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Topics - Anonymous (User Deleted)

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1
NSA Inspector General George Ellard was promoted by himself and Edward Snowden's detractors as the safe, legal, responsible channel that Snowden was supposed to go through instead of leaking documents to the press.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/1ee704978c1e44a1b80db2e1bfbf109a/nsa-watchdog-leave-whistleblower-case
Quote
NSA watchdog on leave in whistleblower case   
By DEB RIECHMANN 
Dec. 19, 2016 5:07 PM EST

WASHINGTON (AP) — Allegations of retaliation against a whistleblower at the National Security Agency have left its top watchdog fighting for his job, according to an intelligence official and another individual familiar with the case.

The case could offer some credence to Edward Snowden's claim that he could not have reported the government's domestic surveillance program without facing reprisals.

George Ellard, the NSA's inspector general, was placed on administrative leave after he refused to give the whistleblower a certain job assignment. The Project on Government Oversight, an advocacy group, first reported last week that Adm. Mike Rogers, director of NSA, had placed Ellard on leave and recommended that he be terminated. Ellard is appealing that decision.  Ellard received attention in 2014 for remarks at Georgetown University Law Center criticizing Snowden, the former NSA contractor who had leaked secret documents about the surveillance program. Snowden says he went public because he feared retaliation from his superiors if he had raised his concerns with them. Ellard said at Georgetown that Snowden could have safely come to him.

Ellard's case is the first to move completely through a process created by President Barack Obama in 2012 to ensure that intelligence employees can effectively report waste, fraud and abuse while protecting classified information. The directive prohibits agencies from retaliating against them or taking away security clearances or an employee's access to classified information.

The case stemmed from a whistleblower's claims of financial misconduct by NSA officials involving a conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

The whistleblower, in a brief email to The Associated Press, said that after he raised his concerns, his name was disclosed to Ellard in violation of rules intended to protect government employees who want to report misconduct.

The whistleblower said his email response had been cleared by the NSA. The agency declined to comment independently on the case. Ellard's attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

It's not clear who revealed the whistleblower's identity to Ellard. But the whistleblower said that after Ellard learned who he was, "I was denied an assignment within the NSA inspector general's office of investigations because of my whistleblowing." He sent the email to the AP on condition of anonymity because the case is still active.

Rogers' decision to recommend Ellard's dismissal followed an eight-month investigation by a panel of inspectors general at the CIA, Treasury and Justice Department, according to an intelligence official, who was not authorized to disclose details about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The trio was empaneled in October 2015 and issued its decision in May.

The Justice and Defense departments declined to comment on the decision.

Louis Clark, director of the Government Accountability Project, said he was happy that the process set up by Obama's directive was finally being used, but expressed disappointment that it has taken so long for it to happen. "It was so slow because the intelligence agencies are extremely hostile to whistleblowing," he said.

The fate of Obama's directive is uncertain. It will be up to Donald Trump, after he becomes president, to decide whether to continue it. Trump has said he doesn't trust the intelligence agencies, but it's not clear if that would make him more or less likely to protect whistleblowers.

Timothy Edgar, Obama's first director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House national security staff, says there is cause for serious concern about the future of whistleblowers.

"What we're left with, I think, is probably primarily the integrity and bravery of people in the bureaucracy, who, despite those obstacles are willing to say 'no' if they are involved in activities that they think are serious violations of the Constitution," Edgar said.
___

Associated Press writer Eileen Sullivan contributed to this story.

2
The Flood / ITT: best prequel quotes
« on: December 17, 2016, 09:24:35 AM »
search your feelings

you know they exist

YouTube


YouTube


YouTube

3
Serious / Trump "punishes" Carrier by giving them $7 million tax deal
« on: December 05, 2016, 01:28:34 PM »
Carrier wants to move jobs from Indiana to Mexico to save money. Trump said he wasn't going to let that happen. To help the president-elect accomplish his agenda, Bernie Sanders introduced a protectionist anti-outsourcing bill.

Trump blew off Congress completely. Carrier's """""penalty""""" will be a $7 million tax cut, and we're still losing half the jobs anyway. It's a deal so blatantly crony capitalism that it makes Sarah Palin sound competent.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/carrier-gets-tax-breaks-but-it-s-still-sending-jobs/article_d2f958e5-1eaf-5401-93b1-c6b0990acab2.html

Update: The jobs saved will ultimately be replaced by automation.
Quote
Carrier gets tax breaks, but it's still sending 1,300 jobs to Mexico

Reuters
Dec 1, 2016

Updated at 4:33 p.m.

WASHINGTON • Indiana state officials have agreed to give United Technologies Corp. $7 million worth of tax breaks to encourage the company to keep at least 1,069 jobs at its Carrier unit in Indianapolis, Carrier and the state said on Thursday.

President-elect Donald Trump has claimed credit for keeping well-paid manufacturing jobs in the country, but the deal is less than a complete victory for the Republican who campaigned on "putting America first."

In the election campaign, Trump vowed to impose hefty tariffs if Carrier did not reverse course on shifting jobs to Mexico. The deal means Carrier will still send an estimated 1,300 jobs there.

United Technologies chief executive Gregory Hayes said at an event that the company will invest more than $16 million over two years to keep its Indianapolis plant in the state.

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. said it has offered Carrier $5 million in conditional tax credits based on a plan to retain 1,069 jobs with an average wage of $30.91 per hour, spokeswoman Abby Gras said.

She declined to say how many of those jobs are at the plant or at the company's headquarters, but the Wall Street Journal reported the deal would save about 800 of the 1,400 jobs at the plant and about 300 at the headquarters.

Indiana is also offering $1 million in training grants to support workforce development and $1 million in tax credits, Gras said. The agreement has not been finalized yet.

Some other details of the deal in Vice President-elect and Indiana Governor Mike Pence's state were unclear but it has already been criticized on the left and right.

Trump and Pence celebrated the 1,000 jobs deal at an event in Indianapolis on Thursday, but employers elsewhere in Indiana are laying off five times as many workers because of foreign competition.

Trump "did just what he said he would do," Pence said, recounting his push to convince Carrier to remain in Indiana. "He made the case for America."

Neither Trump nor Pence made any reference to United Technologies' planned job cuts in Indiana.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that "it is not good enough to save some of these jobs. Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana."

Republican Representative Justin Amish of Michigan tweeted: "Not the president(elect)'s job. We live in a constitutional republic, not an autocracy. Business-specific meddling shouldn't be normalized."

Reuters reported earlier this week that United Technologies would still would proceed with plans to close its Huntington, Ind., United Technologies Electronic Controls plant that employs 700.

Trump also faces pressure to prevent other job cuts. There are several other factories in Indiana that closing and Senator Joe Donnelly, a Indiana Democrat, urged him to take action to prevent other job losses. The United States has shed about 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. Indiana alone has lost about 150,000 factory jobs since 2000 to about 500,000.

4
Serious / So much for draining the swamp
« on: December 03, 2016, 08:32:34 AM »
Despite the report that the transition team had drained its own swamp of lobbyists, they kind of really didn't.

Spoiler
Quote
Peter Thiel Insider Picked to Oversee Donald Trump’s Defense Department Transition

Lee Fang
November 28 2016
1:27 p.m.


Trae Stephens, a principal at billionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund, was appointed last week by Donald Trump to help lead the transition effort at the Defense Department.

Thiel, who made a $1,000,000 donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC, is Trump’s highest-profile supporter in Silicon Valley.

At Thiel’s Founder Fund, Stephens “focuses on startups operating in the government space,” according to his official biography. Before that, he worked at another Thiel-backed firm: Palantir, a highly controversial data analysis firm that is currently competing for Defense Department contracts.

“Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in intelligence and defense as well as international expansion,” says the biography.

Palantir gained notoriety in 2011 after the hacking collective LulzSec dumped thousands of hacked emails from HBGary Federal, a firm collaborating with Palantir to pitch clients, revealing plans to use Palantir’s data analysis tools on a project to spy on labor unions, journalists, and activist groups on behalf of business interests. The proposal detailed a variety of surveillance techniques, including a PowerPoint presentation calling for the use of malware to steal data from target computers.

Palantir and HBGary Federal denied that the plans were acted upon and said they were merely part of an ongoing discussion, though the hacked emails revealed that the chief executive and board of Palantir signed off on the proposal.

The controversy did not stem the growth of Palantir, which is now reportedly valued at over $20 billion, a valuation that would make Thiel’s stake in the company worth potentially $2 billion.

Last year, another leaked document from Palantir revealed that as of 2013, the firm counted over a dozen federal agencies as clients, including the FBI, NSA, CIA, Special Operations Command, and the Air Force.

Palantir has been engaged in a pitched lobbying battle to win over a $3 billion contract to develop battlefield intelligence systems. In October, Palantir secured a victory in court, allowing them to move forward with the bid. The firm has hired a number of political insiders to influence military contracting decisions, including retired Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Terry Paul.

But no amount of outside lobbying can compare to having a Palantir insider now shaping the entire future of the Defense Department.

News of this comes around Congress' quiet amendments of "Rule 41" that grants the FBI broad hacking powers, and the passage of the UK's sweeping investigatory powers bill. I know I've posted about this before, but here's another reminder that Trump will inherit the executive branch at the height of its power with very little to keep him in-check.

I've written before about """""libertarian""""" Peter Thiel's unsavory actions against the media. Now that he's buddies with a similarly authoritarian president-elect, who wants to bet Thiel or his followers will try this stuff again?

UPDATE: Two more Thiel associates join the transition, and a third guy may lead the FDA.

5
Serious / Trump throws cold water on putting his assets in a blind trust
« on: November 24, 2016, 10:31:02 AM »
In NYT's softball interview with Donald Trump, the President-elect doubled down leaving the business to his children:

Spoiler
Quote
SHEAR [interrupts]: And if the reaction from foreign leaders is to slap tariffs on American goods to offset the carbon that the United States had pledged to reduce, is that O.K. with you? And then the second question is on your sort of mixing of your global business interests and the presidency. There’s already, even just in the 10, two weeks you’ve been president-elect, instances where you’ve met with your Indian business partners …

TRUMP: Sure.

SHEAR: You’ve talked about the impact of the wind farms on your golf course. People, experts who are lawyers and ethics experts, say that all of that is totally inappropriate, so I guess the question for you is, what do you see as the appropriate structure for keeping those two things separate, and are there any lines that you think you won’t want to cross once you’re in the White House?

TRUMP: O.K. First of all, on countries. I think that countries will not do that to us. I don’t think if they’re run by a person that understands leadership and negotiation they’re in no position to do that to us, no matter what I do. They’re in no position to do that to us, and that won’t happen, but I’m going to take a look at it. A very serious look. I want to also see how much this is costing, you know, what’s the cost to it, and I’ll be talking to you folks in the not-too-distant future about it, having to do with what just took place.

As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest, but I have, I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world. People are starting to see, when they look at all these different jobs, like in India and other things, number one, a job like that builds great relationships with the people of India, so it’s all good. But I have to say, the partners come in, they’re very, very successful people. They come in, they’d say, they said, ‘Would it be possible to have a picture?’ Actually, my children are working on that job. So I can say to them, Arthur, ‘I don’t want to have a picture,’ or, I can take a picture. I mean, I think it’s wonderful to take a picture. I’m fine with a picture. But if it were up to some people, I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again. That would be like you never seeing your son again. That wouldn’t be good. That wouldn’t be good. But I’d never, ever see my daughter Ivanka.

UNKNOWN: That means you’d have to make Ivanka deputy President, you know.

TRUMP: I know, I know, yeah. [room laughs] Well, I couldn’t do that either. I can’t, that can’t work. I can’t do anything, I would never see my, I guess the only son I’d be allowed to see, at least for a little while, would be Barron, because he’s 10. But, but, so there has to be [unintelligible]. It’s a very interesting case.

UNKNOWN: You could sell your company though, right? With all due respect, you could sell your company and then …

TRUMP: Well …

UNKNOWN: And then you could see them all the time.

TRUMP: That’s a very hard thing to do, you know what, because I have real estate. I have real estate all over the world, which now people are understanding. When I filed my forms with the federal election, people said, ‘Wow that’s really a big company, that’s a big company.’ It really is big, it’s diverse, it’s all over the world. It’s a great company with great assets. I think that, you know, selling real estate isn’t like selling stock. Selling real estate is much different, it’s in a much different world. I’d say this, and I mean this and I said it on “60 Minutes” the other night: My company is so unimportant to me relative to what I’m doing, ’cause I don’t need money, I don’t need anything, and by the way, I’m very under-leveraged, I have a very small percentage of my money in debt, very very small percentage of my money in debt, in fact, banks have said ‘We’d like to loan you money, we’d like to give you any amount of money.’ I’ve been there before, I’ve had it both ways, I’ve been over-levered, I’ve been under-levered and, especially as you get older, under-levered is much better.

UNKNOWN: Mr. President-elect …

TRUMP: Just a minute, because it’s an important question. I don’t care about my company. I mean, if a partner comes in from India or if a partner comes in from Canada, where we did a beautiful big building that just opened, and they want to take a picture and come into my office, and my kids come in and, I originally made the deal with these people, I mean what am I going to say? I’m not going to talk to you, I’m not going to take pictures? You have to, you know, on a human basis, you take pictures. But I just want to say that I am given the right to do something so important in terms of so many of the issues we discussed, in terms of health care, in terms of so many different things. I don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it. They’ll say I have a conflict because we just opened a beautiful hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, so every time somebody stays at that hotel, if they stay because I’m president, I guess you could say it’s a conflict of interest. It’s a conflict of interest, but again, I’m not going to have anything to do with the hotel, and they may very well. I mean it could be that occupancy at that hotel will be because, psychologically, occupancy at that hotel will be probably a more valuable asset now than it was before, O.K.? The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before. I can’t help that, but I don’t care. I said on “60 Minutes”: I don’t care. Because it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters to me is running our country.

Notably, one benefit of voting for Mr. Trump, as touted by his supporters, was that unlike his opponent, Ms. Clinton, Trump would not have conflicts of interest, such as the Clinton Foundation. At the least, Mr. Trump's businesses provide somewhat greater transparency because nearly all of them have his name on them. But his defense largely boils down to the problematic 'it's not wrong if the president (or similar authority figure) does it.'

6
Serious / Mike Pence facing his own emails scandal
« on: November 15, 2016, 11:00:10 PM »
I just watched a movie and I'm too tired to pretend to be impartial so fuck it

Considering Trump never once made the concern over Clinton's email server about transparency--which Clinton clearly tried to avoid by having that server in the first place--and hasn't been a fan of whistleblowers in general, it's probably safe to assume a Trump administration wouldn't favor transparency. If Pence wins, it'll be even more power to the executive branch.

It's a week since the election and there's already concerns over Trump's cabinet picks having conflicts of interest and Trump himself believing his own kids to be a blind trust. If this keeps up, maybe we'll get lucky and Trump and/or Pence will face impeachment before the four years are up.

IndyStar
Quote
What's Mike Pence hiding in his emails?

Fatima Hussein, IndyStar 3:03 p.m. EST November 14, 2016

Mike Pence wants his communications limited from public access. Experts say this sets a "dangerous precedent."

Now that the presidential campaign and most of the furor over Hillary Clinton's email scandal are behind us, the Pence administration is going to court to argue for its own brand of email secrecy.

The administration is fighting to conceal the contents of an email sent to Gov. Mike Pence by a political ally. That email is being sought by a prominent Democratic labor lawyer who says he wants to expose waste in the Republican administration.

But legal experts fear the stakes may be much higher than mere politics because the decision could remove a judicial branch check on executive power and limit a citizen's right to know what the government is doing and how it spends taxpayer dollars.

"It comes down to this — the court is giving up its ability to check another branch of government, and that should worry people," said Gerry Lanosga, an Indiana University media professor specializing in public records law.

In the case, Indianapolis attorney William Groth is appealing a decision handed down by Marion Superior Court in April, which decided that redactions the administration made to a public record could not be second-guessed by the court.

The focal point in the case is a political “white paper” that had been excluded from Groth’s public records request.

Pence’s legal defense team claims the white paper is attorney work product protected by Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act — and at the end of the day, matters of public records are not for a court to decide.

Groth argues the lower court misapplied the law.

“I think governmental transparency is an important concern of anyone who lives in a democracy – the governor cannot put himself above the law,” Groth told the IndyStar.

How the case came about

The matter stems from a lawsuit filed after President Barack Obama announced in November 2014 that he was taking new steps to "fix America’s broken immigration system." Those steps included offering deferred enforcement of immigration laws for parents of children born in the United States, and for children who entered the United States before they were 16 years old.

The action drew the ire of Republican governors across the country, including Pence, who called the policy a "profound mistake."

Pence, joined in on a lawsuit led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbot in State of Texas, et al v. United States, with the blessing of the Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller. Zoeller's office did not respond to IndyStar requests for comment.

Pence hired Indianapolis law firm Barnes & Thornburg to join the Texas litigation. A representative from the firm — which is also representing Pence in this case — did not respond to IndyStar requests for interview.

In December 2014, Groth requested information regarding Pence's decision to hire outside counsel and the cost to Indiana taxpayers.

"I think joining the lawsuit without the attorney general and hiring that firm was a waste of taxpayer dollars and the people have the right to know how much of their money was spent,” Groth said. Groth is known in Indiana for representing the plaintiffs in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court voter identification case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Pence produced the documents in the request “but those documents included substantial redaction,” according to court documents.

The 57-page response also included an email that Daniel Hodge, Abbott's chief of staff, sent to 30 recipients in various states asking them to join the lawsuit against Obama.

The message included an attached white paper, but the governor failed to produce the document, according to court records.

After a yearlong trial, the Superior Court held that the issue was not a matter for the courts to decide, citing a Indiana Supreme Court case decided just days before.

In a 4-1 ruling, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in Citizens Action Coalition, et al. v. Indiana House Rep., that underthe Indiana Constitution’s separation of powers clause the legislature's redactions were nonjusticiable, a legal term that means not for the court to decide. Groth was also the attorney representing the plaintiffs in that case.

Groth appealed in June and the Indiana Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments Nov. 21 at 1 p.m. at the Statehouse, where each side will be allowed 20 minutes for arguments.

'A dangerous legal precedent'

Paul Jefferson, a former professor of state constitutional law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said the major question for the appellate court to decide is "whether they're going to extend that (Citizens Action Coalition, et al. v. Indiana House Rep.) to the executive branch as a whole."

He said if the court rules in favor of the governor, "that would severely limit the Access to Public Records Act."

It's a fear that even the highest levels of court have warned about.

In the sole dissent of the Citizens Action Coalition lawsuit, Indiana Supreme Court Justice Justice Robert Rucker stated: “The majority’s ruling is not only premature, but it unfortunately weighs in on a significant separation of powers issue without an adequate record.”

The state's public access counselor, Luke Britt, appointed by Pence in 2013, also fears what might happen if other public officials invoke the Citizens Action Coalition privilege. "After that case, a lot of local government officials were trying to claim a similar privilege — that was one of my fears."

Jefferson said that "this will be interesting in part because it is hard to draw clean lines between what would be and what wouldn’t be if excluded from a public records request if the court is going to exempt the executive branch from public records review."

Lanosga, the public access professor, says the outcome of the case will set a precedent on what are appropriate levels of transparency in government.

"It shows no accountability," he said, "that an agency can say things are exempt just because and citizens have no recourse."

7
Reports the Wall Street Journal:

Spoiler
Quote
Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton Are Leading Candidates for Next Secretary of State 
Aides to President-elect Trump are focusing on former New York City mayor and former U.S. ambassador to U.N.
By Damian Paletta and Jay Solomon   
Nov. 14, 2016 3:40 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Aides to President-elect Donald Trump are focusing on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton as the leading candidates to be the next secretary of state, two people familiar with the process said.

The choice between the two would force Mr. Trump to choose between Mr. Giuliani, a longtime friend and ally in New York, and Mr. Bolton, a hawkish conservative diplomat who called last year for the U.S. to bomb Iran.

A final decision could be several weeks away, these people said.

Mr. Giuliani has rebuffed questions about his potential role in the Trump administration, saying on ABC on Sunday, “I have a very, very full life. So it would have to be something where I felt he really needed me and—not that I’d be the only one that could do it, but maybe that I could do it a little bit different or a little bit better than somebody else.”

The Trump transition team is considering former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton for the position of the next secretary of state.   

Mr. Bolton declined to comment, and the Trump transition team didn’t respond to a question for comment.

Mr. Trump’s pick will be integral to his effort to reshape U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Trump has called for a complete overhaul of the way the U.S. interacts with enemies and adversaries, arguing that the White House should forge a new relationship with Russia and engage in trade battles with Mexico and China.

Assuming the report is accurate, those hoping for softer relations with Russia or staying out of the Middle East may not get that if Bolton becomes Secretary of State.

8
Serious / Trump's conflicts of interest (UPDATED)
« on: November 14, 2016, 09:12:29 AM »
UPDATE: See yesterday's New York Times piece also covering the issue. Original post is below.

The Guardian ran a piece Saturday about Trump's extensive list of potential conflicts of interest.

(As far as I know, Trump has done less to step back from his businesses than Hillary did to step back from the Clinton Foundation.)

Spoiler
Quote
Trump's conflicts of interest take White House into uncharted territory

With his children, and not a blind trust, running his company, little prevents the president-elect’s political and business careers from bleeding into each other

Sam Thielman in New York



When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.

Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.

Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, has insisted that Trump’s holdings would go into a trust managed by him and his siblings Eric and Ivanka Trump.

“We’re not going to be involved in government,” Trump Jr told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in September on Good Morning America. “He wants nothing to do with [the company]. He wants to fix this country.”
Quote
Candace Smith  (@CandaceSmith_)
.@realDonaldTrump 3 eldest children + son-in-law are on his Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee: pic.twitter.com/SOXizI8rz7
November 11, 2016
Donald Jr, Eric and Ivanka Trump are all on the president-elect’s transition team executive committee, per ABC’s Candace Smith, as is Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

But according to regulators who have overseen potential conflicts of interests under two former presidents, Trump’s arrangements were unprecedented and present a host of issues.

This is in no way a blind trust, said Karl Sandstrom, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the regulatory body that oversees campaign finance, under Bill Clinton and George W Bush. “A blind trust is not anywhere near the same. You don’t still have access to the decision being made. That’s why you put assets in and don’t just have someone else manage the company,” he said. Trump’s assets will instead apparently remain united under his company, and operated under his name even if he is not directly in charge.

“Reagan spent some time in the private sector but he certainly wasn’t a CEO,” said Robert Lenhard, also a former FEC chair, appointed by George W Bush. “He wasn’t operating a set of companies like Trump is. Most of our presidents have come out of political careers – Eisenhower’s time out of office was mostly a hiatus between the military and the presidency.”

Trump owns hotels in Chicago, New York City, Las Vegas, Waikiki and, most recently, in Washington DC, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. As with any hotel chain, the Trump Organization will oversee power, water, maintenance, security, billing and any number of other logistical details that will now essentially be negotiated between the provider and the family of the president.

Abroad, Trump holds properties in Istanbul, where his election was met with satisfaction by that country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as Mumbai, Vancouver and Seoul, among many others. With Trump’s children running his businesses, there is also the matter of their bearing his name, and thus the name of the president, anywhere in the world when they arrive to negotiate leases and construction deals.

From his financial filings, the future US leader also appears to be a shareholder or beneficiary of several entities headquartered abroad, among them Excel Venture LLC in the French West Indies, and Caribusiness Investments SRL, based in the Dominican Republic. How Trump’s holdings in those countries will affect US relations with them remains to be seen; both are notable for their use in finance to avoid taxes. Trump has promised to cut the rate for repatriating cash into the US as an incentive for others who, like him, keep taxable funds overseas.

In Azerbaijan, Trump has a real estate project he said was “on hold” during the presidential campaign. His partner in the endeavor was Anar Mammadov, son of the Iranian transportation minister, Ziya Mammadov, who was accused in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 of laundering money.

In Russia, where Trump’s election has been met with congratulations by President Vladimir Putin, Trump worked closely with the Russian-born American financier Felix H Sater, managing director of the New York-based firm Bayrock LLC. Sater and Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif worked closely with Trump and others in his organization. In a deposition, Trump said that he had discussed “numerous deals all over the world” with Arif, and that Arif had brought potential Russian investors to meet Trump at his office, according to a report in the New York Times.

Bayrock was examined closely during a lawsuit filed by its former finance director, Jody Kriss; the Times said the firm had “occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia”.

Also in Russia, there are Trump’s ties to Paul Manafort, who ran his campaign from March to August. Manafort, who helped to install Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych as president in Ukraine, was named in a corruption investigation by a Ukrainian authority working with the FBI.

Then there is the matter of the president-elect’s stock portfolio. Trump has holdings in Dakota Access pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners. In his first 100 days, Trump has pledged to remove every impediment to the pipeline, which has been the subject of protests violently suppressed by police in North Dakota. He also owns stock in Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted that he was “feeling hopeful” on Wednesday, and in Bank of America – he has promised to deregulate the banking industry.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, defended Trump’s post-election business plans on Thursday. Speaking of Trump’s family, he said: “They’re really intelligent. They’re really qualified. That’s why he really didn’t run in 2012, because they were younger by four years,” he told CNN.

While conflicts of interest may cause scandals for the president, they are unlikely to add to his long list of legal woes. In 1982 the supreme court gave Richard Nixon “absolute immunity” to prosecution for most kinds of crimes committed while in office, setting a precedent for administrations to come. “The president’s absolute immunity is a functionally mandated incident of his unique office, rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by the Nation’s history,” wrote Justice Lewis Franklin Powell in the majority opinion, adding that “diversion of his energies by concern with private lawsuits would raise unique risks to the effective functioning of government”.

As checks on that immunity, Powell wrote, “There remains the constitutional remedy of impeachment, as well as the deterrent effects of constant scrutiny by the press and vigilant oversight by Congress. Other incentives to avoid misconduct may include a desire to earn re-election, the need to maintain prestige as an element of Presidential influence, and a President’s traditional concern for his historical stature.”

Those checks and balances are likely to be tested when the business mogul-turned-president takes office. Public officials below the president and vice-president are subject to conflict of interest rules. “The standards of conduct are government-wide with respect to conflicts of interest, and they are to be found in the code of federal regulations, and whether those basic rules are going to apply throughout from the top down,” Sandstrom said. “How do you enforce rules on others that you don’t abide?”

Since images don't show up in quotes, here's the tweeted image with a list of folks on Trump's transition team:

Spoiler

Free press-hating """""libertarian""""" billionaire Peter Thiel being on Trump's transition team is perhaps enough cause for concern, considering this is a President-elect who wants to "open up" libel laws. I'll leave these here.

Thiel is also the founder of Palantir, a data-mining company that's one of the biggest defense contractors, and whose primary customer is the US Intelligence Community. Several years ago, Palantir was involved in a plot to smear folks who could hurt their business, specifically WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

9
Serious / Don't normalize Trump simply because he won
« on: November 12, 2016, 08:25:06 PM »
We've all heard this line by now--many members of this site have peddled it, too--that since Donald Trump won the election, we should just shut up and give him the benefit of the doubt, as if that excuses all of his dangerous rhetoric over the past 16 months. (This is the first of many ways that Trump's most ardent supporters will attempt to silence and demonize their opposition over the next four years.) A man who finds himself in ideological agreement with the autocrats of the world is not mentally fit for the presidency. Trump has shown no signs of backing down from his rhetoric, either, so why should we roll over and take it? Here's a tip: we should not.
Quote
Autocracy: Rules for Survival 
Masha Gessen

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,
Quote
We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.
Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:
Quote
We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world…. We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.
The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

November 10, 2016, 5:26 pm

 

10
Before it's too late.

(I'm too tired to write up a lengthy intro to these pieces so I'll just post them with a tl;dr.)

1) Trump will inherit the executive branch at the peak of its power. Democrats' foreign policy 180 under Obama can be thanked for that.

Spoiler
Quote
Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them.

Liberals liked executive authority as long as Obama wielded it. Now they've set a precedent.

Liberals are understandably panicked about what Donald Trump can carry out. “We have a president-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful ,” Franklin Foer wrote this past week in Slate. Trump will command not only a massive nuclear arsenal and the most robust military in history, but also the ability to wage numerous wars in secret and without congressional authorization; a ubiquitous system of electronic surveillance that can reach most forms of human communication and activity; and countless methods for shielding himself from judicial accountability, congressional oversight and the rule of law — exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. Trump assumes the presidency “at the peak of its imperial powers,” as Foer put it.

Sen. Barack Obama certainly saw it that way when he first ran for president in 2008. Limiting executive-power abuses and protecting civil liberties were central themes of his campaign. The former law professor repeatedly railed against the Bush-Cheney template of vesting the president with unchecked authorities in the name of fighting terrorism or achieving other policy objectives. “This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide,” he said in 2007. Listing an array of controversial Bush-Cheney policies, from warrantless domestic surveillance to due-process-free investigations and imprisonment, he vowed: “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.”

Yet, beginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance.

Blinded by the belief that Obama was too benevolent and benign to abuse his office, and drowning in partisan loyalties at the expense of political principles, Democrats consecrated this framework with their acquiescence and, often, their explicit approval. This is the unrestrained set of powers Trump will inherit. The president-elect frightens them, so they are now alarmed. But if they want to know whom to blame, they should look in the mirror.

Obama’s approach to executive power flipped so quickly and diametrically that’s it is impossible to say if he ever believed his campaign-era professions of restraint. As early as May 2009, Jack Goldsmith, a Justice Department official under George W. Bush, celebrated Obama’s abandonment of his promises to rein in these authorities, writing that “the new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit.” He added that the “Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.”

By putting a prettier liberal face on these policies, and transforming them from a symbol of GOP radicalism into one of bipartisan security consensus, the president entrenched them as permanent fixtures of the American presidency. As Goldsmith put it, Obama’s actions were “designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run.”

Liberals vehemently denounced these abuses during the Bush presidency. From 2001 through 2008, Democrats called them the embodiment of tyranny, an existential threat to democracy, a menacing expression of right-wing radicalism. “America’s Constitution is in grave danger,” Al Gore warned in a widely praised 2006 speech on civil liberties. Bush had become “the central threat that the founders sought to nullify in the Constitution, an all-powerful executive, too reminiscent of the king from whom they had broken free.” In one 2007 poll, 57 percent of Democrats said they wanted the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to be closed.

But after Obama took office, many liberals often tolerated — and even praised — his aggressive assertions of executive authority. It is hard to overstate how complete the Democrats’ about-face on these questions was once their own leader controlled the levers of power. According to a 2012 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats and 67 percent of moderate or conservative ones now supported keeping Guantanamo Bay open. After just three years of the Obama presidency, liberals sanctioned a system that allowed the president to imprison people without any trial or an ounce of due process.

In fact, a new Democratic Party orthodoxy took hold under Obama: the right of a president to detain people, or even assassinate them, without charges or a whiff of judicial oversight. This included even American citizens. “We do not believe that [Anwar] al-Aulaqi’s U.S. citizenship imposes constitutional limitations that would preclude the contemplated lethal action” by the military or the CIA, a Justice Department memo proclaimed in 2010.

Democrats (who had bitterly complained in 2005 about mere eavesdropping without court approval) not only failed to contest this assassination program but ultimately expressed their support for it. “Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones,” according to the write-up of that 2012 Post-ABC poll. Support drops “only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.”

This same dynamic — Democrats endorsing vast expansions of executive powers — repeated itself time and again, both within the national security realm and outside it. Obama issued numerous signing statements purporting to nullify legal obligations, invoked radical secrecy privileges to avoid lawsuits, eroded long-standing Miranda rights for terrorism suspects, waged a war in Libya even after Congress voted against its authorization and pioneered novel means of using executive orders to circumvent congressional (i.e. democratic) approval in a wide array of domestic policy arenas.

And of course, Obama aggressively expanded the system of mass surveillance, including on U.S. soil, that had been secretly implemented by the National Security Agency after 9/11. Once Edward Snowden showed the world what had been created, many Democrats became the leaders in protecting this spying system from meaningful limits, reform or oversight. When, in the immediate aftermath of the Snowden revelations, a bipartisan coalition of House members headed by Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) sought to impose serious limits on the NSA’s domestic spying, the White House turned to then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to lead the successful effort to stop them.

Civil liberties advocates and proponents of limited executive authority tried everything they could think of to persuade and cajole Democrats to rediscover their concerns about these abuses and once again become allies in the battle to constrain government power. But those efforts were largely futile. Partisan loyalties easily subordinated any commitment to the principles that they had purported, in the Bush years, to support.

The problem such advocates encountered was the same one they’d faced during the Bush presidency when trying (and failing) to persuade putatively small-government conservatives to oppose these expansions of presidential power: namely, many people are perfectly content to have such authority vested in leaders they trust, and fear them only when a politician from the opposing party wields them.

As such, the tactic of last resort to induce Democrats and liberals to oppose such policies was to ask them to think about how, one day, these powers could be in the hands of someone other than a benevolent, kind-hearted, trustworthy progressive like Barack Obama. Instead, Democrats were urged, imagine that a right-wing authoritarian, or a lawless demagogue, or a petty, vindictive tyrant won the presidency and inherited the framework of unrestrained, unchecked powers that Republicans implemented and Democrats expanded.

That day has arrived. With Trump looming, there is much talk of uniting across ideological and partisan lines to impose meaningful limits on executive authority, and those efforts are justified. But, as progressives were repeatedly warned, a matrix of power that has been defended and legitimized for 15 years by both parties will be very difficult to uproot.


2) The USG's expansive national surveillance complex is largely guided not by laws, but by policies. To elaborate: law is what the government is forced to do; policy is what the government chooses to do. Policy is the only thing preventing rampant, unchecked abuses of these powers.

Here's snippets of what Snowden warned about, for context:

YouTube

YouTube

And now the article:
Spoiler
Quote
Donald Trump Will Have His Eye on You

Edward Snowden warned us about the abuses of our national security state. Now look who's in charge of it.

By Graham Vyse

Edward Snowden was right. Glenn Greenwald was right. The American Civil Liberties Union was right.

Throughout the Obama administration and indeed long beforehand, critics of the nation’s ever-expanding national security state have been grabbing Americans by the lapels and shaking them, trying to raise consciousness about the dangers. Their efforts too often have been in vain. Now, with president-elect Donald Trump readying for power, those dangers are more immediate than ever.

As Wired worried last month in a piece titled, “Imagine if Donald Trump Controlled the NSA”:

Quote
America has watched Donald Trump praise foreign dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he’s elected, and call for Russian hackers to dig up Clinton’s emails. “I wish I had that power,” he later said in a campaign speech. “Man, that would be power.” If that statement didn’t sufficiently reveal Trump’s lust for surveillance capabilities, he reportedly listened in on phone calls between staff and guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach in the mid-2000s.

This expansion intensified under President George W. Bush, with warrantless wiretaps, secret kidnappings, and torture, but much of it continued under President Barack Obama, tainting a generally progressive eight years in the White House. As Greenwald—the investigative journalist who helped Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency wrongdoing—wrote at The Intercept on Wednesday:

Quote
Both political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it.

As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless, including on U.S. soil.

After the experience of the Bush years, it’s shameful that Democrats didn’t hold Obama to a higher standard on these issues. His unprecedented war on whistleblowers should have been a red flag, and Democrats should have pressured him to make more than modest NSA reforms after Snowden’s disclosures. The surest way to defend civil rights and civil liberties is to structure the government apparatus so that it can’t easily violate them.

In fact, it’s not too late for Democrats to do something about this. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, another voice in the wilderness on this issue, has called on lame-duck Obama to act now, and the nonprofit Fight for the Future made three specific requests of the president for his final weeks in office:

Quote
1. Disclose mass surveillance programs, their plans for expansion, and their legal justification. America needs to know what we’re up against.

2. Delete the data stored on Americans, and demolish the physical infrastructure needed to collect this data. If Trump wants to spy on hundreds of millions of Americans, make him build this capacity from scratch.

3. Pardon Edward Snowden, to encourage more whistleblowers to come forward if these systems continue growing out of control. Wired asked former NSA counsel Susan Hennessey what exactly Trump could do as president. She said he could, in the magazine’s words, “rescind the executive actions of President Obama aimed at reforming the NSA after Snowden’s revelations,” and he could also “refocus American spying efforts to take the agency’s eyes off Russia and instead target that country’s adversaries, like Georgia, Ukraine, or even the European Union.”

“We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the intelligence community’s high level priorities,” Hennessey told Wired, “and the ability of the president to shift them.”

The impending Trump presidency is also setting off alarm bells for civil libertarians, and they’re gearing up to fight back. The ACLU released a report on July on why Trump represents “a one-man constitutional crisis,” and after Trump’s election the group slapped his face on their homepage with the words “SEE YOU IN COURT” (next to a “DONATE” button).

Anthony Romero, the group’s executive director, warned Trump against pursuing his unconstitutional campaign promises, including the Muslim ban, the immigrant deportation force, bringing back torture and “opening up” libel laws to sue the press.

“If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step,” he said in a statement. “Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers, and millions of card-carrying supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights.”
The question is whether it will be enough.

“Broadly speaking,” Hennessey told Wired, “the only way to tyrant-proof the White House is to not elect a tyrant.”

All available evidence suggests it’s too late for that.

11
(borrowing the title from that old fabled thread of yore)

Psy was in a bad mood and blacklisted me for about two weeks. Verb hardly got so much as a verbal warning, despite shitflinging in the PMs in question, this thread, and this thread, among other instances.

For some reason, the top staff *cough*LC*cough* can't just override the staff below them. Staff, this doesn't mean much when it's never practiced.
Quote
Quote
Posting PMs is against the rules regardless of the sender's personal feelings about it
Not necessarily true.

Psy later scoffed at the notion that he got tricked. Ha ha.

Well, folks, I leave you all with this picture of a dingo:

This dingo has been redacted by the Elegiac Defense Force. Please contact your local EDF chapter for further information.

12
Serious / Fact check: "anonymized" metadata is anything but
« on: March 08, 2016, 01:04:28 PM »
k just stopping by to fact check this

It's trivially easy to connect the dots.



A paper by two Stanford students gives a more elaborate explanation of what's happening here, but with phone calls instead (similarly applicable). An excerpt:
Quote
The dataset that we analyzed in this report spanned hundreds of users over several months. Phone records held by the NSA and telecoms span millions of Americans over multiple years. Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints that should be imposed on those databases. The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive.

Removing a name or account number is a meaningless act. The ability to ID an "anonymous" entity also extends (and is not limited) to credit cards, hospitalization data, Netflix history, and taxi rides.

I might follow this up with an Apple vs. FBI post if I feel like it, and explain how metadata and the like plays into that. Don't be fooled: encryption is not leaving intelligence agencies "in the dark"--this is the golden age of surveillance.

(PS chally pls)

13
All thanks to superdelegates. (AP)
Quote
The Latest: How delegate count shakes out after NH primary     
Feb. 9, 2016 11:20 PM

ESTMANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — The Latest developments from the 2016 presidential campaign, with the focus Tuesday on the New Hampshire primary (all times local):

11:18 p.m.

Bernie Sanders will win at least 13 of the Democratic delegates in New Hampshire and Hillary Clinton will win at least nine. Two delegates haven't yet been allocated.

In the overall race for delegates, Clinton has 394, thanks in large part to endorsements from superdelegates — party officials who can support the candidate of their choice.
Sanders has 42 delegates.

It takes 2,382 delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president.

14
The Flood / NSFW ***OFFICIAL*** Animu/Mango thread
« on: February 04, 2016, 11:00:40 PM »
moshi moshi

kupo desu



~uguu



souka


15
Gaming / Mirror's Edge™ Catalyst will have a closed beta
« on: February 04, 2016, 12:29:48 PM »
As if we didn't need more evidence that "betas" are limited time demos and a marketing ploy

EA's tried to say that there's multiplayer, but it really sounds like a stretch to call it that

16
The Flood / Hello
« on: February 03, 2016, 03:11:56 PM »
Can you hear me?

17
Septagon / "Show Likes" is a different color than the other links
« on: February 02, 2016, 05:25:14 PM »
seriously boutta quit the site over this

GET IT TOGETHER

18
Gaming / Reminder: 1 year of Mythic Pokémon events starts tomorrow
« on: January 31, 2016, 11:15:28 PM »
Pokémon's turning frickin' 20 years old this year, so Ninty is giving away Mythic Pokes all year round. If you keep up with these and got Hoopa last year, you'll eventually have collected all of the Mythic Pokémon.

It's a pain to get them, because they're alternating between Wi-Fi/GameStop/GAME/wherever the fuck. But you can get them for XY and ORAS, so it's a pretty good deal. I'm getting both because, uh, greed.

(Mythic is also apparently the official term for these mons, now. Mythic pokes are the rarest legendaries, usually exclusive to special events. If you're looking to complete your Pokédex, these are must-haves!)

First up is Mew at GameStop, starting February 1. The last time Mew was given away was in 2010 for the 10th anniversary of Gold and Silver. It's also pretty much the most famous Pokémon ever that isn't Pikachu or a Kanto starter.

And for ease of reference, here's a stolen US event schedule:

Mew: February 1 - 24, 2016 at GameStop
Celebi: March 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Jirachi: April 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Darkrai: May 1 - 24, 2016 at GameStop
Manaphy: June 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Shaymin: July 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Arceus: August 1 - 24, 2016 at GameStop
Victini: September 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Keldeo: October 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network
Genesect: November 1 - 24, 2016 at GameStop
Meloetta: December 1 - 24, 2016 at Nintendo Network

19
The Flood / How computer literate are you?
« on: January 27, 2016, 03:14:16 PM »
Take the following quiz and post your answers, and I'll tell you if you need to git gud:

1. Bob lost files stored in THE CLOUD. Would system restore get them back?
a) yes
b) no

2. Turning off the computer screen is the same thing as turning off the computer.
a) true
b) false

3. Installing video games causes viruses that slow your computer down.
a) true
b) false

4. Having antivirus makes your computer invincible.
a) true
b) false

5. Java is the same thing as JavaScript.
a) true
b) false

6. "password" and "123456" are good passwords.
a) true
b) false

7. You can download more RAM to speed up your computer.
a) true
b) false

8. Other people can impersonate your IP address.
a) true
b) Jabba the Hutt


Please hand in your test on the way out.

20
The Flood / NSFW Sep7agon's most popular fetish?
« on: January 26, 2016, 03:26:03 PM »
T4R

21
The Flood / Good news, everyone!
« on: January 20, 2016, 07:08:13 PM »


I've invented a device that
Code: [Select]
makes you read this in another voice

22
The Flood / blows a gasket like the shitposter I am
« on: January 16, 2016, 10:11:41 AM »
I DONT GIVE A SINGLE -blam!- MOTHER -blam!-ER ITS A MOTHER -blam!-ING FORUM, OH WOW, YOU HAVE THE WORD NINJA BELOW YOUR NAME, HOW MOTHER -blam!-ING COOL, NOT, YOUR ARE NOTHING TO ME BUT A BRAINWASHED PIECE OF SHIT BLOGGER, PEOPLE ONLY LIKE YOU BECAUSE YOU HAVE NINJA BELOW YOUR NAME, SO PLEASE PUNCH YOURAELF IN THE FACE AND STAB YOUR EYE BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A PIECE OF SHIT OF SOCIETY

23
The Flood / Retaliatory post complaining about a recently locked thread
« on: January 16, 2016, 10:04:24 AM »
Angry words directed at the moderation staff

24
Reproduced article reaffirming the thread title

25
The Flood / Spoiler Who would win? [ROUND 2]
« on: January 13, 2016, 10:22:55 PM »
after receiving some complaints, I've altered the lineup and added a few more options

let's do this

26
The Flood / Spoiler Who would win?
« on: January 10, 2016, 11:16:50 PM »
The most powerful beings in the multiverse assemble to do battle. Who wins?

27
just FYI

28
The Flood / XSEAN Has Left has left
« on: January 05, 2016, 06:33:17 PM »
It's in jest. It's banter. Please stop sperging, because you're only giving them more of what they want.

29
The Flood / NSFW ***OFFICIAL*** Furries Thread
« on: January 05, 2016, 04:46:47 PM »
 learn about furries:

YouTube

 some more furry stuff i guess:




30
The Flood / Daily reminder that Cheat leaked Deci PMs to CIS
« on: December 24, 2015, 03:58:25 PM »
Another daily reminder that 'it was off-site' stopped being a valid excuse when Kinder doxxed people on ED

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