Real Evil Skates Free

Bradley Manning Headed To Prison, While Those Who Authorized Torture Go Free:

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday for releasing 700,000 documents about the United States' worldwide diplomacy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning was a 25-year-old Army private first class at the time of his arrest. He saw himself as an idealist acting to end the wars, and said in online chats with hacker Adrian Lamo that he was particularly concerned about the abuse of detainees in Iraq. No political or military higher-ups have ever been prosecuted for detainee abuse or torture in Iraq, Afghanistan or at Guantanamo Bay...

Useful Leakers

In Defense of Leakers: Snowden and Manning : The New Yorker:

On the day that Edward Snowden finally left Moscow’s airport in a taxi to take up Russia’s offer of temporary asylum and the sentencing portion of Bradley Manning’s trial continued, it is worth restating what should be obvious. Leaking classified information is a crime, and it can be damaging to the national interest; but, in some circumstances, it can also be a patriotic and useful act that helps bring about necessary reforms...

Too Much NSA Access

Glenn Greenwald: Low-Level NSA Analysts Have ‘Powerful and Invasive’ Search Tool - ABC News:

Today on “This Week,” Glenn Greenwald – the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs – claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years,” Greenwald told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future...”

Both national security and privacy rights can be handled easily and properly if the issue is rationally addressed. Yeah, I know, keyword in that sentence.

Democrats To Fight For Choice

Democrats vow abortion fight in Texas:

Republicans in the Texas Legislature passed an omnibus abortion bill that is one of the most restrictive in the nation, but Democrats vowed Saturday to fight both in the courts and the ballot box as they used the measure to rally their supporters...

Comprehensive Spy Post

The Government Is Spying On ALL Americans’ Digital and Old-Fashioned Communications | Washington's Blog:

Anyone Who Says the Government Only Spies On Potential Bad Guys Is Sadly Uninformed

Even now – after all of the revelations by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers – spying apologists say that the reports are “exaggerated” or “overblown”, and that the government only spies on potential bad guys...

Spy v. Employee

'Insider threat' program reportedly orders feds to spy on each other using sloppy tactics | Fox News:

An "insider threat" program launched by the Obama administration two years ago requires federal employees to spy on each other using profiling techniques not proven to work, according to a new report.

Details about the program, first reported by McClatchy, have gradually been made public in recent weeks. It was apparently ordered in 2011 in the wake of security leaks by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, and urges federal workers and contractors to look out for "high-risk" behavior -- and to report it...

Snowden Revelations: Yawn

5 Intriguing New NSA Revelations From Edward Snowden | Mother Jones:

...On Friday, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald gave a sneak preview of a yet-to-be released document detailing the startling number of phone traffic the NSA collects daily. On Saturday, the Washington Post released more top-secret slides showing how the NSA's PRISM program captures information from tech giants. And the German magazine Der Spiegel dropped a bombshell report about US spying on European Union diplomats...

Oh, yeah-- good flick that showed us everything we already knew. Here, too.

US Spying Too Much

Opinion: U.S. intelligence community is out of control - CNN.com:

It's hard to think of a time in the history of America's intelligence community when it has been more battered by accusations of over-stepping or mismanaging its mission: to secretly gather information to support the activities of the U.S. government...