As Ben Bernanke ends his term as the chair of the Federal Reserve in January 2014, there has been intense speculation amongst Fed watchers as to whom president Obama will choose to replace him, and the betting is that it will be either Janet Yellen, deputy chair of the Fed, or Obama advisor Lawrence Summers. [Read more…]
After several false starts, Edward Snowden has finally left Moscow airport and can move about in Russia. It must be nice for him to be out in the open again, for the first time since arriving in Moscow on June 23. He has been granted temporary asylum for one year.
Cue the screaming in the US by the usual political and media hacks about the need for him to be sent back to the US and to punish Russia for not doing so. Here are the initial salvos. [Read more…]
We now have pretty good algorithms to encrypt our online communications. It is true that given sufficient time and computer power, some of those encryption systems can be broken but (at least as I understand it) the de-encryption has to be done separately for each individual case. This inconvenience clearly must be an irritant to those in the NSA who want to be able to more easily scoop up all telecommunication information, despite having probably the most powerful computers in the world and an army of people to do this work. [Read more…]
There was a riot recently in Huntington Beach following a surfing tournament. Cord Jefferson linked to a video of the rioting young people and wrote an essay saying that it was high time that white parents and leadership addressed this serious problem of young white people running amuck. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald does the honors. It is interesting how whenever Greenwald brings up the issue of why people like Toobin never call for jailing in cases of high-level sources leaking to high-level journalists (like Bob Woodward), Toobin dodges it by saying that is a different discussion without explaining how it is different. He really sank to new lows in this interview, which is quite a feat since he was pretty low in my estimation even before this. [Read more…]
The Senate Judiciary Committee questioned senior officials of the NSA, FBI, and the Department of Justice at the hearings today. As one would expect, the senators scolded their agencies for lying to them but did not refer them for prosecution, which means that it was just grandstanding. Some senators also promised to introduce legislation forcing more transparency and revamping the rubber-stamp FISA court but we will have to see if that too is just grandstanding. [Read more…]
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. [Read more…]
As promised, today’s Guardian has a front page story by Glenn Greenwald about yet another NSA program, this one called XKeyscore, an NSA tool that collects “nearly everything a user does on the internet”.
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a “selector” in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.
Today starting at 9:30 am there was to have been an interesting informal Congressional hearing convened by Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida) in which critics of the NSA program, including reporter Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU, were to testify. But practically at the last minute, the hearings had to be canceled because president Obama suddenly expressed an interest in having a chat with the Democrats in the House of Representatives at that same time. What an unfortunate coincidence! [Read more…]