PATRIOT ACT DEADLINE THREATENS TO SPLINTER NSA REFORMERS

Privacy advocates, facing an uphill battle in a Republican-controlled Congress next year, will have to make a difficult choice.

Some argue that their best shot to curb the National Security Agency's powers will be to kill core provisions of the USA Patriot Act altogether. But other reformers aren't ready to take the post-9/11 law hostage.

The debate over whether to let the Patriot Act provisions expire in June threatens to splinter the surveillance-reform coalition. If the tech industry, privacy groups, and reform-minded lawmakers can't coalesce around a strategy soon, they may have little hope of reining in the surveillance state.

And with outrage over the Snowden revelations fading and fear over the Islamic State rising, the push for reform appears to have already lost its momentum.

The NSA critics are still licking their wounds after Senate Republicans blocked the USA Freedom Act last week. The bill, authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, would have prohibited the government's carte blanche collection of U.S. phone metadata—the numbers and time stamps of phone calls but not their actual contents.

The bill would have also extended key provisions of the Patriot Act for two years, including the controversial Section 215, which the NSA uses to justify its phone-record collection program. But that wasn't enough for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Marco Rubio, and most members of the Republican Caucus, who warned that the bill would have helped terrorists kill Americans.

"This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs. The threat from ISIL is real," McConnell said in a statement, using an alternative name for the Islamic State.

With the Republicans winning the Senate, McConnell is about to become the majority leader, giving him control over the chamber's agenda. Given his aggressive last-minute whipping against the Freedom Act, privacy advocates say it is difficult to imagine him pushing anything more than cursory changes to the NSA.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/patriot-act-deadline-threatens-to-splinter-nsa-reformers-20141125

The 25 most Florida things to happen in 2014

Libertarian paradise: Private security outnumbers cops 5-1

ZACAPA, Guatemala (AP) — Jose Miguel Ramirez went hunting for iguanas on a melon farm, and paid for it with his life. The 19-year-old's body was dumped by a stream near the property line, a bullet hole above his left eye.

What happened to Ramirez remains in dispute, though no one is pushing for answers any longer. The private security guards alleged to have killed him were never prosecuted. A witness who said he saw the shooting recanted. In a country that averages some 100 homicides a week, the killing barely drew headlines and public attention moved on.

The case of Ramirez, whose body was found outside the ZacapaEx plantation in March 2013, reveals just how convoluted security and justice have become in Guatemala, where private guards outnumber police 5-to-1, and the soaring crime rate is married with shocking levels of impunity. Those with means buy protection the state cannot provide, those without take matters into their own hands.

"You don't call the police. You don't call 911. You deal with it yourself," said Frank Moseley, a private security analyst based in Guatemala.

Ramirez, a young corn farmer with a pregnant girlfriend and toddler son had set off with his two brothers-in-law that Sunday, a slingshot in his pocket for hunting. They left the trash-strewn arroyo where the family lives to search for food — fat, green iguanas.

ZacapaEx is one of the large farms producing melons that locals proudly tout as the sweetest in all of Central America. The company is a significant source of jobs in the Guatemalan highlands where opportunities are scarce. Residents get seasonal work in the fields and packing plants, or are hired as guards to patrol the farms against thieves, who take everything from fruit to tires and equipment.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/killing-guatemalan-hunter-likely-unsolved-050806888.html#go3mV1D

Do Online Death Threats Count as Free Speech? (USSC case)

Exhibit 12 in the government’s case against Anthony Elonis is a screenshot of a Facebook post he wrote in October 2010, five months after his wife, Tara, left him. His name appears in the site’s familiar blue, followed by words that made Tara fear for her life: ‘'If I only knew then what I know now . . . I would have smothered your ass with a pillow. Dumped your body in the back seat. Dropped you off in Toad Creek and made it look like a rape and murder.'’

Exhibit 13, also pulled from Facebook, is a thread that started when Tara’s sister mentioned her plans to take her niece and nephew — Elonis’s children — shopping for Halloween costumes. Tara responded and then Elonis did, too, saying their 8-year-old son ‘'should dress up as a Matricide.'’ He continued: ‘'I don’t know what his costume would entail though. Maybe your head on a stick?'’ This time, Elonis included a photo of himself, holding a cigarette to his lips.

After Tara saw these posts — and another one, from the same time, which begins: ‘'There’s one way to love ya but a thousand ways to kill ya. I’m not gonna rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts'’ — she went to court in Reading, Pa., and got a protection-from-abuse order against her husband.

On Nov. 7, three days after Tara got the ruling, Elonis linked to a video satire by the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’ Know. On camera, a member of the group mocks the law against threatening to kill the president. Elonis mimicked the group’s lines but subbed in his own text, to make it about Tara. ‘'I also found out that it’s incredibly illegal, extremely illegal to go on Facebook and say something like the best place to fire a mortar launcher at her house would be from the cornfield behind it because of easy access to a getaway road and you’d have a clear line of sight through the sun room,'’ he wrote. ‘'Yet even more illegal to show an illustrated diagram.'’ Elonis added a diagram with a getaway road, a cornfield and a house. ‘'Art is about pushing limits,'’ his post concluded. ‘'I’m willing to go to jail for my Constitutional rights. Are you?'’

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/do-online-death-threats-count-as-free-speech.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/BriefsV4/13-983_pet.authcheckdam.pdf

This case will obviously have huge implications for the future of online discourse...One extreme might have strict laws and heavyhanded enforcement; the other extreme may have millions of sociopathic nutbars hiding their threats to spouses and co-workers behind "artistic expression"...

As an aside, jesus fucking christ that ex-hubby is batshit insane...That wife couldn't move out fast enough...

As always, the nuanced brilliance of Ta-Nehisi Coates tells it like it is:

In a recent dispatch from Ferguson, Missouri, Jelani Cobb noted that President Obama's responses to "unpunished racial injustices" constitute "a genre unto themselves." Monday night, when Barack Obama stood before the nation to interpret the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, he offered a particularly tame specimen. The elements of "the genre" were all on display—an unmitigated optimism, an urge for calm, a fantastic faith in American institutions, an even-handedness exercised to a fault. But if all the limbs of the construct were accounted for, the soul of the thing was not.

There was none of the spontaneous annoyance at the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and little of the sheer pain exhibited in the line, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." The deft hand Obama employed in explaining to Americans why the acquittal of George Zimmerman so rankled had gone arthritic. This was a perfunctory execution of "the genre," offered with all the energy of a man ticking items off a to-do list....

......Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism....

....The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.

And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring. Hope is not the naiveté that would change the face on a racist system and then wash its hands of its heritage. Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.



http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/


I wanted to lash out at all those people overly harsh of Obama's comments Monday night, but couldn't find the right words...Coates puts all my thoughts in perfect order...

Jian Ghomeshi charged with four counts of sexual assault

Source: Yahoo

TORONTO - Former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi has been charged with four counts of sexual assault.

Toronto police say he also faces another charge, which they called "overcome resistance - choking." Police say Ghomeshi, 47, has surrendered and is scheduled to appear in court early this afternoon.

Ghomeshi was fired by the CBC on Oct. 26. The public broadcaster said it decided to terminate his employment after seeing "graphic evidence'' that he had physically injured a woman. Ghomeshi admitted in a lengthy Facebook post, published on the day he was fired, that he engaged in "rough sex" but insisted his encounters with women were consensual.

Since his dismissal, nine women have come forward with allegations, some dating back a decade, that Ghomeshi sexually or physically assaulted them. Toronto police began an investigation into several allegations of sexual assault relating to Ghomeshi on Oct. 31.

The charges against Ghomeshi were announced a day after it came to light that he had reached an agreement with the CBC to withdraw his $55 million lawsuit against the public broadcaster.


Read more: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/newsalert-ghomeshi-charged-four-counts-sexual-assault-toronto-154607981.html

The one thing that disturbs me more than anything else

is to see how many prominent conservatives celebrated the decision like it was the Super Bowl or something...Yeah, they celebrated Zimmerman too, but they weren't as all-out flagrant with it like this time...The hatred of PBO is reaching pathological levels...

Right or wrong has no meaning for the GOP; they see any political defeat of Black Americans as a defeat for President Obama, and vice-versa...It's all a game...

Just one quick humor break to sum up the week so far:

The Meaning of the Ferguson Riots

The St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police officer who in August shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would have generated widespread anger and disappointment in any case. But the county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, who is widely viewed in the minority community as being in the pockets of the police, made matters infinitely worse by handling this sensitive investigation in the worst possible way.

First, he refused to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor who could have been appointed by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri. He further undermined public confidence by taking a highly unorthodox approach to the grand jury proceeding. Instead of conducting an investigation and then presenting the case and a recommendation of charges to the grand jury, his office shifted its job to the grand jury. It made no recommendation on whether to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, but left it to the jurors to wade through masses of evidence to determine whether there was probable cause to file charges against Officer Wilson for Mr. Brown’s killing.

Under ordinary circumstances, grand jury hearings can be concluded within days. The proceeding in this case lasted an astonishing three months. And since grand jury proceedings are held in secret, the drawn-out process fanned suspicions that Mr. McCulloch was deliberately carrying on a trial out of public view, for the express purpose of exonerating Officer Wilson.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Mr. McCulloch took a reckless approach to announcing the grand jury’s finding. After delaying the announcement all day, he finally made it late in the evening, when darkness had placed law enforcement agencies at a serious disadvantage as they tried to control the angry crowds that had been drawn into the streets by news that the verdict was coming. Mr. McCulloch’s announcement sounded more like a defense of Officer Wilson than a neutral summary of the facts that had led the grand jury to its conclusion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/opinion/the-meaning-of-the-ferguson-riots.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=2

The Meaning of the Ferguson Riots

The St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police officer who in August shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would have generated widespread anger and disappointment in any case. But the county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, who is widely viewed in the minority community as being in the pockets of the police, made matters infinitely worse by handling this sensitive investigation in the worst possible way.

First, he refused to step aside in favor of a special prosecutor who could have been appointed by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri. He further undermined public confidence by taking a highly unorthodox approach to the grand jury proceeding. Instead of conducting an investigation and then presenting the case and a recommendation of charges to the grand jury, his office shifted its job to the grand jury. It made no recommendation on whether to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, but left it to the jurors to wade through masses of evidence to determine whether there was probable cause to file charges against Officer Wilson for Mr. Brown’s killing.

Under ordinary circumstances, grand jury hearings can be concluded within days. The proceeding in this case lasted an astonishing three months. And since grand jury proceedings are held in secret, the drawn-out process fanned suspicions that Mr. McCulloch was deliberately carrying on a trial out of public view, for the express purpose of exonerating Officer Wilson.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Mr. McCulloch took a reckless approach to announcing the grand jury’s finding. After delaying the announcement all day, he finally made it late in the evening, when darkness had placed law enforcement agencies at a serious disadvantage as they tried to control the angry crowds that had been drawn into the streets by news that the verdict was coming. Mr. McCulloch’s announcement sounded more like a defense of Officer Wilson than a neutral summary of the facts that had led the grand jury to its conclusion.

For the black community of Ferguson, the killing of Michael Brown was the last straw in a long train of abuses that they have suffered daily at the hands of the local police. News accounts have strongly suggested, for example, that the police in St. Louis County’s many municipalities systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines — which has the effect of both bankrupting and criminalizing whole communities.

In this context, the police are justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse.

The case resonated across the country — in New York City, Chicago and Oakland — because the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast. This point was underscored last month in a grim report by ProPublica, showing that young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk — 21 times greater — of being shot dead by police than young white men. These statistics reflect the fact that many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.

We get a flavor of this in Officer Wilson’s grand jury testimony, when he describes Michael Brown, as he was being shot, as a soulless behemoth who was “almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.”

President Barack Obama was on the mark last night when he said, “We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue for America.” The rioting that scarred the streets of St. Louis County — and the outrage that continues to reverberate across the country — underlines this inescapable point. It shows once again that distrust of law enforcement presents a grave danger to the civic fabric of the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/opinion/the-meaning-of-the-ferguson-riots.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=2