"Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!

I defy anyone here to get that 2.8 second sprint out of an Atom. A cheetah can repeat that acceleration consistently. Booyah

I dunno about the netting all around trampolines recently. Part of the thrill is knowing that you could fly off the thing in a most indignified way and hurt yourself pretty bad (if you're a grown up, kids just bounce right back up). I do approve of the padding they put over the sprints though. I have a lot of unpleasant memories of sitting on trampoline springs in my shorts while someone else was jumping.

If you live in a dystopia like NY, you have to leave a large cushion between yourself and anybody who looks sketchy.

That means being prepared to sprint the other direction at a moment's notice.

Europe is following the US in the process of ghetto-ization for all their cities, so the only non-dystopic cities left tend to be in Asia, like Singapore.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'cheetahs, sprint, cincinnati zoo, national geographic' to 'cheetahs, sprint, cincinnati zoo, national geographic, natgeo' - edited by messenger

The reality is unfairly that testosterone does give males a huge athletic advantage when it kicks in. Similarly, most professional level sports are extremely dependent on athletic ability. Speed is included in that. There is a reason that the male world records for every sprint are faster than those for females. That reason is genetics and it doesn't care about political correctness or being fair.

In HS our senior girls basketball team had much better game sense, court awareness and overall basketball IQ, than the boys junior team. Those of us on the senior guys team were getting tired of the lack of respect the junior guys were showing for the senior girls and so we arranged a game between them. Knowing how much smarter and aware the girls were on the court we figured it'd be very humbling for the young guys to get beat. We were unpleasantly surprised to watch the younger guys simply running circles around the girls from one end of the floor to the other. They were just plain faster, a lot faster, and all the smarts in the world just didn't make up that difference.

It may not be fair, but that's the way it is. If smarts could make the difference, Michael Jordon would still be getting better every year, but realistically as age cuts into his athleticism smarts just aren't enough anymore and the torch is passed on to those in their prime.


>> ^Sepacore:

>> ^Stu:
>> ^Sepacore:
There is no reason a female couldn't achieve the same at teen or pro level. Speed and balance (and timing) is all it takes to be highly competitive.

There's a huge reason. If a female were to play in college or some how make it to the professional level. She may have tons of skill and balance like you say, she might even be the next Barry Sanders, but even he got hit. you put a 140 pound-150 pound girl in at running back, she will get injuries that would end the career as soon as it starts. Quickness is a lot, but men's natural ability to have that extra muscle and padding is why they keep men and women in different leagues.

If we were focusing entirely on brute-force forms of football, I agree. Except I wasn't, I was thinking more in the direction of how she could continue to utilize her honed skills.
I'm not disputing that males have a significant muscle advantage for handing out and taking impacts, but nor was I forgetting there are multiple versions of football, given that I loosely referenced such as a precursor to my point. My statement was an alternative to the 'testosterone wins everything' view.
To clarify, I specifically had Touch Football in mind when stating there would be no reason females couldn't effectively play with men post-puberty.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

CAT-ASTRO-PHEEEEE


Did you draw that?

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^Quboid:
Why do baseball players look so fat? They're not wearing American Football style padding are they? They're not uber muscled body builders are they?

Professional athletes who go to work and sit on their asses for 1/9 the time when on "offense", jog 100-200 feet to thier "defensive" positions, only to stand around and wait for something to happen that will require, at most, several seconds of effort. I bet their heart rates rarely surpass 100bpm, much less their target zones. (Pitchers aand catchers exempt from this description, of course, but not Pablo Sandoval.)


So basically, it's because they are fat. Huh.

I'd have thought basic professionalism would dictate they look after themselves. Even if they don't need to be able to sprint like a football player, basic co-ordination and physical reactions would be better if they were slim. If nothing else, being on TV regularly would give me extra motivation to look my best.

>> ^joedirt:

This stupid video isn't even to scale. Carl Lewis would have been 7 feet from the finish line. The stupid video needs to exaggerate an lie about how far people are from the finish line... Two strides or one body length away, not like 20 feet back.
Why make a "science" like video then lie in it.


As they said in the video themselves this is a field of runners separated by 3 seconds of time. Which will not be that much distance when you boil down the facts that the fastest runner will possibly get near or at 27 mph (something Usian Bolt stuck up there) and less. The slowest runners I imagine will ATLEAST be above 20 mph which really does make this field closer and closer together. They would all be running somewhere between 10 m/s to 10.4 m/s in 12.6 s (the times they ran a VERY long time ago) or up to and past 9.6 s in the modern era.

If you weren't that great of a runner, very quickly, with these type of numbers however, you would find yourself very far behind--it must be almost shocking to see someone gain a 3-5 meter lead on you if you slip up, particularly in the longer length Olympic sprints. It's a great infographic doing everything right, in fact I think they could literally take this concept and bump it up to a 30-60 minute show about the history of Olympic running; I'd throw it on the Discovery or Science Channels. Just look at the numbers I pulled up in a very short amount of time to give some comparisons, there are FAR more things to look at and open up this conversation much, much further... More things to look at could be anything taking in ANY possible connection to a sprinter's performance which may include a few things some people would never even think of, some examples: average foot-span covered each sprinting step and how that has changed with time (longer-shorter, side strides or are they all in line), the possibility of body weight distribution being re-mapped on the body from training, workouts, and diet, over time and has this been a possible endemic change in society (have we become more top heavy, bottom heavy, or averaged out--how does it compare with analysis we can try to make about our Olympic forefathers--with societal changes any of the things I've listed have the possibility of starting there first, moving outward; a true evolutionary or genetic change that might be observed...), shoes and their timeline with features, surfaces used by the athletes through time, how training was done throughout history, our personal livelihood with things like vitamins, a balanced and INFORMED diet allows you to get more out of your muscles then you normally would EVER get, and there is SO much more they could explore!

I would love to see a very well done show about this and if they cover the subject substantially and extensively enough, I wouldn't mind it being a short one year series. As long as they stay true to the overall presentation found in this infotainment/info-graphic and the information displayed here should be, somewhat, natural to us and keep us at ease in which all this material/information is able to be displayed in this show and always making that information available for us to consume and compare just as easily as here. So to me having a large presence online hand-in-hand With a show would be important, of course providing more info-graphics like this for us. One can hope that they'd read our comments and realize, just from a small clip, they have something bigger here--if they want it...

I wasn't quite sure why they "pulled" out the field so far as well, but all I can think is that they were trying to put a exclamation mark on the overall acceleration of the genesis of runners into the modern day.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'stelietto, heels, sprint, run, course, russia' to 'stiletto, high heels, sprint, run, course, russia' - edited by calvados

Compare to...

Long Jumpers

Interesting article on long jumping where athletes are not only not breaking records like in sprints but getting steadily worse..

Sprint to the car knocking women over, so you can slowly put on a seatbelt and barely get going. Good job, you've made me already hate whatever sport this happens to be.

I think they collected it when he bought those shorts.>> ^brycewi19:

Sorry dude, you're going to have to turn in your man card for a couple weeks.

LOL @ the chick who does the fall ---> into sprint AKA The "I decided I needed to run up the last 4 steps I didn't trip"