Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evenings music features Chicago bluesman J.B. Lenoir. Enjoy!
J.B. Lenoir with Freddy Below - The whale has swallowed me
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”
-- Kurt Vonnegut
News and Opinion
How the NSA is still harvesting your online data
Files show vast scale of current NSA metadata programs, with one stream alone celebrating 'one trillion records processed'
A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data – despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011. ...
[D]ocuments indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.
While there is no reference to any specific program currently collecting purely domestic internet metadata in bulk, it is clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets. ...
The NSA called it the "One-End Foreign (1EF) solution". It intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for "broadening the scope" of what it is able to collect. It relied, legally, on "FAA Authority", a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions.
This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. "The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter," the SSO December document reads. "This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories." ...
The scale of the NSA's metadata collection is highlighted by references in the documents to another NSA program, codenamed ShellTrumpet.
On December 31, 2012, an SSO official wrote that ShellTrumpet had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record". ...
A substantial portion of the internet metadata still collected and analyzed by the NSA comes from allied governments, including its British counterpart, GCHQ.
American Empire stands naked by Snowden leaks but not ashamed
The Naked Empire
Certainly Edward Snowden’s crime is one of public relations. In this day and age, power ain’t just jackboots, tanks and missiles. What he did by outing the NSA and its gargantuan surveillance operation was mess hugely with the American image — the American brand — with its irresistible combination of might and right.
That’s the nature of his “treason.” The secret he gave away was pretty much the same one the little boy blurted out in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale: “The emperor has no clothes!” That is, the government’s security industry isn’t devoted, with benevolent righteousness, to protecting the American public. Instead, it’s obsessively irrational, bent on accumulating data on every phone call we make. It’s a berserk spy machine, seemingly to no sane end. How awkward.
For instance, the government of Hong Kong, in refusing to extradite Snowden as per the Obama administration’s request, explained in its refusal letter that it has “formally written to the U.S. Government requesting clarification on reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by U.S. government agencies. It will follow up on the matter, to protect the legal rights of people of Hong Kong.”
In other words, sorry, Naked Empire. We’re not going to do what you ask, and by the way, we have some issues with your behavior we’d like to discuss.
This is not the sort of insolence the world’s only superpower wants to hear, and it’s Snowden’s fault, along with other whistleblowers who preceded him, some of whom, such as Bradley Manning, are enduring harsh consequences for their truth-telling. Traitors, all of them — at least as far as the government is concerned, because, when you strip away the public relations mask, the primary interest of government is the perpetuation of power. And anyone who interferes with that perpetuation, even, or especially, in the name of principle, is a “security risk.”
Chasing Snowden: Don't Shoot The Messenger
Russia accuses U.S. of putting them in ‘tough spot’ over Snowden - Venezuela offers to grant a safe haven to Snowden
Russia on Friday accused Washington of putting it in a “tough spot” by claiming it had failed to disclose revoking the passport of fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden prior to his arrival in Moscow from Hong Kong.
The diplomatic rhetoric around the explosive case of the 30-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor escalated when Washington blamed Hong Kong’s government of acting in bad faith by letting Snowden out in the first place.
The fate of Snowden himself remained in limbo for a sixth day on Friday as he remained holed up in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport without making any contact with the swarm of international reporters at the scene.
The government of Ecuador — his most likely place of exile should he avoid arrest for lifting the curtain on the scale of the US global surveillance programme to the media — said that it had not yet processed Snowden’s asylum application.
But Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — who will coincidentally will be in Moscow on Monday for an energy summit — reiterated late Thursday his offer to grant a safe haven to the US fugitive.
The NSA Can't Tell the Difference Between an American and a Foreigner
The National Security Agency has said for years that its global surveillance apparatus is only aimed at foreigners, and that ordinary Americans are only captured by accident. There's only one problem with this long-standing contention, people who've worked within the system say: it's more-or-less technically impossible to keep average Americans out of the surveillance driftnet. ...
While it's technically true that the NSA is not "targeting" the communications of Americans without a warrant, this is a narrow and legalistic statement. It belies the vast and indiscriminate scooping up of records on Americans' phone calls, e-mails, and Internet communications that has occurred for more than a decade under the cover of "foreign intelligence" gathering.
The NSA is routinely capturing and storing vast amounts of the electronic communications of American citizens and legal residents, even though they were never individually the subject of a terrorism or criminal investigation, according to interviews with current and former intelligence officials, technology experts, and newly released government documents. ...
But new documents reveal that the NSA has also deliberately gathered communications metadata that it had reason to believe was associated with Americans. ...
According to former intelligence officials, the NSA routinely opens e-mails and reads their contents to determine if the sender was a U.S. person. Reading that message doesn't require the agency to obtain a warrant, and if an analyst discovers that the communication belongs to a U.S. person, he is supposed to destroy it if it has no intelligence value and does not contain information about a crime. But the NSA's guidelines allow the agency to hang onto this information for up to five years before trying to determine its origin.
The Criminal N.S.A.
The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.
The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.
This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.
We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.
Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs
East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes. ...
Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.
As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.” ...
Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.
Former US general James Cartwright named in Stuxnet leak inquiry
Report says Cartwright, once the second-highest ranking US officer, is under investigation over Iran cyber attack leaks
A retired US general, James Cartwright, is the target of a Justice Department investigation into the leaking of secret information about the Stuxnet virus attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, NBC News reported on Thursday, citing unidentified legal sources.
NBC said Cartwright, once the second highest ranking officer in the US military, was being investigated over the leaked information about the computer virus, which temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges used by Iran to enrich uranium, setting back its nuclear programme. ...
Bush reportedly advised Obama to preserve Olympic Games. According to the Times, Obama ordered the cyberattacks to be accelerated, and in 2010 an attack using a computer virus called Stuxnet temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.
Congressional leaders demanded a criminal investigation into who leaked the information, and Obama said he had zero tolerance for such leaks. Republicans said senior administration officials had leaked the details to bolster the president's national security credentials during the 2012 campaign.
Will US General Find Immunity from Obama's Selective Wrath for Leakers?
Could the latest target of President Obama's aggressive war against leakers of government secrets be a recent, and very high-level, member of the country's military power structure?
Reporting by NBC News indicates that (Ret.) US Marine Gen. James Cartwright, who served as vice chairman on Obama's Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been named as the focus of Justice Department investigation ordered by the White House to determine which officials may have been the source for revealing details about a US cyber-attack against Iran in 2010. ...
As many have pointed out, the Obama administration has proven itself very adept at taking advantage of anonymous leaks of classified information that reflect positively on the White House, but have been by far the most aggressive prosecutors when it comes to going after those who leak information unfavorable to government policies.
James Comey remained at Justice Department as monitoring went on
James Comey famously threatened to resign from the Justice Department in 2004 over the warrantless surveillance of Americans' internet records. But once Justice Department and National Security Agency lawyers found a novel legal theory to cover the surveillance, the man Barack Obama tapped last week to lead the FBI stayed on as deputy attorney general for another year as the monitoring continued.
Comey was the acting attorney general in March 2004, when long-simmering legal tensions over the online "metadata" surveillance pitted the Justice Department and FBI against the Bush White House and NSA. That incident, dramatically recounted by Comey to the Senate in May 2007, earned the 6ft 8in former federal prosecutor a reputation for integrity that has become central to his persona. ...
[A] classified report recounting the incident, acquired by the Guardian, complicates that view. Comey threatened to resign over the perceived illegality of one aspect of the surveillance. But he remained at the Justice Department for another year as that effort, operating under a new legal theory, continued nearly unchanged.
Obama's arrest, Bush's trial
Jordanians ‘suspicious’ about U.S. troop movements
Jordanians are suspicious about US weapons and troops being deployed to the kingdom, even if Washington seeks to help its ally protect itself from a possible spillover of Syrian violence, experts say.
Worried about the security of Jordan, which is already struggling to cope with around 550,000 refugees from its war-torn northern neighbour, the United States has kept F-16 warplanes and Patriot missiles in the country since a joint military exercise ended on June 20.
A US defence official has told AFP that Washington has expanded its military presence in the country to 1,000 troops.
“Jordanians do not feel comfortable about the presence of US troops, weapons and equipment in the kingdom,” analyst Oraib Rintawi, who runs the Al-Quds Centre for Political Studies, told AFP.
“For Jordanians, the US military presence is linked to plots and conspiracies against their neighbours, which would impact the country itself.”
NYC Vote to Curb Stop-and-Frisk Is Another Win for Civil Rights
New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities United for Police Reform, a broad coalition of city groups, and will strengthen the existing ban on police profiling and establish independent oversight of the city's police department. ...
Criticism is mounting, not only in the council, but also in federal court, where the legality of these practices is being questioned. Those same questions are echoed in the homes of regular New Yorkers – a majority of whom disapprove of stop-and-frisk and two-thirds of whom support independent oversight of the department. ... The bills passed by city council respond to increasing evidence that in too many cases the department has substituted stereotyping for real police work. A study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in 2011, for example, 41.6% of all New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD were black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 years old, despite the fact that that these groups make up a mere 4.7% of the city's population. The department has continued to defend these discriminatory tactics, despite evidence that they do not even succeed on their own terms, failing to take guns off the street or to significantly reduce crime. In more than 99% of all 2011 stops, for example, no gun was retrieved. And in the first three months of 2013, crime dropped, even as stops also tapered, undermining the department's claim that stop-and-frisk is responsible for the city's lowered crime rate.
Senate Bill Creates Path for Undocumented Immigrants, But at Cost of Radically Militarized Border
Why Stocks Rise on Bad News
Now there’s something you don’t see every day.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the world’s biggest economy grew at a measly 1.8 percent, far-below analysts most pessimistic predictions. The news that the US economy had “slowed to a crawl” was immediately felt on Wall Street where jubilant traders loaded up on equities sending all three indices up sharply led by the Dow Jones which logged 149 points on the session.
Huh? So why did the bad news on growth send stocks higher?
Let’s call it the QE conundrum, although it’s really not a mystery, not to the folks who watch the markets at least. You see, bad is good and good is bad. When the economic data comes in below expectations, stocks rise because traders know the Fed’s trillion dollar stimulus program will continue ad infinitum. And when the data comes in above expectations, then–watch out– because markets will tumble as traders worry that the $85 billion per month liquidity injections will be curtailed or terminated altogether. So bad is good and good is bad. Simple, eh?
This is how Bernanke has turned the equities markets on their head. In this Bizarro world of zero rates and easy money, fundamentals and earnings don’t matter any more, what matters is regular injections of liquidity-meth provided gratis by our friends at the Central Bank. That’s what pushes stock prices higher.
Former Top Regulators Tell Congress to Rein in Big Banks
Scientists Warn: Largest Ocean 'Dead Zone' in History
Wave Goodbye to the Gulf of Mexico - Thanks Agribusiness!
The largest 'dead zone' ever recorded is headed for the Gulf of Mexico this summer, as high levels of pollution runoff, elevated by Midwestern floods, seep into the ocean.
The dead area could grow to as much as 8,500 square miles of toxic deep ocean water—killing all marine life in its path—warn National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Unregulated large-scale farming is to blame for the vast pollutants the rain washes into the ocean. Time Magazine reports:
The major factor driving the size of the dead zone—beyond changing flooding patterns—is the use and overuse of fertilizers in America’s rich Midwestern corn belt. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that 153,000 metric tons of nutrients flowed down the swollen Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers during May—a 16% increase over the nutrient load average seen during the past 34 years.
From endless growth to a new form of democracy: Nafeez Mosadeqq Ahmed at TEDxHornstull
Artful and Delphic: Obama on Keystone Pipeline Is All Things at Once
As the media tries to make sense of Obama's obscure remarks on Keystone, the president becomes both an opponent and supporter of the project.
In a long-awaited, 50-minute speech Tuesday President Obama made clear what his plans are for tackling climate change—except on one major issue.
No one could divine what Obama meant when he talked about the Keystone XL pipeline.
"Both pipeline proponents and pipeline haters cheered his remarks—an unusual reaction," Reuters wrote.
Obama's roughly 150 words (about a minute and a half) on the pipeline—his most noteworthy discussion of the project to date—have been parsed by media outlets and pundits across the globe. It was the first time Obama linked the Keystone XL decision to global warming. Because of that, some observers said the president seemed to be considering rejection of the pipeline—a claim that puts a stake through the heart of a common narrative that has Obama trading a Keystone XL approval for carbon cuts at existing power plants. Others saw the speech as a pipeline greenlight.
Is Obama's Faith in Carbon Capture a Technicolor Dream?
President Obama's climate action announcement yesterday relies heavily on carbon capture and storage technology eventually paying off as a commercially viable option. But carbon capture and storage (or CCS) continues to be more of a dream than reality. And a very expensive dream at that.
According to a database maintained at MIT's Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies program, there are currently six large scale CCS projects underway in the United States. Five of the six projects are still in the planning phase, with one project listed as under construction. The current projected price tag of these six projects is a whopping $16.7 billion.
That's a lot to gamble on a risky technology that continues to struggle to prove it's even possible to deploy on a global scale. And $16.7 billion is only the opening bet. A full scale deployment of CCS technology across the entire US would likely be in the hundreds of billions. Estimates run as high as $1.5 trillion a year to deploy and operate enough carbon capture and storage worldwide to significantly reduce carbon emissions from the fossil fuels we consume.
David Letterman - Environmental Activist, Tim DeChristopher
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Why Ecuador would be an ideal refuge for Edward Snowden
How Much Are the NSA and CIA Front Running Markets?
Obama’s new climate plan: Less coal, more fracking
The 5 Biggest Stories from the Fight for the Survival of Public Education
Josh Fox Talks Fracking and Gasland Part II on The Daily Show
The Public Regulation of Gender
They don't need no stinking memos
A Little Night Music
J.B. Lenoir - I feel so good
J.B.Lenoir - Slow Down
J.B.Lenoir - Alabama Blues
J.B. Lenoir - Born Dead
J.B. Lenoir - Talk to Your Daughter
J.B. Lenoir - Vietnam Blues
J.B Lenoir - The Mojo Boogie
J.B. Lenoir - Feelin' Good
J.B. Lenoir - Man Watch Your Woman
J. B. Lenoir - Back Door
JB Lenoir - Natural Man
J.B. Lenoir - I've been down so long
J.B Lenoir - Let's Roll
J.B. Lenoir - Do What I Say
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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