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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (247229)	3/12/2014 8:28:00 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541933

Koan, I couldn't agree with you more. It's why I started turning against Obama. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. He says beautiful words we want to hear, but his actions are often contrary to his words. I am sick to death of the destruction of our Constitutional rights by the NSA and CIA and Homeland Security, even as Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, stands by and does nothing. --------- Web founder Berners-Lee calls for online "Magna Carta" to protect users sg.finance.yahoo.com LONDON (Reuters) - The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users' rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity. Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England's historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online. Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data. Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google (NSQ:GOOG), Facebook (FB.O), Skype and other U.S. companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States. Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy. "Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" he told BBC Radio on Wednesday. "Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?" he said, referring to the 1215 English charter. While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the Internet, he has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain's GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organisations collecting data on private individuals. He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were "in the public interest". Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential, have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet "bill of rights" for every country. "Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years," he told the Guardian newspaper.

To: koan who wrote (247229)	3/12/2014 8:41:35 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

CIA Hack Scandal Turns Senate’s Defender of Spying Into a Critic BY DAVID KRAVETS03.12.146:30 AM wired.com It’s quite a change to hear Dianne Feinstein, the powerful chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, express outrage over warrantless and potentially illegal government spying. In an impassioned Senate floor speech yesterday, the California Democrat accused the CIA of criminal activity for allegedly searching computers used by Senate staffers. The CIA set up the computers at a secure location in northern Virginia so Senate Intelligence Committee staff could access classified documents pertaining to the CIA’s detainee program. When some of them found an incriminating document the CIA hadn’t intended to release, the CIA started poking around. “The CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance,” Feinstein said during her speech. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), head of the Judiciary Committee, immediately followed up with, “I cannot think of any speech by any member by either party as important as the one the senator from California just gave.” He called it “likely criminal conduct” on the intelligence agency’s part. And, like Feinstein, he suggested it was a breach of the separation of powers doctrine. Feinstein’s statements criticizing the CIA have particular significance because she is perhaps the biggest senatorial cheerleader for domestic surveillance, including the telephone snooping program in which metadata from calls to, from and within the United States is forwarded in bulk to the National Security Agency without probable cause warrants. A federal judge declared such snooping unlawful last year but stayed the decision pending appeal. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court. Feinstein told NBC’s Meet the Press in January that “A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don’t understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan,” Feinstein told NBC. “New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness.” For Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the ACLU, Feinstein appears to be talking out of both sides of her mouth now that the tables appear to have turned. “The particular irony is that one of the NSA’s staunchest defenders appears now to recognize the cost of unlawful surveillance.,” Abdo says. Mark Jaycox, a staff attorney with the Electric Frontier Foundation, agrees. He also said the allegations by Feinstein “should serve as a catalyst for the senator to be concerned with the NSA’s spying on innocent Americans.” Such spying was “wrong” and “so is spying on innocent Americans. The senator should take notice,” he writes in an e-mail. Many, including Human Rights Watch, are using the flap to demand Congress declassify the results of the Senate’s torture investigation. And if the whole affair makes Feinstein a little more sympathetic to other targets of domestic intelligence spying, that wouldn’t be so bad, either.