High overcast with a slightly-chilled wind this way-early Monday as we carrom into another new work week, leaving behind the rat-tailed dump of private-first-class droppings — or what’s now called, ‘Boundless Informant.’
Apparently, there’s no bottom to the data suck.

On Saturday, the UK’s Guardian revealed the NSA whistleblower as American citizen Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former IT guy for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and is currently in Hong Kong, hoping for asylum.

The NSA spying bullshit has also struck a funny chord, as shown by a new kids’ book featured at left — there’s a couple more of these things at the illustration link.

(Illustration found here).

This Snowden guy has to be the most-wanted man on earth right now, and knows it — more via the Guardian: He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.
And like a character in some bad spy movie, they’re coming for him:

“Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA.
I could have people come after me.
Or any of the third-party partners.
They work closely with a number of other nations.
Or they could pay off the Triads.
Any of their agents or assets,” he said.
“We have got a CIA station just up the road — the consulate here in Hong Kong — and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week.
And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”

Farhad Manjoo at Slate looks hard at Snowden and sees more horror (h/t War In Context):

Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator.
He isn’t a State Department analyst.
He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.
Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that.
If Snowden had sent his résumé to any of the tech companies that are providing data to the NSA’s PRISM program, I doubt he’d have even gotten an interview.
Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway — many well-known techies dropped out of school.
But he was given access way beyond what even a supergeek should have gotten.
As he tells the Guardian, the NSA let him see “everything.”
He was accorded the NSA’s top security clearance, which allowed him to see and to download the agency’s most sensitive documents.
But he didn’t just know about the NSA’s surveillance systems — he says he had the ability to use them.
“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities [sic] to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email,” he says in a video interview with the paper.
…
The worst part about the NSA’s surveillance is not its massive reach.
It’s that it operates entirely in secret, so that we have no way of assessing the sophistication of its operation.
All we have is the word of our politicians, who tell us that they’ve vetted these systems and that we should blindly trust that the data are being competently safeguarded and aren’t vulnerable to abuse.
Snowden’s leak is thus doubly damaging.
The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us.
It’s also that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program.
It suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power leveraged by incompetence.
The Keystone Cops are listening to us all.

And in the flurry of scandals and revelations opening new cans-of-worm scandals this past couple of weeks, President Obama is quickly losing that false “cool” everybody figured he was full of, instead of shit.
And that wonder of “cool” Obama seemed to ooze during the run-up to his presidency has seemed to vanish — he’s under fire for the first time from everybody, not just the GOP/Tea Bagger bunch.
Via CNN:

President Barack Obama got off to an awkward and unusual start Friday morning as he took the stage to give a speech on health care reform.
Once he took the podium, he realized he didn’t have anything to talk about.
“Good morning everybody. It is wonderful to see all of you and I want to thank everybody who is here,” he said at the San Jose, California, event.
“I think there is only one problem. My remarks aren’t sitting here.”
As the audience began to chuckle, Obama looked off stage, searching for his aides and uttering: “People?”
“Things by Friday afternoon-things get a little challenged,” he added, trying to stall.
…
Before the speech got started–and as the president was still looking for his printed remarks–a reporter asked if Obama will answer a question.
“I am going to answer a question at the end of the remarks but I want to make sure that we get in the remarks,” he said.
“People?”
“Oh, goodness,” he said as an aide rushed out with the pages and slightly tripped on stage.
“Oh, somebody is tripping,” the president said to laughter.
“Folks are sweating back there right now.”

Mr. President, you’re sweating.

In his attack on journalists and whistleblower-leaks, Obama has instigated the ‘big chill‘ for journalists in DC, and elsewhere — Deep Throat has gone deep underground:

In conversations with POLITICO, national security reporters and watchdogs said they already have seen increased caution from government sources following revelations that the DOJ had subpoenaed Associated Press reporters’ phone records and tracked the comings and goings of Fox News reporter James Rosen at the State Department.
“I had one former intel officer say, ‘I hope you’re buying ‘burner’ phones for your sources,’ but I think he may have been pulling my leg,” said David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s national security columnist.
Reporters on the national security beat say it’s not the fear of being prosecuted by the DOJ that worries them – it’s the frightened silence of past trusted sources that could undermine the kind of investigative journalism that Obama was talking about.
Some formerly forthcoming sources have grown reluctant to return phone calls, even on unclassified matters, and, when they do talk, prefer in-person conversations that leave no phone logs, no emails, and no records of entering and leaving buildings, reporters and watchdogs said.
“The classic leak — of information or of government documents — is becoming more and more difficult and more and more rare because the points of contact between reporters and sources are subject to more and more scrutiny,” Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, told POLITICO.
“Sources will avoid reporters simply so they don’t have to equivocate on a polygraph appearance,” he added.
“In the 90s, you could call up government officials out of the phone book.
In the years after 9/11, that became absolutely impossible.”

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this cloaked, James Bond-high-tech sensationalism, the old story keeps getting more fresh every day — and no one seems to be listening/seeing:

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use rose 1.4 percent to 31.6 gigatons in 2012, setting a record and putting the planet on course for temperature increases well above international climate goals, the International Energy Agency said in a report scheduled to be issued Monday.

IEA chief economist Fatih Birol: “This puts us on a difficult and dangerous trajectory. If we don’t do anything between now and 2020, it will be very difficult because there will be a lot of carbon already in the atmosphere and the energy infrastructure will be locked in.”

See if our Kops can boundless inform on that shit.