You Cannot Tell Me That This Was Not Intentional

Oh to be a fly on the wall of this week's editor's meeting at Businessweek.



H/t TPM.

DuckDuckGo

I've used the search engine DuckDuckGo now and again, and now the search engine, which does not record data on its users, has experienced a surge in use following the NSA revelations:

Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the "Prism" programme. Through the programme, the US's National Security Agency claimed to have "direct access" to the servers of companies including, crucially, the web's biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers, the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.

"It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism," says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia on the US east coast. "We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press." From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight.

Yet you've probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. "If you asked 100 people, 96 would probably think it was a Chinese restaurant," as the SFGate site observed. (The name comes from the children's game DuckDuckGoose, a sort of tag involving seated players.) You won't find it offered as an alternative default search engine on any browser, on desktop or mobile. Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.

But this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. It doesn't use cookies or store data about its users' IP addresses, doesn't offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default. (Google provides an encrypted connection for logged-in users, but not automatically for non-logged in users.) If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.

Seeing as how Google (full disclosure, they do cut me a check occasionally for the ads they serve on this site) is determined to drop the word "Don't" from their motto, "Don't be evil," I do wish them all the success in the world.

Why Ellsberg Could Turn Himself In, and Edward Snowden Cannot

Basically, it comes down to the fact that while Ellsberg might have been at risk by illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he was not at risk by the law itself, while Edward Snowden would be tortured as a matter of law and Department of Justice policy:

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.

After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”

Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

(FYI, “incapacitate me totally” means assassination by Nixon's people)

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

What he is saying here is that Snowden will be tortured if he ever enters US custody.

Hell, they did that almost 20 years ago in the case of Wen Ho Lee, where he spent months in pretrial solitary, largely because the prosecutors, and the counter-espionage apparatus, wanted to break him.

BTW, when we look at the NSA surveillance regime, it is what a former East German Stasi officer would call a totalitarian state's wet dream:

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

You know, if your surveillance regime is something that gives a former Stasi agent a stiffie, you are doing something profoundly evil.

Former FISA Judge Criticizes the Court

Well, now we have a retired FISA Court Judge saying this court has been reduced to a joke and a fraud:

A retired judge who once served on a secretive U.S. intelligence court said on Tuesday it should not be able to approve broad government data-gathering requests without hearing from outside parties who could warn of potential civil liberties concerns.

Currently, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court makes its decisions on government surveillance requests without hearing from anyone but U.S. Justice Department lawyers in its behind-closed-doors proceedings.

James Robertson, a retired federal judge in Washington who served on the court for three years ending in 2005, said that if the court is required to approve broad data-collection programs, the judges should be able to hear from other parties.

Speaking at a public meeting in Washington on privacy and civil liberties, he said the process would work better if some approximation of an adversarial system existed.

"I submit this process needs an adversary," he said.

Robertson suggested the possible reforms during the public meeting held by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a bipartisan government entity set up in 2004 to advise the White House on civil liberties concerns raised by intelligence gathering. He said the privacy board itself could possibly be a party in the intelligence court's proceedings.

The actions of the court have come under new scrutiny following the disclosure of previously secret telephone and internet surveillance programs conducted by the U.S. government.

The British Guardian and the Washington Post newspapers disclosed the details of the data collection in June based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the fugitive U.S. National Security Agency contractor believed to be holed up in Russia.

Since the U.S. Congress amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2008, the court "now approves programmatic surveillance," Robertson said, meaning it was acting more like a government agency than a court.

"That's not the bailiwick of judges," he said. "Judges don't make policy."

Robertson said that when he served on the court, the judges' role was to decide whether to grant government requests for individual warrants, he said. Granting approval to entire programs is not a "judicial function," he said.

(emphasis mine)

While he does say that he is not suggesting the law is being broken, this sort of talk from a judge about his court (with the possible exception of Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia) is very rare.

Note also that he is not criticizing the judges, he is criticizing the role of the court under new laws.

Understanding just how vehement this seemingly mild speech is a bit like reading Nathanial Hawthorne,^* he cannot express his outrage explicitly.  It is a circuitously oblique way to to express his views, but this is as befits a judge.

^*The phrase, "Then, all was spoken!" refers to physical passion (probably sex) in The Scarlet Letter.

I Liked Him Better as Ford Prefect

Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteers to be force fed to show what it's like for the Guantanamo detainees. (Not for the faint of heart, I felt ill after watching)



Note that they stopped when he asked. In our Gulag in the Caribbean, they don't stop, and it goes on for 2 hours ……… Twice a day.

Because torturing people who have been cleared of any crime, because Barack Obama lacks the balls to let them out, is what we have become as a society.

And still, the Republicans are working on a phony IRS and Benghazi scandal, instead of this, or his coddling the banksters.

There are very real crimes here, and the Republicans cannot bring themselves to complain about the torture of non-white people.

And this will be the response from the Obamabots:



Food for thoughtlessness

My Vacation Pix & Sh%$

I'm still organizing the pix, so it will be a few days.

I'm probably going to paste a couple of pix for each category, and link to the rest in some sort of album (Probably Imgur or Tumblr).

One of the joys of digital media is that you can take pictures at essentially no cost, and I took advantage of it.

I Need a Vacation From My Vacation

Too tired to blog.

Posted via mobile.