a refreshing look at Obama

Interesting slant on Prism from Friday's Guardian:

Giving evidence to parliament's intelligence and security committee last year, the head of the UK Government Communications Headquarters made a simple statement. "Communications data is extremely helpful to us," he told the committee in a closed hearing. Given GCHQ's function is to eavesdrop on electronic communications here and around the world, Sir Iain Lobban's words may seem a statement of the obvious. But this rare comment by the head of an agency whose stock in trade is global online and telephone-derived intelligence helps to illuminate why the Guardian's latest allegations about US government data-trawling have now firmly crossed the Atlantic, requiring serious public answers not just from American officials but now from British ones too.

The new allegations – which follow evidence that America's National Security Agency (NSA) now enjoys routine access to communications data from the US's largest telecoms companies – are focused not on telephone records but on internet data. According to the documents obtained by the Guardian, the NSA uses a programme called Prism, authorised under a Bush-era law, since renewed by the Obama administration, to obtain direct access to the systems of internet companies, search engines and social media including Google, Facebook, Apple, Skype, Yahoo and other household names. Although all these companies are obliged, under US law, to comply with NSA or FBI requests for users' communications, the unique feature of the Prism programme seems – at least according to internal evidence – to be that it allows the US agencies direct access to the companies' traffic.

Although all this surveillance is generated and conducted in the United States under sweeping powers granted by post-9/11 US law, it is now alleged that GCHQ – which is essentially the UK equivalent of the massive NSA – is able to drink from the same trough too. The Guardian's documents show that GCHQ has had access to Prism material since at least June 2010 – the programme began in 2007 – and that in the year to May 2012 GCHQ was able to generate 197 intelligence reports to its customers (normally MI6 and MI5) from it – more than double the number generated in the year to May 2011. According to the documents, special programmes exist within Prism for GCHQ's intelligence needs, suggesting that parts of the system were developed with UK input.

If these allegations are correct, the implications are huge. They suggest that the UK's security and intelligence agencies are using GCHQ and NSA channels to obtain far more extensive communications data and, through Prism, communications content than has ever been revealed, let alone publicly authorised. The trawling appears to go far further than the powers contained in the "snooper's charter" communications data bill, which has been dropped by the UK government but which is supported by Conservative and Labour parties at Westminster. As NSA trawling covers communications between the US and the UK, it also seems possible that British agencies are already obtaining much more through the back door than they would like through the front.

"All our operations," says GCHQ on its website, "are conducted within a framework of legislation that defines our roles and activities." GCHQ "takes its obligations under the law very seriously", the agency said on Friday. The Guardian's Prism documents pose a striking question: whose laws? The powers revealed in these documents do not exist under UK law. They raise questions about US-UK intelligence-gathering, including that from British citizens, which should urgently be debated in parliament. There are certainly terrorists out there from whose activities we must be protected, including by clandestine means. But there are also the civil liberties of ordinary British citizens out there. And they must be protected too.

Remember Hope -- and Change -- :)

Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL8q0xv8gUY

More from The Guardian, this time by Jonathan Freedland.



Among the guests at the fabled Bilderberg meeting, held this weekend just outside London, are the top brass of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. How appropriate they should be there, alongside luminaries of the US political and military establishment. For this was the week that seemed to confirm all the old bug-eyed conspiracy theories about governments and corporations colluding to enslave the rest of us.

The Guardian revealed that the US National Security Agency has cracked open our online lives, that it can rifle through your emails, listen to your calls on Skype, watching "your ideas form as you type", as a US intelligence officer put it – apparently in cahoots with the corporate titans of the web.

This disgraces all involved, but it damages the head of the US government most. Barack Obama always had much in common with the Apple and Facebook crowd. Like them, he held out the promise of modernity – a slick, cool contrast to their creaky, throwback rivals. (Obama was rarely without BlackBerry and iPod; McCain and Romney came from the age of the manual typewriter.) But, like those early internet giants, he promised more than just an open-necked, hipper style. He would be better too. Google's informal motto is Don't be Evil. Obama's was Hope.

Perhaps people lost their innocence about Google and Facebook long ago, realising that, just because their founders were kids in jeans, they were no less red-toothed than any other capitalist behemoth. But now the president's reputation will suffer the same treatment. This Prism will dim the halo that once adorned him.

For he has authorised not merely the continuation of a programme of state surveillance that he once opposed, but has actively expanded it. That officers who serve him could brag in a 41-page presentation – one, incidentally, laced with David Brent-style grandiosity, starting with the naffness of the Prism logo – of their ability to collect data "directly from the servers" of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, will be a lasting stain on his record. In this, he is George W Obama.

There is a mirthless chuckle to be had from a president repeatedly slammed as a "liberal" whose legacy will be marred by a series of gravely illiberal acts.

He promised but failed to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, where men have been held for more than a decade without charge (though Congress shares the blame for that). He has made routine the use of drones, assassinating enemies from the sky – repeatedly taking the innocent in the process, as he's admitted. Last month it emerged that Obama's justice department had spied on a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, tracking his movements, seizing his telephone records and taking two days' worth of his personal emails, in pursuit of a state department leak. That came after Obama had made "no apologies" for seizing two months of telephone records from Associated Press. Little wonder that the high citadel of US liberalism, the editorial column of the New York Times, this week declared that "The administration has now lost all credibility", later softening the blow by adding the words, "on this issue".

It is becoming ever harder for liberals to defend Obama. One forlorn effort I heard this week was that perhaps he did not know what the NSA was up to, even though we're told Prism is now the prime generator of material for the president's daily brief. When you're reduced to saying your hero is not evil, just useless, you know you're in trouble.

As for the web companies, their role remains unclear. Initially they insisted that the access-all-areas relationship described in Prism's PowerPoint presentation is false and there was no such collaboration. Yet one industry insider tells me that "it's very hard to think the companies did not know" the NSA was collecting their data, since such an intrusion "would show up pretty damn quick". That leaves a third possibility: that the Prism pitch was exaggerated, in order to make it a more attractive sell to its potential customers among the US – and UK – intelligence fraternity.

Whatever the truth, it's unlikely to have a lasting impact on the web giants' success. That's partly because of cynicism: plenty of us assumed these big companies abused our privacy anyway. But it's also because our relationship is one of dependence. When it emerged that Starbucks, Amazon and Google had all been paying negligible tax in the UK, it was obvious Starbucks would feel the consumer heat most, simply because it's easy to walk across the street to get a cup of coffee somewhere else. Amazon is harder to avoid and Google all but impossible. So reliant are we on these companies' services, we simply shrug and move on.

And here lies the heart of the matter, the shift in our lives that has made Prism possible. Back in the le Carré days of cold war espionage, private information was hard to get. Spies relied on papers stuffed in manila files, or operatives hanging around on street corners, forced to gain each bit of knowledge by hand. Back then, people gave up their personal details sparingly and reluctantly.

Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet. Perhaps we assume that our name, address and search preferences will be viewed by some unseen pair of corporate eyes, probably not human, and don't mind that much. We guess the worst that can happen is Google bothering us with an annoying ad or Spotify recommending Taylor Swift.

But if that knowledge goes elsewhere, if governments can get it when they ask for it, or even without asking for it, then that means something else entirely. It means that the intelligence agencies can now watch the entire population, albeit by privatised means, having in effect outsourced the job of spying to the web mega-companies.

That leaves us with a choice. Either we try to stuff this genie back in the bottle and return to the privacy habits of old. Unlikely. Or we demand companies stand firm when pressed by governments to disclose our data. Not easy. Or we demand lawmakers change the rules, restraining the executive branch's limitless appetite for information on us.

It's hard to be optimistic, for technology has made the pickings available too rich, too tempting, for the spies to resist. And, strangest of all, it is us who made this possible – by becoming informants on ourselves.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by trish

Corporations have a responsibility to make profits for their shareholders. The are organization that consist OF workers, are run BY ceo's and exist FOR shareholders.

Our government's responsibilities are described in the Constitution and in summary they are to secure and protect our rights and liberties are stated therein. The responsibility of the government, like the government itself is of, by and for the people.

Because the security of our governance rests on the structure of checks and balances, no branch of government is going abdicate power to another bran...no wait...it was Congress, to avoid a political awkwardness, that in essence abdicated its prerogative to declare war and since then those powers have been eroding to the advantage of the executive.

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Yes! Corporations have to maximize their own power which translates into serving shareholders. Not, say, stakeholders. Meaning: people, the wider population. And there is nothing in economic or business principle that says corporations have to serve shareholders and not, say, stakeholders. I mean, the legal obligation to serve shareholders came about through the courts and not through parliament, as it were. So, it wasn't a democratic decision.
Corporations, by design, don't and can't care about future generations.... I mean, corporations, again, have an institutional imperative to trash the planet. Do we really think oil companies can care about the impact of global climate change on future generations? Do corporations care about pollution? Whether it be soil, water or air pollution? No, of course not. It's not to say that people within those institutions are awful people. They have a job to do. And if they don't do it, well, they're out.
Simply put: corporate entities can't care about future generations.
According to environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey: "... the folks that wrote the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the DNA or hardwiring for this country, in essence worshiped English common law. We got rid of the King but we didn't get rid of an English structure of law that placed property and commerce over the rights of communities and nature."
So, the Constitution was set up to serve the concentration of capital and not people.

Is Obama worse than Bush? That's beside the point

Obama's transformation from national security dove to hawk is the norm: any president is captive to America's imperial power:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ush?CMP=twt_fd

Don't expect this in America...

Obama called "war criminal" & "hypocrite of the century" in Irish Parliament:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIMucHfUMyg

MP: Ireland a Lapdog for US Imperialism | Hero - YouTube

Obama Is Laying The Foundations Of A Dystopian Future by Oliver Stone:

http://www.zcommunications.org/obama...y-oliver-stone

Obama holds historic phone call with Rouhani and hints at end to sanctions:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...sident-rouhani

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ben

Obama holds historic phone call with Rouhani and hints at end to sanctions:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...sident-rouhani

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Addendum -- :)

Brian Williams' Iran propaganda:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ran-propaganda