Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden for his part in exposing how much information the government has been collecting from private citizens.
“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk,” Paul said in a statement posted on the website of Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit political organization which focuses on educating about constitutional issues, which he chairs. “They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”
Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him… Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.
“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,” he wrote in early May, before we had our first direct contact. He warned that even journalists who pursued his story were at risk until they published.
The U.S. intelligence community, he wrote, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information”…
I asked him, at the risk of estrangement, how he could justify exposing intelligence methods that might benefit U.S. adversaries.
“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 03:07:012013-06-10 03:07:01Snowden: US Intelligence Would Have Killed to Stop Me; Greatest Danger to Freedom is our Omniscient State (+video)
Representative Elijah Cummings says based upon everything he has seen, the IRS case is “solved.” He believes it is time to wrap up the case and move on.
Never mind the fact that the DC ringleader of the IRS fiasco has yet to be identified, while lower level agents are being “thrown under the bus.”
And never mind the fact that no one has really been punished for the overt political targeting of conservatives, including Tea Party and Christian groups.
Representative Cummings is the poster child for what Congress has single digit approval ratings among the American public.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 03:04:192013-06-10 03:04:19Congressman: IRS Case is Solved; Time to Move On
Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an ‘authoritarian surveillance state.’
Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations:
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 02:54:142013-06-10 02:54:14Liberal Pundit: U.S. Has Become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’ (+video)
Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday he wants to mount a Supreme Court challenge to the federal government logging Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities.
Paul, R-Ky., a leading voice in the Libertarian movement, told “Fox News Sunday” he wants to get enough signatures to file a class-action lawsuit before the high court and will appeal to younger Americans, who appear to be advancing the cause of less government and civil liberties.
“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit,” he said. “If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”
Paul, a first-term senator and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said he disagrees with President Obama’s argument that the National Security Agency collecting 3 billion calls daily and other information is a modest invasion of privacy.
“That doesn’t look like a modest invasion of privacy,” he told Fox. “I have no problem if you have probable cause … but we’re talking about trolling through a billion phone records a day.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-10 02:41:162013-06-10 02:41:16Paul Wants to Lead Supreme Court Challenge to Fed’s Tracking of Americans’ Calls, Emails (+video)
By Fox News. The Obama administration has taken a first step toward opening a criminal investigation into the purported leaking of classified documents related to the federal government tracking Americans’ phone calls and emails, a source familiar with the high-level discussions told Fox News on Saturday.
The source said a “criminal report has been filed,” which begins the process.
The FBI and Justice Department would likely be involved in such a probe, which is expected to focus on British and U.S. newspapers including The Guardian. The British newspaper reported late Wednesday that the U.S. government had collected the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
On Saturday, White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said the president is reviewing the situation to see what kind of damage might have been done.
“We’re still in early stages,” he said. However, Rhodes acknowledge the Justice Department would have to be involved and that the agency will discuss the matter with intelligence officials in the coming days.
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans
By Michael Isikoff. The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.
Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair’s recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.
The judges “were really upset about this,” said the former official. As a result, Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take steps to correct the problem as a condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:35:442013-06-08 23:35:44Obama Admin. Takes First Steps to Retaliate Against Leaker of Phone Surveillance Program (+video)
Fox’s Neil Cavuto confronted Democratic strategist Julian Epstein with mounting evidence of the Obama administration’s wholesale disregard of the Fourth Amendment. He suggested that the near-daily disclosures of the White House’s surveillance of US citizens amounted to a pattern:
“You see one incident after another that comes up. It all comes back to the same basic issue: privacy invaded or potentially invaded. Institutions of all sorts doing the same thing. There is a pattern.”
Epstein insisted on playing politics with the issue, suggesting that the surveillance had no direct connections to White House: “If you want to conflate and combine the issues and make the general statements you can do that. I don’t think it’s a thoughtful way to approach it.”
Cavuto retorted: “Think about what I said. Julian, don’t play the politics thing. I’m telling you, drop the liberal thing and focus on the reality thing. You have one entity after another going after American people. You have one system of government, one agency, one department after another essentially doing the same thing. You can call that conflating. I am telling you there is a pattern.”
Epstein reiterated, “You can’t conflate all these issues, you have to speak about them differently. In the case of the IRS, I agree the targeting is wrong, but there was never any connection to the White House. Nobody has proven that.”
Right before cutting off his microphone, Cavuto responded, “I’m not going to get anywhere arguing this point You are saying nothing and it’s offensive. It’s annoying how obnoxious you can be on reality.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:34:402013-06-08 23:34:40Neil Cavuto Goes Off on the Surveillance State, Shuts Down Mic of Obama Defender (+video)
A North Texas high school silenced its Valedictorian’s microphone during his speech, prompting questions over his free speech rights.
Students attending the Joshua High School graduation say Remington Reimer’s microphone was cut off, right when he began to talk about the Constitution.
“He just said, he was talking about getting constitutional rights getting taken away from him,” Colin Radford, a Joshua H.S. graduate, said. “And then he said, just yesterday they threatened to turn my microphone off, and then his microphone went off.”
Reimer, who was accepted into the Naval Academy, had his speech pre-approved by the school district.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:33:292013-06-08 23:33:29School Cuts Off Class Valedictorian’s Mic When He Starts Talking About Constitution (+video)
Jay Leno is continuing his unrelenting, hilarious attacks on the Obama administration.
He hammers the White House for listening to phone calls, going through computer records, and basically acting like a “psycho ex-girlfriend.”
Leno rejects Obama’s statement yesterday that the feds “aren’t listening to your phone calls.”
He also suggests that Obama put his aggressive surveillance program to good use in watching the IRS.
Leno criticizes the IRS’s multi-million dollar conferences and wasteful spending on art, like paying an artist $17,000 to paint pictures of Lincoln to inspire agents. He suggests saving $16,995 by using a $5 bill.
Finally, Leon concludes his monologue suggesting one IRS party taxpayers would be happy to pay for: a “going away party.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-08 23:20:092013-06-08 23:20:09Leno: “We Wanted a President That Listens to All Americans. Now We Have One” (+video)
Dozens of Republican lawmakers have joined in accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of “apparent bias” against conservative groups following a claim that it routinely showed favoritism to liberal organizations.
The allegations were first made by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. It claimed the EPA was not being fair as it weighed whether to charge fees to groups seeking information via Freedom of Information Act requests.
Its research showed liberal groups have their fees for documents waived about 90 percent of the time, while conservative groups are denied fee waivers about 90 percent of the time.
“This activity calls into question the objectivity of the FOIA employees at EPA and undermines public confidence in an agency that is charged with protecting our air and water,” a group of nearly three dozen House Republicans wrote in a letter to EPA Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in a separate statement that the findings are “not a coincidence” and track with the kind of targeting conducted by the IRS against conservative groups.
Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him… Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.
