Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly alarmed at the way that Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has made inroads in the west and the thaw that seems to be occurring between Iran and the US. The goal of Israel has been to have the US go to war with Iran and so you could expect him to use his annual speech to the UN to whip up alarm about the extreme danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program and urge that everything be done to completely dismantle it. But it would be hard to top the comedic effect produced by last year’s speech with the ridiculous cartoon of a bomb that spawned numerous parodies inspired by the similarities to the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. [Read more…]

We have been repeatedly told by the NSA and its supporters inside and outside the government about how valuable the massive privacy invasions were because they stopped a large number of terrorist plots, possibly 54 of them. Marcy Wheeler says that under close questioning from senator Patrick Leahy, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted that it actually may have been at most two plots. [Read more…]

Politics, as Otto von Bismarck famously said back in 1867, is the art of the possible.

This means that a good politician knows that what is needed is the ability to craft a policy that enough people can be persuaded to sign on to so that it can be implemented. But one of the things that can prevent this is when the issue being fought over shifts subtly from the original one that can be bridged by political compromise to a new, and more difficult, one that is based on intangibles that are hard to negotiate over. [Read more…]

Lavabit was the encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used. Thanks to a court order that revealed hitherto secret hearings, we now know what prompted Ladar Levison, the founder of the company, to close the service.

The US government ordered the company to hand over the encryption keys to not only Snowden’s account but to every one of the 400,000 people who used the service. Basically, the government wanted Lavabit to defeat its own system, by allowing the FBI to install a “pen register trap and trace device” that could monitor all the email metadata. Levison had previously complied with targeted court orders to hand over data about specific individuals but balked at giving blanket access to everyone’s accounts. [Read more…]

Charlie Pierce does the honors:

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one. [Read more…]

So the United States government has shut down much of its operations due to the decision by the Republican party that this is the only way they can repeal the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. For those who wonder how rare this kind of action is, Cannie Cass provides an entertaining history of previous fiscal crisis points. [Read more…]