Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
Amirite?
From: Democratic Party <democraticparty@democrats.org>
Subject: [birthday cake] Sign President Obama’s card [birthday cake]
Date: July 30, 2013 5:41:03 PM CDT
To: Steve Rhodes <dusty@speakeasy.net>
Reply-To: Tim Kaine <democraticparty@democrats.org>
</democraticparty@democrats.org></dusty@speakeasy.net></democraticparty@democrats.org>
Posted on August 8, 2013
By Kara Brandeisky/ProPublica
When the House of Representatives recently considered an amendment that would have dismantled the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program, the White House swiftly condemned the measure.
But only five years ago, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. was part of a group of legislators that supported substantial changes to NSA surveillance programs. Here are some of the proposals the president co-sponsored as a senator.
Posted on August 7, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
One is a series of updates about your country.
“For a quarter of a century, the rules were followed and the NSA stayed out of trouble, but following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided to illegally bypass the court and began its program of warrantless wiretapping,” James Bamford reports in the New York Review of Books.
“‘Basically all rules were thrown out the window and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans,’ I was told by Adrienne J. Kinne, who in 2001 was a twenty-four-year-old voice intercept operator who conducted some of the eavesdropping. She or her superiors did not have to get a warrant for each interception.
“It was incredibly uncomfortable to be listening to private personal conversations of Americans,” she said. “And it’s almost like going through and stumbling and finding somebody’s diary and reading it.”
“All during this time, however, the Bush administration was telling the American public the opposite: that a warrant was obtained whenever an American was targeted. ‘Anytime you hear the United States government talking about a wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order,’ President George W. Bush told a crowd in 2004. ‘Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.’ After exposure of the operation by The New York Times in 2005, however, rather than strengthen the controls governing the NSA’s spying, Congress instead voted to weaken them, largely by codifying into the amendment to FISA what had previously been illegal.
Posted on August 2, 2013
By Cora Currier/ProPublica
Soon after taking office, President Obama pledged to open a new inquiry into the deaths of perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan fighters in late 2001.
Last month, the White House told ProPublica it was still “looking into” the apparent massacre.
Now it says it has concluded its investigation – but won’t make it public.
Posted on August 1, 2013
