@bareboards2
@newtboy



Answer this Why is Baltimore such a shit hole in treating inner city poor folks like dogs?


Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor. In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore city vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland. Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years.”
..."the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is. Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat. Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor “Space-to-Destroy”. From a recent Allen West post

http://allenbwest.com/2015/04/the-dirty-little-secret-no-one-wants-to-admit-about-baltimore/

Not to mention the $1.5Million /year federal dollars for education. Total 18.3 Million from 2001 and today..

plus the 1.8 Billion from Obama's Stimulus.

Peace/ love sharing and caring. Yep a Democrat Utopia.

Thanks for linking the videos.
It probably wont make any headline news on the mainstream media. Sad to see him call the American people too stupid and openly say he tricked the people via deception and lies all the while Obama and the left are right there cheering him on.

Even worse the left will watch these and be too stupid to be offended .

Another video popped up with Kristen Stewart in it about camp x-ray after watching this one. The context might have been wrong, but i can understand why @billpayer said that - it's a terrible, terrible thing of which he speaks and it can feel frustrating when you care about those things but it seems to you like most forms of mainstream media only tell a certain side.

It is frustrating, and i doubt many people disagree with you that it's a monumental injustice, but the other side of the story does get told.. and i think the noticeable weighting is indicative of what the majority of people "want" to hear/believe rather than a calculated move to revise history (i.e. more cinema tickets will be sold by a movie in which a westerner overcomes perceived terrorism than one in which a light is shone on the possible human rights violations and illegal internment of innocent victims of the west's war on terror).

I was surprised by the 'kstew' trailer, looked ....intelligent and thoughtful?

He also doesn't do it very well, or comfortably. He reminds me of what Cenk was like during his brief stint in the mainstream media, however he'll probably continue to be an apologist for the $$.

And mainstream media's self censorship continues
http://www.alternet.org/media/msnbc-correspondent-i-was-canceled-because-i-criticized-networks-pro-israel-coverage

And every reporter who is critical of Israeli actions gets reassigned. This is how the mainstream media coerces reporters into covering one side of the story. Reporters are forced to choose between their careers and their integrity.

I have to hear the Fox News drivel every day blaring at ultra high volumes from downstairs every day. I can't wait to get out of this house again, just to escape the maddening stuff. Depressing so many people think that it is agenda free and all the others are the one that have the agenda because Fox News and often times the pulpit says so. Don't question authority, unless said authority is a demoncrat as they tend to think of the Dems...

Of course once upon a time I did too, then I started applying actual critical thinking rather than what they said, often by going "if you really think about it..." then apply some logical fallacy that sounds true enough that you repeat it and feel embarrassed later that not only did you believe it that you actually propagated the non-sense. I used to be a hardcore Christian Republican (even had posted on the Sift under another name, but could never recover the password for, defending Fox News saying how they may be to the right but that is just to balance out how far left the mainstream media's which I was lead to believe were near Pravda). Then I had problems with legislating morality, mostly Republican drug policy and became a Christian Libertarian. Then I had an issue with American style Free Market Capitalism, and felt we had to do more to help the needy and the poor as Jesus commanded us to, and I went more or less an independent leaning to the Green/Democrat.

My faith if God started waning as I had issues with so many Christians voting Republican as the party was clearly opposed to everything I was reading in the Bible, and if Jehovah was any more real than any other supposed god, such as Odin (who at least apparently got rid of the Frost Giants as I've never seen one or evidence of one), then He'd be screaming at them that is the wrong way (now to be fair, half of the Christians in this nation also feel the Dems are more Christian oriented than Republicans, and many of the more liberal of them would point out that the election and more importantly the re-election of Obama was God's way of saying just that).

Then hundreds of Christians shouted "let them die! Let them die!" over and over again at the Republican debate and Christianity lost me forever. The Republican right wanted to see people like me and my children die because my employer doesn't offer an affordable health care plan and they don't want their taxes to help with getting health insurance either. And it wasn't just about me, because even if I got a better job, somebody has to work that job, somebody has to sacrifice health insurance so some rich guy who can more than afford to pay living wages and affordable health care for all who work for him, chooses not to in order to make himself rich, and over half the Christians in this country support the position, they vote for people who want to give that rich guy more tax cuts, and cut all aid to the people he employs. They want those people to die, as they said at the debate. Confront them and they'll say no, they don't want them to die, but the people who work there should take responsibility for their own selves, and ignore the fact somebody has to work there. They seem to think that people only work where they want to work at, and that everybody at that big box retailer is working there because its what they want rather than the fact it was who called and offered the job. They seem to think that in fact, no, nobody needs to work that spot if I didn't work it, that anybody needing affordable health insurance and a living wage simply wouldn't work the people working, or I, weren't too lazy to do so, that somehow everyone working jobs not paying living wages and not having affordable health care took those jobs out of laziness and not necessity.

What? Now you are just making what I said up because you have a weak argument and you need to try to fuel the fire. Nobody says to keep it a secret. Honestly, nobody cares if you are gay or not (only mainstream media likes to sensationalize it). I'm just saying, dont tell me what I should believe or shouldnt believe. And if I dont believe what you believe, you should just fuck off. Dont try to ruin peoples livelihood because they dont believe the same things. The gay community tends to do this a lot and to me that makes them no better than the Nazi's.

Again, I'm separating what normal religious people think and the extremist.

World leaders are cumulatively an agency for international corporations. NATFA, MAI, TPP, and every g8, g12, gWhatever summit are all secretive meetings with the same end result: to break down barriers to trade and facilitate greater corporate profit. These agreements give corporations the power to supersede local labour, environmental and trade laws and they have been layering one agreement atop another for years.

Thank you to Wikileaks for exposing what protesters on the ground have always known but weren't able to prove. Once thought of as lunatics, they are now the most sane among us. It's going to be a sad world if we don't stand up to corporate money in politics, although they'll be keeping us happy in the meantime with cheap goods and entertainment and status-quo, happy-happy news reporting from mainstream media.

@lantern53, basically what @enoch said.

EDIT: Warning.... very long post ahead... I'm sure there will be many TLDRs.

Let me be clear. I have no objection to businesses making a profit, or the people who run and operate those businesses to make more income than their workers... where I have a problem is when a bushiness fires 350 people, then tells the rest of the employees the company can't afford to give them raises then the owner goes out and buys a jet on the companies dime, the next year he fired 250+ people, and last year 450+ people, and no raises to anyone but the executives all those years, because the company couldn't afford it. How many jobs did that jet cost? Apparently 1,000 jobs so far, and many more who've made minimum wage for 4 years now so that one man can have a jet? Unrepentant greed is my issue. Where I have a problem is where the 6 Walmart heirs have a net worth over the bottom 30 some percent of the American population, meanwhile they pay their workers minimum wage and give few benefits... All of that would be somewhat acceptable, but for the fact that those on the right get mad at those 1,000 people that guy fired to have his jet for having lost their jobs, they are mad at the employees still there and working jobs like Walmart, Target, McDonalds and the like for not being paid a living wage. People on the right are mad at the people stuck at the bottom rather than saying those at the top should be held mildly accountable. It's like that cartoon where a rich guy, a middle class guy and a low wage worker are all at a table with 100 cookies, the rich guy takes 99 of them, the middle class guy gets 1, and the rich guy points to the poor guy with crumbs and warns the middle class guy that the poor guy wants his cookie... and rather than be mad at the rich guy for taking everything from everyone, the middle class guy (read those on the right, or at least those who vote that way, as those in control know what's going on) gets upset at the poor guy who was left with crumbs. The right are angry at the victim rather than the person doing the crime.

And like Enoch pointed out, it isn't Democrat vs Republican. They are very much the same, especially nowadays. The ideological differences are greatly exaggerated by the media... [And no, there isn't a "liberal media", at least not mainstream. Over 90% of the news is controlled by like 6 companies, none of whom have an interest in making American's aware of just how big the wealth distribution divide is, how fast it's growing, how the income gap is growing at an alarming rate... The fact that if minimum wage kept up with inflation since 1968, it would be over $10.50 by now, and if it kept pace with worker productivity it would be over $21.72 and a bit higher (I can't find the exact figure at the moment, but it was around $24) if it kept pace with executive/CEO pay... but I'm getting way off topic.] The truth is, they are far more alike then the media makes it out to be, especially right wing media. The reason it seems so vast is because that drives ratings, making people angry and distracted. Making mountains out of molehills, keeping people up with the Kardashians, Honey Boo Boo, Miley Cyrus, and other people that don't matter rather than focusing on the stuff that matters... rather than just report the news, they now feed you how to think about it (especially used by those on the right when they go "if you really think about it" then make some logical leap that isn't there, but makes their listeners/viewers think they are being smarter than they are... mainstream media does the same though, so...)

I am ultimately an anarchist. I'd love to see an end to government, but until such point that humanity can grow up, get past the evils of greed, lack of education, lack of empathy, and superstitions, then government is a necessary force to maintain those with greedy motives that want to take advantage of those lacking education, who are superstitious. We need a government of people of empathy who can understand those people, and help those people free themselves of the greedy elite are are pulling way too many strings... sadly they are using government to do so, but that is the thing about democracy, representative or not, we can change the outcome, we can make things better for all, not just a select few.

I get it. I used to be a hardcore Republican. I used to hate the poor, and thought that "teach a man to fish" type stuff, and thought the best way to help them was to kick them in the water and let them sink or swim essentially, some may drown, but many would swim and rise above it all. Then I started to have issues with how the Republican party wanted to control what people did on their own, that wasn't hurting anyone else, and I became a hardcore Libertarian, still belittling the poor (funny as I was poor myself). I stopped watching and defending Fox and Rush and the like, but I held to the Libertarian ideals of free markets being the best solution. Then as I studied God's Word, I started having issues with how the Republican right and Libertarians were sort of contrary to His teachings that I already commented on in my earlier post. At the same time I was learning critical thinking to analyze not just what was said, but who's saying it, and vetting their sources, and I started to see that not only did it conflict with my faith, it conflicted with logic, at least with how man is now... that critical thinking would soon be applied to faith as well, already shaken by the fact that so many people were clearly voting for a party that proclaimed Christianity but was so vastly opposed to the teaching of Christ I had to ask why wasn't God screaming at His people that they were wrong (some liberal Christians would agree that perhaps God was saying something, but making sure the right lost the Presidency, as God is in control, and appoints all leaders, but I was too far off faith by that point). I came to question other aspects of faith, and eventually lost it fully. [I think the Christian Right has been taken over by Christian Reconstructionist who don't admit they are Reconstructionist or even Calvinist, but they clearly are. They try to slightly distance themselves from Rousas John Rushdoony and his ilk, but they are all the same, and they will turn more and more people off Christianity than anything else in this world... save perhaps education and learning to think critically... and ultimately is the true power behind the Tea Party movement... Reconstructionist mixed with a healthy dose of Millennialism...] Anyhow, again getting way off topic, I get it, I was there once myself. I have an old account here on the Sift (I could never resurrect as Hotmail kept losing the password reset requests) where I defended Fox News, where I said something stupid and ignorant about evolution... heck, one look at the old political or religious posts on my blog (personal blog, not a videosift blog) and one would see how far to the right I used to be. I learned though that everyone is closer to one another than the media and politicians and the elite that are pulling the strings would have you believe.

This is the kind of bullshit I expect from mainstream media. At least in the Lewinsky scandal there was some actual evidence made available to the public. Here they are just speculating on the personal life of a politican based on an alleged tape that no one has seen. And besides, the personal life of a politican is irrelevant. If it's affecting how he actually performed his job than focus on that. They're reporting unverified accusations against a person which aren't really any of the public's business in the first place. They only report it because it grabs more eyeballs than dissecting policy.

@alcom No hard feelings. I'm starting to get used to this. Please let me try to explain one more time, because I feel like I have an important point:

Videos like this are great for the people who are already in agreement, but it's my belief that they're intended to educate and bring positive change.
My belief is that we need to get people who disagree entirely with the subject and message to absorb the information if we actually want to make that change.
We're communicating with people who, for all intents and purposes from our point of view, are completely irrational. 'They' believe the same about people with our perspective. If you're going to approach them for a dialogue, it only takes ONE mistake, misquote, or sense of being manipulated to lose them, and then you're back to square one.

So the reason I criticize this video is because I could see someone who was ignorant of this information easily turning it off as soon as it got to the dramatic music and the matter-of-fact narrative presentation, or the misalignment with their Empirical analogies.
I'm sure you've seen enough mainstream media today to know that as soon as something smells fishy to one party or another, they hang onto that, no matter how trivial whatever that thing is, and it's the only excuse they need to stick fingers in ears and "La la la I can't hear you! You're wrong!"

I feel like I'm turning into exactly that kind of manipulative, psychoanalyzing communicator, which makes me sick. But my whole motivation is to clear the bullshit away, that's all. Thanks for your reply.

Has not left our solar system...it has only entered interstellar space.
It would need several tens of thousands more years to leave our solar system.

Silly mainstream media.

brilliant piece from Cenk, thought he was going to shed a few tears there, you could certainly see how much he values integrity in reporting, and how upset he is that it no longer exists in the mainstream media.

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A leaked top-secret order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Business customers. Last night The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on a, quote, "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the content of the communications. The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over records for both international and domestic records. It also forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the court order. It is unclear if other phone companies were ordered to hand over similar information.

AMY GOODMAN: According to legal analysts, the Obama administration relied on a controversial provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of, quote, "any tangible thing relevant to a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation." The disclosure comes just weeks after news broke that the Obama administration had been spying on journalists from the Associated Press and James Rosen, a reporter from Fox News.

We’re now joined by two former employees of the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the NSA. He resigned shortly after the September 11th attacks over his concern over the increasing surveillance of Americans. We’re also joined in studio here by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

First, for your legal opinion, Shayana, can you talk about the significance of what has just been revealed?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. So I think, you know, we have had stories, including one in USA Today in May 2006, that have said that the government is collecting basically all the phone records from a number of large telephone companies. What’s significant about yesterday’s disclosure is that it’s the first time that we’ve seen the order, to really appreciate the sort of staggeringly broad scope of what one of the judges on this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved of, and the first time that we can now confirm that this was under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which, you know, has been dubbed the libraries provision, because people were mostly worried about the idea that the government would use it to get library records. Now we know that they’re using it to get phone records. And just to see the immense scope of this warrant order, you know, when most warrants are very narrow, is really shocking as a lawyer.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, some might argue that the Obama administration at least went to the FISA court to get approval for this, unlike the Bush administration in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. Well, we don’t know if the Bush administration was, you know, getting these same orders and if this is just a continuation, a renewal order. It lasted for only—it’s supposed to last for only three months, but they may have been getting one every three months since 2006 or even earlier. You know, when Congress reapproved this authority in 2011, you know, one of the things Congress thought was, well, at least they’ll have to present these things to a judge and get some judicial review, and Congress will get some reporting of the total number of orders. But when one order covers every single phone record for a massive phone company like Verizon, the reporting that gets to Congress is going to be very hollow. And then, similarly, you know, when the judges on the FISA court are handpicked by the chief justice, and the government can go to a judge, as they did here, in North Florida, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, who’s 73 years old and is known as a draconian kind of hanging judge in his sentencing, and get some order that’s this broad, I think both the judicial review and the congressional oversight checks are very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is just Verizon, because that’s what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian got a hold of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other orders for the other telephone companies, right?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Like BellSouth, like AT&T, etc.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: As there have been in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Yeah, those were—those were companies mentioned in that USA Today story in 2006. Nothing about the breadth of this order indicates that it’s tied to any particular national security investigation, as the statute says it has to be. So, some commentators yesterday said, "Well, this order came out on—you know, it’s dated 10 days after the Boston attacks." But it’s forward-looking. It goes forward for three months. Why would anyone need to get every record from Verizon Business in order to investigate the Boston bombings after they happened?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Binney, a decades-long veteran of the NSA, your reaction when you heard about this news?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, this was just the FBI going after data. That was their request. And they’re doing that because they—if they want to try to get it—they have to have it approved by a court in order to get it as evidence into a courtroom. But NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. That’s one of the main reasons they couldn’t tell Senator Wyden, with his request of how many U.S. citizens are in the NSA databases. There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, let’s go to Senator Wyden. A secret court order to obtain the Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going asked senators, "Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?" The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Ron Wyden. He and Senator Udall have been raising concerns because they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee but cannot speak out openly exactly about what they know. William Binney, you left the agency after September 2001, deeply concerned—this is after you’d been there for 40 years—about the amount of surveillance of U.S. citizens. In the end, your house was raided. You were in the shower. You’re a diabetic amputee. The authorities had a gun at your head. Which agency had the gun at your head, by the way?

WILLIAM BINNEY: That was the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: You were not charged, though you were terrorized. Can you link that to what we’re seeing today?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s directly linked, because it has to do with all of the surveillance of the U.S. citizens that’s been going on since 9/11. I mean, that’s—they were getting—from just one company alone, that I knew of, they were getting over 300 million call records a day on U.S. citizens. So, I mean, and when you add the rest of the companies in, my estimate was that there were probably three billion phone records collected every day on U.S. citizens. So, over time, that’s a little over 12 trillion in their databases since 9/11. And that’s just phones; that doesn’t count the emails. And they’re avoiding talking about emails there, because that’s also collecting content of what people are saying. And that’s in the databases that NSA has and that the FBI taps into. It also tells you how closely they’re related. When the FBI asks for data and the court approves it, the data is sent to NSA, because they’ve got all the algorithms to do the diagnostics and community reconstructions and things like that, so that the FBI can—makes it easier for the FBI to interpret what’s in there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after he blew the whistle on mismanagement and waste and constitutional violations at the NSA. Thomas Drake, your reaction to this latest revelation?

THOMAS DRAKE: My reaction? Where has the mainstream media been? This is routine. These are routine orders. This is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records of—from any company that exists in the United States.

I think what people are now realizing is that this isn’t just a terrorist issue. This is simply the ability of the government in secret, on a vast scale, to collect any and all phone call records, including domestic to domestic, local, as well as location information. We might—there’s no need now to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond. And this is only just Verizon. As large as Verizon is, with upwards of 100 million subscribers, what about all the other telecoms? What about all the other Internet service providers? It’s become institutionalized in this country, in the greatest of secrecy, for the government to classify, conceal not only the facts of the surveillance, but also the secret laws that are supporting surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Drake, what can they do with this information, what’s called metadata? I mean, they don’t have the content of the conversation, supposedly—or maybe we just don’t see that, that’s under another request, because, remember, we are just seeing this one, for people who are listening and watching right now, this one request that is specifically to—and I also want to ask you: It’s Verizon Business Services; does that have any significance? But what does it mean to have the length of time and not the names of, but where the call originates and where it is going, the phone numbers back and forth?

THOMAS DRAKE: You get incredible amounts of information about subscribers. It’s basically the ability to forward-profile, as well as look backwards, all activities associated with those phone numbers, and not only just the phone numbers and who you called and who called you, but also the community of interests beyond that, who they were calling. I mean, we’re talking about a phenomenal set of records that is continually being added to, aggregated, year after year and year, on what have now become routine orders. Now, you add the location information, that’s a tracking mechanism, monitoring tracking of all phone calls that are being made by individuals. I mean, this is an extraordinary breach. I’ve said this for years. Our representing attorney, Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project, we’ve been saying this for years and no—from the wilderness. We’ve had—you’ve been on—you know, you’ve had us on your show in the past, but it’s like, hey, everybody kind of went to sleep, you know, while the government is harvesting all these records on a routine basis.

You’ve got to remember, none of this is probable cause. This is simply the ability to collect. And as I was told shortly after 9/11, "You don’t understand, Mr. Drake. We just want the data." And so, the secret surveillance regime really has a hoarding complex, and they can’t get enough of it. And so, here we’re faced with the reality that a government in secret, in abject violation of the Fourth Amendment, under the cover of enabling act legislation for the past 12 years, is routinely analyzing what is supposed to be private information. But, hey, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because we can get to it. We have secret agreements with the telecoms and Internet service providers and beyond. And we can do with the data anything we want.

So, you know, I sit here—I sit here as an American, as I did shortly after 9/11, and it’s all déjà vu for me. And then I was targeted—it’s important to note, I—not just for massive fraud, waste and abuse; I was specifically targeted as the source for The New York Times article that came out in December of 2005. They actually thought that I was the secret source regarding the secret surveillance program. Ultimately, I was charged under the Espionage Act. So that should tell you something. Sends an extraordinarily chilling message. It is probably the deepest, darkest secret of both administrations, greatly expanded under the Obama administration. It’s now routine practice.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Shayana, I’d like to ask you, specifically that issue of the FISA court also authorizing domestic surveillance. I mean, is there—even with the little laws that we have left, is there any chance for that to be challenged, that the FISA court is now also authorizing domestic records being surveiled?

AMY GOODMAN: FISA being Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I mean, you know, two things about that. First, the statute says that there have to be reasonable grounds to think that this information is relevant to an investigation of either foreign terrorist activity or something to do with a foreign power. So, you know, obviously, this perhaps very compliant judge approved this order, but it doesn’t seem like this is what Congress intended these orders would look like. Seems like, on the statute, that Congress intended they would be somewhat narrower than this, right?

But there’s a larger question, which is that, for years, the Supreme Court, since 1979, has said, "We don’t have the same level of protection over, you know, the calling records—the numbers that we dial and how long those calls are and when they happen—as we do over the contents of a phone call, where the government needs a warrant." So everyone assumes the government needs a warrant to get at your phone records and maybe at your emails, but it’s not true. They just basically need a subpoena under existing doctrine. And so, the government uses these kind of subpoenas to get your email records, your web surfing records, you know, cloud—documents in cloud storage, banking records, credit records. For all these things, they can get these extraordinarily broad subpoenas that don’t even need to go through a court.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, talk about the significance of President Obama nominating James Comey to be the head of the FBI—

SHAYANA KADIDAL: One of the—

AMY GOODMAN: —and who he was.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. One of the grand ironies is that Obama has nominated a Republican who served in the Bush administration for a long time, a guy with a reputation as being kind of personally incorruptable. I think, in part, he nominated him to be the head of the FBI, the person who would, you know, be responsible for seeking and renewing these kind of orders in the future, for the next 10 years—he named Comey, a Republican, because he wanted to, I think, distract from the phone record scandal, the fact that Holder’s Justice Department has gone after the phone records of the Associated Press and of Fox News reporter James Rosen, right?

And you asked, what can you tell from these numbers? Well, if you see the reporter called, you know, five or six of his favorite sources and then wrote a particular report that divulged some embarrassing government secret, that’s—you know, that’s just as good as hearing what the reporter was saying over the phone line. And so, we had this huge, you know, scandal over the fact that the government went after the phone records of AP, when now we know they’re going after everyone’s phone records, you know. And I think one of the grand ironies is that, you know, he named Comey because he had this reputation as being kind of a stand-up guy, who stood up to Bush in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004 and famously said, "We have to cut back on what the NSA is doing." But what the NSA was doing was probably much broader than what The New York Times finally divulged in that story in December ’05.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, will Glenn Greenwald now be investigated, of The Guardian, who got the copy of this, so that they can find his leak, not to mention possibly prosecute him?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Oh, I think absolutely there will be some sort of effort to go after him punitively. The government rarely tries to prosecute people who are recognized as journalists. And so, Julian Assange maybe is someone they try to portray as not a journalist. Glenn Greenwald, I think, would be harder to do. But there are ways of going after them punitively that don’t involve prosecution, like going after their phone records so their sources dry up.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw an astounding comment by Pete Williams, who used to be the Pentagon spokesperson, who’s now with NBC, this morning, talking—he had talked with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had said, when he goes after the reporters—you know, the AP reporters, the Fox reporter—they’re not so much going after them; not to worry, they’re going after the whistleblowers. They’re trying to get, through them, the people. What about that, that separation of these two?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I’ll give you an example from the AP. They had a reporter named, I believe, John Solomon. In 2000, he reported a story about the botched investigation into Robert Torricelli. The FBI didn’t like the fact that they had written this—he had written this story about how they dropped the ball on that, so they went after his phone records. And three years later, he talked to some of his sources who had not talked to him since then, and they said, "We’re not going to talk to you, because we know they’re getting your phone records."

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. William Binney and Thomas Drake both worked for the National Security Agency for years, and both ultimately resigned. Thomas Drake was prosecuted. They were trying to get him under the Espionage Act. All of those charges were dropped. William Binney held at gunpoint by the FBI in his shower, never prosecuted. Both had expressed deep concern about the surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for our hours of interviews with them, as well." - Democracy Now!