Yipee! Friday!
Overcast and gloomy again this morning on California’s north coast, but like yesterday and the day before and the day before that, the sun will come and all will be happy.

Still high in the news cycle, the NSA spying bullshit continues to plague the Obama White House and has turned the DC bullshit into a soft downy blanket of contradictions and horn blowing, despite the screams of national security.
But everybody should really be afraid.

(Illustration found here).

The real-big problem here, beyond the actual spying, is the NSA and its assorted minions can keep scooped-up data on file for generations. And because there’s so many freakin’ laws, everybody breaks them at one time or another.
Moxie Marlinspike at Wired looks at these laws, first from James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary.
It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes.
These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages.
Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization.
Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are “nearly 10,000.”
…
If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations.
You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.
…
Police already abuse the immense power they have, but if everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective.
Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all.
Even ignoring this obvious potential for new abuse, it’s also substantially closer to that dystopian reality of a world where law enforcement is 100% effective, eliminating the possibility to experience alternative ideas that might better suit us.

A new world is already here. And has been here for a long, long time.
Despite all this mega-billion-dollar hardware, there’s really nothing to show for it.
On Wednesday, NSA head General Keith Alexander told Congress the surveillance has stopped ““dozens of terrorist events,” but of course, didn’t go into any detail.
And yesterday, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall begged to differ:

“We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence.
Gen. Alexander’s testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program helped thwart ‘dozens’ of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collection methods.
The public deserves a clear explanation.”

You betcha!

And Wired also has a lengthy overview of asshole Alexander and his kingdom, and it’s a doozy.
Some high points:

Inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles.
Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force.
But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras.
To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh.
This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize.
Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy.
A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
…
Inside the government, the general is regarded with a mixture of respect and fear, not unlike J. Edgar Hoover, another security figure whose tenure spanned multiple presidencies.
“We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander — with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets,” says one former senior CIA official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
“We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.”
…
Alexander also proved to be militant about secrecy.
In 2005 a senior agency employee named Thomas Drake allegedly gave information to The Baltimore Sun showing that a publicly discussed program known as Trailblazer was millions of dollars overbudget, behind schedule, possibly illegal, and a serious threat to privacy.
In response, federal prosecutors charged Drake with 10 felony counts, including retaining classified documents and making false statements.
He faced up to 35 years in prison—despite the fact that all of the information Drake was alleged to have leaked was not only unclassified and already in the public domain but in fact had been placed there by NSA and Pentagon officials themselves.
(As a longtime chronicler of the NSA, I served as a consultant for Drake’s defense team. The investigation went on for four years, after which Drake received no jail time or fine. The judge, Richard D. Bennett, excoriated the prosecutor and NSA officials for dragging their feet. “I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable,” he said during a hearing in 2011. “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”)

All of this shit stinks. Read the whole Wired piece, scary, thought-provoking stuff.
Which arises this commentary from China’s china.org.cn and Edward Snowden, the guy who blew that ugly whistle on Gen. Alexander and his all his nefarious gadgets.
The Chinese are not impressed:

We can see, therefore, that when American politicians and businessmen make accusatory remarks, their eyes are firmly fixed on foreign countries and they turn a blind eye to their own misdeeds.
This clearly calls into question the integrity of these rich, powerful and influential figures and gives the definite impression that the U.S. bases its own legitimacy not on good domestic governance but on stigmatizing foreign practices.
Perhaps the most confusing issue revolves around the hypocrisy of those who preach about Internet freedom abroad while they stifle it at home.
The Fudan University students who listened intently to President Obama’s speech about Internet freedom and censorship at a town hall-style meeting in Shanghai in 2009 certainly took his remarks seriously.
How must they be feeling now that it is obvious that President Obama himself does not believe his own Internet rhetoric?
In the same vein, many like-minded young Chinese once presented flowers to Google’s Beijing headquarters to pay tribute to its “brave” and outspoken challenge to perceived state surveillance by the Chinese government.
How must they be feeling in light of Google’s involvement in PRISM and with the knowledge that Google’s action against China is only part of its commercial strategy?
An increasing number of Chinese people will come to understand that the democratization of domestic Chinese media is entirely different from that which happens abroad.

And China might grant Snowden asylum — the title of the above piece is “Whistleblower Welcome in China.”
This entire US surveillance narrative really, really stinks — not only in how/what the NSA does, but also in that the operation is run by self-serving total dumb-asses.
Trust these fuck heads?

History’s hardware will trick us again.