Surreal Reality

December 27, 2013

castleBright sunshine and cold air this afternoon on California’s north coast, ending another work week, and near-about ending a whole year.
Peculiar how quickly 2013 has bled away — seemingly the fastest year, ever.
I’m an old guy, though, so I might be traveling in more rapid circles than you.

Top of the news this PM is an intelligence flip/flop of the legal sort: A federal judge ruled today that the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata spying program is “lawful” and represents the nation’s “counter-punch” to terrorism, a decision at odds with a different federal judge who two weeks ago said it infringed the Constitution.
Invoking the infamous 9/11 motif, and that people are already in a “voluntarily surrender” mode with social media, the judge claimed the NSA’s vacuum-suck-up-techno-scheme is a “vital tool” for national security.

(Illustration: Escher-inspired, ‘Castle of Illusions,’ by Irvine Peacock, found here).

U.S. District Judge William Pauley of New York opened a nasty can of worms — maybe enough President Obama does what he intends, and the NSA keeps on keeping on, business as usual. The only reason he left the ‘change’ door open on the agency were the twin slaps, first from a federal judge two weeks ago that the bulk suck-up was probably unconstitutional, and then from his own White House panel demanding more curbs be placed on the NSA.
A step backward today.

Pauley in his ruling says the scooping method is required to thwart the nefarious designs of al-Qaeda.
Via Wired:

No doubt, the bulk telephony metadata collection program vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States.
That is by design, as it allows the NSA to detect relationships so attenuated and ephemeral they would otherwise escape notice, as the September attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a thread can be horrific.
Technology allowed al-Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely.
The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the Government’s counter-punch: connecting fragmented and fleeting communications to re-construct and eliminate al-Qaeda’s terror network.

The judge maybe didn’t have marbles to begin with, but he’s displaying all the symptoms now of having none. In the last couple of weeks has come reports the NSA’s bulk collection system is really bogus, and hasn’t really stopped any terrorist activity. Even one of Obama’s blue-ribbon surveillance panel said it’s all bullshit.
Tim Cushing at TechDirt has a really-good analysis up this afternoon on Pauley’s decision.
A couple key points:

Pauley’s ruling is predicated on the very expansive reading of the Third Party Doctrine security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have relied on for years.
Information given voluntarily to third parties is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
This reading has allowed the NSA to collect every phone record generated in the US for the past half-decade uninterrupted and for a majority of the last 12 years.
For many people, the reality of the Third Party Doctrine didn’t hit home until the Snowden leaks began.
It wasn’t so surprising that this sort of data harvesting was happening.
Whistleblowers had been warning for years that the government was collecting data and content on a massive, worldwide scale.
The real shock was that, for the most part, everything was completely legal.

Even those on the direct payroll of intelligence agencies have had trouble pinpointing the program’s success in preventing terrorist attacks.
For Pauley to claim that the “effectiveness can’t be seriously disputed” is laughable.
The last several months have seen many question the effectiveness of the Section 215 program and the challenges issued by the NSA’s many critics have yet to be definitively answered.
Pauley treats the NSA’s assertions as gospel.

A judge aping the government.

And tomorrow a snap which will effect a goodly-chunk of Americans — 1.3 million will lose emergency unemployment benefits, which was installed to off-set the Great Recession in 2008, renewed 11 times since, and might be renewed when Congress gets back together after the holiday break.
But we’re dealing with the worse bunch of Congress-critters in US history, so the benefits could be just shit away like a lot of other necessary stuff.
But there’s joy here:

Markets have charted big gains this year.
The Dow is up more than 25 percent and S&P 500 has gained nearly 30 percent.
The Nasdaq has soared 38 percent.
The Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since 1996 and the S&P 500 is on pace for its strongest year since 1997.

Let the good times roll — for me, it’s rolling into the weekend.

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