Unmask This

Opening of Grenell's list, via Adam L. Silverman/Balloon Juice.

"The fact that Vice President Biden and all of the president's inner circle, President Obama's inner circle, individually requested to unmask Gen. Flynn is very troubling," he said. "Unmasking involves revealing the identity of an American's private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant to eavesdrop on that conversation." (Senator Rand Paul, quoted on Fox News)

Q: Dad, what's unmasking?

A: I thought you'd never ask. I found out around the beginning of the Republican attempt to discredit the case against Michael Flynn, in April 2017, and first wrote about it then. Actually I sort of found out earlier than that, during the days of High Greenwaldianism following the Snowden leaks of 2013, but didn't pay the same kind of attention.

Nothing is easier than getting an indictment

Once someone starts to cite a grand jury indictment as their proof that a prosecutors' charges have merit, they've demonstrated how weak their case is. Nothing is easier than getting an indictment. And either way, you haven't seen the evidence to assess it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 14, 2018

Trying to imagine how an investigation team that had a bunch of flashy assertions with no evidence managed to compose a couple of paragraphs like these from the indictment (from the money laundering count 10):

59. ...To further avoid creating a centralized paper trail of all of their purchases, the Conspirators purchased infrastructure using hundreds of different email accounts, in some cases using a new account for each purchase. The Conspirators used fictitious names and addresses in order to obscure their identities and their links to Russia and the Russian government. For example, the dcleaks.com domain was registered and paid for using the fictitious name “Carrie Feehan” and an address in New York. In some cases, as part of the payment process, the Conspirators provided vendors with nonsensical addresses such as “usa Denver AZ,”'“gfhgh ghfhgfh fdgfdg WA,” and “1 2 dwd District of Columbia.” 

60. The Conspirators used several dedicated email accounts to track basic bitcoin transaction information and to facilitate bitcoin payments to vendors. One of these dedicated accounts, registered with the username “gfadel47,” received hundreds of bitcoin payment requests from approximately 100 different email accounts. For example, on or about February 1, 2016, the gfadel47 account received the instruction to “[p]lease send exactly 0.026043 bitcoin to” a certain thirty-four character bitcoin address. Shortly thereafter, a transaction matching those exact instructions was added to the Blockchain.

Like this?

For the Record: Two Rants

Updated

Jeffeson Memorial after a 25-foot rise in sea level (that's centuries away, but we could see five feet in another hundred years). Image by Nickolay Lamm/Storage Front.

The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 1, 2017

Or the big story that in catching Manafort, Page, Stone, Flynn, and hopefully Trump NSA turns out to be working exactly the way it should.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

Turns out the feared abuse of the system didn't happen. Instead it unmasked Trump minions letting Russia compromise our security.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

And one on this afternoon's big announcement from the Rose Garden:

The Mask of Sanity

"Any Rand Paul supporters out there in the audience? Please step over to the information desk after the show so the Deep State can take those masks off and mercilessly mock you on TV."

Harvey Cleckley's book The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality described the psychopath as

outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions. Cleckley questions whether this mask of sanity is voluntarily assumed to intentionally hide the lack of internal structure, but concludes it hides a serious, but yet imprecisely unidentified, semantic neuropsychiatric defect.

"Semantic neuropsychiatric defect" sounds like a plausible characterization of the logic used by the paranoid conservative trying to assemble a workable conspiracy story.

Chuck Ross in the Daily Caller a month or so ago:

According to Mensch, who has been criticized for spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about Trump on social media, the warrant was for communications from two Russian banks, Alfa Bank and SVB. While a warrant for the banks would not directly target American citizens, including any Trump associates, some have speculated that the FBI could have used a technique called “reverse targeting” in which a warrant is obtained for a foreign entity even though the goal is to surveil Americans.

There's that idea that since Louise Mensch has spread unfounded conspiracy theories about Trump, she'd be a really great person for Daily Caller to cite. "See, if we think everything she says about our Leader is a vicious fabrication, then if she says something we like it must be true!"

It's the coverup that tells you there's a crime

Down in Mobile, December 17; photo by Stephen Crowley/New York Times.

So we already knew Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III lied to Senator Franken in his confirmation hearing for the attorney general gig in early January.

No, not about his contacts as a Trump surrogate with the Russian ambassador, reported in the Washington Post last night, about his record as a defender of civil rights:

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) grew testy when questioning Sessions about several civil rights lawsuits Sessions had listed on his Senate questionnaire as examples of “significant” cases that Sessions personally litigated during his career.

The Trump transition team later said that the cases were worthy of being mentioned, even though Sessions had not been actively involved in them.

New Year Schadenfreude

Is Netanyahu a secret Muslim? Image via CNN.

A couple of years ago (November 2013), in the context of one of those posts I was doing at the time trying to explain why the NSA surveillance operations affecting US persons, unacceptable as they might be if they actually existed, were definitely not the same thing as the SS or the Stasi, I wrote:

The Obama administration is considerably less Pinochet-like than [the Nixon-era programs]. They would plainly prefer that whoever they're spying on should not have a clue that it's happening, a sign that what they're after isn't fear or obedience at all, but intelligence. And above all they don't want the people being spied on to know who they are, even at the price of letting us believe, following the Snowden document dumps, that it's all of us. Am I confident nobody's spying on me? Yes. Am I confident nobody's spying on harmless dissidents, cheating girlfriends, or Binyamin Netanyahu? No, but I sure hope they're tapping Netanyahu.

So I'm naturally pretty pleased to learn from this Adam Entous and Danny Yadron article (Wall Street Journal this side of the paywall) that they decided to take my advice and even got some real stuff for a change, catching the Israeli government suborning legislators and lobbyists in the effort to sabotage Obama's Iran policy:

Got paranoia? Update

Toilet in Tobermory, Ontario, via Dima's Corner.

I haven't wanted to dive into this toilet for quite a long time, because it's really not my subject, but I happened to notice a silly falsehood from Mark Rumold for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at Professor Cole's place:

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans’ Internet communications.

Well, no, they don't confirm that at all. Yes, the tight relationship between NSA and AT&T seems to be demonstrated, but as the Times introduction to the documents makes clear,

White House Fool Report: Down to the wire

Eastern gray squirrel. Image via Chris Vaisvil.

I need you to make a phone call

Inbox

x

Elizabeth Warren info@elizabethwarren.com via proofsender1.gc.cuny.edu	12:59 PM (23 hours ago)

David, We have one last chance to stop Fast Track on trade – right now! The House has scheduled a vote for Friday, and dozens of members of Congress are still undecided (or undeclared) about which way they will vote. Will you take a minute right now to call your representative’s office and tell him or her to vote NO on Fast Track?

You need me to make a phone call? Honestly, if I'm doing it, I'm not doing it for you. I hope this great American progressive is not slowly turning into Alan Grayson.

Spies on the Prize

Image from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers by flamedrake.

Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo in the Times:

When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.

“That’s a good question, actually,” she said.

But she's just had so much on her mind in the intervening months. The answer is probably somewhere in there too, but who knows where she stashed it?

Cheap shots and free associations

Poster by Mungo Thomson, 2004.

@matthewstoller @emptywheel @AlexanderAbdo @froomkin I know that, Matt- I've never, ever thought "reform" would come from USG - still don't.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2014

No, of course, how could a branch of government institute reform in a government agency? Like, how would that even work? It makes no sense at all!

Electoral cheap shots

New York painted door, Léa Descamps.

The DCCC Only Rings Twice

Just heard from Tengrain that Steve Israel has resigned from his chair, to spend more time with his Broder Caucus I guess (their motto: We can have a path to citizenship, but only if we secure the Broder). Meanwhile the DCCC is sending its first post-election emails:

Bless them all!

This is great, from Shane Harris at Foreign Policy: it seems that at the same time as General Keith Alexander was running the National Security Agency he was really busy speculating in commodities, potash and aluminum, with weird and unpredictable markets and connections to our favorite spying targets, China and the Russian Federation:

Glorious Fifth: Postscript

Looks like the promised sky-covering fireworks naming of Snowden names at Pierre Omidyar's Intercept really has taken place after all, not on the fifth of July, but close. It's possibly the most shocking misbehavior by the NSA reported in the Snowden documents so far—involving the targeting of American citizens and even a Republican!—and I'm really glad to see it come out:

Cheap shots and dust storms

Worst thing about the NSA? They're all apparently 9 years old:

And cops and hookers, boobs and haboobs and much much more below the fold!

Merkelwürdiges Gefühl im Kopf

"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland". Photo by Armin
Kübelbeck, via Konrad Werner.

Jon Queally at CommonDreams passing on some Greenwaldian goose bumps which may turn out to be a little more excited than the occasion calls for:

Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What the paper reported, based on information provided by a "high-ranking NSA employee in Germany," was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed [jump]

Greenwald's literary errors

Santiaguito, Guatemala, 2005.

Bureaucrat Decries Unauthorized Disclosures that Make Him Look Bad

Or as Glenn Greenwald's copy editor at The Intercept, who I believe is Glenn Greenwald, put it,

Blackout Blues

Image via TodayInWebDesign.

At Jonathan Turley's blog is a post (signed by Charlton Stanley, PhD) alleging a US "media blackout" of Edward Snowden's interview on the German government–run TV station ARD:

The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it.

I left the following in the comments section:

Surveillance is for little people

Hide and seek. From The Little People Project by Slinkachu.

Let's just try this one more time:

I really don't like the idea of everybody's communications metadata, including mine, being collected, but I do like it better than one alternative, which is that exemplified by, say, the German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, speaking of Orwellian names), of spying only on one's political enemies, adherents of obnoxious sects and soi-disant religions, and threats to "free enterprise":

While the BfV uses all kinds of surveillance technology and infiltration, they mostly use open sources.^[1] The BfV publishes a yearly report (Verfassungsschutzbericht) which is intended to raise awareness about anti-constitutional activities.^[8]

Main concerns of the BfV are:

And thanks for all the fish

Great job reining in those abuses, self-denominated progressives:

And the president said he would sharply restrict eavesdropping on the leaders of dozens of foreign allies, the disclosure of which ignited a diplomatic firestorm with friendly countries like Germany.

But Mr. Obama did not accept other recommendations that have been made to him on reining in surveillance, like requiring court approval for so-called national security letters, in which the government demands information on individuals from companies. That was a victory for the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies, who argue that these letters are vital to investigations.

Threw all the Arab Americans under the bus but at least you protected Angela Merkel's Handy.

AP Photo/Joerg Sarbach

Don't make me

Personally I don't think Edward Snowden should be charged with espionage under a ridiculous misuse of the statute, and apparently charging him with theft of government property is a violation of sensible Justice Department rules, so if that's the best they can come up with maybe they really should just drop the case altogether. Especially if it gives Michael Hayden a sad.

That said, I just cannot get over what a crappy case it is as a poster child against the abuses of the US intelligence agencies foreign and domestic or for the improved protection of federal whistleblowers. This is shown more clearly than ever by the way the New York Times has jumped on it as part of their campaign to show that the Obama administration is more totalitarian in tendency than that of Cheney because even Stalin wouldn't have been mean to David Sanger. I refer to Friday's editorial in which the Times claims, with some reason, that