Rep. Alan Grayson Amends DOD Budget

ALAN GRAYSON:
Every year, the U.S. House of Representatives passes a single law that authorizes the spending of a half a trillion dollars. That's half a
trillion, with a "T". Half a trillion, as in five hundred billion dollars.
$500,000,000,000.00. Some serious coin.

I'm talking about the spending law for the Defense Department. This
spending bill is being written right now. Congress uses this massive
spending bill to allocate dollars for every base, every gun used by every U.S. soldier, every military drone, each National Security Agency snooping computer, every defense contract for the military-industrial complex, and each covert and overt war.

When you are a Member of Congress, you can influence how that money is spent - as long as you can convince a majority of your colleagues to agree with you. Though I'm a Democrat in a Republican-controlled House, I've had some luck doing this on other pieces of legislation. I've passed seven amendments on the Floor of the House already this year, by persuading my Democratic and Republican colleagues that my ideas are good ideas and worth putting into law.

In other words, even in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of
Representatives, even in gridlocked Washington, D.C., if you pay attention and you work hard, you can actually make a difference. And since so many of you donated to my campaign so generously, I don't have to spend my time begging from lobbyists all day. Instead, because of you, I can spend my time writing good law.

Here are some of the amendments I'm proposing to this massive Defense bill:

A ban on torture;
More money for suicide prevention for American troops;
An end to NSA spying on Americans;
A ban on the funding of video games by the Pentagon;
A ban on the Defense Department naming people killed in a drone strike as "enemy combatants" unless we know for sure they are enemy combatants;
An end to the Pentagon censoring the internet on its internal networks to stop troops from accessing news media sites;
A ban on fees for military families enrolling in military health care;
More money to find a cure for "Gulf War Illness";
A prohibition on the U.S. using the military to pilfer any possible oil resources in Afghanistan;
No defense contracts to companies that are convicted of fraud or bribery;
No defense contracts to companies that lie about their products being made in America; and 
No more no-bid defense contracts to foreign corporations


In all, I'm proposing 20 amendments to this bill. There are 156 amendments in total offered to this bill, by all 435 Members of the House. This means that I am offering roughly one in every eight amendments offered by the ENTIRE U.S. House of Representatives. Will the Republicans let any of them pass? Maybe. In all likelihood, the GOP will block most of them. Most. But even if we pass just one or two, a small shift of priorities in a half-a-trillion-dollar bill is a lot of change.

THAT'S part of what being a True Blue Democrat means. It means getting things done. It means working every angle to make the world a better place. It means trying, trying hard, never surrendering.

And it means, on a bill spending more money for war than we can possibly imagine, working toward peace. That's what you've helped to make possible.
I just thought you'd like to know.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
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FISA OKs NEXT DRAGNET on US CITIZENS

Secret Court Lets NSA Extend Its Trawl of Verizon Customers' Phone Records

By Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK

20 July 13

 Latest revelation an indication of how Obama administration has opened up hidden world of mass communications surveillance.

he National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian's disclosure in June of the NSA's indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).

The announcement flowed, the statement said, from the decision to declassify aspects of the metadata grab "in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program".

According to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Verizon phone surveillance has been in place - updated every three months - for at least six years, and it is understood to have been applied to other telecoms giants as well.

The decision to go public with the latest FISA Court order is an indication of how the Obama administration has opened up the previously hidden world of mass communications surveillance, however slightly, since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed the scheme to the Guardian.

The ODNI statement said "the administration is undertaking a careful and thorough review of whether and to what extent additional information or documents pertaining to this program may be declassified, consistent with the protection of national security."

The Verizon metadata was the first of the major disclosures originating with Snowden, who remains in legal limbo in the international airport in Moscow.