It's Official: The USA Freedom Act Is Just As Destructive As The USA Patriot Act

[Octafish]

It's Official: The USA Freedom Act Is Just As Destructive As The USA Patriot Act

Tyler Durden
zerohedge, June 3, 2015

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/03/2015 21:30 -0400
Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,

EXCERPT...

If anyone had actually taken the time to read the legislation, they’d see that most of the ‘concessions’ made by the government are entirely hollow.

Secret FISA courts still exist. Lone wolf surveillance authority and roving wiretaps still exist. They can still grab oodles of other data like medical and business records.

And the US Attorney General has even been awarded new ’emergency powers’ to use in his/her sole discretion… just in case the secret courts might be uncooperative.

The big victory being cheered by the media pertains to the collection of phone records. This one is actually hilarious.

The USA FREEDOM Act prevents the government from seizing and storing ‘call detail records’, the so-called meta-data information like your phone number, the other caller’s phone number, the length of the call, etc.

But section 107(k)(3)(B) of the new law specifically states that ‘call detail records’ do NOT include the *actual content* of the call itself. Or your name. Address. Financial data. Cell-site location. Etc.

So basically they can’t archive your phone number. But everything else is fair game. Congratulations on your freedom.

Lawmakers also managed to sprinkle all sorts of other worthless provisions into the USA FREEDOM Act.

For example, the Inspector General (IG) of the United States is required to issue a report discussing what civil liberty violations may have occurred over the last few years.

Great. Except that IG reports are just that– reports. They have no teeth. And Congress can do with this one precisely what they do with every other IG report that gets issued: nothing.

(Seriously, when was the last time you heard any ruckus about an IG report? Probably never.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-03/its-official-usa-freedom-act-just-destructive-usa-patriot-act

EmPHASSis in original.

I dunno why we fight about who's a commie wearing what pantsuit on Vanity Fair. We need focus on the real problems out to destroy democracy.

[bananas]

1. "just in case the secret courts might be uncooperative"

Because you never know when a rubber-stamper will develop a conscience.

[Octafish]

6. A big Rubber Stamper appointed by a Rubber Head for the Robber Barons

Chief Justice Roberts Is Awesome Power Behind FISA Court

by Ezra Klein
Bloomberg, July 2, 2013

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Chief justice of the U.S. is a pretty big job. You lead the Supreme Court conferences where cases are discussed and voted on. You preside over oral arguments. When in the majority, you decide who writes the opinion. You get a cool robe that you can decorate with gold stripes.

Oh, and one more thing: You have exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.
To use its surveillance powers -- tapping phones or reading e-mails -- the federal government must ask permission of the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A FISA judge can deny the request or force the government to limit the scope of its investigation. It’s the only plausible check in the system. Whether it actually checks government surveillance power or acts as a rubber stamp is up to whichever FISA judge presides that day.

The 11 FISA judges, chosen from throughout the federal bench for seven-year terms, are all appointed by the chief justice. In fact, every FISA judge currently serving was appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will continue making such appointments until he retires or dies. FISA judges don’t need confirmation -- by Congress or anyone else.

No other part of U.S. law works this way. The chief justice can’t choose the judges who rule on health law, or preside over labor cases, or decide software patents. But when it comes to surveillance, the composition of the bench is entirely in his hands and so, as a result, is the extent to which the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can spy on citizens.

“It really is up to these FISA judges to decide what the law means and what the NSA and FBI gets to do,” said Julian Sanchez, a privacy scholar at the Cato Institute. “So Roberts is single handedly choosing the people who get to decide how much surveillance we’re subject to.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/chief-justice-roberts-is-awesome-power-behind-fisa-court

For those new to the Party, the same John Roberts made his bones helping out during Iran Contra and Florida. So that's the kind of BFEE awesome America is getting in secret, too. Signs of a conscience so far: zero.

[bigwillq]

2. No, it's not.

Obama would never support or sign legislation that would be destructive to our country or our planet.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. thanks........ I love good satire

is that from the onion or Borowitz?

[bigwillq]

10. Garlicwitz

[Octafish]

7. I'm just as ticked as the Socialists at Socialist World who are really hopping mad.

“USA Freedom Act”: A fig leaf for illegal spying

by Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site, 4 June 2015

EXCERPT...

The most overstated and effusive presentation of the bill came in the New York Times, the principal shaper of liberal public opinion and a slavish supporter of the Obama administration. Its account was headlined, “US Surveillance in Place Since 9/11 Is Sharply Limited.” That the bill affected only one of hundreds of intrusive surveillance programs went unmentioned.

The news analysis claimed, “The legislation signaled a cultural turning point for the nation, almost 14 years after the Sept. 11 attacks heralded the construction of a powerful national security apparatus. The shift against the security state began with the revelation by Edward J. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, about the bulk collection of phone records. The backlash was aided by the growth of interconnected communication networks run by companies that have felt manhandled by government prying.”

This paragraph includes a mass of falsifications and distortions. First, the “powerful national security apparatus” was in existence well before September 11, 2001—indeed, the role of the CIA, NSA and FBI in permitting and even directly facilitating the terror attacks, which allowed the US government to go forward with a long-planned program of militaristic aggression, including invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, raises many troubling questions.

The “shift against the security state” prompted by Snowden’s revelations was a shift in popular opinion, not a change in the policies of either Congress or the Obama administration, both of whom defended the intelligence apparatus and demanded Snowden’s arrest and prosecution for treason. And Snowden revealed far more than the bulk collection of phone records, releasing tens of thousands of documents on myriad illegal NSA spy programs directed at both the American population and the entire world.

Nor did American companies play any significant role in opposing government spying. On the contrary, Snowden’s revelations included the exposure of collaboration by Google, Microsoft and dozens of other Silicon Valley giants, and well as the entire telecommunications industry, with the build-up of an American police-state apparatus.

CONTINUED...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/04/pers-j04.html

The supporting role played by Corporate McPravda to the NYT lead is touching.

One major correction: One Telco CEO did oppose the NSA domestic spy treason. Joseph Nacchio of QWEST Communications. The only one to go public in his opposition to the government's unconstitutional program, he got railroaded for his trouble and sent to prison.

[TampaAnimusVortex]

17. Dont let the facts stop you from coming to predefined conclusions...

Certainly his authorizing this must mean its in our best interests right? I mean what's the other possible alternatives, except maybe aliens have taken over his mind of course...

[Wilms]

4. Thanks, Oct.

You're are amongst the greatest posters here.

[Octafish]

13. Back at you, Wilms. Police State on Supercomputers knows how to turn a buck.

Feeling is mutual. For those new to the subject

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, jawohl.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck.

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude, thanks to the banksters and warmongers' ability to use the USA PATRIOT Act to their advantage. Only a few people -- on DU and in RL -- are brave enough to stand up to them, pretty much alone. Thanks for always being one, Wilms.

[Mnemosyne]

5. I am shocked, shocked I tell you!

[Octafish]

14. “Spies R Us”: Mass FBI Aerial Surveillance of Americans Using Drones

By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 04, 2015

Free and open societies don’t spy on their citizens. They don’t invent phony threats as justification.

SNIP...

Bureau secrecy and cover-up make it impossible to know the full extent of its lawlessness. It operates ad libitum with minimum oversight and accountability.

One example is its mass surveillance of US citizens by drones and other aircraft. On June 2, AP reported ”(s)cores of low-flying planes circling American cities…”

“They’re “part of a civilian air force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies…”

It’s not secret. It’s been reported before. In July 2013, the agency admitted using drones for domestic surveillance numerous times without court authorized warrants or other forms of oversight.

At the time, deputy director Stephen D. Kelly said “(t)he FBI uses UAVs in very limited circumstances to conduct surveillance when there is a specific operational need.”

“Since late 2006, the FBI has conducted surveillance using UAVs in eight criminal cases and two national security cases.”

Former FBI director Robert Meuller admitted spying on US citizens with no “operational guidelines.”

Warrantless spying by any means threatens everyone. No probable cause is needed. No restraints are imposed. Constitutional protections are circumvented.

Once a program is established, it takes on a life of its own. In the last decade, FBI aerial spying expanded to “civilian air force” level.

In April alone, AP identified at least 50 FBI aircraft conducting more than 100 flights over urban and rural areas in 11 states.

It cited a 2009 budget document indicating 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft.

FBI aerial spying is longstanding. Today, drones and other aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras for close-up visual surveillance as well as technology able to monitor thousands of cell phones – a blatant breach of privacy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/spies-r-us-mass-fbi-aerial-surveillance-of-americans-using-drones/5453450

Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights, anyway?



Yeah, see. No such thing as the BFEE uh I mean organized crime. Yeah.

[KG]

8. never expected anything other than politicians caving to fear

[Octafish]

16. Yet, they pretend. And the lobbyists fashion a SuperDuperPATRIOT Act.

"A conservative government is an organized conspiracy." -- Benjamin Disraeli

A Misleading Moment of Celebration for a New Surveillance Program

Retooling the Patriot Act

by NORMAN SOLOMON
CounterPunch, weekend June 5-7, 2015

The morning after final passage of the USA Freedom Act, while some foes of mass surveillance were celebrating, Thomas Drake sounded decidedly glum. The new law, he told me, is “a new spy program.” It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations of Fourth Amendment rights.

Later on Wednesday, here in Oslo as part of a “Stand Up For Truth” tour, Drake warned at a public forum that “national security” has become “the new state religion.” Meanwhile, his Twitter messages were calling the USA Freedom Act an “itty-bitty step” — and a “stop/restart kabuki shell game” that “starts w/ restarting bulk collection of phone records.”

That downbeat appraisal of the USA Freedom Act should give pause to its celebrants. Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency — and a whistleblower who endured prosecution and faced decades in prison for daring to speak truthfully about NSA activities. He ran afoul of vindictive authorities because he refused to go along with the NSA’s massive surveillance program after 9/11.

Drake understands how the NSA operates from the highest strategic levels. He notes a telling fact that has gone virtually unacknowledged by anti-surveillance boosters of the USA Freedom Act: “NSA approved.” So, of course, did the top purveyor of mendacious claims about the U.S. government’s surveillance programs — President Obama — who eagerly signed the “USA Freedom” bill into law just hours after the Senate passed it.

A comparable guardian of our rights, House Speaker John Boehner, crowed: “This legislation is critical to keeping Americans safe from terrorism and protecting their civil liberties.”

SNIP...

Right now, many people in Europe and elsewhere who care about civil liberties and want true press freedom are looking at the United States: to understand what an aroused citizenry might be able to accomplish, seeking to roll back a dangerous accumulation of power by an ostensibly democratic government. Let’s not unwittingly deceive them — or ourselves — about how much ground the U.S. surveillance state has lost so far.

SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/05/retooling-the-patriot-act/

Today they are an extremely well-paid hypocrisy -- of cowards.

[Blue_Tires]

9. Zerohedge? FFS...

Does anybody actually keep up with the NSA coverage, or do they just sporadically read what they want to read?

From 3 weeks ago:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/14/nsa-loves-the-nothing-burger-spying-reform-bill.html

http://www.newser.com/article/c485761f7c6648868793cb60c8c4979a/analysis-nsa-emerges-mostly-unscathed-from-congressional-surveillance-reform.html

[Octafish]

12. How about ''Foreign Policy''?

Congress May Have Passed the Freedom Act, But Mass Surveillance Is Alive and Well

BY ELIAS GROLL
Foreign Policy, JUNE 4, 2015 - 6:33 PM

ONe useful way to think about the USA Freedom Act that President Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday night is as a lightning-rod for the National Security Agency. By changing the way the NSA examines domestic phone records, the agency is now able to make the argument that it has undergone significant reforms in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations. By giving up the authority to collect all American phone records, the agency has paid a small price — and gotten rid of a program that it had come to consider a burden, anyway — to keep its most important authorities intact.

The full measure of those powers were on prominent display in the New York Times on Thursday, when the paper reported that the agency has expanded its “warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking.” The NSA, the paper reported, has also partnered with the FBI to provide federal investigators with intelligence about computer intrusions carried out by foreign powers, according to documents provided by Snowden. There is no evidence of outright wrongdoing in Thursday’s reports, but they signal another expansion of the NSA’s authorities to collect data on the Internet.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said Thursday’s report “underscores the critical importance of placing reasonable and commonsense limits on government surveillance in order to protect the privacy of Americans” and that “Congress should have an open, transparent and honest debate about how to protect both our national security and our privacy.”

Jonathan Mayer, a cybersecurity researcher, told the Times that FBI use of NSA data to combat cybercrime threatens to conflate the latter’s intelligence gathering role with the former’s law enforcement mandate. “That’s a major policy decision about how to structure cybersecurity in the U.S. and not a conversation that has been had in public,” he said.

In short, the Times report, which was published in conjunction with ProPublica, reveals that the NSA has directed some of its most powerful tools toward cracking down on state-sponsored hackers online. The agency now has the power to search the data streams it has access to for snippets of code and other identifying information to spot hackers and track their activities. It is doing so by relying on one of its most important tools: Its position atop the global Internet infrastructure.

The NSA has risen to become the world’s most powerful intelligence agency in no small part because a huge amount of the world’s Internet traffic flows through the United States. Fiber optic cables carry large amounts of Internet data from one part of the world to another, and when that traffic arrives in the United States, the NSA is there to have a look at it.

CONTINUED...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/congress-may-have-passed-the-freedom-act-but-mass-surveillance-is-alive-and-well/?wp_login_redirect=0

Is that good enough, Blue Tires, FFS?

[Initech]

11. Never trust any law with the words "freedom" or "patriot" in the title.

We can thank the BFEE for that one.

[Fumesucker]

15. No one could possibly have predicted that

/condi