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Cop Says Obama Doesn't Follow Constitution, Neither Does He

Neil deGrasse Tyson schooling ignorant climate fools

robbersdog49 says...

I think the parallel with gravity is that although the exact cause is debatable, the effect isn't.

If gravity were to be discussed like climate change is then we'd have people arguing about whether or not a ball will fall downwards if dropped, not about whether a graviton is the cause. The right would be arguing that the 'scientists' only observe the ball going down because they're throwing it down.

We're living under a cliff and rocks are starting to fall down on us with alarming regularity, far more often than they used to. We should be building shelters to hide from them or moving away, or strengthening the cliff to stop more rocks from falling but we aren't because we don't know if the graviton exists or not.

I just don't understand the controversy. The earth is warming, and it's going to have a catastrophic effect on a lot of the life on the planet, including us. We could potentially do something about it, or at the very least try to do something about it. But instead there's all this fighting and bitterness.

I'd resign myself to the fact that the human race are a bunch of fucking idiots and we'll get what we deserve but six months ago my wife gave birth to our first child. Every time I look at him I think about the world we're going to leave for him and his kids and realise what a bunch of arseholes we're being. I would love to know what catastrophic things the deniers think will happen if we do try to do something about climate change. What could be worse?

harlequinn said:

I don't feel gravity is ever a good comparison because gravity always points out the opposite of anyone trying to say something is settled.

I'm sure you know this, but for those that don't.

When the Newtonian model of gravity was postulated it answered some unexplained phenomena. Even though it was mainly right, it wasn't totally right.

Along comes Einstein and he proposes a couple of neat new hypothesis that when verified answered some of the shortcomings people had found after a while in Newton's hypothesis.

We moved a little closer to the truth.

At this point in time we haven't actually observed a graviton. It remains elusive. And more to the point, our model (theory if you like) of gravity may change and things like the graviton may not exist at all.

In summary, science points to what is the most correct explanation of what we observe at a given point in time. It is rarely settled and almost never "right" or "true", just "more right" or "more true" than what has passed before.

Japanese trains are scheduled to within 0.19 seconds

andyboy23 says...

An interesting bit from that Wiki link:
"It is believed that a contributing factor in the accident was the JR West policy of schedule punctuality. As a result of this, Masataka Ide, JR West adviser who played a major role in enforcing the punctuality of the company's trains, announced that he would resign in June 2005 at the company's annual shareholder meeting, with the company's chairman and president resigning in August."

Executives taking responsibility for things? Woah. An unfamiliar concept in America...

Jinx said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_rail_crash

Arriving on time aint all it's cracked up to be.

David Mitchell on Atheism

shinyblurry says...

I wasn't raised in a religious home so I never had that aspect in my life of seeking comfort from the idea of God. I believed that we were products of random chance, although the real love and connection I felt to people and this reality did not feel that way. Essentially, though, I had resigned myself to the fact of my future death, and that eventually no one would ever remember or care that I even existed.

I was an agnostic towards the idea of God at that point. Atheism to me was the other extreme from theism, and I believed that the rational standpoint was agnosticism. If you did not have equal skepticism towards either side, I felt you were being intellectually dishonest. You could sum it up in a simple statement, that everything, including the fact that anything exists at all, is equally unlikely. To try to get that fact to point towards or away from a God in my opinion just showed bias.

I changed my mind when I began to have supernatural experiences. This didn't make me a theist, but it did open my eyes to the idea that there was a spiritual reality. It was in pursuing that spirituality that I received revelation that an all powerful, benevolent God does exist. After this, I became a Christian and was born again, and transformed into a new person.

So, what I would say is, there is no evidence of God beyond personal revelation by God. This is by design because God requires us to seek Him by faith. He is seeking those who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth. If you want to know whether there is a God or not, you must seek Him with all of your heart. Seek Him while it is still called today, because today is the day of salvation.

Jeremiah 29:13 And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

How Conservative Media Treated Women In 2013

Jon Stewart on Rob Ford's Response to Sexual Harassment

Lawdeedaw says...

On this one I am curious. Forget the crack and rants, forget the fact he is a lying piece of shit that needs to resign, this one seems non-issue on every level. It's not PC, but it's not malicious, and malicious is what I care about.

eric3579 said:

Come on Canada, get your shit together. Even the Americans are pointing and laughing.

Jon Stewart Skewers Toronto Mayor, Again

jwray says...

100% not sarcasm. A politician's personal life is none of your business. When a reporter asks a question that is none of their business they deserve to get a lie or Clinton-esque evasion (the latter is what happened in this case). He said he does not use it and is not an addict, both statements being consistent with having tried it in the past. One puff does not make him a crackhead. The scientific literature on this issue demonstrates that cocaine is about as addictive as tobacco. Even if the unverified accusations were true, that wouldn't be automatic grounds for resignation.

robbersdog49 said:

You forgot to tick the sarcasm box!

Please tell me you forgot to tick the sarcasm box...

"I Quit!" Lady Dances Around the Office at 4AM

ChaosEngine says...

I missed the bit in the cartoon where he danced around the office.

'cos it seems like in the 10th panel he just hands in his resignation like a professional.

If you're not doing what you want to, then definitely quit. More power to you.

This is not that. This is someone looking for their 15 mins of viral fame.

rebuilder said:

Wow, a lot of vitriol directed at someone deciding to stop doing what they no longer want to do!

I'll just leave this here:
http://maxcdn.zenpencils.com/comics/2013-08-27-watterson.jpg

The first 9/11: Salvador Allende's last speech

radx says...

My friends,

Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Radio Corporación.

My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [national police].

Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign!

Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.

They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector which will today be in their homes hoping, with foreign assistance, to retake power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

I address, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the worker who labored more, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals, those who days ago continued working against the sedition sponsored by professional associations, class-based associations that also defended the advantages which a capitalist society grants to a few.

I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours -- in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to protect them. They were committed. History will judge them.

Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to [inaudible] the workers.

The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

Slam Poetry - 'Friend Zone' - Loser To Hero in 3 Minutes

Procrastinatron says...

@alien_concept

Thanks! I was struggling to come up with a username, and then I just decided to accept my true nature.

And this is a timeless issue that I think we've all run into at times. A woman comes to a man to talk about her emotions. The man sees that she has a problem, and tries to help her solve it. This frustrates the woman - she only wanted to share her troubles with him, and she feels insulted that he would assume she is incapable of solving her own problems. This, in turn, frustrates the man; after all, why would she come to him if she won't accept his help? He's sincerely doing his best, and he feels that she is being unfair and overly emotional.

A fight ensues, and neither party understands how it even happened, or how to find a way out of it.

And as I have a VERY emotional mother and VERY rational father, I've been on both sides, as well as in the middle, of this conflict many times.

As for Assange, he once said that Sweden is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism," and having grown up here, I can vouch for the veracity of that statement.

It has gotten to the point here that most guys are just too afraid to stand up to even the most obvious acts of bigotry because the one-way sexism has become so widely accepted. We're only left with three choices; we either accept the abuse and join in it ourselves, or we simply give up and take it with a sort of hopeless resignation.

Since I can't stand to be victimized, I favour the third option; pointing out the bullshit and then riposting with facts, logic and righteous anger.

But I've had some utterly INSANE examples of sexism happen in the classroom, including a teacher derailing a lecture right at the beginning of it and instead spending her entire hour to essentially claim that all men are either rapists or potential rapists, and as a guy, it's just difficult to know what to do in that situation.

It's also very hurtful, as I find rape to be one of the most despicable acts imaginable.

And... that's why my reaction to this guy's poem was so strong. It's like he's been abused for so long that he's begun to think that it's actually true.

You gave your son a very good answer! Men and women are different from one another (though this isn't entirely set in stone), and I think that anybody who claims otherwise simply prefers ideology or fantasy (same thing, really) over reality.

And for what it's worth, I think those differences are pretty freaking valuable. I love women, and part of the reason for that is the fact that they aren't men.

griefer_queafer (Member Profile)

Louis C.K. on Nixon's Resignation

ulysses1904 says...

I don't remember Nixon shedding tears or getting choked up during his resignation speech. I was 15 at the time and was watching it with everyone else. I'll have to look for it on YouTube but I remember him being as stone-faced as ever.

Just watched the full 22 minute version on YouTube. Sorry Louis, he didn't weep like an insane person, didn't even pause to clear his throat.

griefer_queafer (Member Profile)

Louis C.K. on Nixon's Resignation

siftbot says...

Tags for this video have been changed from 'louis, ck, nixon, resign, president' to 'louis ck, nixon, resign, president, cry, quit, helicopter' - edited by xxovercastxx

Democracy Now! - NSA Targets "All U.S. Citizens"

MrFisk says...

"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!



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