It seems sadly fitting the USA Patriot Act turned ten years old the day after police in Oakland, California assaulted peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets. While police violence had been already rampant in New York in Zuccotti Park, Oakland marked one of the first major violent confrontations with Occupy demonstrators. Soon after, police in cities across American began raids on Occupy camps, many of which culminated in the use of pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and sonic weapons. The evidence that such raids were coordinated by city mayors continues to mount, even though they vehemently deny any collusion. Most recently, police at UC Davis in California nonchalantly pepper sprayed peaceful students sitting on a plaza.

For ten years, we’ve watched one of the most draconian laws passed with incredible haste systematically destroy the freedoms that were supposedly under attack by terrorists and the “axis of evil.” In the name of national security, the Patriot Act has allowed our government — one that touts itself as the freeist in the world — the ability to spy on its citizens without justification, search their homes without warrants, and even penalize them for speaking a word of such actions.

Its recent anniversary in October however, also highlights something equally as insidious now embedded in the American national psyche: The Patriot Act has further cemented the normalcy of bloated security culture and the abuse of civil liberties in exchange for a supposed sense of safety. Its passage was the first nail in the coffin we’ve constructed for our constitutional rights, and paved the way for a security state that Orwell’s Big Brother would eventually be envious of. Between the FBI creating and then capturing terrorists, an incredible nexus of national security organizations, the militarization of our civil police forces and a mostly complicit mainstream media all too willing to act as a mouthpiece for whatever administration happens to hold the White House, we have wrapped ourselves in an increasingly fascist looking flag.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Reporter Charlie Savage of the New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out the federal government’s interpretation of its own law…and had it refused. According to the federal government, its own interpretation of the law is classified. What sort of democracy are we living in when the government can refuse to even say how it’s interpreting its own law? That’s not democracy at all.

We’ve been covering for a while now how Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been very concerned over the secret interpretation the feds have of one piece of the PATRIOT Act. They’ve been trying to pressure the government into publicly explaining how they interpret the law, because they believe that it directly contrasts how most of the public (and many elected officials) believe the feds are interpreting the law. While the two Senators continue to put pressure on the feds and to hint at the feds’ interpretation, just the fact that the government won’t even explain its own interpretation of the law seems ridiculous.

Julian Sanchez points us to the news that Savage and the Times have now sued the federal government for not revealing its interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, pointing out that if parts of the interpretation contain classified material, the Justice Department should black that out and reveal the rest, but simply refusing to reveal the interpretation entirely is a violation of the Freedom of Information Act. You can bet that the feds will do everything they can to get out of this lawsuit, just as they did with the various lawsuits concerning warrantless wiretapping. Here’s hoping the court systems don’t let them. No matter what you think of this administration (or the last one) and how it’s handling the threat of terrorism, I’m curious how anyone can make the argument that the US government should not reveal how it interprets the very laws under which it’s required to operate.

With the Obama administration considering federal civil-rights investigations into police brutality, some local police departments have reacted not by cleaning up their act, but instead by intensifying their ongoing efforts to stop citizens from even documenting police misconduct in the first place.

Earlier this summer, Rochester authorities arrested Emily Good for videotaping police while on her own property — and then later used parking tickets to try to punish and intimidate those protesting Good’s arrest. In Las Vegas, it was even worse — the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday reported that a police not only arrested Mitchell Crooks but then beat him to a pulp — all for the “crime” of innocently videotaping them from his own driveway. Importantly, Crooks may have been specifically marked for police revenge after he had made headlines in 2002 by documenting Inglewood, California police beating a 16-year-old boy.

The hypocrisy of police trying to stop citizens from videotaping their public actions should be obvious in this, the Patriot Act Age. From warrantless wiretapping to data mining to the proliferation of red-light cameras, the Surveillance State is clearly on the march. And yet, when citizens occasionally exercise their constitutional rights and turn the camera on the Surveillance State itself, they increasingly face the threat of police retribution.

More: Salon.com

In the brave new world of cloud computing, where data is stored off-site in massive server farms instead of on a user’s local hard drive, privacy and security are paramount in the consumer’s mind.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, their concerns are essentially moot thanks to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which a key Microsoft official said recently permits the U.S. to spy on data stored within cloud servers across the European Union.

The revelation of transcontinental spying, which has long been suspected, came from Gordon Frazer, Microsoft U.K.’s managing director, speaking at an announcement event for the company’s new suite of office software.

Frazer’s admission was caught by ZDNet reporter Zack Whittaker, who’s long covered data security issues as they relate to the Patriot Act.

For more information, see original article.

Photo: Thomas Good (CC)

Is President Obama getting away with some of the same offenses that led to Nixon’s resignation? Daniel Ellsberg thinks so. The Raw Story reports:

Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said Tuesday that disgraced former Republican President Richard M. Nixon would “admire [President Barack] Obama’s boldness” in trying to stifle whistleblowers.

“Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life,” Ellsberg told CNN. “And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.”

“He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me — which forced his resignation facing impeachment — are now legal,” he continued.

“That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to ‘incapacitate me totally’ (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971)… But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. [T]hey have all become legal.”

[Continues at The Raw Story]

Did you lose yourself?  Did they get to you? If so, then how? You represented some good principles when you ran for president, and you said a lot of good things.

It’s not that you lied, but it’s like you made promises that you couldn’t keep. I don’t blame you, it’s a structural and systemic problem, it’s not your fault.  But, will you be coming back to the side of the citizenry anytime soon? Will you leave the side of multinational corporations and the big bankers and the military industrial complex? Or is is possible that you were never with us in the first place? Sometimes you make me more sad and angry than George W. Bush did when he was president (at least you didn’t steal the elections!).

Regardless, enjoy the G-8. If you get a chance, please tell those protesters I say hi. P.S. What do you think of Ron Paul?

Lisa Mascaro writes in the the LA Times:

Acting with minutes to spare, President Obama approved a four-year extension of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, after Congress overcame mounting opposition from both parties to narrowly avoid a lapse in the terrorist surveillance law.

Obama, attending an international summit in France, awoke early Friday to review and approve the bill, directing that it be signed in Washington by automatic pen before the provisions expired at midnight Thursday Eastern time.

The administration had warned Congress that any interruption in the surveillance authority would threaten national security.

Passage came late Thursday after a protracted political struggle that played out over several months, a sign of increased unease with powers granted to the federal government to investigate citizens and foreigners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Conservative Republicans, many of them elected with backing from the “tea party” movement, and liberal Democrats resisted attempts to extend the three expiring provisions of the act.

Read More: LA Times

Senator Ron Wyden

Spencer Ackerman reports on Senator Ron Wyden’s claim that there’s a secret Patriot Act, for Wired:

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information. But one component of the Patriot Act in particular gives him immense pause: the so-called “business-records provision,” which empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a security investigation.

“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden says. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”

That’s why Wyden and his colleague Sen. Mark Udall offered an amendment on Tuesday to the Patriot Act reauthorization.

The amendment, first reported by Marcy Wheeler, blasts the administration for “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes.” It would compel the Attorney General to “publicly disclose the United States Government’s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act.” And, intriguingly, it refers to “intelligence-collection authorities” embedded in the Patriot Act that the administration briefed the Senate about in February…

[continues at Wired]

On September 19th, 2001, just one week after the 9/11 tragedies, Frothsburg State University economics professor William L. Anderson wrote a piece entitled, “Osama and Goldstein”. He spoke of a parallel between Osama Bin Laden and Emmanuel Goldstein, the contrived enemy of the state in George Orwell’s 1984. Over the past decade Bin Laden has become the face of terror throughout the western world and the focus of its people’s fear, anger, and hatred. Now that he is dead (read “dead” if you prefer), I believe it would be appropriate to revisit this article from William L. Anderson on LewRockwell.com:

In George Orwell’s classic 1984, the government of Oceania — Big Brother — tells the people that they have a common enemy — Goldstein. At their daily “hate” sessions, the picture of Goldstein comes up on the screen, while the people scream in anger and horror at the image. Goldstein, they are told, is everywhere and must be destroyed.

In one way, it is difficult to draw the parallels between Goldstein and America’s latest enemy, Osama bin Laden, who has been accused of masterminding the suicide assaults on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. After all, Goldstein is a fictional character, and probably was a fictional character in Oceania as well. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, is real — all too real — and has been the financier and “spiritual leader” of numerous terrorist cells around the world.

Thus, to draw comparisons between the two men seems absurd. Goldstein posed no real danger to anyone, while today what is left of the bodies of more than 5,000 innocent people lie beneath the rubble of the once proud WTC, the Pentagon salvage operation continues, and investigators are combing the rubble of the remains of Flight 93 in the Pennsylvania countryside, just 40 miles from my home.

Yet, the similarities are more real than apparent and speak to what has been happening in the United States since World War II. Each decade has seen evil characters who have been hell-bent on destroying “our way of life” paraded before the American public…

Read More from William L. Anderson on LewRockwell.com

Image Courtesy of TheDissenter.

“Lawmakers will soon start debating” … yeah right, it seems like the PATRIOT Act is a permanent reality. I’d like to know more about the scope of this “lone wolf” provision. Via the Washington Post:

President Barack Obama has signed a three-month extension of key surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act.

The law extends two areas of the 2001 act. One provision allows law enforcement officials to set roving wiretaps to monitor multiple communication devices. The other allows them to ask a special court for access to business and library records that could be relevant to a terrorist threat.

A third provision gives the FBI court-approved rights for surveillance of non-American “lone wolf” suspects — those not known to be tied to specific terrorist groups.

Obama signed the three-month extension of the provisions Friday. They were to expire Monday.

Lawmakers will soon start debating a multiple-year extension of the provisions, which have drawn fire from defenders of privacy rights.

Read More in the Washington Post

Check out these two news reports. Hypocrisy, politics, or both?

Simmi Aujla reports in the Politico:

Top House Democrats pounced on Republicans’ mishandling of a routine vote Tuesday evening, which caused a bill to extend provisions of the Patriot Act go down in defeat.

The Democrats said Wednesday morning that the failed vote is a sign that Republican leaders aren’t prepared to handle the practical difficulties of governing.

“I don’t think they’ve found their center yet,” Democratic Caucus conference chair Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) said. “It seems they’re coming apart at the seams.”

Rank-and-file Republicans threw off Republican leaders’ plans for the measure, which was expected to pass easily, when a large enough number bucked their party and voted no. The measure fell short of the two-thirds vote it needed by 13 votes.

But Greg Sargent reports in the Washington Post:

Yesterday, a vote on reauthorizing three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act failed after most Democrats and a few Republicans voted against it. So does the vote represent a new Tea Party revolt against big government? Hardly. Republicans hate the welfare state, not the surveillance state.

Only 26 Republicans voted against the bill, and there are 52 members of the Republican Tea Party Caucus, whose chairperson, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn)  voted for reauthorization along with most of the rest of her caucus. As Slate’s Dave Weigel  points out, only eight of the 26 were Republican freshmen elected last November. One hundred and twenty-two Democrats voted against reauthorization, I suspect most of them just because they could.

So how did the bill fail? Basically Republicans were trying to pass the bill under “suspension of the rules,” which is considered the process for passing “noncontroversial” legislation.  You need a two thirds majority of those present to pass bills that way. For one brief night, Republicans in the House learned what it was like to be a Democrat in the Senate.

Sadly, the revolt probably won’t last, as there are more than the 218 votes needed to pass reauthorization under normal procedures. What’s uncertain is whether the reauthorization will contain mild oversight provisions, and when the provisions will actually sunset. As Cato’s Julian Sanchez notes, there are two Democratic Senate versions that reauthorize these provisions for three years, but the Republican House version sunsets them until December 2011, while the Republican Senate proposal makes them permanent. Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s  version of the bill would reign in Section 215 orders and provide some key oversight over the use of the widely abused National Security Letters, but those modest reforms were too much for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), so she introduced an alternate bill without them.

In George Orwell’s 1984, Britain is depicted as a totalitarian police state that is ruled by the Party, or Big Brother — an enigmatic, ubiquitous elite that controls society through heavy surveillance, nationalist propaganda and historical revisionism.

The concept seems like a far-fetched portrayal of a Democratic nation’s demise into totalitarianism, but in America’s “post 9/11” climate of fear, the United States government has been building a comprehensive grid of surveillance and control that bears frightening similarities to Orwell’s fictional narrative.

The glaring difference between the two is that Orwell’s dystopian society is overtly totalitarian. America, conversely, operates under a “soft fascism” – an insidious, systematic method of preventative action and corporate top-down control over society’s media, economy and politics – while maintaining the necessary illusion of personal choice and freedom. A populous with little to no concept of their subjugation makes them the perfect subjects to rule.

Many Americans might not feel the government’s hand or Big Brother’s watchful eye directly in their lives. However, with the use of GPS, cell phones and the Internet, every move we make can be tracked, cataloged and divied into demographics that are used to increase corporate advertising efficiency and to create a “chilling effect” throughout our culture, stifling dissent and diminishing activism.

During times of war, governments are notorious for capitalizing on their ability to suppress dissent and manipulate the masses. In the wake of 9/11 hysteria, the Bush administration enacted several controversial pieces of legislation that severely curtailed Americans’ freedoms under the pretext of “security” and “protection”. With the help of a consistently compliant and unquestioning media, his administration also instituted a legal framework to circumvent citizens’ civil liberties and target their free speech. Bush’s cabinet adopted Orwellian rhetoric and Nazi style propaganda to litigate sweeping measures that further eradicated liberty: The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’s (USA Patriot Act) warrantless domestic wiretapping, and the Homegrown Terrorism Act & Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act’s criminalization of thought and peaceful activism.

Read full article about the impending police state here.

We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.

Is it true?

Let’s look:

• The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)

• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office

• Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11

• The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11

• Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11

• Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this

• Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”

• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)

• The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11

• The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11

• The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11

• Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay

• It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people

So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?

SEE ALSO: 5 Facts You Don’t Know About Spying

Photo: Nevit Dilmen (CC)

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

For a country that prides itself on its freedoms, we’ve systematically begun to dismantle them in favor of a perceived sense of safety. We have the largest, most powerful military in the world. Our surveillance systems and police technologies are state of the art. We have more law enforcement agencies than acronyms available.

Yet, for all the measures in place to make us feel safe, we live our lives in fear of the next thwarted terrorist attack. To live and believe that we are the most powerful country in the world and simultaneously feel so vulnerable is a mental gymnastics performance that would make Orwell blush.

With all of the shouting in the public square about the constitution and the paranoia some Americans fear over “big government,” how can our elected leaders even begin to fathom, let alone propose and support such draconian and downright dictatorial powers? Yet, millions of Americans justified the PATRIOT ACT when legislators jumped at the chance to sign the bill without reading it.

Even though there is hopeful popular and political resistance to Arizona’s immigration bill, millions of Americans support that as well. Now in the face of this “vulnerable world,” we’re supposed to quietly and lovingly accept big brother’s biometric seal of approval and God given right to take it away in secret, without presenting a burden of proof.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation’s main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act.

Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday.

The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.

Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:

Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group…

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that pits an individual’s right of free speech and association against a federal law aimed at combating terrorism. At issue is part of the Patriot Act that makes it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful lawful activity on behalf of any group designated as a terrorist organization.

Federal law makes it a crime to provide material support to any organization designated as a terrorist group by the secretary of state. But the definition of material support includes not just providing weapons or money or bomb-making skills; it includes providing any sort of expert advice, training or personnel — including advice on how to resolve disputes peaceably or training on how to make human rights claims before the United Nations.

The nonprofit Humanitarian Law Project has a long history of engaging in such activity, mediating international conflicts and promoting human rights. But it has stopped doing some of its work for fear of being prosecuted under the material support provision.

“My speech is particularly nonviolent,” says Ralph Fertig, president of the organization. “I’ve gone to jail in the United States for my advocacy for peace.”

The federal government, he maintains, cannot constitutionally make it a crime to help others advocate lawful, peaceful solutions to international conflicts. In particular, Fertig and his organization have helped the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, make human rights claims before international bodies. They have trained Kurdish leaders in peacemaking negotiations and have brought them to Washington to lobby. But when the PKK was designated an international terrorist organization under the Patriot Act, that all stopped, and the Humanitarian Law Project went to court.

The government, arguing that the PKK had engaged in terrorist activities that have cost some 22,000 lives, said it was justified in making the organization a pariah. Thus, the government contended, even filing a legal brief on behalf of the PKK in an American court, would be a crime…

[continues at NPR]

Rushed into law by Congress just weeks after Sept. 11, 2001 three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act granting officials far-reaching surveillance and seizure powers in the name of national security, are due to expire this New Year’s Eve.

Two differing bills passed by the House and Senate judiciary committees in recent weeks will have to be reconciled in Congress, but only when the Senate isn’t backlogged by health care, Democratic aides told ABC News.

“This critical legislation protects our national security, as well as our civil liberties, and the clock is ticking,” said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., an author of President Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act and former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee under the Bush administration.

Sensenbrenner urged the House and Senate to act quickly in reauthorizing the provisions before they expire at the end of this year.

That timing is unclear. With so few weeks left in the year and the health care debate just beginning in the Senate, it’s possible that Congress will first vote for a temporary extension to prevent certain Patriot Act authorities from sunsetting, according to an aide…

[continues at ABC News]