The advantage of having a political PAC is that you can do political advertising. As we raise money, you may be seeing more messages like the following. There will also be ads with graphics. You can see one on my facebook page (I am the only user named "George Phillies".) Because I am a Libertarian, I am not asking here for money in support. Instead, send your money to Marcy Wheeler http://emptywheel.net in support of her efforts.
And if any of you are inspired writers, America needs her Emile Zola. America needs her J'accuse.
Impeach them Both
Restore the Fourth Amendment!
Preserve the Constitution!
Impeach Director of National Intelligence Clapper
Impeach NSA Director Alexander
(Yes, this does not remove Alexander from his military positions.)
Impeachment? Yes, Impeach them both.
On what charges?
They lied to Congress.
They violated the Fourth Amendment.
They waged electronic war against America.
The Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
“Misdemeanor” has its 18th century meaning here, a grave misbehavior, whether criminal or not.
The Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Opposite to Fourth Amendment warrants are the Writs of Assistance issued by the English tyrant King George III, which allowed his minions to go anywhere and search anything.
Writs of assistance are totally unconstitutional.
What are the charges?
#1 They lied to Congress
#2 They violated the Fourth Amendment. They spied on you. They are spying on you right now
#3 They are waging electronic war on America
#1) Here are the Lies
Here is some evidence, taken from a broad range of media sources. First, lies to Congress:
Here, thanks to EmptyWheel, is a videotape of Clapper lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee Clapper prevaricates!http://www.emptywheel.net/...
The conversation part way in goes:
"[Senator Ron] Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data, at all, on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?
[General] Clapper: No sir.
Wyden: It does not?
Clapper: There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, uh, collect, but not wittingly."
And here, with a tip of the hat to Forbes.com
They deny again!http://www.forbes.com/...
In a congressional hearing in March of last year, for instance, NSA Director Keith Alexander was questioned about a Wired magazine cover story that included on-the-record interviews with multiple ex-NSA officials describing the agency’s collection of Americans’ voice and digital information. Speaking to Representative Hank Johnson, Alexander responded 14 times that the agency doesn’t collect the kind of domestic data Bamford had alleged. Here’s a sample of that questioning:
Rep. Johnson: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?
Director Alexander: No.
J: Google searches?
A: No.
J: Text messages?
A: No.
J: Amazon.com orders?
A: No.
J: Bank records?
A: No.
Why were those statements to Congress not true? The statements were not true
because the NSA really is doing those things that Clapper and Alexander denied that they were doing.
#2) Here is the truth: The NSA was and is spying on you. It’s collecting data on phone, internet, cell hookups, and game apps.
What was actually being done by the national security agencies was quite different than what they said. They're collecting your phone calls on Verizon. As reported in The Guardian newspaper http://theguardian.com/... , not to mention More Documents
(the Guardian posted the text of the order)
"NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama"
They're collecting your phone calls on AT&T and Sprint Nextel, your internet use, and what you bought with your credit cards. As reported by the Wall Street Journal
".... the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp....Phone calls, internet, credit cardsrecords from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers. ...." http://online.wsj.com/...
But the spying doesn't stop there. The Washington Post reported that the PRISM computer stream was used to spy on you far more intimately:
"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs..."
For full details: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story_1.html
When challenged about the spying, companies gave identical denials: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to our servers."
Why was the language so precisely repeated? Readers familiar with computers may recognize that this statement is a scripted denial that is not a denial. To spy, you want a copy of the datastreams, not an opportunity to fondle the hardware.
They Violated Our Laws and Our Constitution They did not execute a legal search. They used their court orders as UnAmerican Writs of Assistance. The White House’s own data review panel, stuffed with people perhaps unfairly characterized in some circles as White house cronies, reported that the mass searches were illegal. You can read more as covered by Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/...
#3 The Spy Scheme is Electronic Warfare on America
After all what is America? It’s not a scrap of cloth or soaring mountains or beautiful words lovingly inscribed on immortal paper. America is us. All of us. Yes, you, too.
And decoding coded messages is indeed electronic warfare.
That’s war against you.
That’s war on America.
There is only one solution:
Impeach them both
Remember, innocence will not protect you
An Editorial from Liberty for America magazine
With tips of the hat to many people including some here who saw the same thing first:
Innocence Is No Protection
The NSA and its fellow agencies are reading your every email and listening to your every phone message.
You might say ‘I don’t care. I have nothing to hide.’
Let’s consider what that claim misses. There are 40,000 NSA employees, at least as many at other spy agencies (National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, and many many more), for an easy 100,000. Their near relatives and friends are ten times as many, and their good friends are several times that. Almost for sure, some of these people work where you do, invest in the same stocks and mutual funds that you do, and much more.
You work hard, and looking for promotion into management. Your competition is Clement Doofus, who never does things so wrong that he’ll be fired, partly because you keep setting him straight. It’s promotion time, and Clement gets the job.
What happened?
You’re clean as a whistle. Clement is clean as a whistle. Alas, the fellow making the promotion decision is terrified that his family will find out about his affair with the hot babe in accounting, and responded positively to the anonymous motivational phone call — he didn’t recognize the voice as being synthesized on a good computer — telling him who to promote. He can’t imagine how anyone knew, because he and she always met at a different motel, and always had their cell phones turned off. Alas, Clement’s brother works for one of those three-letter places.
You’re clean as a whistle. Your brokers are even cleaner. You spend your evenings doing careful analysis, good enough that you score yourself against Warren Buffet and are doing almost as well. It’s just that when you go to buy, because the time seemed right, stocks started up somewhat before you got there. Alas, your broker has three-letter-agency investors.
You’re clean as a whistle. It’s just that when calls started increasing between Sailor’s Mutual Bank and Atlantis Sunken Trusts, and tracking showed tablets and laptops of their finance people repeatedly at the same place, it took a lot of computing and a little forethought to tell that a merger was impending.
You’re clean as a whistle. The video showing the teenagers breaking a storefront window is too grainy to interpret. Thanks to tracking, it is real clear which two teens pulled this off, especially because they both accidentally turned on their phones to record the deed, records that should only have been recorded in encrypted cloud memory unseen by the public. They even both erased the record as soon as they saw what they had mysteriously done.
And now you have a friendly visit ‘You know, this store is mostly a front for our surveillance operations’, and the suggestion ‘if you will only enroll your child in this very expensive military academy,’ operated by a recently-retired friend of the intelligence community speakers, ‘all will be forgiven and forgotten’.
You may be innocent. What about the people around you?
The Surveillance state is a direct threat to YOU. Yes, YOU!
Let me say that again.
No matter who you are: The surveillance state menaces you, your family, and your country.
Take it down, before it takes us all down!
With thanks to several proposers who voiced similar themes.
Far more information on their spying on you is available. In addition to the press sources above, note in particular
Empty Wheel http://emptywheel.net
The Guardian (UK Newspaper) http://theguardian.com