The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. . . . I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. . . . I don't see myself as a hero, because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. --Edward Snowden
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. --Fourth Amendment, United States Constitution
An interview filmed a couple of days ago with the 29-year-old whistleblower who spilled the beans to the Guardianand the Washington Post about the National Security Agency's vast data-mining operations, thereby rocking the United States Government to its core:
Snowden was in Hong Kong when the interview was filmed, and quickly running out of funds. As of Sunday evening, Texas time, he had checked out of his hotel room, and the press says his whereabouts are "unknown."
He strikes your Head Trucker as a sensible, conscientious person, not a bug-eyed radical; and while he may or may not have been mistaken in his conclusions, my gut tells me his motives were good, and selfless, and for that I think he deserves our attention and respect. Of course, his days at liberty are likely to be numbered - if he is still alive, and not already kidnapped and flung into a hellhole "black prison" somewhere. But he seems to have known the enormous risks he was taking, and took them anyway. God help him.
Rachel further explores the limits of secrecy and freedom with the latest on the unfolding PRISM scandal, including a talk with one of the prime investigative journalists who broke the story - about 20 minutes of stuff here, but well worth your time:
Showtime! Pay no attention to those little men behind the curtains . . .
In the wake of the Verizon phone-trawling revelations, coming hot on the heels of other privacy and civil-liberties scandals in recent weeks, the New York Times today said in a scathing editorial that Obama "has now lost all credibility." Do you agree?
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive—whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. . . .
Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance—with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power—fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.
My question is, Who says the feds aren't also listening to every call, with some kind of futuristic, top-secret, voice-recognition software?
But if the Verizon revelation doesn't make you jump out of your socks, maybe this will, as reported by Amy Davidson today in the New Yorker - emphasis mine:
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”
These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”
This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that the order went well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.
The N.S.A.-briefing slides mix corporate cheer and disturbing revelations. There are the logos of the nine companies involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. That is the order in which they joined PRISM. The Post describes Apple as a holdout (it acquiesced, coincidentally or not, after Steve Jobs’s death).
In other words, boys: Everything you've ever done online in the last six years or so is recorded and stored in a government database. Everything. Just stop and sit with that thought awhile.
I don't know about you fellas, but one reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was to prune the rot from the governmental tree that Dubya and Co. introduced, and to try to preserve constitutional government in this country.
Now it appears I was misinformed. Somebody, please tell me it's not so.
Update, 9:45 p.m.: The Guardian reports that chiefs of the Silicon Valley companies named as collaborators in the PRISM program are shocked, shocked! that gambling is going on in this establishment to hear this story and deny they have any connection with it. Of course.
Round up the usual suspects.
Update, 6/7/13, 11:40 p.m.: Via Daily Kos, Rick Perlstein in The Nation reports that our government has been massively spying on its citizens by the millions since the 1930's - receiving daily bulk data from telephone and telegraph companies in the pre-internet days - as was revealed in the Abzug/Church congressional hearings in 1975, something your Head Trucker doesn't remember hearing about back then. But then, Perlstein says the mainstream media downplayed the story and buried it in the back pages.
Your Tax Dollars at Work.
Rachel reports on a story that originally broke in 2006, but nobody paid much attention: "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room" - and has more on this week's stories.
But not to worry. The Prez says, "Chill, people. Nobody is listening to your damn phone calls."
Anyway, it's all cool because all of your elected Congresspeeps, Democrat and Republican alike, have known all about this shit since like Day 1. So chillax already! And once again, pay no attention to what's going on over there with that funny little man behind the curtains. And call off your damn dog too.
Funnyman Flip Wilson played the line for laughs. But OMG what the hell is wrong with people who keep getting suckered in by all the religious shysters and charlatans of the world? Enough already.
It's always the same story, isn't it. Some guy (very rarely a woman) decides he's got God's personal phone number in his back pocket; he suckers the crowds in; then fleeces the sheep, uses and abuses them, and I don't mean just metaphorically. Lots of those holy boys just can't keep it in their pants.
You remember all the televangelist scandals; the priest abuse scandal; the FLDS; and on and on and on, and way back into history. Of course, not every believer is guilty of abuse and deceit, but so many leaders have been, and tragically, faithful people keep falling for the same old song and dance. This week, a new scandal comes to light involving a highly influential Catholic priest, as the NYT reports:
The Legionaries of Christ, an influential Roman Catholic religious order, have been shaken by new revelations that their founder, who died a year ago, had an affair with a woman and fathered a daughter just as he and his thriving conservative order were winning the acclaim of Pope John Paul II.
Before his death, the founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had been forced to leave public ministry by Pope Benedict XVI because of accusations from more than a dozen men who said he had sexually abused them when they were students. . . .
In Catholic religious orders, members are taught to identify with the spirituality and values of the founder. That was taken to an extreme in the Legionaries, said the Rev. Stephen Fichter, a priest in New Jersey who left the order after 14 years.
“Father Maciel was this mythical hero who was put on a pedestal and had all the answers,” Father Fichter said. “When you become a Legionarie, you have to read every letter Father Maciel ever wrote, like 15 or 16 volumes. To hear he’s been having this double life on the side, I just don’t see how they’re going to continue.”
Father Fichter, once the chief financial officer for the order, said he informed the Vatican three years ago that every time Father Maciel left Rome, “I always had to give him $10,000 in cash — $5,000 in American dollars and $5,000 in the currency of wherever he was going.”
Father Fichter added: “As Legionaries, we were taught a very strict poverty; if I went out of town and bought a Bic pen and a chocolate bar, I would have to turn in the receipts. And yet for Father Maciel there was never any accounting. It was always cash, never any paper trail. And because he was this incredible hero to us, we never even questioned it for a second.”
Why do we humans keep getting suckered in this way, giving up all our freedom and good sense to follow some peckerwood who claims to speak for God? Guess it feels safer that way than having to figure things out on our own. Check out the comments section on this story in the Dallas Morning News: even with the truth laid out on the table, lots of people still just don't get it.
But of course, corrupt as the Catholic Church is on these matters, the Protestant side has no room to gloat. Mike Signorile is hot on the trail of further revelations in the ongoing Ted Haggard scandal:
A Colorado Springs bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter who has been investigating New Life Church and Ted Haggard for several years appeared on my show late on Friday and told me that he now has information on ten more cases of sexual misconduct on the part of Ted Haggard and that three of these involve minors. He also said that New Life Church had suppressed from the media an earlier case of a pastor at the church (which has many pastors under the senior pastor) who was convicted of sexual assault against a child under the age of 15 and got off easy with help from the church, only to later have his probation revoked. The convicted pastor then illegally left the country, he said, and he speculates that New Life Church may have helped him do so. . . .
Brown said that it’s clear that local law enforcement has been intimidated by the New Life Church and by all the megachurches of Colorado Springs, which is like the Vatican of the evangelical movement. He noted that Ted Haggard continually bragged about how he had friends in the district attorney’s office and police department.
So you see how things are. Men reach great heights of power, influence, and wealth slamming other people for sexual sins - all the while actively, consciously, deliberately wallowing in the very things they say are oh so terrible.
And I can never forget that just a couple of weeks after I buried my husband, all the grief and shock still fresh, the last Pope came out with this brilliant pronouncement: gay marriage is, he said,
part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.
Me and my husband and the little dog, living our life, quietly, peaceably, lovingly, way out on the prairie - an evil, insidious, sinful thing?
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
.
We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
Insert valid picture ID with date of birth now, or click here.
My Story
click photograph to read
Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
