No system of detection is perfect, whether it be in medicine or police work. There is always the chance of false positives and the wider you make your dragnet, the larger the number of false positives that you are going to get. While the massive secret databases of the NSA are touted as an efficient means of detecting patterns to thwart terrorist attacks, it is simply a statistical fact that any pattern matching software will throw up false positives. [Read more…]

Despite the massive efforts by the administration and leading members of Congress and elements of the servile establishment media to downplay the NSA spying revelations and attack those who brought them to light, opposition and anger about the programs is starting to build. [Read more…]

In its effort to counter the fallout from the leaks of the NSA’s secret spying on people, the administration has handed out a set of talking points to its friends in the media and in Congress so that they don’t have to go through the chore of trying to figure out for themselves why they are comfortable with an authoritarian government.

Mike Masnick puts the talking points under a microscope.

What worries me is that president Obama might try to divert attention from the NSA spying story by some sort of military adventure, say in Syria, the way Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 when he was being besieged by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. No one was punished for that crime either. [Read more…]

He says that he has been busy on a new set of stories that will be released soon. I for one am eagerly looking forward to it and I suspect that the elites who run our government and other major institutions are quaking in their shows wondering what other of their activities are going to be revealed.

Greenwald expresses astonishment (that I share) at how people could defend the secrecy that has been exposed.

How can anyone think that it’s remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and find “astounding” when they learn of them? How can anyone claim with a straight face that there is robust oversight when even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are so constrained in their ability to act that they are reduced to issuing vague, impotent warnings to the public about what they call radical “secret law” enabling domestic spying that would “stun” Americans to learn about it, but are barred to disclose what it is they’re so alarmed by? Put another way, how can anyone contest the value and justifiability of the stories that we were able to publish as a result of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing: stories that informed the American public – including even the US Congress – about these incredibly consequential programs? What kind of person would think that it would be preferable to remain in the dark – totally ignorant – about them?

[Read more…]

One of the great fantasies inspired by Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is that the real producers in society can bring society to a grinding halt by simply withdrawing their services. In the book they are so tired of the fruits of their labor being taken by the moochers and looters that they carry out their threat and retreat to a remote place called Galt’s Gulch. [Read more…]

Jonathan Turley writes about an interesting development in South Florida where a prosecutor defense attorney in a purely local car robbery case in which phone records that he needed had disappeared suddenly realized that the NSA had the data and now he wants them to share it. [Read more…]