If you live in the general vicinity of Los Angeles, there's a good chance you'll be soon able to see the nation's newest national monument
from your house.
President Obama will personally set aside the San Gabriel Mountains as a national monument Friday, protecting 346,000 acres of U.S. forestland just northeast of Los Angeles. [...]
The new monument, which will include parts of both Angeles and San Bernadino National Forests, accounts for 70 percent of L.A. County’s open space and provides more than one-third of its drinking water. Fifteen million people live within a 90-minute drive, and the range provides critical habitat for imperiled plants and animals, such as the California condor, Nelson’s Bighorn sheep, spotted owl, and the mountain yellow-legged frog.
Who knows? If all the stars align, perhaps your grandchildren will someday be able to see one of these from their house as well.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—What the NSA is doing with all our data:
The Brennan Center for Justice has taken on the herculean task of explaining all of the ways that surveillance agencies are collecting, storing and sharing the private data on U.S. citizens. It's all in a new report, and it's disquieting, to say the least. The report focuses on the "misses"—all of the information that is collected that is completely innocuous, that shows no nefarious activity at all. What happens with that information is particularly problematic. […]
The reports' authors conclude that the "widescale collection and retention of personal information about Americans not suspected of criminal activity invites abuse without any significant demonstrated benefit." How can it benefit when there's no differentiation in how innocuous information is treated from how potentially useful information is treated? When the NSA is collecting so much data and not, as the report says, sifting the wheat from the chaff, can all these mountains of data really hold the key to protecting the nation? One technology expert, Bruce Schneier, suggests it's the opposite: “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, a bigger haystack doesn’t help. [...] In general, if you look at all the successes we have against the 'bad guys,' they come from following the leads ... you don’t need to surveil every American.” The firehose of information—with no apparent mechanism in place to sort it—could be obscuring any real threats the NSA might be picking up.
Brennan doesn't suggest ending the surveillance program wholesale, but does have solutions that lawmakers working to reform surveillance programs should carefully consider […]
|
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: another fatal police shooting in St. Louis. The deficit has Ebola.
Greg Dworkin has actual Ebola news and the many not-actual solutions to it.
Joan McCarter brings up the flu, a disease that actually kills people in America. Like in Idaho. Where, as elsewhere, there are Republicans in electoral trouble all over the map. Justice Kennedy stays ID (and NV) marriage equality cases. Why? And did you know that Idaho has slashed education funding so drastically that in many counties they can only afford a 4-day school week? Dinesh D'Souza's d'scent into trolling. A GunFAIL follow-up that's sure to make you Respect the Culture.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments