Conservative activist Larry Klayman — the victor the recent NSA case — tongue-lashes CNN's Don Lemon and Jeffrey Toobin.

The clip, below doesn't show the whole interaction, but the text at Politico does:

Klayman’s appearance Tuesday night on CNN was preceded by a profile of him that included a quotation from a former George W. Bush staffer saying his lawsuits were about “fighting for himself and his own, in my opinion, delusions of grandeur.”

When Klayman was brought into the conversation, he came out firing.

“I think it is important to note that you’re a big supporter of Obama,” Klayman said to Lemon. “That you have favored him in every respect. You have to try to do a hit piece to diminish a very important decision.... I’ve watched you for many years. You’re an ultra-leftist and you’re a big supporter of Obama.”

"I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen..."

"... for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval... Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."

Wrote Federal District Judge Richard J. Leon, a Bush appointee, in a case brought by Larry Klayman, a conservative activist, who is seeking to represent a class of all Americans.

Similar legal challenges to the N.S.A. program, including by the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, are at earlier stages in the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an unusual challenge to the program by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had sought to bypass lower courts.

ADDED: Orin Kerr has some sharp analysis:

Judge Leon’s first and most fundamental move is to distinguish Smith v. Maryland, the 1979 case ruling that the Fourth Amendment does not protect numbers dialed from a telephone. I found Judge Leon’s argument on this point not only unpersuasive, but quite plainly so. I realize that a district court judge can’t just announce that he thinks a Supreme Court decision was wrongly decided. But there are plausible ways to write an opinion distinguishing Smith and implausible ways to do so, and Judge Leon’s opinion struck me as a surprisingly weak effort.

Read the rest at the link.

How to turn your face into an "anti-face" — a sight that surveillance technology cannot read as a face.

Don't imagine that sunglasses will work. You need things like dramatically asymmetrical bangs in multiple colors.

I think whatever we do, the robots will learn it and get out in front of us, but you can look quite foolish in your feeble effort to outsmart them. The linked article is more of an art-and-fashion project than a real defense against surveillance. Isn't it funny? Finding surveillance funny is perhaps the closest you can get to a defense.

"State of Deception: Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?"

Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker. Excerpt:

In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. [Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.

"It’s safe to assume that few people in the White House or the defense agencies would be happy to see Time pick Snowden as Person of the Year."

"But that’s just another reason why he deserves the honor," writes John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

Often with the best of intentions—protecting us from terrorists and potential terrorists—governments of both parties have overseen an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state that bent America’s laws and violated some of its most cherished values. (Ryan’s piece recounts some of the relevant history.) Even now, after all of this year’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything very meaningful will be done to roll back the incursions and to protect the zone of privacy in which all (or most) of us would like to interact, and live.

ADDED: Here's the Ryan Lizza article cited in that parenthetical: "State of Deception/Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?"

"The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites..."

"... as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document."

The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority....

The document justifies the targeting based on their expressions indicating that "Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam" or "offensive jihad is justified," or "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself."

Do you object to the NSA preparing to discredit people like that by collecting information on their use of pornography? The linked article, at the Huffington Post, reminds us of the old FBI history of keeping files on, among others, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The FBI today displays its file on MLK, here. If you go there, you can click into lots of files through the links in the sidebar. Writing this post, I got distracted into reading about whether Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx were Communists. Somehow these 2 were nevertheless on TV all the time in the 1950s.

And did you know the FBI wasted time trying to figure out what was up with ESP? From the file on William Foos: "Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit to the value which could accrue to the FBI  — complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings — the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned."

Ridiculous... but in the end, they only had to wait for email, and then they had it — complete and undetectable access to mail... the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned.

50 years ago today, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died.

One might imagine them encountering John F. Kennedy in the antechamber of the afterlife.

I've been planning for a while to write this as the first post today, but I'm pleased to see that there are many news stories this morning honoring the 3 men who shared a death date. You may have noticed who entered the world on the same day as you. (Perhaps I had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh in the antechamber to life.) But will you know who passes through the departure gate alongside you?

ADDED: In The Guardian: , the author Laura Miller writes:

Apart from the Narnia books, the work of Lewis's I most cherish, "An Experiment in Criticism," makes the almost postmodern – and at the very least radically humble – proposition that we might best judge the literary merit of a book not by how it is written, but by how it is read. If "we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." That is a faith I am happy to share.

And Nicholas Murray writes:

The FBI kept a fat file on [Aldous Huxley] but failed utterly to find anything damning (as his biographer I was sorely disappointed when it slid out of the jiffy bag). He was nevertheless refused US citizenship...

He has survived his detractors and remains an eloquent critical voice, warning against our tendency to "love our slavery" – Brave New World's dystopian idea of manipulation and conformity and our tendency to submit to soft power, so clearly vindicated by the extraordinary complacency with which the public seems to have greeted the Snowden revelations of illegitimate surveillance. A free democrat to the core of his being, at war through words with "the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom," he shows that heroism can exist away from the noisy battlefield.

AND: "Yes, 'Everybody’s happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way." Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1167-1169).

ALSO: Kindle Locations 2729-2737:

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.

How is your carapace of thick stupidity today? Mine is chafing. I'm struggling not to concoct a joke out "little pill-boxes of soma tablets," Jackie's iconic pink hat, and my favorite Bob Dylan song. I need some rage to make me fluent.

One way to defeat the surveillance state.

In China, there are cameras everywhere, but if you pick a smoggy day — which is pretty much every day — they won't see you.

No clemency for Snowden.

"'Mr Snowden violated US law. He should return to the US and face justice,' said White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer."

Facebook is looking to collect data on where your cursor hovers and clicks.

Says Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin, whose face looks like this:



At least he can't track my eyes and read my mind as I look at him.

Record the closest approximation of your thoughts.
	The face of evil.
	He must be rich, and yet his teeth remain unwhitened.
	He seems like a nice man.
	A generic white-man face. Nothing is gained or learned by seeing it.
	In the future we won't need faces. We'll have Facebook.
pollcode.com free polls

AND: You remember the past?

"The big embarrassment here isn’t the spying..."

"... but rather the fact that it has become public due to the incompetence of those charged with keeping it secret — and, of course, the inept response once the news has come out."

"Germany and France demand talks with US over NSA spying revelations."

"The revelations are threatening to create a major rift between the US and its European allies," says the Guardian.

Despite US efforts to placate Angela Merkel – including a phonecall made by the US president, Barack Obama, on Wednesday – she has refused to conceal her anger over the issue. "We need trust among allies and partners," Merkel told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. "Such trust now has to be built anew... It's become clear that for the future, something must change – and significantly."...

The latest confidential memo provided by [Edward] Snowden reveals... that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

After Merkel's allegations became public, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, issued a statement that said the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" the German chancellor's communications. But that failed to quell the row, as officials in Berlin quickly pointed out that the US did not deny monitoring her phone in the past.

I do a Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury that's ostensibly about whether Obama has weakened and what the NYC police are doing after stop and frisk.

The folks at Bloggingheads put it this way:

On The Glenn Show, Glenn and Ann check in on Obama a year into his second term. Has his vacillation on Syria and the Fed hurt his credibility? Ann argues that the Larry Summers controversy exposed an anti-science crowd on the left—but maybe a small dose of delusion is healthy. Turning to the end of NYC's stop-and-frisk program, Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate. Are liberal gun-control measures breeding a nation of victims? Finally, Glenn criticizes the secrecy of the security state under Obama.

There's an awful lot going on in that diavlog, and I think we talk past each other more than usual. "Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate" is a terrible summary of what I say. 

Go to the link if you want to hear the whole thing. I'll excerpt a part that deals with something I care about: the unlikelihood that anyone is really making truth their highest value.



I'm highlighting what I had to say, so click to continue the video when you get to the end of this clip if you want to hear Loury's response. The lead-up to this clip is about the trouble Larry Summers got into at Harvard when he suggested that there might be a biological explanation for the scarcity of females in the highest levels of math and science.

"Once there was a fight in the classroom, it was just you and that person who had a fight; now on social media, it’s 500,000 people looking at this fight."

"Why are you creating a unit to incriminate and criminalize what they’re doing and lock them up?"

A criticism — by the founder of an organization that works with teenagers — of the NYC police strategy dealing with gangs:

The strategy seeks to exploit the online postings of suspected members and their digital connections to build criminal conspiracy cases against whole groups that might otherwise take years of painstaking undercover work to penetrate. Facebook, officers like to say now, is the most reliable informer.


Operation Crew Cut melds intelligence gathered by officers on the street with online postings, allowing the department to track emerging conflicts in a neighborhood before they erupt into violence and, when shootings do occur, to build conspiracy cases against those responsible. But the scrutiny online has raised concern that idle chatter by teenagers might be misinterpreted by the police.

We're told that opposition to the "stop and frisk" tactic has led to this, but I find that a little hard to believe. Why wouldn't the police use both approaches if they could? Also, I wonder what the police are really doing, since publicly revealing a tactic is itself a tactic. From the above-linked NYT article:

Officers follow crew members on Twitter and Instagram, or friend them on Facebook, pretending to be young women to get around privacy settings that limit what can be seen. They listen to the lyrical taunts of local rap artists, some affiliated with crews, and watch YouTube for clues to past trouble and future conflicts. Party announcements posted to social media draw particular attention: officers scour the invitation lists, some of which explicitly include members of opposing crews, beseeching them to “leave the beef at home,” said Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, who heads a police unit focused on social media and youth gangs.

Presumably, the idea is to deter criminal activity by creating the impression that the police are everywhere. That's very easy to do, once everyone's gone on line for their friendship (and criminal conspiracy). I wonder how many police department employees have jobs that consist of reading kids' Facebook postings and analyzing rap lyrics. Do you think that's creepy/offensive surveillance or clever and important work? Do you think it's a good anti-crime tactic to paranoia amongst vast swaths of NYC teenagers who might otherwise socialize on line?

Let's talk about Drudge's depiction of Obama coming after us sexually.

The underlying story is about how the government is requiring all doctors to routinely ask patients: "Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?" They want complete records on these things, and I suppose they're hoping most people don't care about their privacy anymore.

But quite aside from that policy, what's with that picture of Obama? Is Drudge trying to make Obama look like a sexual predator? Are people accusing Drudge of racism yet? Maybe he's just trying to portray the Obama as desperately, insanely hungry for all your information. He's grasping at it with his clawing hand.

Back up a bit and look at the whole 3 columns. The other hand in view is Putin's, gently adjusting his mirrored sunglasses. We can see Obama's weird eyes — spying eyes — as he clumsily grabs for his own people's secrets, but Putin's eyes are hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, and he seems skillful and analytical as he peers into America's secrets.


Meanwhile, it's a "WOMAN'S WORLD: YELLEN SET TO CHAIR FED..." Yellen is looking more Putinesque, exhibiting a stern seriousness.

Look at the series of headlines under her. Surely subliminal messages are intended. Note: "END OF THE PUMP?" That goes to a story about the Fed's quantitative easing policy, but there's a sexual theme across the top of the 3 columns this morning, and with Putin intimidating us, Obama flailing and spying on us, and the dour Yellen leading us into a "Woman's World," the "end of the pump" inspires dread.

The end of sex... it's coming to get you.

"A Swedish sociology professor has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize..."

"... saying that awarding the former NSA employee would correct Nobel Committee’s mistake in giving the award to President Barack Obama in 2009."

"This is exactly the kind of photo you shouldn't post of your child."

That is: the kid's face.

Paranoia (of facial recognition) strikes deep.

"Republicans... are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people."

Said the college professor, secretly videoed by a student in the back row, now playing on YouTube, linked by Twitchy.

And I say: Look out all you professors. Anything you say may be taken out of context and posted on YouTube. Your hyperbole and casual humor and reenactments of the arguments of others will look quite different as the world looks over the shoulders of the captive audience you think you're talking at. The back row is no longer the back row. There are a million more rows behind that, full of people with no motive to act like they respect you.


And by the way, if you live in Wisconsin and are at least 60 years old, you have a legislature-given privilege to attend — free of tuition — classes at the University of Wisconsin.

Welcome to the future. Feel free to rant about the Panopticon wherein you find yourselves, but please at least notice you are here.

I feel like recording myself teaching and taking my own quotes out of context, as I paraphrase some argument that's made in a case, putting it in starker words to reveal problems lurking within the carefully framed language of lawyers and judges. I'd like to demonstrate how easy it would be to make me sound like a monster. (And I'm saying that partly to inoculate myself! I've got paraphrase paranoia.)

The man in the video — which I chose not to embed — is said to be a creative writing teacher. Who knows what he was up to? Maybe cranking the kids up, trying to get juices flowing. Come on, somebody, get angry. Look alive.

It's an old game. Waking up the students, but the professors need to wake up. Those students who look sleepy and blank to you all have videophones and they may be wide awake and 10 steps ahead of you.

Juxtaposition highlights the politics of distraction.

Captured just now at Memeorandum (which auto-aggregates news and opinion pieces based on what's being written about right now by "experts and pundits, insiders and outsiders, media professionals and amateur bloggers"):



Here's "White House Had Advance Notice on Heathrow Detention," implicating the Obama administration in the British government's 9-hour detention of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the most conspicuous journalist dealing with Edward Snowden.

But, look, a puppy!!! The Obamas got another dog, a girl puppy this time. Isn't she cute? She's named Sunny. Aw, doesn't that make you feel sunny? Sunny, thank you for the truth you've let me see. Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z. My life was torn like a windblown sand, then a rock was formed when we held hands. Sunny one so true, I love you.


David Miranda, a citizen of Brazil, was detained when he got off an airplane in the UK:

His carry-on bags were searched and, he says, police confiscated a computer, two pen drives, an external hard drive and several other electronic items, including a games console, as well [as] two newly bought watches and phones that were packaged and boxed in his stowed luggage.

The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, asked whether "United States government [was] at all involved in this," said:

... what you’re referring to is a law enforcement action that was taken by the British government. The United States was not involved in that decision or in that action. So if you have questions about — if you have questions about that, then I would refer you to the British government.

Asked whether the U.S. government was involved, Josh Earnest — must resist remarking on his name again — substituted the issue of whether the U.S. made the decision. Then he reinserted the word "involved" and said "United States was not involved in that decision." There are the extra words "or in that action," but that doesn't answer whether the U.S. was at all involved, since the action occurred in the U.K. and was done by the police there. Earnest archly refers reporters to the British government. Go ask them.

The follow-up question — which lets him off the hook for that evasion — is "Does the U.S. feel that Miranda could have revealed information that’s useful in terms of finding Edward Snowden or pursuing its case against Snowden in any way?" And Earnest once again stresses that the Brits made the "decision" and took the action and go ask them...

Like I said, I’m not aware of any of the conversations that Mr. Miranda may have had with British law enforcement officials while he was detained, but that detention was a decision that was made by the British government and is something that if you have questions about, you should ask them.

Like I said... As in: How many times must I repeat my talking points? Now, look here....



My life was torn like windblown sand on Martha's Vineyard la la la we held hands... Sunny one so true, I love you.

Thanks, Obama, for the truth you've let us see. The facts from A to Z.

"We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now."

"We knew USG would come after us," says CEO Michael Janke.

It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy....

Silent Circle reportedly had revenue increase 400% month-over-month in July after corporate enterprise customers switched to its services in hopes of avoiding surveillance. The company giddily told Forbes it planned to nearly double staff and significantly increase revenue this year in part thanks to the NSA’s practices coming to light.

I'm sure there's lots of money that could be collected for providing services that are impossible to provide, but that's the catch: The service is impossible to provide.