TPP Trade Deals Allow Corps to Cancel US Law

Corporations Now Using Foreign Tribunals to Attack Domestic Court Rulings

Should an international tribunal of three private attorneys, sitting outside of any domestic legal system, have the power to overrule domestic courts?
That’s the question addressed in the recent analysis, “Investment Agreements versus the Rule of Law?,” published on UNCTAD’s Investment Policy Hub by Todd Tucker, Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies.  The piece highlights the little-known but creeping practice of corporations asking foreign tribunals to second-guess domestic court decisions not in their favor and to order taxpayer payment as compensation. 
These tribunals are the product of the “investor-state” system, a little-known creation of “trade” and investment deals that empowers foreign corporations to skirt domestic courts and directly challenge governments before extrajudicial tribunals for policies and decisions that they claim as undermining “future expected profits.”  Under this extreme system, foreign corporations have challenged toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, water and timber policies, medicine patent policies, pollution clean ups, climate and energy laws, and other public interest polices. 
As if undermining a government’s public interest laws and regulations was not enough, foreign investors are increasingly using the investor-state system to challenge court judgments, undermining the principles of legal certainty, state sovereignty, and rule of law more generally.  While domestic courts often employ safeguards, such as the principle of judicial review, judicial independence and transparency in their decision-making, these safeguards are notably absent in investor-state arbitrations, where lawyers who represent the investors take turns as ostensibly “impartial” arbitrators, interpretations of international law are regularly inconsistent and erroneous, and decisions often cannot be appealed.
In his compelling piece, Mr. Tucker cites examples from three investor-state case decisions issued in the last several years, Mr. Franck Charles Arif v. Republic of Moldova and two iterations of Chevron v. Ecuador, in which the tribunals found Moldova’s and Ecuador’s domestic court decisions to be in violation of these countries’ obligations to foreign investors under Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs).
In the Moldovan case, Moldovan airport officials gave Franck Arif, a French national, an exclusive concession to operate tax-free shops at an airport.  When his competitors challenged this in court, Moldovan courts found that the non-competitive concession was illegal.  In response, Franck Arif launched an investor-state case against Moldova under the France-Moldova BIT, arguing that the courts’ ruling violated the “fair and equitable treatment” provision in the BIT – the vague obligation that inventive tribunals have interpreted as corporations’ “right” to a legal framework that conforms to their “expectations.” The tribunal first conceded that the Moldovan courts had “…applied Moldovan law legitimately and in good faith in the proceedings commenced by Claimant’s competitors.” Nevertheless, the tribunal still decided that the Moldovan courts’ rulings conflicted with the airport officials’ granting of the non-competitive concession, and therefore constituted a violation of the vague “fair and equitable treatment” obligation as a “breach” of Mr. Arif’s “expectations.”
In one of the Chevron v. Ecuador cases, a three-person tribunal last year ordered Ecuador’s government to interfere in the operations of its independent court system on behalf of Chevron by suspending enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest.  The ruling against Chevron, rendered by Ecuador’s courts, was the result of 18 years of litigation in both the U.S. and Ecuadorian legal systems.  Ecuador had explained to the panel that compliance with any order to suspend enforcement of the ruling would violate the separation of powers enshrined in the country’s Constitution – as in the United States, Ecuador’s executive branch is constitutionally prohibited from interfering with the independent judiciary.  Undeterred, the tribunal proceeded to order Ecuador “to take all measures at its disposal to suspend or cause to be suspended the enforcement or recognition within and without Ecuador of any judgment [against Chevron].”
This dangerous trend of private three-person tribunals assuming the authority to contravene domestic court decisions at the behest of multinational corporations should raise the ire of those who support the independence of courts, the sovereignty of nations, the rule of law, or even the core democratic notion that a system of legal decision-making should be accountable to those who will live with the decisions.  Now the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) threaten to expand the investor-state system across two oceans, subjecting domestic court decisions to a new wave of second-guessing by unaccountable tribunals.  Now is the time to halt the advance of this extreme system – to restore the authority of our courts and the principles of our democracy.

Posted by Shannon Gough at 7:53pm in Investment | Permalink

NSA Captures US Citizens' Email Addresses

NSA Collects Americans' Email Contact Lists

Monday, 14 Oct 2013 09:39 PM

By Cathy Burke

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The National Security Agency collects contact lists of email and instant message services from users worldwide, and Americans are among those whose data is being harvested.

The revelations, from senior intelligence officials and documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, were reported by The Washington Post on Monday.

The program feeds off email address books and buddy lists transmitted by various online services when users sign on, write a message, or sync their computers or mobile devices to one another, The Post reported.

Urgent: Should the NSA Spy on Americans? Vote Here Now

Instead of targeting individual users, the lists are described as being collected en masse, in hopes of letting the spy agency map out and discover relationships between various players.

A similar NSA program mapping social ties and relationships of Americans was reported by The New York Times last month.

According to a summary provided by The Post, the harvested "contact lists" are the online address books that allow users of Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Facebook and other online services to keep track of their friends, family and business associates.

Address books contain the email addresses of people whom users are in contact with via email or chat. In some services, including Google Contacts and Facebook, they can also include full names, addresses and phone numbers.

Many smartphones and computers allow you to "sync" your contacts to services such as Google and Facebook.

Leading web-based email services generate contact lists automatically as a result of sending, and sometimes receiving, emails. These lists allow users to compose emails more quickly via an "auto-complete" feature.

A document supplied to The Post by Snowden indicates that in a typical day, the NSA collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from other providers.

Those figures correspond to a rate of more than 250 million per year, The Post reported.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials told The Post that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. The number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions, The Post reported.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, told The Post the agency "is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans."

Their spokesman, Shawn Turner, said rules approved by the Attorney General require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use, and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records under a separate program has generated a storm of controversy since it was revealed June, but has been upheld by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The data snooping was defended Monday by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk.

Senior intelligence officials told The Post it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States, but another official said the NSA avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points "all over the world."

"None of those are on U.S. territory," that official told The Post.

An unnamed intelligence official told The Post that the privacy of Americans is protected despite mass collection, because "we have checks and balances built into our tools."

Google spokesman Niki Fenwick told The Post: “We have neither knowledge nor participation in any mass collection of webmail addresses or chat lists by the government."

Urgent: Should the NSA Spy on Americans? Vote Here Now

At Microsoft, spokesman Nicole Miller said the company "does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customers’ data," adding that "we would have significant concerns if these allegations about government actions are true."

Facebook spokesman Jodi Seth told the newspaper "we did not know and did not assist" in the NSA’s interception of contact lists.

Suzanne Philion, a Yahoo spokesman, said Monday in response to an inquiry from The Post that beginning in January Yahoo would start encrypting all its email connections.

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Sen. Feinstein Loves NSA Surveillance

In Wall Street Journal, Senator Dianne Feinstein Insidiously Defends NSA Surveillance
By: Kevin Gosztola Monday October 14, 2013 4:08 pm	Tweet95

Legitimacy is at stake for the United States government after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents on secret surveillance programs that has ignited a wide-ranging debate. At the forefront of intelligence community efforts to fully restore legitimacy to the massive surveillance apparatus that has grown since the September 11th attacks is Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

On October 13, in the Wall Street Journal, Feinstein defended a bulk records collection program under the PATRIOT Act, which was recently renewed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Though the program violates the law and is also unconstitutional, Feinstein ignored this and couched the necessity of the program in the language of warfare. It further demonstrated how she is one of the NSA’s most fawning and insidious defenders.

“Since it was exposed in June by leaker Edward Snowden,” Feinstein wrote, “the National Security Agency’s call-records program has become controversial and many have questioned whether its benefits are worth the costs. My answer: The program—which collects phone numbers and the duration and times of calls, but not the content of any conversations, names or locations—is necessary and must be preserved if we are to prevent terrorist attacks.”

She recounted a story about former CIA director George Tenet being panicked about al Qaeda ahead of the September 11th attacks. She equated that moment to a campaign of fear around chatter intercepted between two al Qaeda leaders that led to the temporary clearly intended to stifle calls for reforms that would constrain the NSA’s powers to collect and store virtually all Americans’ data.

Although Feinstein now used the word “events” instead of “plots,” she restated a false intelligence community claim that 54 acts of terrorism were thwarted as a result of the bulk data collection program. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy managed to get NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander to admit that phone records collection stopped terrorist activity in only one to two terrorist cases.

She highlighted the case of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar to further support her argument except, according to Sen. Ron Wyden, “The government had all the information it needed to go to the phone company and get an individual court order.” And, “If time was of the essence” in any of these cases, the government could seek a “different court order or administrative subpoena” that “would allow for an emergency request for the records.”

“The NSA call-records program is working and contributing to our safety. It is legal and it is subject to strict oversight and thorough judicial review,” Feinstein argued.

According to Georgetown Law professor Laura Donohue, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, this is patently false. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) orders for information are not properly particularized or targeted. It violates the law by allowing millions of records to be collected, all of which could not be “relevant to an authorized investigation,” as they must be under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“The FISC order governing the telephony metadata program amounts to a general warrant, which the Fourth Amendment precludes,” Donohue argued. “It authorizes the government to rummage through our papers and effects in the hope of finding wrongdoing. There is no previous suspicion of criminal activity.   FISC admits that almost none of the information obtained relates to illegal behavior.”

A March 2009 FISC opinion found the NSA was collecting data that “otherwise could not be legally captured in bulk by the government.” Yet, the court reauthorized collection of “call detail records” because the government had explained such data was “necessary to analytical methods that are vital to the national security of the United States and that it had “minimization procedures” to “carefully restrict access” to the data. A program the court considered to be violating the law was permitted to continue even though the court’s role was to act as a check against this kind of abuse of authority.
Toward the end of her op-ed, Feinstein mentioned she introduced legislation to make “improvements to these counterterrorism programs” that would “require court review when the call records are queried” and “mandate a series of limitations on how the records can be obtained, stored and used.” That might lead one to think Feinstein is in favor of reform, however, her legislation is intended to disrupt concerted efforts to truly impose reform.

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed out that her proposed legislation might change the way the NSA accesses Americans’ phone records but it will not impose a limit on the volume of records collected. In fact, the legislation is likely to expand government surveillance powers by “legalizing the warrantless wiretapping of people known to be located in the US for 7 days where that surveillance began abroad.” And, under a section of FISA, the legislation would also legalize queries for “US persons’ names or email addresses without probable cause, so long as it is for ‘articulable foreign intelligence purposes.’”

Similar to what former vice president Dick Cheney might have said if he were in her position, she concluded, “If we end this vital program, we only make our nation more vulnerable to another devastating terrorist attack.” This is because fear is all Feinstein has to make the case that the NSA should not give up any of its powers.

Wyden, who has introduced his own legislation, warned Americans last week to expect this from members in Congress, who are part of the “business-as-usual brigade.” He told an audience at a recent CATO Institute event on NSA surveillance “defenders of the status quo will argue that the best way to protect Americans’ rights is to codify these rules into law, and maybe tweak them a little bit around the edges.” He explained that codifying the bulk data collection program into law would make it more permanent and make it easier for the government to justify collecting other types of records under the PATRIOT Act.

“Codifying the bulk collection program into law and ushering in a new era of digital surveillance would normalize overbroad authorities that were once unthinkable in America,” Wyden added.
The op-ed written by Feinstein is but another signal that Feinstein will be working to suppress a movement to diminish some of the NSA’s authority and constrain its power to conduct boundless and unchecked surveillance.

Feinstein is an artful politician, a Democrat but that is the label which gives her the credibility to build support for her agenda. She knows exactly what she is doing and hopes she can aid the intelligence community by directing energy for action into the passage of her legislation, which would expand the NSA’s power and re-legitimize it in the eyes of Americans.

If she can limit the terms of what’s possible, contain reform efforts in Congress and steer them in the direction that the intelligence community and administration of President Barack Obama desires, the NSA will not only escape the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures largely unscathed. Its powers will expand and become even more entrenched.

The Surveillance War on Americans

From Spying on "Terrorists Abroad" to Suppressing Domestic Dissent: When We Become the Hunted

by Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyer's Guild. (Photo: City Lights Books)If you're wondering why the ongoing revelations about the development and use of a massive public and private surveillance complex should be of concern to you, read what Michael German, senior policy counsel for the ACLU (and former FBI agent), says about the new book, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance:

Heidi Boghosian's 'Spying on Democracy' is the answer to the question, 'If you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone's watching you?' It's chock full of stories about how innocent people's lives were turned upside-down by public and private-sector surveillance programs. But more importantly, it shows how this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.

Truthout recently spoke with Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, about the ever-expanding government/corporate surveillance state.
You can receive the book and help support Truthout with a minimum contribution. Just click here to order.
Mark Karlin: Aren't we at a juncture in history where we've arrived at a perfect storm for nearly unrestricted surveillance in the United States? We have the political cover of keeping America "safe from terrorism" to justify the surveillance state. We have technology so advanced that few people cannot be monitored and tracked unless they are hermits hidden in caves. We have a corporate sector that increasingly depends on data mining for marketing and increasing profitability. And we have a rising tide of rebellion against the financial status quo, which the state has an interest in suppressing on behalf of the economic elites.
Heidi Boghosian: The confluence of circumstances enabling mass surveillance has the potential to permanently imperil Americans' civil liberties. How we respond will determine whether we continue to function as a democracy.
Several other factors add to the urgency of this challenge: The Obama administration is on the defensive after Edward Snowden's disclosures and will likely invest even more resources to protect its perpetual "war on terror" campaign and the corporate partners that profit from this manufactured war. As the public, and certain legislators, express apprehension about mass surveillance, the executive branch and the NSA may enact more stringent measures to fortify and safeguard their highly sophisticated spying infrastructure.
On top of that, CEOs of telecommunications and defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon and Microsoft are allied with the administration, guiding telecommunications and anti-terrorism policies through the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. And in addition to the lucrative business of data mining, corporations continue to adapt and refine technologies of war, from laser microphones to motion sensing capabilities, with which to monitor civilians.
Mark Karlin: Of course, we also have the "feed the beast" phenomenon that we have with the military-industrial complex. There are now so many US agencies and private contractors with a financial interest in the surveillance industry that it has the lobbying power to grow exponentially. How many individuals are approximately employed in the government-corporate surveillance behemoth? How important and approximately how many private companies have a stake in surveillance dollars?
Heidi Boghosian: We have created an entire new class of society that gathers and has access to classified information - an elite class that promises to grow as private companies seek increased revenue and as the government operates in unparalleled secrecy.
The majority of national intelligence, an astonishing 70 percent, is carried out by contractors. That translates into tens of thousands of analysts from more than 1,900 private firms who have performed intelligence functions over the past few years. Large contractors conduct most of the work, including Booz Allen Hamilton (which according to The New York Times, derived $1.3 billion in revenue from intelligence contracts), Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (with 39,600 employees, a reported $11.17 billion in revenue as of 2013, and a recent $6.6 billion contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency).
In 2012, an estimated 1.1 million private contractors had security clearance. The number of federal employees with security clearance is 2.6 million.
Mark Karlin: Historically, the U.S. government and local and state governments have used law enforcement agencies to suppress dissent. We have seen this in almost every era: Those who challenge the established financial order, in particular, are subject to surveillance. We are seeing the increased criminalization of protesting, whether it be the Occupy Movement, environmental protests, animal abuse protesters (you cover spying on critical mass bicyclists in NYC), etc. How easy is it to shift the surveillance data and information that the US and its contractors are assembling into focusing it on those who exercise First Amendment rights to challenge the status quo?
Heidi Boghosian: Not only is it easy for the US and its contractors to focus on activists, it is imperative that they do so. They must target social advocates in order to justify maintaining their budgets and their livelihoods. There are simply not enough "terrorists" in existence for the government to warrant the current level of intelligence spending. As a result, enormous federal resources are devoted to identifying and tracking activists who are portrayed as "extremists." Individuals who have helped bring about changes in corporate policies, such as animal rights or environmental advocates, are labeled domestic terrorist threats by the FBI.
The more individuals the security industry can identify as posing a national security threat - often based on tenuous, inaccurate or misleading information - the more it becomes possible to secure sizable government contracts.
The catch-all "anarchist extremist" can describe many individuals who challenge the status quo. Law enforcement circulated a list with photographs of "known anarchists" in 2004 before the Republican National Convention in New York. An unclassified DHS-FBI Intelligence Bulletin received much media coverage during the 2012 political conventions; it warned of possible increased risk of violence and property damage by anarchist extremists, arousing fear among local residents and businesses. FBI agents persist in circulating lists of alleged anarchists and visiting their friends, families and colleagues to frighten and harass politically active individuals and to create threats where none exist.
Mark Karlin: Explain the significance of the recent revelation that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was using secret surveillance data supplied to it by other agencies and not informing defendants or their counsel of the existence of the secret monitoring or information as the origin of the DEA charges.
Heidi Boghosian: This is precisely why we cannot trust the administration when officials say they are only using data for specific reasons. Secrecy is not compatible with the rule of law or with democracy.
The DEA's Special Operations Division's routine use of NSA information to initiate cases (and then backtracking and lying about how cases began) illustrates just one of the many possible ways that information gathered covertly may be used to contravene the laws of this nation. Hiding evidence gathered secretly violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable government searches and seizures and also impugns due process requirements of a fair trial. This shows how secrecy inherently corrupts a fair judicial process. And there are many other ways that covertly gathered personal data may be misused.
Mark Karlin: Much has been made by the Obama administration of alleging Edward Snowden has done great damage to the surveillance state by revealing its illegal and Foreign Intelligence Service Act-authorized activities and massive information database. But if such a large number of people allegedly are involved in surveillance activities, isn't data kept on us and those around the world at risk of leaking to foreign governments and private global corporations? Isn't this "top secret" information vulnerable to being obtained in parts or whole by parties other than the government for uses that have nothing to with "preventing terrorism"?
Heidi Boghosian: As more individuals are entrusted with access to and oversight of vast troves of personal data, this information necessarily becomes more vulnerable to misuse, whether by the parties gathering and analyzing it or by foreign governments and private multinational corporations. Because this data literally contains information related to people's entire lives, it is ripe for bullying, blackmail, threats or other improper uses.
But this "top secret" information is already being used by our own government for reasons that have little to do with combating threats to national security. Ownership of this information affords the administration unlimited power to suppress dissent, inhibit free speech and intimidate would-be critics into adhering to the status quo.
Stored data is vulnerable in the future as well. We cannot know now what activities the government may elect to stigmatize or criminalize years from now. Having access to stored data means that currently benign information may be assigned sinister meaning long after it was collected.
Recall that J. Edgar Hoover wielded enormous powerful because his FBI agents gathered information that he stored in secret dossiers on key politicians for nearly five decades. Presidents despised him but wouldn't fire him because he knew the intimate details of their personal and political lives and could use it to ruin their careers.
Mark Karlin: Just continuing on this concept of inherent vulnerability built into the NSA and the other government and private agencies doing US authorized surveillance work, doesn't the alleged hacking into the Pentagon database and other sites by the Chinese government generate serious implications that the US cannot protect its data, given rapid advances in technology?
Heidi Boghosian: No system is completely secure. There is only one surefire way to safeguard data, and that's by not collecting and storing it in the first place. The more data that the NSA and other government and private intelligence agencies amass about us, the more vulnerable we are, as individuals and as a nation. This underscores the dangers of secrecy. If there was a massive data breach, corporations and the government would not inform the public. They would hide it. We would be none the wiser, and our overall security would be greatly compromised. The less data that private security companies collect, the less money they make. The current dynamic is to sustain and grow the private surveillance industry; as a result, mistakes will be covered up.
Mark Karlin: Given the fascination of US consumers with new technology, isn't technological surveillance going to continue to have new products that will enable it to tighten its grip even further on monitoring individuals?
Heidi Boghosian: Technology cuts both ways: that which protects privacy and that which destroys privacy. Edward Snowden's disclosures will hopefully spark a public backlash against the model pioneered by Google, Apple and other corporations, namely, personal data in exchange for free services. People should start to recognize that when something is offered for free, the customer/user becomes the product.
Mark Karlin: What are the threats to a free press, even the mainstream media, in recent Obama administration use of surveillance information to threaten prosecution and to intimidate journalists?
Heidi Boghosian: Radical changes in media ownership, coupled with the Obama administration's penchant for secrecy and control of information, pose a formidable threat to the possibility of a free press - the ability of the media to be independent of the government.
The administration's unprecedented attacks on whistleblowers and members of the media have impeded the ability of investigative journalists to cultivate new sources, causing Jane Mayer of The New Yorker to proclaim that "investigative reporting has come to a standstill."
Those writers who do engage in investigative journalism, such as Associated Press reporters or James Rosen from Fox News, are spied on and may be accused of being co-conspirators in felonies for communicating with confidential sources. New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen was monitored and subpoenaed after exposing President George W. Bush's domestic wiretapping program and publishing State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
The mainstream press is now part of the corporate-government system. Anyone who doubts the alignment between the media and government should be reminded that Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, bought The Washington Post, was awarded a 10-year, $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA.
With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security came more ways for the government to collect and retain personal information about members of the press. The DHS Office of Operations Coordination and Planning and the Media Monitoring Initiative of the DHS National Operations Center are authorized to gather and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors and others who use traditional or social media in real time.
These examples are part of a history of threatening journalists and the independent press. From 1971 to 1978, the FBI's COINTELPRO targeted alternative newspapers with the goal of shutting them down. Banks routinely handed over financial records for these papers and their subscribers; from 1971 to 1978, the number of alternative publications declined from more than 400 to 65, as a direct result of customer and printer harassment, infiltration, wiretaps and even bomb threats.
Mark Karlin: Is there a chance that the surveillance-state story that has evolved is so massive that people won't be able to comprehend the extent of how the government is amassing information that can be used to control its citizens? There are so many forms of surveillance - and such obfuscation from the White House and the surveillance industry - that it's hard to get one's hands around the specifics. On top of that, let's not forget that we - as citizens - know only what we know. We don't know what is still secret.
Heidi Boghosian: We can never know the true extent to which the government is amassing information, given that the nature of intelligence gathering is covert, but we can begin to surmise the scope. Knowing what we do know, we have a duty to reign in an overreaching government and its corporate partners. Frank Church, chairman of the Church Committee that investigated surveillance abuses in the 1970s, predicted that the NSA could be used to control the citizenry: "The [National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, andno American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."
Mark Karlin: Given the history of the National Lawyers Guild in defending protesters exercising their constitutional rights against a government that historically suppresses dissent that threatens the elite status quo, are you in any way optimistic that the surveillance state can be slowed down or rolled back?
Heidi Boghosian: The power of the people united against government and corporate abuse is the most resilient power in the world. Revolutions rippling across the globe, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to protests in Turkey, make clear that the vast majority of people are dissatisfied with the global system and are ready, and able, to resist. Because of this, I am optimistic that we can curtail the surveillance state.
To do so we must first end the war-on-terror campaign. James Madison noted that "no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare," and it is apparent that the current perpetual war on terror is indeed thinning our lifeblood, namely our freedoms. This perpetual war is as much a failure as the government's ill-conceived and costly war on drugs, initiated during the Nixon administration.
We must also restore transparency to government.
At the bleakest moments in our past, whether in the labor or civil rights movements, people persevered against overwhelming odds. The challenges facing us now are: will we, the people, elect to harness our collective power to curb a mass surveillance state that infringes on our privacy and our constitutional rights? Will we demand transparency and accountability from government agencies? Will we respect the Supreme Court decisions affording corporations the same rights as people, or will we demand that the law protect human rights and not the property interests of an elite few?
I hope we will do all this and more - people power is limited only by one's imagination, and history has proven humanity to be eminently resourceful, creative and persistent in the face of injustice.

Surviving New World of George Orwell's "1984"

Living the Orwellian Life

Saturday, 12 October 2013 01:38 By Kathleen Sharp, Truthout | Opinion

(Photo: Wikipedia)Sixty-five years ago today, in a remote part of Great Britain, George Orwell was finishing his prescient novel, 1984. At the same moment a continent away in Hollywood, an American woman was actually living Orwell's fictional story. In the fall of 1948, actress Dorothy Comingore of Citizen Kane fame had no clue that the U.S. "thought police" was spying on her, but she could feel a shadow dogging her steps. Dorothy couldn't find a job to save her life and grew so upset about her difficulties, she wondered aloud: "If I've done something wrong, I'd like to know what it is."
It was as if the moody, random terror that Orwell had so vividly created in his manuscript had drifted across the Atlantic and slipped onto a westbound train for California. Unbeknown to Dorothy, she was being tailed by federal agents, monitored by Congressional investigators, and ranked as dangerous on a top-secret "security" list. These facts seemed more ludicrous than Orwell's parody of a "security state." But America already was constructing it.
Today, many U.S. writers, artists and activists undergo similar surreal experiences thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA). While we may think that our government's scrutiny of our private lives is somehow new and shocking, it isn't. America has a tradition of spying on its own. I realized this recently when I picked up my yellowed copy of Orwell's classic after reviewing Dorothy's private papers. I was struck by the parallels between Orwell's imagination, his real-life contemporary in America and what's happening to us today. Covert surveillance, travel restrictions, detentions, loss of work and worse. ... This is what happens to Americans who think differently than those in power.
This is what's happening now.
To understand the beauty of - and potential punishment for - independent thought, let's go to postwar Britain, a cold and dreary place. To finish his novel about "The Ministry of Truth," Orwell felt that he had to go to an even darker place. In late 1948, he lived on the Scottish isle of Jura, a remote and barren scratch of Hebridean rock. With little more than a camp bed and a table, the author used his "natural hatred of authority" to write a satirical fantasy about a totalitarian world. In it, eternal warfare is the price for a bleak prosperity. The "Party" remains in power by controlling the people. Giant telescreens scan the actions of everyone, disembodied voices deliver "newspeak" to the masses, and citizens are bombarded with nonsensical slogans such as "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength." (Sound familiar?)
In 1984, the Party prohibits any display of individuality, and the worst crime is thinking for oneself. Yet, before long, two lovers, Winston Smith and Julia, begin to do just that. They try to evade the thought police by joining the underground opposition. But the Party finds them, turns one against the other, and tortures Winston until his spirit finally breaks.
When Orwell's book was published, it was called a fantasy. But it served as a warning to Americans such as Comingore. The fiery actress had become famous for starring in Citizen Kane (1941). She portrayed Susan Kane, the mistress of industrialist Charles Foster Kane, who was based on media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. She had rendered the mogul's paramour with such skill and vulnerability that she was rumored to be short-listed for an Academy Award. She already had won the hearts of millions of moviegoers, according to Variety readers' polls, and her gorgeous face graced the pages of Life, Look and dozens of other publications. In the 1940s, Dorothy was a star with a promising career, the admiration of peers, a fine marriage and two children.
The star also had acquired a powerful enemy - the 78-year-old Hearst. The media mogul so hated Dorothy's portrayal of his mistress, 44-year-old Marion Davies, that he used his chain of newspapers and radio stations to smear the young woman. Hearst's columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell publicly accused Dorothy of belonging to the "Party," in this case the Communist Party, and borrowed Orwellian "newspeak" to malign her. As it was, Dorothy never was a dues-paying "commie." But even if she had been, it was her constitutional right to be one. She did associate with screenwriters who were communists or had been at one time: Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront), Dorothy Parker (A Star Is Born) and dear friends Cleo and Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus). These people were called to testify about their beliefs in front of America's ersatz Ministry of Truth - the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Publicly, union members and artists had to convince the HUAC that their "incorrect" affiliations and thoughts no longer existed - or if they did, they were not dangerous to the state.
Orwell would have loved the irony of it all.
U.S. political leaders at the time distrusted labor organizers and free thinkers even if those thinkers had raised money for the war and its victims, as Dorothy had. The FBI began tailing the actress. According to her files, agents reported her attending parties with Russian guests and giving speeches that, among other things, praised Soviet painters for their realism. But her biggest sins were working alongside black musician Leadbelly and singer Paul Robeson to try and desegregate USO clubs (they did), canvassing voters in Watts for state Assembly candidate Albert Dekker (who won) and trying to overturn the judicial lynching of Mexican youths in the corrupt Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial (they succeeded).
Dorothy's triumphs embarrassed the status quo.
Agents began collecting all of Dorothy's stage names, addresses and names of relatives and traveling companions. Officials tapped her telephone, opened her mail, and went so far as to ransack her tiny apartment. By then the actress was blacklisted and divorced, struggling to raise her children. It's no wonder she descended into depression, alcoholism and a few nervous breakdowns.
Still, the FBI didn't let up. Director J. Edgar Hoover had added Dorothy to his secret expansive "Security Index." He'd devised a system of writing the names of "subversive" citizens on white index cards and ranking them according to how far that person's beliefs strayed from what Hoover considered acceptable. It was easy to get on the list; it was impossible to get off. Dorothy was ranked a "Category C" danger, which meant that in the event of war she could be hauled off to an interment camp. As absurd as that sounds, the U.S. in mid-1950 was fighting the Korean War and, under Hoover's plan, Dorothy and some 12,000 other "potentially dangerous" dissidents were about to be arrested and detained in prison camps. Fortunately, President Harry Truman considered the plan unconstitutional and vetoed it.
But instead of learning from our old, cold mistakes, the U.S. is now repeating them. In fact, we're expanding the old surveillance and intimidation tactics, only we're using far more sophisticated digital tools. NSA agents can access our personal bank codes, voter registration rolls, property records, tax history, GPS coordinates, Facebook profiles and Twitter threads.
The alleged purpose of this giant stakeout is not to stamp out "communism" but to quash "terrorism." But these efforts edge perilously close to punishing "thought crimes," too. The only difference is that, unlike Orwell's telescreens or Hoover's binoculars, individuals (not the Party) pay for the new spy tools by purchasing big-screen computers, private smartphones and the latest high-tech gadget.
Of course, we wouldn't know any of this without the painstaking work of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, American journalist Glenn Greenwald and their source Edward Snowden. Poitras is no stranger to heavy surveillance. She has been harassed by the United States ever since she began filming My Country, My Country, which documents the abuse of American power in Iraq. In 2006, her government began marking her flight tickets with "SSSS" - Secondary Security Screening Selection. This designation is just as mysterious as Dorothy's Category C was 65 years ago, but it too means that Poitras faces extra scrutiny. Authorities have seized her private work papers, her computers, cellphones and other equipment, sometimes for weeks at time. They've detained her for hours, interrogating her without specifying why. Poitras has written to members of Congress and submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests. But she has never received an explanation as to why she is being hounded.
As Poitras told Salon and The New York Times Magazine, she no longer feels safe in her own country. Incredible as it seems, the woman now lives in Berlin.
Greenwald, too, has long chronicled how the United States has abused its powers and eroded our freedoms; naturally, his views have made him unpopular with US institutions. The author has been smeared as a "communist terrorist," and legislators from both political parties have said he should be prosecuted for revealing our domestic spy program. His past has been dredged up, including his work in defense of the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis, his work at a gay adult film company (critiques of Greenwld often are drenched in homophobia) and recent financial problems. To stay ahead of spymasters, Greenwald has used encryption software, prepaid phones and track-blockers. But that hasn't gone far enough. Greenwald's spouse recently was detained for nine hours by authorities; officials seized documents he was carrying for Greenwalkd then denied him counsel.
At least Greenwald and Poitras have the protection of shield laws and public notoriety. Unfortunately, ordinary citizens do not. Lately, officials have been detaining a string of women for mysterious reasons. Clay Nikiforuk was stopped for carrying a stash of condoms. Sarah Abdurrahman, a producer for On the Media, was detained by U.S. officials on her way home from Canada. They eventually let Sarah go but never explained why they had detained her. And then there's Michigan resident Mary Scott. She said she received threatening e-mails and was tailed by detectives after she blew the whistle on a health-care company.
The company was fined millions of dollars. Then the government began harassing the whistleblower. Mary and her daughter were placed on a TSA watch list; they've been pulled out of airline boarding lines and detained. According to court documents, Mary also has been denied some basic legal remedies. In fact, when a judge in North Carolina heard about the actions that the U.S. government and company had taken against Mary and her family, he was shocked. The official retaliations, he said, "violate everything related to American jurisprudence."
Yet, this happens increasingly in a country where power has grown more secretive and unaccountable in the past 13 years. Americans cherish their basic rights such as privacy, equality and free expression. Yet the fact that those rights are no longer guaranteed to all is a sign of how far we've fallen.
All of which brings us back to Orwell. He didn't think much of the king and queen. But he loved his country and its working people. He was a socialist but in a pragmatic way, hoping that the conditions of the poor and powerless would be improved. But most importantly, he opposed abstractions of every kind: fascism, Communism and nationalism. He recognized that Americanism was a term that easily could be exploited for totalitarian ends.
How right he was.

Progressive and Tea Party Alliance

CA and NYC Progressive Democratic Workers and Tea Party Activists in CA have AGREED.

Progressive Democrats - Tea Party Alliance

Goal   -  To Cut Federal Bureaucracy from our way too big Government

and end the United States Government Shutdown

Federal Bureaucracy to Cut

1)  NSA -  National Security Agency - $40 Billion legal, $80 B. Black budget yearly

    SAVE est. $800 BILLION over 10 years

2)  DHS -  Department of Homeland Security -  $2 Billion, but ATF, ICE spend more

    SAVE $50 BILLION over 10 yrs.  (NSA shares data with DHS, “the little NSA”)

3)  FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM  -  $7 Billion, Save cool $70 BILLION over 10 yrs.

4) IRS  -  INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE -  $5 Billion, Save $50 BILLION over 10 yrs.

CUT ALL FOUR AGENCIES and SAVE $970 BILLION over 10 years (nearly 
a $ TRILLION)             (that’s a lot of FREEDOM from Big Government)

No one will ever win another election as long as the NSA can steal the opposition 
Party’s Strategy, and pass it over to the Party in Power.  (Reason for the FISA Law 
and President Richard Nixon’s impeachment.)

We believe these CUTS in Government are more substantive than debating ACA now.
These CUTS are a way past the current Shutdown and impasse between the Parties.

In Congress

Progressive Democratic Workers (PDWAmerica.blogspot.com) and Tea Party
Organizations agree to work together to defund and repeal these 4 Federal agencies.

100 Progressive Democrats and 130 Tea Party Republicans are a Majority in
 the HOUSE of Representatives.

We will work together for the US People; rid the USA of NSA, DHS, the Fed, and IRS.

We will save Tax payers $970 BILLION over 10 years.

Obama's Peace Voters Win on Syria

On Syria and Larry Summers: 

The Obama '08 Voters Have Finally Found their Voice

  By Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian | Op-Ed

If we step back a moment from the government shutdown – an assault on millions of Federal workers and people who need the services of the national government at this time – and the Republicans' over-hyped and largely empty threat to trigger a default on the national public debt, there are more significant recent political developments that will continue long after this damaging political theater is over. 

 President Obama was twice defeated last month on matters of national and international importance, by grassroots opposition and resistance from within his own party. 1) The first was over his planned bombing of Syria; the 2) second was over his attempt to appoint Larry Summers as chair of the Federal Reserve.

The blocking of the Syria bombing was a historic victory with profound implications, perhaps the first time in the past 50 years that the American people were able to prevent an announced military intervention by pressuring Congress. Although some politicians and media outlets tried to say that Obama's military threats led to the agreement on Syria for destruction of its chemical weapons, the exact opposite is more likely true.

Obama had no military threat when he entered into negotiations over Syria – he clearly didn't have the votes in Congress to approve it. And so, he turned to diplomacy, which, for Washington, is all too often a last resort.

The Antiwar movement and the American people can also claim credit for the recent and vitally important diplomatic overtures with Iran: despite Obama's continuing, illegal threats that "all options are still on the table", the military option carries increasing political risk at home. The public has become progressively more aware that our endless wars and military interventions have little or nothing to do with so-called "national security".

The defeat of the Summers nomination was also unprecedented, in that a President's choice for Fed chair was rejected because of populist opposition. Summers played a major role in the deregulation and regulatory failures that contributed to the Great Recession, the Asian financial crisis (and resulting US trade deficit), and various abuses of America's bloated, corrupt financial sector.
It has taken a few years, but this is the base of the voters that brought Obama to power asserting itself. When Obama appointed his first cabinet, you could almost hear the collective groan of disillusionment from the millions who made up the mass movement that elected him. There was Goldman-Sachs (Tim Geithner) at Treasury; Bush's defense secretary was held over; and Hillary Clinton as secretary of State.

Change seemed mostly down the toilet, and hope was not far behind.
Ironically, the Tea Party Republicans who are holding the government hostage want to get rid of Obamacare, the one really important reform that the President did deliver – even if it was much reduced from what his supporters rightly demanded. The Republicans' desperation has some logic to it; most Americans don't yet appreciate the improvements in health insurance that have been won, but they will as the Law is implemented.

The Republicans are fighting a losing battle – and the shutdown will almost certainly increase their losses.  

But looking ahead, the more significant contribution of the Tea Party will be on issues where the majority of Americans are pitted against a corrupt elite that dominates both parties: the national surveillance state, and its cousin, endless war. And it is here – as in the Congressional opposition to the Syria bombing – that they have a positive contribution to make in the transition from the deceitful, violent, and increasingly-repressive-at-home regime of the so-called "war on terror".

It was Hillary Clinton's stubborn defense of the Iraq war that sealed her loss to Obama in 2008; and antiwar opposition also played a decisive role in the Democrats taking Congress in 2006. The 8 million-member organization Moveon.org was an important grassroots contributor to both of these changes; its members voted three to one last month to actively oppose President Obama's going to war in Syria, and they did so. They – together with lesser-known but also influential organizations of the antiwar movement – have changed the political equation for any American president contemplating war.

My own view is that 2006 and 2008 marked the end of nearly four decades of rightward drift in the United States. This includes the Clinton administration, which abandoned its campaign promises and instead delivered NAFTA, "welfare reform", and the WTO. Clinton's counter-reforms were masked by the longest-running economic expansion in US history, thanks to a stock market bubble and Alan Greenspan's change of policy that allowed the growth to continue after 1996. But Clinton did as much as a Republican administration could have done to continue the record-breaking upward redistribution of wealth and income (pdf) that has transformed America into a vastly more unjust society.

In a way, Obama's election in 2008 was similar to the election of left-of-center governments that has swept across Latin America, and especially South America, over the past 15 years. Those elections were driven primarily by the failure of neo-liberal (Conservative) economic policies.
In Latin America, the failure manifested itself in an unprecedented collapse of economic growth (pdf) for more than 20 years; in the United States, there was growth, but the gains went mostly to the richest households, and culminated in the disaster of the Great Recession. But in both parts of the western hemisphere, the voters rejected these long-term neo-liberal economic failures and wanted something different.

While the Latin American voters got a lot of what they voted for, including a vastly better foreign policy, we in the United States have been less successful. But that is beginning to change.
The Occupy Wall Street movement succeeded as no pundits or politicians had in the past, in placing inequality on the media and political agenda. And now, Bill de Blasio's success in the New York mayoral race, which he is leading by a large margin, is another indicator that social justice will be a serious electoral issue in the years to come.

Obama's defeats in the last month may well turn out to be a more important part of future political changes in this country than his likely victory over the Republicans in the current confrontation.