It all adds up: mass wiretapping by NSA/updated

Recently we discussed whether the NSA was just looking at metadata or involved in mass wiretapping, with conversations being recorded. Declan McCullough of CNet, citing sources including William Binney of the NSA indicates that the latter is closer to the truth (via Brit at DK):

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned.
…
[Updated article adds this: James Owens, a spokesman for Nadler, provided a statement on Sunday morning, a day after this article was published, saying: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans' phone calls without a specific warrant."]
…
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
…
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
…
William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. “They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record,” Binney said.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.
…
A New York Times article in 2009 revealed the NSA engaged in significant and systemic “overcollection” of Americans’ domestic communications that alarmed intelligence officials. The Justice Department said in a statement at the time that it “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law.

The best description of the situation seems to be that the NSA is attempting to record everything, but that it has been limited by storage to record only 500K-1M people, many of whom are presumably outside of the US. That will change with Bluffdale coming online, at which point the NSA will be able to record everyone on the planet.

On the other hand, they only listen to a limited number of conversations and they claim they obtain legal authority to do so. From a rubber stamp court that never denies them, of course. So we are basically protected from totalitarian control because the NSA are honorable men who would never, ever break the law.

Except, of course, for the many times in the past when they have been caught at it.

They don’t even think they have to tell plausible lies anymore.
______
Added: I should point out that major news organizations have not yet gotten this far down the line and McCullough is hardly infallible. Citing an interview in the Daily Caller is an example of journalistic laziness. But this seems to me to be a fair summary of what is a very complicated story. Among the elements of the story that require careful dissection are:

* Are the targets of surveillance Americans?
* Are the interceptions based on communications inside the country?
* Is the intercept a telephone call vs. other forms of electronic communication?
* Does the intercept include metadata or content?
* What threshold is required to review the content of communications?
* If an intercept is determined not to be useful (or simply not examined), how long is it retained?

I actually think that storage is the most dangerous part of the system that has been constructed. In security states, the abuse typically occurs when someone does something legal that ticks off someone in power. They go back through old records to find something of which to to accuse the person. Limit storage to, say, 60 days, and that gets harder.
__________
Update: Josh Marshall says that McCullough misunderstood what Nadler said. Somehow he managed to miss all of the rest of the stuff in the article. The Nadler quote was only startling because it suggested that the NSA had admitted something. The NSA never admits anything.

It’s the other people–people like Bamford and Binney–who we should be listening to.

Financial crisis 2.0

Atrios linked a bit by Charles Pierce which linked Mary Williams Walsh in the NYT, with an uncharacteristically easy to understand article (based on a report by Benjamin Lawsky of NY Dept of Financial Services) on how life insurance companies are cooking their books.

Let’s suppose that you took the $100,000 mortgage on your house and sold it to your five-year old son for $1. Now you don’t have any liabilities! So you can buy that flat screen TV you always wanted.

But of course, when the bank comes around looking for their payment, your 5 year old son won’t have anything to give them.

This is what the life insurance companies have done, creating out of state shell companies to buy their liabilities in a phony “re-insurance” scheme. It looks to me to be exactly like the Enron scheme, turning a liability into an asset in an off-the-balance-sheet maneuver. According to Walsh, Lawsky says these deals were backed by “’hollow assets,’ ‘naked parental guarantees’ and ‘conditional letters of credit.’” And if the life insurers are doing this, what are other insurers doing?

These are publicly traded companies, so an investigation into whether or not this is fraud should be mounted. Walsh:

The separate analysis by SNL Financial, by contrast, was based on public regulatory filings. It did identify the life insurance companies that are the biggest users of the transactions, both in and out of New York. They include Transamerica, MetLife, Prudential, Hartford, Genworth, John Hancock, ReliaStar and Lincoln National, among others. Another insurer, Allstate, turned up in the sample even though its primary business is property and casualty, because it owns some life insurers.

Just incredible.

Kerry is a lost cause

You may recall that former Guatemalan president Rios Montt was convicted of mass murder for directing the massacre of the Ixil Indians, part of the mass murder of 250,000 people in the roughly 40-year repression initiated by and abetted by the US. In the course of Montt’s trial, the bloody role of current Guatemalan president Otto Fernando Perez Molina emerged. The judge and prosecutor received very public death threats, but they and the witnesses bravely carried the trial to its inevitable end: Montt was convicted.

Then the Constitutional Court, presumably acting at the behest of Perez Molina and the other mass murderers who have not faced justice, arbitrarily reached in and annulled Montt’s conviction. Montt is unlikely to face any punishment greater than the inconvenience of having to go to court. And so Perez Molina is off the hook, too.

And so this is how John Kerry, meeting with Perez Molina, greeted him:

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you. Thank you very much. Muchas gracias. Estoy encantando de estar aqui en Guatemala y (inaudible) con el Presidente Perez Molina. Gracias.

I want to begin, if I may, by expressing the condolences of all Americans for the loss of life of nine Guatemalans in Oklahoma City in the tornado last month. We know that that is a deep pain for the families, and I bring you the President’s condolences and the condolences of the American people.

… Let me begin by congratulating you, Mr. President, on the enormous progress that you have made with respect to your justice system, the strengthening of your justice system, the independence of that system. And obviously, we are appreciative for your reciprocal law enforcement initiatives that benefit both of us we believe.

I also would express our appreciation for the way in which you have led your internal – your security efforts and particularly citizen protection efforts.
…
I also want to thank you for your leadership with respect to the professionalization of police, which is very important, and also your efforts to make sure that we live up to the standards of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Needless to say, that is so important to Guatemala’s standing on a global basis and we appreciate your efforts.

I realize that diplomacy involves not saying things publicly that would lead to an irreconcilable break. But Kerry has just congratulated Perez Molina for having turned the justice system into a sham, for having demonstrated that Guatemalan impunity extends to confessing the crime and walking undisturbed away.

John Kerry was a man I deeply respected for a long time. He showed courage in battle and then he showed the courage to say that the war in which he fought was wrong.

And now, he’s saying that everything he said and did before was an opportunistic lie.

The Real Scandal

Via commenter DeDude at Ritholtz, David Horsey in the LAT.

Scoring the Media on Coverage of the West Fertilizer Explosion

All roads lead to Charles and David.

Hugh Kaufman of the EPA in an interview with FAIR

HK: I think the worst [coverage] was the New York Times. The New York Times claimed that the company notified EPA that they had 270 tons of this explosive ammonium nitrate, but they did not notify EPA of that. In fact, they told EPA that the facility posed no fire or explosion hazard. The New York Times did not say that, and I think that’s probably the biggest problem.

Interestingly, Texas is a Republican state — a red state — and in fact, many of the leaders want to secede from the union, and they despise EPA — they want the EPA abolished. And yet the Republican newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has probably has the best environmental coverage of the case, which makes it very ironic to me.

CS: You also pointed to Reuters.

HK: Reuters did a piece where they implied and stated that EPA and OSHA do not have authority to regulate the facility or this ammonium nitrate, and that’s totally false. Again, you have the Reuters and the New York Times taking the public off the scent. Of course, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox — none of the cable channels are covering the details. The only cable channel I’ve seen that mentioned the fact that this is law-breaking and they lied to EPA was on the Young Turks on YouTube.

CS: I think it’s still on Current TV too.

HK: Is it still on Current, yeah? And the Wall Street Journal has done very good coverage too. So you’ve got the Wall Street Journal on the right, Dallas Morning News on the right and Current on the left, doing the good coverage, and everybody in the middle doing no coverage or bad coverage. By the way, MSNBC did one good thing. They put on their website the sheet the company gave to the state of Texas that identified they did have 270 tons of the explosive material, so that was a good thing.
…
HK: Reuters did a piece where they implied and stated that EPA and OSHA do not have authority to regulate the facility or this ammonium nitrate, and that’s totally false. Again, you have the Reuters and the New York Times taking the public off the scent. Of course, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox — none of the cable channels are covering the details. The only cable channel I’ve seen that mentioned the fact that this is law-breaking and they lied to EPA was on the Young Turks on YouTube.

CS: I think it’s still on Current TV too.
…
HK: … You know who the largest owner of fertilizer business in the world is?

CS: I think you’re going to tell me.

HK: The Koch brothers.

These are the guys who want to buy the LAT and the Chicago Trib, so that their voice can be heard.

Rios Montt trial shut down by Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina

This is a government which the United States proudly supported when it was a dictatorship killing two hundred thousand Guatemalans–and still proudly supports.

Then:

ALLAN NAIRN: [In the 1980s] The [Guatemalan] army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they’ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt’s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see.’

Now:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: An historic trial against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an abrupt end Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a criminal court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported last night Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina.

So, the guy who was actually ripping children’s hearts is now president and shut down the trial of the guy who was ordering him to rip children’s hearts out of their bodies.

There’s a lot more in the interviews. For example:

at the end of his testimony, the prosecution read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos Montt general, “Well, General, what is your response to this document?” And the general responded by saying, “Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document.”

And the fact that a guy who is Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts now:

was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military… Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea.

Guatemala is a respected ally of the U.S. today–a paragon of “democracy.” Even though the president can shut down a trial because he doesn’t like what is being said about him. The Constitutional Court will rule within ten days on whether the trial will proceed.

Wonder how they’ll handle these legal arguments:

ALLAN NAIRN: In one case, one of—one of the lawyers involved in pushing the case forward was approached by a man who offered him a million dollars if he would kill the case against Ríos Montt, a million U.S. dollars. He also said he would help him launder the money, set up offshore bank accounts. The lawyer rejected that. The man then took out a pistol, put the pistol on the table and said, “I know where your children are.” Another was approached on the street with a—with a direct death threat.

Death squads in Honduras run by the police, funded by US/updated

Adrienne links a video report from Al Jazeera on the Honduran death squads. The case that Bonilla is running these kidnappings/murders is circumstantial, but that’s not exactly surprising. Most of the witnesses are dead.

Meanwhile, as we have posted, the State Department continues to dissemble and distract. As Adrienne notes, the State Department is describing its handling of the allegations against Bonilla as “internal deliberations.” Under the Leahy Law, funding death squads is illegal. My suggestion: arrest the State Department. Most Latin American countries would be very grateful.

El Heraldo (amazingly) posted video from November of the operation of one of the death squads (via Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian).

Weisbrot’s description:

The video (warning: contains graphic images of lethal violence), caught randomly on a warehouse security camera, is chilling.

Five young men walk down a quiet street in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. A big black SUV pulls up, followed by a second vehicle. Two masked men with bullet-proof vests jump out of the lead car, with AK-47s raised. The two youths closest to the vehicles see that they have no chance of running, so they freeze and put their hands in the air. The other three break into a sprint, with bullets chasing after them from the assassins’ guns. Miraculously, they escape, with one injured – but the two who surrendered are forced to lie face down on the ground. The two students, who were brothers 18- and 20-years-old, are murdered with a burst of bullets, in full view of the camera. Less than 40 seconds after their arrival, the assassins are driving away, never to be found.

Wonder if Juan Carlos Bonilla, the Honduran police chief, was among the killers.

Bertha Oliva of COFADEH also states her view of the return of the death squads here (via Adrienne). Excerpt:

The death squads of the past were never really dismantled. What we’re witnessing is a reactivation of these death squads. And we’re seeing it quite clearly. We’ve seen videos of incidents in the street where masked men with military training and unmarked vehicles assassinate young people. There is the recent case of the journalist Julio Ernesto Alvarado who gave up his news program from 10pm to midnight on Radio Globo because members of a death squad came to kill him, and to save his own life he had to stop doing his program.

Corrupt head of Mexican teachers union accused of corruption

Jo Tuckman, The Guardian:

[Elba Esther] Gordillo [aka The Teacher], leader of the 1.5 million-strong national teachers’ union in Mexico, was arrested on Tuesday evening after the private jet in which she had travelled from California landed at an airport near the capital. She spent the night in a Mexico City jail before appearing in court where she was formally read the charges of “operations with resources of illicit origin” and “organised crime”.
…
With the aid of complicated diagrams, the attorney general, Jesús Murillo, laid out a triangulation scheme in which nearly 2,000m pesos (close to £100m) was funnelled out of union bank accounts in Mexico into other accounts at home and abroad of three associates and a business, and then used to finance Gordillo’s legendarily expensive tastes, from luxury homes to plastic surgery.

In an editorial, La Jornada explained just how corrupt (my hasty translation):

Especially serious are those in regard to her responsibility in the murder of the magistral leader Misael Núñez Acosta, which occurred 1/30/81 in Ecatepec, allegations of kidnappings and illegal detentions instigated by Gordillo and her predecessor Carlos Jonguitud, of dissident professor from 1980 to the present; repeated accusations of opacity and corruption in the management of labor union dues; subpoenas for illegal enrichment by The Teacher; as well as indications such as that drawn up in 7/11 by Miguel Ángel Yunes– ex-Gordillo ally who was yoked director of the Mexican Social Security last presidency–in the sense that the Chiapan Leader [Gordillo] demanded of him 20 million pesos monthly from the funds of Social Security to finance the New Alliance Party.

A real sweetheart– and one of those who installed former president FeCal in office.

Thirty years too late, justice may at last have noticed her. I would place no bets that she ends up in jail.

Rich Grabner’s reaction: “This is friggin’ huge.” For your entertainment, he also has the many faces of Elba Esther Gordillo.

NM Governor accused of voter fraud

I have no idea whether these allegations will go anywhere, but it’s always amusing to see how casually the party of voting integrity takes voting laws.

Election documents, obtained by ProgressNowNM, from a 2011 school board election in Dona Ana County show that both Martinez and her husband Charles “Chuck” Franco requested absentee ballot applications from the County Clerk (they are still registered to vote at their Las Cruces home). However, the county clerk confirmed to us that he refused to process the applications because he believes the signature of Franco was forged by Martinez. And that, according to New Mexico law in effect at the time is a violation of the Election Code

There’s never enough Bachmania

Via Kaili Joy Gray at DK, Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald:

Over a year after she dropped out, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has refused to pay five staffers from her failed presidential bid, according to a former top campaign official. Peter Waldron, her controversial former national field coordinator, told Salon the dispute started when former Iowa straw poll staffers refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would bar them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they witnessed on the campaign with police or reporters.
…
A home-schooling group accused the Bachmann campaign of stealing the [group's e-mail] list, which was contained on a volunteer’s laptop, and then using it to fundraise for the campaign. The home-schooling group has sued the campaign and Waldron said there is also a criminal investigation pending, explaining that he spoke with police about the incident “several times.”

Now, I have as much expectation of the theft being prosecuted as for the Second Coming being at 9 o’clock tonight (which would, presumably, obviate any earthly prosecution). But it is truly amazing that a self-professed Christian has to demand that employees silence themselves over “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity.”