Weiner, Frontrunner

The numbers are ...

Weiner 25%
Quinn 20%
Thompson 13%
de Blasio 10%
Liu 8%

The poll also shows that Weiner has made substantial progress moving the numbers among those New Yorkers who would consider voting for him in the general. Two months ago only 40% said they'd consider voting for him in the general. Now that number is 49%. On the flip side, the `no way, dude' number has fallen from 52% to 45%. Those numbers are likely more favorable that they suggest because the GOP is hardly fielding any serious candidates this year.

The uber-outrageous part is the judge hearing the case ruled the defense cannot even mention the supreme law of the land, Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.  

Why do I think if little kids were drawing hopscotch on the sidewalk in chalk there would be no prosecution?  

President Nelson Mandela is on life support, a South African official told CNN Wednesday.

Mandela has been in critical condition for four days in a hospital in Pretoria, South Africa. President Barack Obama is currently en route to to the continent and his trip will take him to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.

The White House has not said whether the First Family plans to visit Mandela. link

So they presented Hong Kong with the screwed-up papers wrong name and number and all and, as happens to any other litigant doing that, got their papers rejected.

In New York magazine today, Rich gouges David Gregory's sockets with a stiletto for questioning Glenn Greenwald's journalistic credentials, and for suggesting on the air that Greenwald should be arrested for aiding and abetting Edward Snowden:

"Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he's covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he's conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer."

Rich further suggests that the incoming new leadership at NBC News avail themselves of the opportunity to elevate the conversation at Meet the Press, by transferring Gregory full-time to The Today Show, "where he can speak truth to power by grilling Paula Deen."

(Reuters) - Ecuador's leftist government thumbed its nose at Washington on Thursday by renouncing U.S. trade benefits and offering to pay for human rights training in America in response to pressure over asylum for former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The angry response threatens a showdown between the two nations over Snowden, and may burnish President Rafael Correa's credentials to be the continent's principal challenger of U.S. power after the death of Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

"Ecuador will not accept pressures or threats from anyone, and it does not traffic in its values or allow them to be subjugated to mercantile interests," government spokesman Fernando Alvarado said at a news conference.

In a cheeky jab at the U.S. spying program that Snowden unveiled through leaks to the media, the South American nation offered $23 million per year to finance human rights training.

more...

The director of the CIA has outlined plans to launch a new campaign aimed at keeping the organization's operations secret. The memo, issued by director John Brennan, was itself leaked late on Wednesday.
[...]
The CIA declined to comment on the leak after AP contacted it.

Anyway, this is what we've learned today:

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data - despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011.

Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted."

But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

[snip]

On December 26 2012, SSO announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.

The NSA called it the "One-End Foreign (1EF) solution". It intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for "broadening the scope" of what it is able to collect. It relied, legally, on "FAA Authority", a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions.

This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. "The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter," the SSO December document reads. "This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories."

Are there questions?  Of course.  The article states that it isn't known how much of this is Americans' data, nor is it known what the legal authority is.

Also, we learned:

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general - published for the first time today by the Guardian - the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.

The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the NSA was collecting the call records of millions of US Verizon customers under a Fisa court order that, it later emerged, is renewed every 90 days. Similar orders are in place for other phone carriers.

The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails. It also details the internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people inside the United States when sending emails - information which can reflect their physical location. It did not include the content of emails.

Over at The Nation, Lee Fang explains that Mike Murphy, who served on Meet The Press' pundit panel this past weekend (and who opined, of L'Affaire Snowden, that it has "never been easier in human history to be a whistleblower," which is comically wrong) receives some of his boodle courtesy of the NSA. That's a fact that should have been disclosed. Of course, before you accuse "Meet The Press" of nefariousness, you should consider the possibility that its operators actually don't understand journalism well enough to know that these kinds of disclosures are important. Still, we have to applaud Carly Fiorina for being willing to admit that she was "good friends" with a central figure in the story, Gen. Michael Hayden. Murphy was a friend with benefits! link

Though Murphy was introduced only as a "Republican strategist," he is also the founding partner of Navigators Global, a lobbying firm that represents one of the NSA's largest contractors. Disclosures show that Navigators Global represents Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) on issues before Congress. For at least a decade, CSC has won major contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA). Murphy's firm has lobbied on behalf of CSC for bills that would expand the NSA's reach, including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.

Intelligence whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden will continue to leak state secrets in the public interest despite being "aggressively pursued" by the Obama administration...
[snip]
"The Obama administration has made it clear that it will aggressively pursue leakers and whistleblowers. I think there will inevitably be leakers and whistleblowers, however, because there are so many people who have access to classified information."
[snip]
His comments come following the media outcry in the US over the seizure of AP phone records and the threat of criminal prosecution against a Fox News reporter. The US Department of Justice targeted the records of more than 20 phone lines of AP reporters and editors in secret in April and May in an attempt to discover the source of leaked information about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen.

Business Insider

The decision of the Ninth Circuit is vacated and remanded.

Petitioners did not have standing.

But official jeers that the US engages in "double standards" by describing Russian defectors as "political refugees," while hounding those like Snowden who have leaked intelligence to the ends of the earth, have been replaced by much more cautious rhetoric such as Putin's oddly colorful metaphor whose meaning appears to be that he wishes Snowden had never turned up in Russia.

"Just like Snowden, [Mr. Assange] considers himself a rights advocate and fights for sharing information. Ask yourself: should or should not people like these be extradited to be later put to jail?" Putin said.

"In any case, I would like not to deal with such issues because it is like shearing a pig: there's lots of squealing and little fleece," he added.

Experts say the basic reason for the change of tone may be fear of diplomatic consequences.

Sports Illustrated:

Aaron Hernandez was arrested and taken out of his North Attleboro, Mass., home in handcuffs on Wednesday morning. A short time later, the Patriots released the star tight end. Hernandez was then brought to Attleboro District Court where he was charged with murder in the first degree and five other gun-related charges. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and will be held without bail.

[snip]

During the arraignment, a prosecutor detailed the case evidence and said Hernandez "orchestrated" the crime from the beginning. He said Hernandez was seen with Lloyd at 2:30 a.m. and his phone included texts to the victim and two friends on the night of the murder. He also said that the prosecution has video evidence of Hernandez walking through his home with a gun shortly after Lloyd's murder.

Patriots have released him:

"A young man was murdered last week and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss. Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation. We realize that law enforcement investigations into this matter are ongoing. We support their efforts and respect the process. At this time, we believe this transaction is simply the right thing to do."

Internet traffic to the United States from Asia, Africa and even Latin America has been in decline, a trend that is almost certainly going to accelerate as those regions ramp up their own network exchange points and local services to minimize dependence on networks and media services under US control.

The global imperative is to contain and isolate the criminal NSA data-mining exploits solely to the United States. That is, to quarantine this Orwellian infection to North America.

That's what the world is talking about today.

...............................................................

Actually, it's hundreds of millions of computers, and billions of phone calls, that are routed through the NSA's data collection traps -- from every corner of the world -- every minute of the day. Even though most of them are not communicating to anyone in the US, the Internet's current architecture allows the NSA to capture them all. Potentially, that means every single soul on earth who uses electronic communication is being tracked.

Other nations understood this immediately. They are well aware that their citizens have been caught in the illegal NSA dragnet. This is a completely unacceptable act by the US -- just as it would be if the world's Internet backbone was located in Russia and Moscow was mining the rich personal data of every American citizen.

The United States has inadvertently declared itself to be a rogue, predatory Police State. When the story broke, officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and a serious violation of basic human rights.

There were heated and outraged discussions at the G-8 summit in Ireland. Eric Holder was flown to Brussels for questioning by the European Union. When Holder left, they were even more outraged. The Germans openly liken the United States actions to the actions of the Cold War-era Stasi.

A working group of the Federation Council for investigating the facts of American Internet companies providing data about Russians to the US intelligence services invites the ex-employee of the US intelligence Edward Snowden to cooperation, head of the working group, Senator Ruslan Gattarov said Thursday.

The decision on creating the group was adopted at the plenary session of the Federation Council on Wednesday. According to Gattarov, it will include legislators, representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Prosecutor's office, the Ministry of communications, Roscomnadzor. Parliamentarians intend to submit first temporary results of the investigation in October.

"We invite Edward Snowden to cooperation and hope that, as soon as he settles his legal status, he will collaborate with our working group, and give us the proof of the US special services' access to servers of Internet companies," Gattarov said.

Voice of Russia

Perry criticized Davis for preventing the passage of a Texas measure that would ban abortions in the state after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Davis, a Democrat, held up the vote with a 13-hour filibuster that won national attention.

"No life is trivial in God's eyes. The fact is -- who are we to say that children born into the worst of circumstances can't live successful lives?" Perry asked at the National Right to Life convention in Dallas.

"In fact, even the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances," he continued. "She was the daughter of as single woman; she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It is just unfortunate that she hasn't learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters."

When can a weekend guest consent to a law enforcment search of a home computer?

h/t Volokh

Certainly Edward Snowden's crime is one of public relations. In this day and age, power ain't just jackboots, tanks and missiles. What he did by outing the NSA and its gargantuan surveillance operation was mess hugely with the American image -- the American brand -- with its irresistible combination of might and right.

That's the nature of his "treason." The secret he gave away was pretty much the same one the little boy blurted out in Hans Christian Andersen's tale: "The emperor has no clothes!" That is, the government's security industry isn't devoted, with benevolent righteousness, to protecting the American public. Instead, it's obsessively irrational, bent on accumulating data on every phone call we make. It's a berserk spy machine, seemingly to no sane end. How awkward."