The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama's premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency's widespread tracking of Americans' telephone calls.

The President's Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel's roster shrinking to just four people.

In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America's spy agencies as the United States withdraws from big wars abroad.

Some analysts say the panel would have been an obvious choice to dig into the profound questions and concerns contractor Edward Snowden raised by leaking details about the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata and internet traffic.

But the board's thin ranks at present -- and the remaining members' close ties to Obama -- may have fueled the decision the president announced last week to turn instead to a brand new and still unnamed body of outside experts to delve into the privacy issues raised by surveillance in the "Big Data" age.

So if you're keeping a list, you have the right to free speech via chalk as long as you aren't protesting banksters and/or coppers.  

The stated rationale:

While Mohammed Morsi was elected president in a democratic election, his government was not inclusive and did not respect the views of all Egyptians.

In typical Obama fashion, he gives a hint of acceptability to the motives of the crackdown by Egypt's "interim" government, if not its methods. Both sides of the fence is his favorite spot.

For many years now, spanning at least the last two administrations, in the US of A, we have had "democratically elected" governments, only to find that they were hardly inclusive and did not respect the views of all Americans. I would amend that to say that it respects the views of very few Americans. Like, maybe, 1%.

Were our disaffected to take to the streets, I fully expect, based on our history regarding the treatment of protesters by head-cracking coppers, that our very own regime would not be all that different than that of Eqypt's military.

Two Democratic senators say new reporting by The Washington Post about invasions of privacy by U.S. intelligence is "just the tip of a larger iceberg."
...
Democratic Sens. Rob Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both members of the Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement that there are more details to come:

"The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans have been violated thousands of times each year. We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg.
...
In particular, we believe the public deserves to know more about the violations of the secret court orders that have authorized the bulk collection of Americans' phone and email records under the USA PATRIOT Act. The public should also be told more about why the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has said that the executive branch's implementation of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has circumvented the spirit of the law, particularly since the executive branch has declined to address this concern."

link

Have a great Saturday, my friends.

There are a number of narratives  being floated by the usual suspects to attempt to demonstrate that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed secrets vital to the security of the United States. All the arguments being made are essentially without merit. Snowden has undeniably violated his agreement to protect classified information, which is a crime. But in reality, he has revealed only one actual secret that matters, which is the United States government's serial violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution through its collection of personal information on millions of innocent American citizens without any probable cause or search warrant.

That makes Snowden a whistleblower, as he is exposing illegal activity on the part of the federal government. The damage he has inflicted is not against U.S. national security but rather on the politicians and senior bureaucrats who ordered, managed, condoned, and concealed the illegal activity.
[...snip...]
Here in the United States, it remains to be seen whether anyone actually cares enough to do something about the illegal activity while being bombarded with the false claims that the out of control surveillance program "has kept us safe." It is interesting to observe in passing that the revelations derived from Snowden's whistleblowing strongly suggest that the hippies and other counter-culture types who, back in the 1960s, protested that the government could not be trusted actually had it right all along.

by Philip Giraldi at, uhhmmm, TheAmericanConservative.com

MSNBC Geography.

... nearly every Democrat in Congress has been co-opted by the Obama legislation or DC social networks. There is now an extreme center in the US where the Democratic administration and a large chunk of the Republican Party have come together pushing forward very fast in a dangerous direction that compromises the future of the US democracy. The Libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is the only useful political voice in the US Congress presently.

This was the most complete transcript I could find. He also praised Matt Drudge as a news media innovator.  

He repeated the principle: "... transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest of us." I think he's hypocritical because his supporters have spread information on private individuals, such as the women who accused him of sexual assault, and he has not condemned them.

Although I generally agree with the principle, the question arises: Who decides who is powerful and who isn't? By U.S. legal standards, Assange is a public figure, and he certainly has some power.

If he's elected to the Australian Senate, he said, he would "... introduce [an] Australian media innovation fund to have every Australian eligible to be paid for their intellectual content: blogs, popular twitter feeds, videos they produced, books they made available free for download. And to cut out funding the middle man. That's a mechanism that can incentivize millions of Australians to produce content to educate other Australians and the world."

There are some obvious problems here: 1) Not everyone has the skills to produce their own videos, books, etc., and not everyone has access to fast, 24-hour Internet access. The digital divide hits poor and rural people the hardest, and Australia has plenty of both.

2. Who decides who is eligible? The government? What are the criteria? I wouldn't want to fund writing that has incorrect information. That's propaganda, not education. But the government would have to hire an army of fact-checkers.

3. Since the early '80s at least, journalists and media scholars have been saying the problem isn't a lack of people expressing their opinions, but a lack of factual analysis.

I really liked the entire series, but recognize it was probably time for it to end. At least going to Direct TV gave it some extra life, even though I had to wait for the DVDs to watch it the last two years.

Even Seattleites are aghast at Hansen's ploy, which may hurt the city's effort to obtain a new NBA franchise to replaced the since-relocated-and-renamed SuperSonics, and further cause the Seattle City Council to seriously reconsider the city's own arena deal with him.

It was an inexplicably dumb move for such a smart guy, because Hansen may have also violated California campaign finance law in the process.

If this keeps up, I may have to become a Sacramento Kings fan.

(Reuters) - British authorities used anti-terrorism powers to detain the partner of a journalist with close links to Edward Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor, as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on Sunday.

The 28-year-old David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen and partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald who writes for Britain's Guardian newspaper, was questioned for nine hours, before being released without charge, a report on the Guardian website said.

The scene near the end when Walt and Skylar are talking broke my heart. His eyes moving from gratitude to distrust, and her whole expression moving from concern to hurt to determination. Usually only Jesse can get to me like that.

Have a great day, my friends.