappropriate logic make obots throw a tantrum.”
mclaren
@michelle:
Ah, yes. “Vicious provocateurs.”
Agents provocateur, no doubt. Commies. Vile pinko subversives. Running-dog hooligans, the enemies of everything decent and noble that Rome ever built–
Wait, that last is Marcus Licinius Crassus’ speech after he captures and crucifies Spartacus for the crime of leading a slave revolt.
Oh, well, same difference, I guess.
Amazing how quickly the obots turn into members of the Committee for Public Safety under Robespierre, screaming for their former comrades to be sent to the guillotine, isn’t it…?
Corner Stone
@michelle: Oh, honey cakes Cassidy. That one should be easy by now. I, by far, am worse.
Corner Stone
@michelle: That is just out and out slander!
I’ll have you know some of my best friends are black!
Now you’re just being hurtful Cassidy.
mclaren
@ruemara:
Well, you know…we must look forward, not backward:
“Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs,” The New York Times, 11 January 2009.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Nope.
pseudonymous in nc
If there is intel obtained from sources that make it hard to use elsewhere, it will be laundered to make it usable, and attempts to identify the real source will fall down in court because seekritz. If there are attempts to defund the methods being used, the Pentagon’s non-dairy creamer budget will just go up by several billion dollars instead and the money will be spent from that.
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
Absolutely! That giant NSA data center in Utah is designed to hold cat pictures. There are a lot of cat pictures on the internet!
And where do you think those “overseas NSA intercepts” are going, praytell? Oh, and incidentally…as for the cute term “overseas NSA intercepts”…technically any signal that exits U.S. airspace can be considered an “overseas NSA intercept,” just as Attorney General Eric Holder’s cute little reply to Snowden’s statement, to the effect that “torture is unlawful” and “there is no torture in America” represent a clever exercise in verbal calisthenics. Yes indeed, there is no torture in America — because high-value targets like Snowden get kidnapped (“extraordinary rendition”) and taken overseas in CIA lear jets ot secret “black prisons” where they’re tortured and assassinated. Doesn’t happen in the United States!
And notice that Holder said “torture is unlawful,” not that it’s illegal. “Unlawful” doubtless means that after Snowden is tortured until he’s insane, his relatives can take the United States to court and try to sue for damages. Unlawful…not illegal. Of course, since it’s a “black” program, the suit for tortious damages will be summarily dismissed.
In case you people haven’t realized, most of the world’s internet data now funnels through the name servers in the central internet backbone in the United States. The reasons for that are historical: America invented the internet and in the early days, all the internet name servers were located on American soil. Around 2008, internet traffic began to bypass the U.S. (see the New York TImes story “Internet Traffic begins to Bypass the U.S.,” 29 August 2008) but an awful lot of the world’s data traffic still comes into America for the simple reason that google has the largest and most effective data centers for search, so even many foreign-language searches that begin overseas shunt into google data centers to search and then return to their countries of origin.
You’re still not getting it. The NSA has been collecting everything. Every email, every tweet, every google search, every bank record, all of it. What part of “everything” do you not understand? Why the fuck do you think the NSA needs a million square feet of rack server space in a giant building in Utah that looks like something out of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY?
different-church-lady
Padilla was arrested by customs agents at O’Hare airport.
I mean, just sayin’…
mclaren
@pseudonymous in nc:
Contra the shit-for-brains tax avoidance lawyer burnspbesq, we already have hard evidence for this. Take a look at this chart showing the frequency of sneak-and-peek counterterrorism searches over the last few years.
1618 sneak-and-peek search warrants executed for drug suspects, 122 for fraud suspects, and for suspected terrorists…a grand total of 15.
Fifteen.
Yes, 92.1% of those sneak-and-peak counterterrorism searches were executed for drug-related reasons, N*O*T for counterterrorism.
And where, pray tell, do you think the FBI and DHS got the intel to apply to a judge for probable cause to get all those drug-related sneak-and-peak warrants…?
I’ll give you a hint:
Three little letters — N. S. A.
Corner Stone
@mclaren: I think some here are still on their heels trying to explain away the one slide that was produced by the government that mentioned $20M for something.
They’ve all kind of hung their hats on a boulder rolling downhill, and just don’t know how to get out of the way of it.
Won’t stop them, though. Each little trickle has led to another trickle and by now any reasonable human being is looking at the fucking Niagara Falls and these guys are all, “Just a flesh wound!”
But they’ll all keep telling us how much of a narcissist or jerk Snowden is. Or how Greenwald did something that one time with that nun. Or maybe Snowald was the cause of apartheid in S Africa as well as genocide in other parts of the world throughout history.
Anything they can think of to not just look right the fuck at this fucking boulder gaining steam down the hill.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
No, Jose Padilla was arrested “as soon as he stepped off the plane.” U.S. customs officials are not stationed on the airport tarmac. Padilla was arrested by unnamed federal officials “as soon as he stepped off the plane” and then handed over to U.S. customs, and then subsequently
Which part of the U.S. customs and immigration department is the United States military? Which part of the United States federal department of corrections currently operates a military brig?
Sorry, darling, your bullshit is showing. Time to scream some insults in a frantic effort to cover the fact that Padilla was detained by military operators, sent without access to a lawyer to a military brig on a military base, and held indefinitely until the charges against him fell apart and the federal government had to backpedal and remand him to a civilian court on conspiracy charges, the weakest charge any prosecutor can bring, and the easiest charge to convict on.
Source: Online law library, law.jrank.org.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: He wasn’t transferred to military custody until a solid month after returning to the US.
A Humble Lurker
@Corner Stone:
But do you swallow their spiny black jism?
AnonPhenom
@Thomas:
…and you know Google and Apple have been collecting your data for like, 4-ever! Same difference, amirite?
Corner Stone
@A Humble Lurker:
“That’s what friends are forrrr”
Michael Finn
@Bill in Section 147: Hoover was better. He saved over 300 million people from starvation.