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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (135067)	7/26/2013 8:17:20 PM
From: No Mo Mo	Respond to of 149317

In a nation of secret laws, how do you know what's too sensitive to talk about? I don't trust these guys to tell us. ------------------------------------------ Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash BY DAVID KRAVETS07.26.134:14 PM House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard McKeon, (R-California), speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the house voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters. That’s the upshot of a new =D&party[R]=R&party=I&vote[AYE]=AYE&vote[NOE]=NOE&vote[NV]=NV&voted_with[with]=with&voted_with[not-with]=not-with&state=&custom_from=01%2F01%2F2011&custom_to=12%2F31%2F2012&all_pols=1&uid=44999&interests-support=&interests-oppose=D2000-D3000-D5000-D9000-D4000-D0000-D6000&from=01-01-2011&to=12-31-2012&source=pacs-nonpacs&campaign=congressional]analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request. The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a member’s vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted Wednesday to dismantle it. Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765. Of the top 10 money getters, only one House member — Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) — voted to end the program. SOURCE: MAPLIGHT “How can we trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected? Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors,” said Daniel G. Newman, MapLight’s president and co-founder. The Guardian newspaper disclosed the phone-metadata spying last month with documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The House voted 205-217 Wednesday and defeated an amendment to the roughly $600 billion Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 that would have ended authority for the once-secret spy program the White House insisted was necessary to protect national security. The amendment (.pdf) was proposed by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), who received a fraction of the money from the defense industry compared to top earners. For example, Amash got $1,400 — ranking him in the bottom 50 for the two-year period. On the flip side, Rep. Howard McKeon (R-California) scored $526,600 to lead the House in defense contributions. He voted against Amash. Of the 26 House members who voted and did not receive any defense financing, 16 voted for the Amash amendment. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voted against the measure. He ranked 15th in defense earnings with a $131,000 take. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) also voted against Amash. Pelosi took in $47,000 from defense firms over the two-year period. Ninety-four Republicans voted for the amendment as did 111 Democrats. The Amash amendment was in response to the disclosure of a leaked copy of a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion requiring Verizon Business to provide the National Security Agency the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls. The government confirmed the authenticity of the leak and last week suggested many more, or “ certain telecommunication service providers” are required to fork over the same type of metadata. The government says it needs all the data to sift out terrorist needles in a haystack. The program began shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. The vote list follows. (A “no” vote is a vote to continue the NSA’s phone spying.) wired.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (135067)	7/26/2013 8:23:18 PM
From: No Mo Mo	Respond to of 149317

Or, from the closing arguments of Bradley Manning's trial: @kgosztola 3h If "world includes the enemy," what I publish on nat'l security issues for "world" could aid enemies. That's logic of govt. #Manning

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (135067)	7/26/2013 8:35:16 PM
From: No Mo Mo	Respond to of 149317

Were you just being light-hearted w/ the lips? @TomJunod 2h The lips are the last to go: Mick Jagger turns 70 today. If not, for balance, a comi-tragic post: guardian.co.uk newyorker.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (135067)	7/29/2013 12:55:15 PM
From: No Mo Mo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Feds Say It's Classified Info To Say Who We're At War With from the why,-we've-always-been-at-war-with-eurasia dept --------------------------------------------- Who is trying to sink our ships, btw? --------------------------------------------- Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning's trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different "enemies," with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and... mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that's no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we're at war with wasn't just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well. At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates. The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.” The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we're actually at war with would do "serious damage to national security." The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more. But that's ridiculous, since those groups are already being targeted by the US: Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written [6] on this question [7] at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name." It really goes beyond that when you think about it. This lack of transparency out of some silly fear that these groups would use it to build up their own reputation is just wacky. It leaves open such massive loopholes for abuse by the government. Every time we talk about things like this, people trot out the same old joke: it really means that "the public" is "the enemy." That, obviously, is an exaggeration, but the level of secrecy around all of these kinds of efforts -- in the mistaken belief that letting anyone know who you're fighting and what you're doing will somehow undermine the whole campaign -- is entirely antithetical to the kind of example we should be setting around the globe. And, of course, it's doubly ironic that the very same people who are defending this lack of transparency are the ones who trot out the "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide." The obvious response, then, is that we should be asking exactly what our government is trying to hide, because it sure sounds like they've done a lot of things wrong. techdirt.com