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Glenn Greenwald asks a more interesting and important question than /. encourages its readers to consider when Greenwald asks "What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?" and then he answers it, "More damage has been inflicted historically by censorship than by the "terrorism" used to justify it.". Considering how little of a threat terrorism is in the US relative to other known dangers ('Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella', 'Gun Murders vs. Terrorism by the Numbers') one has to wonder about other western countries such as France.

http://news.firedoglake.com/20...
The provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks and has thus been dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act” by activists who oppose the biotech giant. President Barack Obama signed the spending bill, including the provision, into law on Tuesday
Since the act’s passing, more than 250,000 people have signed a petition opposing the provision and a rally, consisting largely of farmers organized by the Food Democracy Now network, protested outside the White House Wednesday. Not only has anger been directed at the Monsanto Protection Act’s content, but the way in which the provision was passed through Congress without appropriate review by the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees. The biotech rider instead was introduced anonymously as the larger bill progressed — little wonder food activists are accusing lobbyists and Congress members of backroom dealings.

The NSA supported this bill. Various whistle blowers signed a joint letter against it.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.c...

The original version several months ago had some significant good points, but after negotiations with the administration removed the primary protections, what was left was mostly a bill extending the Patriot Act. Republicans might be right to vote against this and let the Patriot Act expire.

I'm fairly certain that there were also secret wiretaps done on some of the people they were tracking, though I don't remember if that was the case with MLK or not.

Not only did they wiretap MLK, they bugged his hotel room and then used the recordings to try to blackmail him.

Hi AC

One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here.

Please find a real scientific paper from a researcher without bias and then we can discuss it. This one doesn't quite meet the standard.

He'd have had a great deal more credibility (and thus have a greater impact) had he gone through proper channels first and gotten no satisfaction. He'd be able to say "I tried to do this the right way, hoping that the system would correct itself, but it didn't, so I decided that the people should know about this by other means."

So what you are actually saying is he has total full and complete credibility - seeing as he did everything you are claiming he didn't do.

If the NSA Office of General Counsel, the NSA Office of Oversight and Compliance, and his own chain of superiors is not "proper channels", then I seriously have to question your motives and desires.

http://dissenter.firedoglake.c...

If none of that is "proper channels" then who exactly, by name, did you want him to tell?

Do you consider the Chinese mafia proper?
Are you claiming he should have run directly to the press without telling anyone?
Or do you just wish he shot himself in the head and get all the messy technicals out of the way for them?

I can't see any other reason you would keep repetitively making false claims except A) ignorance on the subject at levels that should exclude you from all conversation on the subject, or B) gross and criminal support of the NSAs activities.

In either case you need to seriously rethink your life choices, as we are sick and tired of giving you this many chances and are no longer offering you the excuse of ignorance of the subject.

When you grow a government to huge proportions and inject it into all aspects of your economy, you need an army of people to do all the work. When you add-in a political class to "run" things, they'll bring-in their "friends" to fill all the management spots.... and when control of the beast shifts from one party to another, the political appointees of the party losing power get the boot - and appointees of the inbound party get all those management spots. All these political appointees being human, they tend to want to buy homes, have families, and develop "roots" in their communities. As a result, there ends-up being a permanent class of people in each party who live in the vicinity of the capitol city who work in government when their party is in power and who need jobs outside government (but in their fields) when their party is not in power. There's your revolving doors. In the US, both parties have certain "friendly" companies where they "park" their friends. Goldman Sachs, for example gives money to politicians on both sides of the aisle but it's also a great place to park Democrats as are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Republicans like to park people in defense contractors. Smart companies that like the public to see them as non-partisan will happily park people from both parties.... after all, you never know when your multi-billion dollar company mign need some favors in D.C. and having some former (and future) employees there to answer your phone calls can sure be handy in in Crony-Capitalist world.....

You can ONLY end this with smaller government (NOT a panacea, but a good start). When government is small and not involved in much, businesses have far fewer reasons to get involved in government corruption, the politicians have far fewer spots to fill with appointees, and the public has far fewer people and departments to scrutinize for signs of corruption. Shrinking the government shrinks the petri dish in which corruption grows.

Precisely what is so surprising about the NSA spying on political radicals?

By "radical", you mean "anyone to the left of Dick Cheney", right? Were you an FBI sniper all hot and bothered that he didn't get to go around shooting OWS protestors in the head, or something?

More to the point, if anyone had said that the NSA had a "full take" surveillance dragnet on every network on the planet it had access to BEFORE Snowden came along, you would have been sneering at them to sit next to the 911 Truthers.

Sure if you had said the NSA had James Bond movie level surveillance, people would think you were crazy.
On the other hand if you didn't think that's an imaginary bar they would aim for and fall short of, then what... exactly did you figure intelligence agencies DO?

It's similar to how most people would probably watch Wolf of Wall Street and think "awe that's exaggerated a bit, the rich and powerful don't do THAT many drugs and hookers" but people are surprised when a mayor smokes crack.

I really don't get it. Why 90% of a grandiose story is perfectly believable, but confirmation of 1% is surprising.

"BUT we didn't KNOW until THEN." I really have to question the intelligence of people using that line. The interest I get, the surprise I do not.

Precisely what is so surprising about the NSA spying on political radicals?

By "radical", you mean "anyone to the left of Dick Cheney", right? Were you an FBI sniper all hot and bothered that he didn't get to go around shooting OWS protestors in the head, or something?

More to the point, if anyone had said that the NSA had a "full take" surveillance dragnet on every network on the planet it had access to BEFORE Snowden came along, you would have been sneering at them to sit next to the 911 Truthers.

Especially if you ignore that the FBI and NSA are two prongs of the same criminal organization and that the FBI doesn't even pretend to be primarily about law enforcement anymore. The CIA is similarly attacked, using NSA intelligence for both domestic and foreign operations.

Oh, wait, no, there's a piece of paper on it with an org chart on it that says otherwise and another piece of paper that says the NSA isn't involved in domestic spying, so, nothing to see here, move along.

The anti-missile bases and technology are quantitatively and qualitatively utterly inadequate to make a flyspeck of a difference. Russia knows this.

They likely do. But as we've wasted well over $100 billion on our so-called "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system over the years, and even more money on the anti-missile systems we're developing with/for Israel, I'd bet the Russians fear the day that we finally get it working.

Consider that after the breakup of the USSR, Russia has engineered and deployed substantial new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The US has not.

I think this is misleading. Of course Russia has developed new ICBMs. First, this ignores what may or may not have been in the developmental pipeline. But more importantly, it ignores that we did unilaterally break the ABM treaty and started deploying ABM sites and mounting systems on ships. To expect the Russians not to counter our aggression is to expect them to act foolishly.

Is it the US who is really the only problem here?

Considering the US has launched multiple wars of aggression since the breakup of the USSR, the US gov't wages blatant proxy wars, the US gov't ignores all int'l law dating back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and claims a "right" to attack any country even if we have not been attacked first, and considering things like we have used flat-out torture as a national policy and spend almost 1/2 of the entire world's military spending, the US gov't may not be the "only" problem but most definitely our gov't is the largest and most aggressive problem country in the world.

Not surprisingly, but still sadly, it's not just me saying this; in one Win/Gallup International survey of people in 65 countries, the US is seen as the greatest threat to world peace.

"The organization has concluded that the United States is now the principle violator of human rights and freedoms worldwide." -- Amnesty International's annual report on human rights.

LOL all these "anonymous cowards" posting pro-government public relations. If they're tonguing government's balls why would they need anonymity? I smell government public relations all paid for with your taxpayer dollar.

Way to ignore another story and the FISA finding that the government was breaching the Constitution. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/16/judge-nsa-surveillance-fourth-amendment/4041995/ http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/22/fisa-court-ruled-nsa-program-unconstitutional-said-nsa-misled-them/ That you're ignoring these smacks of a shill. The right and left are united on this. On the other side are government workers like yourself living a parasitic existence off the hard-working taxpayer.

> Snowden is a sellout who took what he had and likely ran to the highest bidder with the info.
Not a shred of evidence do you have. Now get a real fucking job, you piece of shit government shill.

It's just wrong, that's all. Wrong because our emails are *clearly* the "papers" mentioned in the Constitution. If there's a law that makes 3rd party possession of same somehow the equivalent of "it suddenly not being yours" then it's THAT law that has to go. This is how it is in most of Europe BTW. YOU control your phone records, not Verizon.

I could almost live with TIA if I thought that it would only be accessed via a court order, but that's not what we have. What we have is secret FISA orders, executed in secret, using secret criteria in accord with secret interpretations of secret executive orders.

I sympathize with this judge's concerns, I do, but the real world consequences of what they're doing are more likely to be worse than the real world consequences of stopping them from doing it, even if we have another 9-11 every year.

Our democracy will not survive if the government can data mine all our "anonymous" data until programs it wrote decide that we fit a "profile" and THAT itself constitutes "reasonable suspicion". This can be used to stifle all dissent, and will be used for exactly that, starting, obviously, with people who speak out against the legitimacy of this process in the first place. A guy like Howard Zinn would just be destroyed by this.. we wouldn't have legitimate dissent in this nation.

Here's something that should help people think clearly on this topic. The NSA line operators and management REFUSED to permit the NSA to apply the same level of monitoring to THEM as they apply to us. They didn't want Congress to second guess them or know what they were doing.

(Binney) ".. also explained that NSA never developed and implemented technology in order to have the capabilities to track activities by employees on the agencyâ(TM)s systems because of two groups of people: the analysts and management.

The analysts âoerealized that what that would be doing is monitoring everything they did and assessing what they were doing. They objected. They didnâ(TM)t want to be monitored.â

Management resisted because it meant one would be âoeable to assess returns on all the programs around the world.â It would be possible to âoelay out all the programs in the world and map [them] against the spending and the return on investment.â

It meant the agency would be âoeexposed to Congress for auditing,â Binney added.â Management did not want that."

From:

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/27/interview-with-nsa-whistleblower-bill-binney-afraid-were-spreading-secret-government-around-world/

But this is the ONE thing that MUST be implemented. If an NSA operator cuts a fart, I want Congress to be able to know what he had for lunch. Unwatched watchers cannot be permitted to exist. Period.

At the heart of what's going on here is the people at the NSA are looking into their own hearts and deciding that they're all right and the American public has nothing to fear from them or their intentions. Bully for them, I'm sure it's true, but they won't always be there.

It's not about them or their intentions. It's about the institution, the process, *the machine* and how we're building that machine.

You can't say to yourself, as an NSA employee, by way of assuaging your own secret apprehensions, "Well, if push ever does come to shove, if it came right down to it, an unconstitutional, openly fascist-level of abuse would just never happen because WE'D never permit it". At least, you can't tell yourself that and also bash guys like Snowden and Binney because THOSE guys , whom you hate so much they make you grind your teeth , they're exactly the hypothetical WE you posit in the above safeguard. It doesn't look any different that THIS .. THIS THIS that is before your ey

Every single one of us has felt the hesitation to speak out agianst what the NSA is doing lest be experience some sort of retaliation, typically being mechanically put on a "list" what is used in other contexts for other decisions. The most basic one is getting on the "no fly list" but one imagines that other lists exist also, for instance, the "do not fund research" list.

THAT'S what a chilling effect is. It's a self perpetuating thing, because the more dissent is stifled, the more the faux consensous becomes reality, the more license the chillers see themselves as having been given by society.

I'll never forget the CIA film of Saddam Hussein assembling Anyone Who's Anyone In Iraq into an auditorium then calling out names of individuals, who , when they appropriately stood up having been addressed, were escorted away by security personnel to their summary executions.

As soon as the luminaries understood what was happening, they all stood and started to applaud this monster, chanting his name, swearing fidelity at the top of their lungs, hoping that such would make it less likely that they would ever appear on any such list and, if their name was on The List, they might somehow induce a last minute change of mind.

That's the chilling effect of compiling lists of people and assigning them properties- "enemy", "hub", "individual of special concern should X Y or Z be happening".

Every single one of us, whether we admit it or not, has felt a pause, a fear, the need to calculate and perhaps somehow soften or even self censor what we're saying WRT the government and the NSA for fear of such lists and their possible future consequences.

This is one of the most insidious and well documented effects of surveillance and no one is immune, and- and this is significant- they know it.

This is why the ability to spy on anyone all the time without anyone outside of people you command, or who fear you, knowing what you're doing has to go. This is why total transparency into who does what when why for how long without a scintilla of exception needs to be implemented into the spy agencies. We need spies and spying because we have real enemies who really want to do unspeakably evil things and will given the chance. We have to stop those people. In order to achieve that, we need to stop the spy agencies using the spy agencies to undermine their own democracy however inadvertently. If they were capable of doing this, then they wouldn't have hounded Binney and Drake and Kiriakou ; they would have listened to them.

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/08/07/imprisoned-cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-totality-of-punishment-is-not-limited-to-a-prison-sentence/

Right now, the biggest threat to the continued effectiveness of our spy agencies is the culture which has ascended and become the dominant one in the those spy agencies.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/28/nsa-has-been-spying-on-members-of-congress-for-a-long-time/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html

Interview with Russ Tice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFt22SI70DE

I find it hard to believe that a Social Democracy throws people in solitary before formal charges have been brought.... Are you seriously claiming that the Social Nirvana that is Sweden treats defendants worse than the United States?

Well prepare to be shocked by Swedens draconian system then, as it has already happened. We have well documented examples of people being held in solitary FOR MONTHS without any charge. One of the more high profile examples was Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm, just another who pissed off the powers that be.:

"concern surrounds the Swedish detention facility, where Mr Assange would be held incommunicado upon arrival. Similar treatment can be seen in the case of Gottfrid Svartholm, founder of The Pirate Bay, who was held in solitary confinement for months without being officially charged."

Lost in all of this are his alleged victims, whom are supposed to actually receive some measure of justice. Their allegations may be completely bogus, totally legitimate, or lie somewhere in between, we'll never know as long as he keeps ducking the judicial system.

Interesting you should mention them - because if Sweden actually cared about justice for the girls they would hold an interview as they have done for murderers, see "Assange is willing to return to Sweden but prosecutors can also question him in the UK.". Then Sweden could let the girls have some closure by pressing charges, or dropping them as looks increasingly likely. The plot thickens by the month.

For someone who proposes to have spoken a lot about this case you seem to be missing a lot of high level well known and confirmable facts. Things that make one go Hmmm?

I remember when Obama said that while running for office. The DOJ on the other hand made no such claim. I'm not defending the DOJ, they still in my opinion gleefully trampled on states rights and individual rights, and over an idiotic law. Just pointing out that I don't think they ever said they wouldn't.

You might also point out that Obama then lied again to try to cover for his first lie. Except he was in office during the more recent lie. With about the same effort of coming up with that lie, he could have changed pot's scheduling status to actually fulfill his campaign promise, yet instead he chose to lie. Given the number of people who mildly support pot legalization, I can't fathom why he would allow the raids to happen.

a simple google can find the connection with the CIA... such as

http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurphy/2010/12/04/assanges-chief-accuser-has-her-own-history-with-us-funded-anti-castro-groups-one-of-which-has-cia-ties/

And British MP Liam Fox thinks the Guardian should be investigated? Fuck, Britfags. Why do you put up with these arseholes? Vote them out of existence and that David Cameron arsehole too. http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/10/16/british-prime-minister-endorses-parliamentary-investigation-into-guardian-for-publishing-snowdens-leaks/

you'd have found plenty of cases of me defending Snowden and his choice to leave the country, as well as contrasting Snowden's actions with the actions undertaken by Manning, not to mention providing the specific criteria by which I say that he acted unethically, rather than just pulling random reasons out of my ass to fit the occasion.

That's the definition of concern trolling: you claim to support someone's cause in general, but they did it in the wrong waaaaay. It's the same tactic whether it's used to dismiss gay rights protestors chaining themselves to the White House fence or dismissing Bradley Manning. And like I said, if you didn't find this excuse that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, you'd find another.

First, this wouldn't have happened in the first place if we weren't warmongering jackasses who invade and bomb countries based on lies and selective standards.

You're arguing that one wrong turn deserves another. That's hardly the morale high ground to be starting your attack on my comment from.

Psst....claiming that revealing war crimes is a "wrong" just like the war crimes themselves isn't going to help your protestations that you aren't a right wing authoritarian. And again, this "leaking indiscriminately" storyline holds no water when he gave the documents to a responsible media organization that asked the USG for help in redacting the documents before publication multiple times but were ignored.

Third, he tried taking his evidence to "responsible" outfits like the NYTimes and the WaPo, and was ignored.

I'm not sure what evidence you're talking about, nor am I aware of any attempt by him to contact those outlets for any reason. I'd love a link to some additional information.

I thought you were an authority on this? Bradley Manning Tried Going To NY Times, Washington Post, Politico Before Turning To WikiLeaks

Fourth, "following proper channels" isn't meant to protect whistleblowers, but to cover up crimes.

I don't know why you decided to add scare quotes

Oh, maybe since they tend to get shut down and prosecuted. John Kiriakou: "Everyone is corrupt, I've come to learn"

In 2009, Kiriakou took the position of senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry. His job was to investigate waste, fraud, abuse and illegality and he turned his attention to the 2001 Dasht-i-Leili massacre, in which an American-backed warlord had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Taliban soldiers when he ordered them to be crammed into metal containers and then loaded onto trucks bound for a prison in Shibarghan, Afghanistan.

A source had told Kiriakou that Americans wearing T-shirts and blue jeans oversaw the box-up of the prisoners.

"I wanted to know,â Kiriakou said, "were these guys CIA officers? If they weren't, who were they? Were they Defense Department? Were they contractors? Who were these guys? And why didnâ(TM)t they stop this from happening? ...

Six weeks later, Kiriakou got a phone call from John Kerry asking if he was investigating the CIA.

"I said, 'Yes, I am.' [He said,] 'I want you to stop right now.' I said 'but we've got a story here. This is a serious situation.' 'I want you to stop right now,'" Kerry repeated. "So I stopped."

Former CIA Officer & Whistleblower

Agreed. I think people know that Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz are the ones who need to pay for Aaron Swartz death by losing their jobs. Any MIT and JSTOR employees involved should be penalized by people remembering them and obstructing their promotion within those organizations, but tempers have cooled enough that they shouldn't be getting death threats now.

In any case, these documents will help focus anger back on Heymann and Ortiz. Example :

Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Compared Aaron Swartz To Rapist

Implying Obama hasn't taken care of business?

He's been getting so much done, he's had time to comment on a trial in Florida! Forget about the IRS, Syria, Benghazi, Fast and Furious (fuck everyone involved in this), NSA unconstitutional domestic spying, keeping tax cuts, patriot act garbage. There is a long list of issues that really need to be addressed in this country, and we're too busy squabbling about little shit.

He averted an econopocalypse. There were not runs on the banks. FDIC didn't come into play. The stock market bounced back, if not the job market.

The whole thing began because of pressure from the government on the banks. In addition, 290,000 fewer people were counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work. That drop in those seeking jobs was the reason the unemployment rate fell to 7.6%, the lowest since December 2008. Second Largest Employer In America Is Temp Agency. And the stock market? Is not a bastion for the American middleclass.

He ramped down our military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. In such a way that was a non-newsworthy event. This is a SLAM DUNK.

Not according to the facts. All because of this due to the military industrial complex not to mention the deaths of thousands, for what, freedom?

But all in all he's got shit done. Despite the massive resistance he's facing from the Republicans.

Fuck all the partisan posturing. What's the narrative when he had a democrat majority in the senate and House? Why don't we take an objective look at what both of the hands are doing to for the body they're attached to?

Because this THIS is revealing state secrets for personal gain, which is worse, much worse than what Manning, Snowden Tice , Drake , Klein, Binney , Kiriakou

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

Tice,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/21/687340/-Exposed-NSA-Watching-Everything-on-Anyone-Illegally-Updated-x3#

Drake,
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-center/save-tom-drake

Kline,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135645/The_NSA_wiretapping_story_nobody_wanted

Kiriakou
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/

Conclusion: you have to be extremely naive or engagged in a career enhancing self-serving thinking process to imagine that universal spying on ordinary Americans won't be used to in the basest way control the internal political trajectory of the nation by the next group of people like Cheney PErle Rumsfeld and Bolton.

Yes something very bad could and probably will happen . Yes we will lose relevant information by not constantly tapping all Americans , The but alternative path is worse. When bad actors get involved, there are often no good paths left.

the NSA does whatever policy makers tell them to do without getting all "philosophical" or "speculative" about whether it's exactly or even slightly legal or not. That's what we know for certain. Anyone able to worm themselves into a position of power - from the analyst level on up, has God power over The Database Of Guilt. Unelected officials - Perle Rice Rumsfeld Abrams Bolton Cohen etc can and will commandeer that database for their own illegal purposes and the NSA will comply because that's what they do. It may already be happening.

This is 100% unacceptable. This is no-go no-matter-what territory.

Another creation of the All powerful bike lobby. Helmets are just a particularly sturdy stepping stone on the way towards totalitarianism.

Yeah...This seems pretty raving out of context. Just FYI, here is the context http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWf2JyIKrN4 There are more videos about this and it is a long standing sore spot in NYC

Another creation of the All powerful bike lobby. Helmets are just a particularly sturdy stepping stone on the way towards totalitarianism.

OK I am not being combative nor was I in my first post. I meant just what I said- I dint' see it.

The excerpt you quote is ambiguous to me. I am not sure what is meant by that. I don't see any indication of commercial gain through spying, I only see information being collected (through spying) and made available. I am not sure what information and I am not sure how it's of commercial use. They're concerned with "outcomes for it's presidency of the g20" . That itself is ambiguous (to me).

They want to see if Turkey is going to go along with the rest of the g20. On what specifically? It's not clear to me.

The danger overall is the following equivalency becomes structural in the minds of the NSA and the national security apparatus in general.

National Security == America remains powerful == American companies are winners == NSA spies for commercial gain of American companies == NSA et. al. undermines anyone who opposes what American companies want (think Ralph Nader , Common Cause etc. you cannot believe tha amount of hyperventilating that went on in the e 60s when he first took on GM. He was a Communist plant, for sure! A certain brand of conservative still hate him in just that way.. they're still recycling business think-tank blow back as truth 45 years later. )

So all opposition, any undermining of established players, or ways of doing business, or business models,. or anything from specific business opportunities to the existence and status quo of particular industries gets hyperventilated and puffed up into a threat to national security. Then we have Mussolini's definition of fascism- when (and the Chamber of Commerce's wet dream) the national security apparatus and industry are one and exist to support each other

This could happen through blackmail of key officials. Remember when you helped us spy on corporation X? You wouldn't want THAT to get out would you? We need this....

The ease with which this could become SOP is frightening even to me.

People cannot be trusted to police themselves. It's not like we've evolved since , say the 1200s , to a more enlightened species . Evolution hasn't selected for "trustworthiness, consciousness and egalitarianism". far from it. You wouldn't want effectively unlimited, unilateral power over *the perception of reality* to fall into anyone's hands. But this is just what the read/ write access to a reference database that can be used as the basis for, and serve as evidence for, kill / no kill, guilty / not guilty decisions, is. The power to create , distort and manipulate reality all in the service of the current power holders- both governmental and commercial- in society.

If anyone knows of a specific proved case of this I am interested. The more i think about it, the less inclined I am to permit this kind of power to just be kept around on trust. It's too easy to target political enemies while enduring no damage to yourself. There is no MAD holding everyone in check.

I think we need this power; my reason tells me that the loss of privacy is something that has to go on because smaller and smaller groups of individuals will come to wield ever greater amounts of destructive power. At the same time, the potential for abuse is equally as frightening given what people are, what they evolved to be.

This:

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/06/14/government-accountability-project-issues-statement-on-edward-snowden-nsa-domestic-surveillance/

I agree.

We need to work on this as a society, we need to work through this need to know and the nefarious use the technology could be put to and not shout people who are worried about that abuse down as paranoids , traitors , narcissists or lunatics.

> Well, we did have 8 years of President Bush as a result of a third party candidate bleeding votes away from Gore...

http://my.firedoglake.com/jest/2012/08/26/debunking-pathological-myths-of-the-2000-election-part-1-cnn-exit-polls-prove-that-nader-did-not-cost-gore-fl/

Aside from the ugliness people display when they immediately resort to pulling the race card...

    The whole point is that if Obama were somehow better than Bush, I would expect him to have come in and said: "This is unacceptable. This is unconstitutional. I want it gone." That is not what happened by a longshot. Instead he doubled down on all the nasty secretive stuff while he told everyone lies like how he would have the most transparent administration, ever. I am sorry if you cannot see what is right in front of your face. By now reality is pretty undeniable.

Ok, I'll bite.

What part of the constitution prohibits this particular act? Especially given that we now know that the NSA spying story was mostly and overstated hoax but even if it were as bad as it sounds (it's not)... it's both constitutional and perfectly legal.

Or are you speaking of the IRS scandal, the real scandal being that the IRS somehow investigated 11 illegal Koch brothers front groups and somehow didn't find ANYTHING wrong. (The "IRS Scandal" is a preemptive faux scandal, much like the NSA faux scandal and the Benghazi fake scandal, designed to attack Obama and to make the IRS less likely to investigate future Koch brothers front groups.)

What's to stop them from lying like Holder apparently did. Just editing out tons of stuff. It's not like they're worried about going to jail.

I am not being cynical.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/05/28/eric-holder-under-investigation-by-house-judiciary-committee-for-possibly-lying-under-oath/

We have a serious problem with the integrity of the justice system. It's mainly because of worries about national security. Those worries go directly to a part of the minds of the individuals involved, the decision makers, and interact with inchoate, unconscious, individually-derived, unexamined, unspoken, irrational fears of death, chaos, disorder and loss of control.

What we're getting from this is a lot of law breaking and attempted law breaking on the part of the authorities who are basing decisions on the contents of their own personal unconscious .

Essentially everything, every breach of secrecy, every challenge to the ways and means they've decided upon, in some cases every utterance and especially anyone displaying an attitude of contempt for America is processed as some sort of potential disaster of absolute and unrecoverable proportions and justifies every kind of abuse .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesselyn_Radack#cite_note-Dark_Side.2C_p.97-22

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/

9-11 made us lose perspective of a lot of things we need to keep perspective on in order to achieve real security and also to maintain our way of life, e.g. democracy.

One of those things is the fact that people may hate us for perfectly reasonable causes from their perspective because war involves the injection of unfairness by Bad People followed by an attempt to reduce, mitigate and unfortunately redistribute that unfairness. That's the morality of drones. As soon as the extremists in Waziristan decide someone's going to die, our job is to make that dying redistribute to them and unfortunately those close to them, but in any event it's not going to be their intended target. The morality of it is, we didn't decide anyone has to die in the first place- they did.

We have to consciously and collectively decide what we're wiling to put up in terms of terrorism in order to sustain our way of life . We aren't doing that.

The answer can't be "nothing ever gets through" because no one can promise that anyways and only the total corruption of our government lies down that road.

Maybe one day their will be a DIY doomsday technology. When that day comes, and I think it will, we will have to have worked out a way for us to keep ourselves free and keep ourselves safe. In order to have achieved that, we have to start talking publicly about tradeoffs between security and freedom, gotten the unconscious, hysterical motivations out of the collective closet, created a means to know what needs to be known and a means to deliberately not know what doesn't need to be known.

The government is hysterical. More precisely, the people in the government are so afraid of making a mistake , not having turned over the right rock, that they're breaking the law.

I have to add that the insane, vituperative politics which treats every potential national security error as a form of treason plays into this too.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/pete-santilli-secret-service_n_3312564.html

No one wants to lose

What's to stop them from lying like Holder apparently did. Just editing out tons of stuff. It's not like they're worried about going to jail.

I am not being cynical.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/05/28/eric-holder-under-investigation-by-house-judiciary-committee-for-possibly-lying-under-oath/

We have a serious problem with the integrity of the justice system. It's mainly because of worries about national security. Those worries go directly to a part of the minds of the individuals involved, the decision makers, and interact with inchoate, unconscious, individually-derived, unexamined, unspoken, irrational fears of death, chaos, disorder and loss of control.

What we're getting from this is a lot of law breaking and attempted law breaking on the part of the authorities who are basing decisions on the contents of their own personal unconscious .

Essentially everything, every breach of secrecy, every challenge to the ways and means they've decided upon, in some cases every utterance and especially anyone displaying an attitude of contempt for America is processed as some sort of potential disaster of absolute and unrecoverable proportions and justifies every kind of abuse .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesselyn_Radack#cite_note-Dark_Side.2C_p.97-22

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/

9-11 made us lose perspective of a lot of things we need to keep perspective on in order to achieve real security and also to maintain our way of life, e.g. democracy.

One of those things is the fact that people may hate us for perfectly reasonable causes from their perspective because war involves the injection of unfairness by Bad People followed by an attempt to reduce, mitigate and unfortunately redistribute that unfairness. That's the morality of drones. As soon as the extremists in Waziristan decide someone's going to die, our job is to make that dying redistribute to them and unfortunately those close to them, but in any event it's not going to be their intended target. The morality of it is, we didn't decide anyone has to die in the first place- they did.

We have to consciously and collectively decide what we're wiling to put up in terms of terrorism in order to sustain our way of life . We aren't doing that.

The answer can't be "nothing ever gets through" because no one can promise that anyways and only the total corruption of our government lies down that road.

Maybe one day their will be a DIY doomsday technology. When that day comes, and I think it will, we will have to have worked out a way for us to keep ourselves free and keep ourselves safe. In order to have achieved that, we have to start talking publicly about tradeoffs between security and freedom, gotten the unconscious, hysterical motivations out of the collective closet, created a means to know what needs to be known and a means to deliberately not know what doesn't need to be known.

The government is hysterical. More precisely, the people in the government are so afraid of making a mistake , not having turned over the right rock, that they're breaking the law.

I have to add that the insane, vituperative politics which treats every potential national security error as a form of treason plays into this too.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/pete-santilli-secret-service_n_3312564.html

No one wants to lose

Here's one Starscream's been saving for you: http://my.firedoglake.com/jest/2012/08/27/debunking-pathological-myths-of-the-2000-election-part-2-democrat-defections-to-bush-blue-dogs-bush-democrats-caused-gore-to-lose-fl/

The rape analogy really takes the cake, though. An extremely poor map of the real model.

Actually Nader didn't spoil it for the democrats.

http://my.firedoglake.com/jest/2012/08/26/debunking-pathological-myths-of-the-2000-election-part-1-cnn-exit-polls-prove-that-nader-did-not-cost-gore-fl/

It might be tempting to dismiss that as a case of missing the forest for the trees, but I'm willing to say that the spoiler effect is a myth. Kind of like the "ticking timebomb" scenario used to justify torture. Makes for a good story, but in the real world it never really happens.

Not sure which side of this you are on, but the perfect example of circling the wagons is Marty Lederman. When GWB was pres, he excoriated him for using secret legal memos to support due process free detention, torture, and for abusing the rule of law. Once he became part of Obama's legal team, he went to work WRITING secret legal memos to support due process free assassination.

What he's doing now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Lederman

What he was saying when GWB was in office: http://firedoglake.com/2008/09/15/first-monday-marty-lederman-on-the-restoration-of-the-rule-of-law/

If Marty Lederman doesn't win a Nobel in Hypocrisy, I don't know who possibly could.

And to be clear, my view is that Marty was right to attack GWB, and he should be now attacking Obama for doing the exact same shit. If that isn't circling the wagons, I don't what is.

1. Quote Martin Luther King as saying disidents should be proud to go to jail.

Not everyone is heralded like Mandella with a large base of supporters and international attention. Most are swallowed up by the penal system never to be heard from again. Only their family remembers. Look what happened to John Kiriakou who blew the whistle on illegal torture. He's gone away for 30 months. http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/01/28/convicted-cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-confronts-government-talking-points-on-nbcs-today-show/


Whistleblower John Kiriakou said "I am proud that I stood up to our government. I am not a criminal. I am a whistleblower. Torture is illegal and it’s officially abandoned in our country and I’m proud to have had a role in that." Sounds a bit like Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death". A hero right? And yet...

Don't expect the media to save you. NBC's Savannah Guthrie began her interview of him: "Some people say you betrayed your former colleagues in order to raise your media profile in order to sell books and get a consulting business going." Are *you* going to be holding a candlelight vigil for a cad of a man who betrayed his country to sell books?

Don't expect the judge to save you: The US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema said on Friday that Kiriakou had damaged the CIA. She called the sentence, the result of a plea arrangement with prosecutors, "way too light". Before issuing the sentence, the judge asked Kiriakou if he had anything to say. When he declined, she said: ''Perhaps you have already spoken too much.''
This book tells how once you're jailed the public think you deserve it and quickly forget about you. http://books.google.com/books?id=Tu5RB6YHf10C&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&ots=51Ya4U8XFt&dq=lynch+in+the+name+of+justice (Go to page 43 of this Google Books preview).


2. Swartz broke the law and should do the time.

These posts are usually accompanied by an anal exploration of the relevant statute by watched too many courtroom dramas and thinks they are real life, but was there ever an Episode of Law & Order when McCoy said "Let's fuck this college kid over! I want a promotion! "

People who post these overlook the whole point that these are unfair laws. Volokh showed how unfair they are when he wrote a TOS that could be used to send anyone to jail named "Ralph".
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120803gw.html
http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-Arrested/dp/1556526377
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1227896387.shtml

Many people argue that if you break the law on principle and don't accept the punishment you're doing it wrong. This is incorrect. There are, as you so nicely illustrate, other approaches. Indeed, the reason for acquiescing to punishment is precisely to highlight the law's abuse! Arguing that protest is unethical if it does not accept punishment is a neat trick. In effect, it is often little different from arguing that the law is right because it is the law.

The problem is that the American civil rights movement has been taken a standard for protest. But it was an unusual case. The protesters knew that they were in fact acting in accordance with their legal rights, and could appeal to the federal government for support. This is hardly a universal illustration of how to defy the law.

The strategy of the civil rights movement began with a legal agenda pursued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), resulting in a number of Supreme Court decisions in the 1940s and 1950s affirming the civil rights of African Americans. Activists then attempted to nonviolently assert those rights, knowing that segregationists would respond with violence. The ensuing crisis would compel the federal government to enforce rights upheld by the courts.

The other standard for civil disobedience is Gandhi. But like the civil rights movement, he used it because it was an effective tactic:

. . . where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. . . . I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor. But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.

The underground railroad is an example that makes clear that the ideal of submitting to punishment can be antithetical to principled, legitimate defiance of the law. On the Volokh Conspiracy, a commenter named Mark Nelson makes the point:

I'm rather confused by the widespread misconception (repeated here) that civil disobedience is primarily about being willing to serve jail time. That's one possible tactic, to draw attention to a cause and the injustice of a law by being arrested amidst much publicity. But it's not the only or historically the main tactic. Another major reason for civil disobedience is to render a law unenforceable by flouting it. That may (depending on the person/situation) be intended either to eventually get the law changed by demonstrating to the public that it's manifestly unenforceable, or simply to directly circumvent it, effectively nullifying it whether it gets repealed or not.

The tactic can actually be enhanced by not being caught in some cases. One famous American example: the Boston Tea Party was an act of civil disobedience performed by people who took some care to ensure they would not be caught. It was mostly an act of symbolic politics, but did not involve anyone getting arrested as part of the symbolism: they disguised themselves and escaped with impunity. Anon Y. Mous also mentions the Underground Railroad, another prominent example of civil disobedience explicitly aimed at violating the law without being caught, in that case of the direct-circumvention variety.

In Swartz's case, the goal was simply to release academic papers to the public, producing an actual "fact on the ground", not to make a symbolic protest against intellectual property by going to jail.

The idea that one cannot legitimately protest the law without suffering for it is an oddly puritanical myth that needs to be debunked.

Let me get your logic straight. You are saying it is management's fault for agreeing to the unreasonable demands of the unionized employees?

There is nothing voluntary about a union contract. In most states in the USA ALL employees in a union company must be union: even employees who do not WANT to be in a union and would rather keep their union dues. There is nothing capitalistic about unions. Without government legislation protecting unions they weaken quite quickly. Look what happened to the public employees union in Wisconsin after the law changed: one union lost 55% of its membership, another union lost 70% of its membership. http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/05/31/public-employee-union-membership-in-wisconsin-drops-after-collective-bargaining-law/

"Sandy In Your Eye: Global Insurers Call BS On Climate Deniers"

Simple, the USPS does not a have a profitable business model.

That's actually false. The USPS is profitable and self sufficient. All the dire warning crap you here about the USPS is because the owner of FedEx was good friends with the Bush family. In 2006, they managed to get Congress to require the USPS to fully pre-fund its retirement benefits for the next 75 years by 2016. 10 years to save enough to cover 75 years of benefits... that puts the USPS in the red every year. It is entirely an effort to break the postal union.

read more here

The Fusion Center network has been plausibly alleged to be used for coordination by various municipalities with Federal agencies - for suppression of "Occupy" protests.

Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle â" all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression. Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through "law enforcement channels," where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would "reach out" to "LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor" to assist.

http://my.firedoglake.com/joeshikspack/2012/05/30/foia-revelations-show-administration-role-in-occupy-crackdown/

So, the Fusion centers are used by DHS to obfuscate their role in suppression of people's rightful, democratic action.

"Hostility to nonviolent public protests is hostility to democracy."
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/09/suck-on-it.html

You need an ID to do almost anything these days. I personally think that's wrong, but it's a reality.

The only things I can remember hauling my ID out for over the past year are (1) paying with credit cards (because I never bother to sign them; if the card is signed, retailers are not allowed to ask for ID), (2) when I got a speeding ticket (not an issue for those who don't drive), and (3) for companies to hold on to when they want some kind of temporary collateral for a rental (i.e. renting paintball equipment). Perhaps your lifestyle requires frequent use of ID, but there are plenty of ways to live that do not. Note also that many places that ask you for ID do it simply because it is the easiest route; if you don't have a government-issued photo ID, most of them will be happy to switch to an alternate method (for example, utility companies).

I have not met anyone who does not have an ID of any sort. I have known and been dirt poor, homeless, and destitute in my life. I still had an ID.

Your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. Studies show that in Pennsylvania alone there is anywhere between 3/4 to 1.5 million voters without ID; even the people who support the voter ID laws and claim those studies are overestimating the issue claim it's at least 100,000 people. The fact that you don't know these people doesn't mean shit; they are voters with a constitutional right to vote whether you like it or not.

It is the only way to efficiently prevent the rampant voter fraud that is happening in certain important counties in this county that largely decide the fate of the entire nation.

What rampant voter fraud? There is no evidence of any kind of "rampant" in-person voter fraud. None. There is a handful of cases in any particular year. When the state of Pennsylvania got sued over their new voter ID laws, they acknowledged in-person voter fraud has never been a problem. So why is the law necessary again?

Bullshit.

That is a good tag for your post.

The problem isn't Bush or Obama - it's the system.

Well, Obama is actually part of the problem here.
The same Goldman Sachs that just got cleared of the sub-prime mortgage issue provided a good part of Obama's administration. A conflict of interest is absolutely guaranteed.

I thought Goldman Sachs were the good guys?

They are! That's why the Hope & Change President decided to put change on hold and continue the long-standing tradition of stuffing the White House with Goldman alums and associates and sending administration people back.

This is a PR move by the FBI. It makes them APPEAR to be an actor for justice - it matters of little consequence, except those personally involved.

Another oxymoron for America? How about "Justice Department"?

4 Years - and not ONE criminal indictment perused against the "investment" and reserve Banksters. Surely, the FBI could better spend their time and resources to ensure that the entire country is safe from another criminal fraud, costing tens of Billions, no?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/20/wall-street-role-financial-crisis

http://www.propublica.org/article/why-no-financial-crisis-prosecutions-official-says-its-just-too-hard

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/should-some-bankers-be-prosecuted/?pagination=false

http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=30979

BTW: The Fed knew about LIBOR fixing specific to Barclays and beyond... in 2008.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/14/barclays-employee-to-ny-fed-2008-we-know-that-were-not-posting-um-an-honest-libor/

So what's our precious FBI doing about examining THAT evidence?

For example, imagine if the only way you could send letters was the US postal service. Fed Ex and UPS would be illegal.

The USPS is the only way we can send letters. It is illegal to send letters through parcel carriers like FedEx and UPS. This has served us very, very well for over 200 years, until Republicans decided to kill it by passing completely insane "reforms", such as funding pensions to be funded for 75 years into the future. In other words, the USPS is required by law to have pension funds for employees that have not even been born yet.

When you think about it, the ability for anyone in the country to send a letter to anyone else in the country for less than a dollar is really fucking incredible. You won't get that from FedEx and UPS. We need the same kind of guaranteed service from nationwide internet.

http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurphy/2010/12/04/assanges-chief-accuser-has-her-own-history-with-us-funded-anti-castro-groups-one-of-which-has-cia-ties/

First, they have you on camera? So? Only a problem if you do something illegal.

Eh? Did you really just make the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be worried about" argument?

Second, if people wear masks they're going to feel like they can get away with things. It encourages violence and mob behavior.

And if people are allowed to own handguns, it will just encourage violence and mob behavior. Sorry, but this seems to be a bit of a tautology.

Third, you see people wearing masks at protests in third world countries where they worry about a secret police tracking them. This is not a reasonable concern in the first world.

The first world that has FBI files on nonviolent actresses and civil rights activists?
The first world where undercover agents go so far as to impregnate the nonviolent activists they are spying on?
The first world that constantly uses entrapment to prosecute "terror" cases?
The first world which has recently passed both laws allowing military detentions of citizens and criminalizing "disrupting events" where someone is under Secret Service protection?

Lets say you decide to protest a Bank of America shareholder meeting at a convention center. You're peacefully protesting in the street and the parking lot, but totally unknown to you, Jill Biden was quietly on her way to meet some Democratic donors in another room at the convention center.

But she was a few minutes late getting past the crowd, so you and your fellow protesters "disrupted an event" where the Secret Service was protecting someone. That spiffy new spy center in Nevada runs CCTV footage through their facial recognition software, and not only picks you out of a crowd, but is able to cross-reverence your location with a warrantless wiretap on your cell phone. Presto, you receive a summons in the mail a few weeks later.

It'll be the new speed camera fine-by-mail.

The FBI has nothing to do all day long but assemble files on people who are not suspected of nything.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/26/are-95-of-people-investigated-under-new-guidelines-innocent-but-entered-into-database/

They obviously have time to spare on ...

a report of a suspicious car that included no license plate number. Such tips are entered into its computer system even if there is no way to follow up on them.

Check, your move.

http://my.firedoglake.com/cgrapski/2011/10/09/american-standard-editor-admits-to-being-agent-provacateur-at-d-c-museum/

And this just in: WikiLeaks Uncovers Report Showing Homeland Security Monitored Occupy Movement

Spook BackDoors In Cisco Routers (continued - revision 3)
- Older news, but still relevant!!
Please save this story and repost it everywhere
Especially in Security Discussion Forum Sites
- You should use OpenBSD or a hardened Linux distro
For a router, NOT these blackboxes offered with
proprietary hardware & firmware!

"More on Cisco Building Surveillance into Routers"
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/04/22/1656215/more-on-cisco-building-surveillance-into-routers

PDF: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-10/Cross_Tom/BlackHat-DC-2010-Cross-Attacking-LawfulI-Intercept-wp.pdf

PDF2: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-10/Cross_Tom/BlackHat-DC-2010-Cross-Attacking-LawfulI-Intercept-slides.pdf

Is Apparent US Conspiracy with Cisco about Wiretapping?
By: emptywheel Monday June 6, 2011 2:52 pm
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/06/06/it-is-simply-not-done-in-a-civilized-jurisdiction-that-is-bound-by-the-rule-of-law/

Canada has just discovered how much corporations own our legal system, how our legal system criminalizes whistleblowers, and our utter and total disdain for the rule of law.

At issue is the apparent conspiracy between Cisco and the US government to respond to an anti-trust lawsuit launched by Peter Alfred Adekeye, a former Cisco employee. He sued because of the way Cisco forced customers to buy a maintenance contract for things like bug fixes.

This lawsuit is about Ciscoâ(TM)s deliberate and continuing attempt to monopolize for itself (and its âoepartnersâ (Cisco-authorized resellers of Cisco equipment and services nationwide) with which it does not significantly compete) the service and maintenance of Cisco enterprise (Cisco networking equipment for all segments (e.g., internet service providers, government, academia, small, medium and large business, etc.) with the exception of home networking equipment) hardware, principally routers, switches and firewalls. Cisco possesses a market share of approximately 70% in the networking equipment industry.

[snip]

To protect its over $6 billion yearly stream of service and maintenance revenue, Cisco has cleverly and uniquely conditioned the provision of its software âoeupdatesâ on the customerâ(TM)s purchase of a hardware maintenance service agreement called âoeSMARTnet,â

[snip]

The effect of this leveraging of monopoly power and unlawful tie-in and/or bundling is to effectively preclude any non-Cisco affiliated Independent Service Organization (âoeISOâ) from competing for the business of servicing Cisco networking hardware, thus preserving for itself all but a pittance of that line of commerce which is separate and distinct from the âoeupdatesâ of its software.

In response, Cisco counter-sued, accusing Adekeye of illegally accessing Cisco services. And Cisco either lied persuasively or got DOJ to conspire in the intimidation campaign, because DOJ then charged Adekeye with 97 violations thatâ"the Canadian judge who just blew this up suggestedâ"should have only amounted to one single violation.

The US also refused to allow Adekeye to enter the US after 2008, meaning he couldnâ(TM)t testify in the litigation. Finally, in 2010, he flew to Canada to testify. At t