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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 evening's music features blues pianist Curtis Jones. Enjoy!
Curtis Jones - Lonesome Bedroom Blues
"Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens."
-- J. M. Roberts
News and Opinion
Inside the "Electronic Omnivore": New Leaks Show NSA Spying on U.N., Climate Summit, Text Messaging
White House rejects clemency for Edward Snowden over NSA leaks
The White House and leading lawmakers have rejected Edward Snowden's plea for clemency and said he should return to the United States to face trial.
Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama administration adviser, said on Sunday the NSA whistleblower's request was not under consideration and that he should face criminal charges for leaking classified information. Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers, respectively the heads of the Senate and House intelligence committees, maintained the same tough line and accused Snowden of damaging US interests.
The former NSA employee this week appealed for clemency and an opportunity to address members of Congress about US surveillance. He also asked for international help to lobby the US to drop the charges against him. The White House, stung by domestic and international criticism, has shown growing appetite to rein in some of the NSA programmes that Snowden exposed but it has not softened its hostility to the 30-year-old fugitive.
Pfeiffer told ABC's This Week that no clemency offers were being discussed following Snowden's appeal in a letter released by a German lawmaker who met him in Moscow.
Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, remained implacable. "He's done this enormous disservice to our country. I think the answer is 'no clemency'," she told CBS's Face the Nation.
No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries. ...
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart. “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said. ...
The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control. ...
Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency’s role in preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the focus on counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are breathtaking.
Drowning in Haystacks
The NYT and Guardian have similar stories out today describing the sheer breadth of NSA’s spying. The Guardian describes how NSA gleefully embraced change because it presented more opportunities for SIGINT collection. ...
And both present the plight of someone analyzing Lashkar-e-Taiba who couldn’t read the intelligence because it was all Farsi and Arabic.
One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He “ran some queries” to read intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba members, he wrote in the wiki, but added: “Most of it is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can’t make much of it.”
Collecting all this data — particularly if we can’t even analyze much of it — has costs. One cost is in the tradeoff we’ve made in keeping it secure.
Our haystacks our drowning us.
'Spoiler Alert': NYT's Rapid-Fire Review of Snowden Docs Questioned
Given access to a large trove of the NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the New York Times has published an aerial view of the agency—cataloging numerous and varied surveillance programs—which the paper says shows that President Obama and other high-ranking officials who defend the agency by citing its counterterrorism credentials are using "a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an almost unlimited agenda."
Though critical and informative on many levels, however, the approach and perhaps unintended consequences of the story raises some questions. ...
[D]espite the scale and scope of the Times' reporting on the documents, it was difficult for some to avoid the feeling that part of the exhaustive review was designed to scuttle future—perhaps more detailed—reporting on the same programs.
Truth Manifesto: In Der Spiegel Snowden justifies leaks, citing calls for reforms
Germany 'should offer Edward Snowden asylum after NSA revelations'
An increasing number of public figures are calling for Edward Snowden to be offered asylum in Germany, with more than 50 asking Berlin to step up it support of the US whistleblower in the new edition of Der Spiegel magazine
Heiner Geissler, the former general secretary of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, says in the appeal: "Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him." ...
The weekly news magazine also publishes a "manifesto for truth", written by Snowden, in which the former NSA employee warns of the danger of spy agencies setting the political agenda.
"At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth
"Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world", Snowden writes in the short comment piece sent to Der Spiegel via an encrypted channel.
This is what the NSA says; “Sigint professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as terrorists or dictators seek to exploit our freedoms. Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not.”
Snowden's revelations bring into question just exactly what the NSA will do, including making bald-faced lies to those tasked with oversight of their activities and the Americain people. What they will do sounds an awful lot like what the "bad" adversaries do.
Three Leaks, Three Weeks, and What We've Learned About the US Government's Other Spying Authority: Executive Order 12333
[T]he NSA collects ... innocent Americans contacts from their address books and buddy lists. The information is in addition to Americans' calling records, phone calls, emails, and any other information publicly available on the Internet. And it's yet another sign that the NSA will stop at nothing to collect innocent Americans' information—all in the name of protecting us from foreign threats.
The details from the Washington Post reveal the NSA's collection is "likely to be in the millions or tens of millions" of Americans' contacts. The NSA is helped, in a way, because your contacts aren't always encrypted when you sync them from your laptop or mobile devices to your online account. The Post's articles provide a vital supplement to a recent New York Times story, which revealed NSA using Americans metadata collected under its spying programs to map social networks.
What's most unnerving about these collections is that the NSA is using Executive Order 12333, which lays out guidelines for spying outside the authority granted by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The order was created in the 1980s, is publicly available, and has been updated several times since then.
But Executive Order 12333 relies on Executive oversight. And we all know how well that works. When it comes to Congress, Senator Diane Feinstein, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—the committee that's supposed to oversee the intelligence community—ruled 12333 collection as "not fall[ing] within the focus of the committee." General Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, agrees. At a Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, he couldn't even confirm that the oversight committees of Congress were informed of 12333 collection.
Google chief: NSA spying ‘outrageous’ and potentially illegal
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said reports that the U.S. government spied on the Internet giant’s data centers were “outrageous” and potentially illegal if proved true, in an interview Monday.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal during a visit to Hong Kong, the technology guru said that Google had filed complaints with the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama, as well as members of Congress.
“It’s really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centres if that’s true. The steps that the organisation was willing to do without good judgement to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy, it’s not OK,” Schmidt said.
“The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be at risk. It’s just bad public policy … and perhaps illegal,” he said in the interview conducted in the southern Chinese city.
British claim Greenwald’s partner detained for "promoting a political or ideological cause"
The detention of the partner of a former Guardian journalist has triggered fresh concerns after it emerged that a key reason cited by police for holding him under terrorism powers was the belief that he was promoting a “political or ideological cause”.
Now documents referred to in court last week before a judicial review of Miranda’s detention shine new light on the Metropolitan police’s explanation for invoking terrorism powers – a decision critics have called draconian.
It became apparent during the court hearing that there were several drafts of the Port Circular Notice – the document used to request Miranda’s detention under schedule 7 to the 2000 Terrorism Act – before the final version was submitted.
The draft that was finally used states: “Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security. We therefore wish to establish the nature of Miranda’s activity, assess the risk that Miranda poses to national security and mitigate as appropriate.”
The notice then went on to explain why police officers believed that the terrorism act was appropriate.
“We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people’s lives. Additionally the disclosure or threat of disclosure is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause."
Capability is Driving Policy, Not Just at the NSA But Also in Police Departments
If you’re concerned about the dragnet nature of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, then you should also pay attention to what your local police department is doing. You may find that the dragnet surveillance happening there has a lot in common with the NSA’s mass collection of phone log data.
More and more when it comes to monitoring the public, capability is driving policy. The limits of law enforcement surveillance are being determined by what is technologically possible, not what is wise or even lawful. And it’s not uncommon for the police to use a new technology in secret for as long as they can, and then allow the courts to sort out legality once the issue finally comes before them.
It has never been so cheap and so easy for our law enforcement agencies to access and record the details of our daily lives. Consider automatic license plate readers: This seemingly innocuous technology snaps photos of passing cars’ license plates and stamps them with the location, date, and time. While these scanners were once limited to uncontroversial purposes such as identifying stolen vehicles, increasingly the police save the photos for months or even years—even though virtually all of people whose movements are being recorded are completely innocent, and even though travel patterns can reveal sensitive details of our lives. ...
And that cell phone in your pocket? The police can get all of your location history very easily—without a warrant. In this case it’s not the government collecting everyone’s data, but cell phone service providers, who keep it for years. Why are they doing that? Because they can. Should they be doing that? No.
So when you think about dragnet surveillance, you should think about the NSA. But you should also worry about what your local police are doing with the data they collect about you.
Everybody is really good at something. I wish that Obama had been less interested in developing this particular talent:
Last Year President Obama Reportedly Told His Aides That He's 'Really Good At Killing People'
This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
According to the new book “Double Down,” in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes.
Peter Hamby of The Washington Post noted the moment in his review of the book.
The reported claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.
America’s Drone Wars
Latest US Drone Attack Kills More Than Taliban Chief
PESHAWAR - The drone attack that killed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan chief Hakimullah Mahsud this week seems also to have killed hopes that drone attacks will end. ...
[T]he attack coming a day before talks between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban has sabotaged peace talks, the Pakistani government says. ...
The Taliban have described these attacks as a weakness of the government. “The government must stop the drone attacks before peace talks with Taliban,” Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid told media. Without ending these strikes, there will no dialogue, and attacks on the army and police will continue, he warned in a statement Oct. 10.
Remind me again, what was it that made America a shining city on a hill?
CIA made doctors torture suspected terrorists after 9/11, taskforce finds
Doctors were asked to torture detainees for intelligence gathering, and unethical practices continue, review concludes
Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded.
The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees".
Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.
In political messaging wars, White House deploys a Twitter army
Under a strategy championed by Obama's senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, the White House has doubled its footprint on Twitter since July, giving official accounts on the social media web site to more than a dozen additional communications staffers.
The White House's Twitter army is the lead player in an intense war of messaging on social media in Washington, a conflict that also involves a range of lawmakers, bureaucrats, conservatives and liberals. ...
[T]he White House operation stands alone in its aggressiveness, analysts say. ...
Since 2009, Obama's administration has sent tweets through a raft of well-followed but faceless accounts such as @whitehouse and @blog44, gradually adding individuals who work there.
The administration's most prominent Twitter account, @BarackObama, has more than 39 million followers and is actually run by Organizing for Action, a pro-Obama group with close ties to the White House, rather than by Obama and his staff.
Others are more directly engaged on Twitter. Press Secretary Jay Carney has tweeted as @PressSec since 2010 and has 455,360 followers. White House photographer Pete Souza has 92,000.
The Great Austerity Shell Game: Here's How the Capitalist Scam Works
When capitalist economies crash, most capitalists request – and governments provide – credit market bailouts and economic stimuli. However, corporations and the rich oppose new taxes on them to pay for stimulus and bailout programs. They insist, instead, that governments should borrow the necessary funds. Since 2007, capitalist governments everywhere borrowed massively for those costly programs. They thus ran large budget deficits and their national debts soared.
Heavy borrowing was thus capitalists' preferred first policy to deal with their system's latest crisis. It served them well.
Borrowing paid for government rescues of banks, other financial companies, and selected other major corporations. Borrowing enabled stimulus expenditures that revived demand for goods and services. Borrowing enabled government outlays on unemployment compensation, food stamps, and other offsets to crisis-induced suffering.
In these ways, borrowing helped reduce the criticism, resentment, anger, and anti-system tendencies among those fired from jobs, evicted from homes, deprived of job security and benefits, etc. Government borrowing had these positive results for capitalists – while saving them from paying taxes to get those results.
Nor is that all. Corporations and the rich used the money they saved by keeping governments from taxing them to provide the huge loans governments therefore needed. Middle- and lower-income people could lend little if anything to their governments. Corporations and the rich, in effect, substituted loans to the government instead of paying more in taxes. For those loans, governments must pay interest and eventually repay them.
Government borrowing rewards corporations and the rich quite nicely. It amounts to a very sweet deal for capitalists.
The Top Secret Trade Deal You Need to Know About
The Evening Greens
"The propaganda goes in before the name goes on."
MSNBC "Leans Forward" Into Running "Native Ads" Promoting Fracking
Three years into its "Lean Forward" re-branding campaign, MSNBC has given new meaning to the catchphrase, leaning forward into running branded content promoting hydraulic fracturing ("fracking).
Looking to beef up its web presence, MSNBC has brought "Lean Forward" online with a new and improved website, calling it a "Platform for the Lean Forward, progressive community." A key part of funding that platform: running "native advertisements" for America's Natural Gas Alliance and General Electric.
"General Electric and America’s Natural Gas Alliance are the site’s launch partners," explained an October 30 MediaPost article. ...
GE, former owner of NBC, of which MSNBC is one of its many tentacles, is fully invested in the fossil fuel industry, with assets in fracking, coal, offshore drilling, tar sands, and more. ANGA is the shale gas industry's lobbying tour de force, both at the federal and state level.
Native advertising - also referred to as "branded content" or "native content" - is quickly replacing banner ads and pop-up ads as the go-to channel of reaching consumers for advertising executives.
Hat tip Agathena:
Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines
For decades a federal moratorium has protected British Columbia’s sensitive northern waters from crude oil tankers. All that will change if currently proposed oil pipelines are built from the Alberta tar sands to the coast of BC’s Great Bear Rainforest.
For example, the Enbridge Northern Gateway project proposes two parallel 1,177-kilometre pipelines across northern BC – crossing hundreds of important fish-bearing rivers and streams. One pipeline would carry an estimated 525,000 barrels a day of crude oil from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, BC; the second pipeline would carry 193,000 barrels a day of condensate in the other direction (a chemical and petroleum mixture used to dilute tar sands crude oil extracted so that it can travel by pipeline) from Kitimat to the Alberta tar sands. Despite safety measures, oil pipelines leak – and a leak into BC’s rivers could bring terrible consequences for fish, animals and birds, and communities that rely on those rivers for food sources and water.
If these pipelines are built, about 225 oil tankers, including massive supertankers, would carry their loads to and from BC’s Pacific North Coast every year. The waters of the north coast are notoriously dangerous and difficult to navigate. With that much tanker traffic carrying tar sands oil to Asian markets, BC can likely expect many small spills every year and a catastrophic spill of over 10,000 barrels every 12 years (figures based on a report from Simon Fraser University). British Columbia would be vulnerable to an oil spill disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez, which could devastate the coastal environment and way of life for generations.
Climate Impacts Poised to Decimate Human and Earth Systems, says Leaked IPCC Draft
A draft of a global scientific review on how human and natural systems are expected to respond to the growing threat of climate change has been leaked and its contents—though not wholly unexpected to those who have followed climate science news in recent years—are nonetheless both alarming and devastating.
The IPCC's first installment, released in September, focused on assessing the global scientific community's combined research on the causes, pace, and evidence of planetary climate change. As the title of the leaked draft suggests, the next installment takes a more focused looked at the way the projected climate impacts will play on a variety of the Earth's systems both in the natural world, including the oceans and natural habitats, and those, like agricultural and economic systems, built by human society.
Focusing on what the draft report says about the future of world agriculture and food security, the New York Times reports:
On the food supply, the new report finds [...] that over all, global warming could reduce agricultural production by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century.
During that period, demand is expected to rise as much as 14 percent each decade, the report found, as the world population is projected to grow to 9.6 billion in 2050, from 7.2 billion today, according to the United Nations, and as many of those people in developing countries acquire the money to eat richer diets.
Any shortfall would lead to rising food prices that would hit the world’s poor hardest, as has already occurred from price increases of recent years. Research has found that climate change, particularly severe heat waves, was a factor in those price spikes.
The agricultural risks “are greatest for tropical countries, given projected impacts that exceed adaptive capacity and higher poverty rates compared with temperate regions,” the draft report finds.
Tea Party Splits Republican Loyalists on Climate Change, Poll Shows
Tea party Republicans are now the only group of Americans who think the Earth is not warming, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, with just 25 percent of tea party Republicans saying global warming is happening. By contrast, 67 percent of all Americans say there is evidence climate change is underway, including 61 percent of non-tea party Republicans.
Democrats and independents are more confident about global warming: 88 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents say there is solid evidence climate change has taken place over the past few decades.
Despite broad belief in warming overall, fewer than half the public believes human activity is to blame (44 percent), a number hardly changed from last year (42 percent). That’s despite a significant rise in the share of Americans who believe scientists generally agree the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, from 45 percent last year to 54 percent now.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
DiFi & Rogers: "Snowden Should Have Come to Us" Message is Disingenuous at Best, Really Entrapment
How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America
A Little Night Music
Curtis Jones - Cool Playing Blues
Curtis Jones - Black Magic Blues
Curtis Jones - Black Gypsy Blues
Curtis Jones - Reefer hound blues
Curtis Jones - Gut Bucket Blues
Curtis Jones - My Baby's Getting Buggish
Curtis Jones - Tin Pan Alley
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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