[PAULYPOKER]

‘Freedom is dying in America’

The United States has become a police state and freedom is dying in the country as U.S. officials keep “lying all the time” to justify the government’s encroachment on civil liberties, says American author and radio host Stephen Lendman.

At a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, President Barack Obama claimed that “at least 50 threats” have been foiled thanks to the National Security Agency’s newly disclosed spying programs.

The president’s comment came after NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said Tuesday that the agency had thwarted over 50 potential terrorist plots.

“They both lied. They foiled zero terror plots. How do I know that? How do I say it? I have been writing for years on falsely accused, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned Muslims. Nearly always it’s a Muslim,” said Lendman in a phone interview with Press TV’s U.S. Desk on Wednesday.

“I’ve written on maybe 6 to 7 dozen individual cases where wrongfully-charged individuals were convicted and put in prison. The evidence proved nothing [and] suggested they had nothing to do with terrorism,” he said.

“They committed no crime whatsoever. They harmed no one. They were targeted simply, as I’d like to put it, for being Muslims in America at the wrong time. That was their crime,” Lendman added.

President Obama has vigorously defended the U.S. government’s spying programs, describing them as transparent and legal after top-secret documents revealed by whistleblowers Edward Snowden shed light on the scale of surveillance on Americans and other nationals.

According to Snowden, the U.S. government is collecting data on phone calls of U.S. citizens and Internet records of people across the globe.

ISH/HJ

[TheRifleman]

The President and any government legislator, executive or judge – simply issues words. It is the enforcers who do the threatening and initiating of physical force, who carry out the enforcement of those edicts/mandates/directives/laws/regulations/etc.


As long as government enforcement is a job that a large number of individuals are willing to take because their friends/associates/relatives/neighbors/etc do not treat them any differently than actual value-producers, the harm caused by government will continue.


Don’t want government-caused harm – whether inside or outside of the US – to continue?? Then make government enforcement unpopular. No voluntary association with those enforcers who refuse to be persuaded by reasoned logic to change to truly productive work (outside of government of course). No sales. No service. No camaraderie. No voluntary anything! (Including no violence.) When there are far fewer enforcers (domestic policing agencies and the military), government will be severely limited in the amount of harm it can actually do.

[TheRifleman]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/wh...y-on-americans

Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

lenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.


“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.

That’s right: don’t panic.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.

Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to “urgently hold an inquiry” into what was supposedly President Bush’s domestic wiretap program.

Levin continued, at length: “It means that there’s some growing concern on Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized and unexplained…The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it is totally legal, but he doesn’t give what the legal basis is for this. He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even when there is an emergency and there’s a need for urgent action can



There are two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.


As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: “[I] did everything short of leaking classified information” to stop it.

His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian’s news break: “I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private,” Wyden said to Politico, noting “there’s going to be a big debate about this.” The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he’d mislead Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement yesterday to state that the NSA didn’t do “voyerustic” surveillance.

The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.


Now, we’re about to see if the Obama administration’s version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.

[PAULYPOKER]

FBI uses drones in domestic spying: Mueller


FBI director Robert Mueller

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has admitted that agency uses drones in domestic spying operations.

During an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Robert Mueller answered positively to a question posed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) who asked, “Does the FBI use drones for surveillance on U.S. soil?”

“It’s very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident when you need the capability,” Mueller told U.S. lawmakers. “It is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized needs.”

“There are a number of issues related to drones that will need to be debated in the future,” Mueller added.

Civil rights activists have raised concerns that the use of drones for spying purposes in the U.S. would create a “surveillance society” in which authorities are allowed to monitor, track, record, and scrutinize every movement of citizens.

Mueller refused to give out more information about the bureau’s spying operations saying, there would be “a price to be paid for that transparency.”

Moreover, he briefly touched upon the contentious issue of domestic and international surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) which has recently been disclosed.

According to Mueller, 22 FBI agents, including 20 analysts and two overseers, have access to a huge surveillance database.

Top secret documents disclosed by former CIA and NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shown that the NSA has been authorized to collect massive amounts of data on U.S. citizens and people across the world via major phone and Internet companies.

ISH/HJ

[NrmlCurvSurfr]