The latest NSA revelation: XKeyscore

As promised, today’s Guardian has a front page story by Glenn Greenwald about yet another NSA program, this one called XKeyscore, an NSA tool that collects “nearly everything a user does on the internet”.

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a “selector” in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.

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Obama sabotages Congressional hearings on the NSA

Today starting at 9:30 am there was to have been an interesting informal Congressional hearing convened by Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida) in which critics of the NSA program, including reporter Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU, were to testify. But practically at the last minute, the hearings had to be canceled because president Obama suddenly expressed an interest in having a chat with the Democrats in the House of Representatives at that same time. What an unfortunate coincidence! [Read more…]

The Washington cesspool

Jon Oliver of The Daily Show interviews Mark Leibovich on his new book This Town about the total corruption of Washington. I have not read the book and likely wont but it apparently just confirms with names and stories what most careful observers have long realized: that people in government and the media and the lobbying industry exist solely to serve each other and make money, and all the so-called partisan animosity is just a show put on for the rubes. [Read more…]

The importance of journalists being adversarial

Many people in the US do not realize the extent to which the government has gone to instill fear in journalists. One way they have done this by threatening to cut off access to them. This should not be a serious problem if journalists were doing their jobs the proper way, which is to investigate those things that governments want to keep secret. But so many of them have become dependent on insider gossip provided by anonymous high level sources that being cut off can be a career-ender. They have become content with becoming part of the government propaganda machine. [Read more…]

“The ‘peace process’ is whatever the US supports”

Via Juan Cole, I came across this clip from 1990 in which Noam Chomsky talks about how in the propaganda model, words have technical meanings in addition to their normal meanings. In the US media it is the technical meanings that are used because they provide justification for anything that the US government does. What Chomsky said then still holds up, including the examples he gives of this practice, especially as it pertains to the Middle East ‘peace process’ that is back in the news. [Read more…]