Bush White House asked CIA to spy on academic blogger critic

[Cain]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/us/politics/16cole.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted "to get" Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

Apparently that the CIA are verborten to spy within America is unknown to the White House (of course, it is also apparently unknown to many CIA operatives).  But shades of Nixon anyone?  Hans Morgenthau was spied on by the White House for his influential opposition to the Vietnam War, after all.

[LMNO]

Given the history of current presidents maintaining the policies of old ones, I can only wonder whose phones Obama is tapping right now.

[Cain]

Everyone's.

Hey, you got an iPhone, right?  The NSA can request that information directly from Apple's tech people.  No warrant required.  "They" know who you're talking to and where you're doing it from (never forget, Apple, Google and Facebook, between them, are tracking all of your movements).

[LMNO]

Everyone's.

Hey, you got an iPhone, right?  The NSA can request that information directly from Apple's tech people.  No warrant required.

This is a great reason to keep all of GIGGLES' pics on my iPhone.

[Salty]

Didn't Obama strengthen and extend the government's ability to wiretap without a warrant?

I wonder how many of these kinds of reports we WON'T see on Obama's White House. Is this administration better at keeping tight-lipped than the last? Do you suppose they learned from Bush's mistakes?

BTW, of all the common complaints directed at Apple and the telcoms, warrantless wiretapping is rarely ever one I hear. Prices, sure. Products, yeah. Constant, sanctioned violations of the 4th Amendment? DUUURRR WUT?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Right?


...Right?

[Salty]

Yeah, and what with Obama being a Super Liberal and all we doubly have nothing to fear. He's one of US. Not like those bad republicans who want to curb our liberties to wage constant war...

This sort of thing make me shit teeth when an Air Force buddy of mine who works intel says, "Oh, trust me. The government can't just do that kind of thing. It never happens."

Um, yeah. And if it did YOU WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO TELL ME ANYWAY.
And.
WHY WOULD THEY TELL YOU ANYTHING BUT BULLSHIT?

[Cain]

Just read Antifascist Calling if you want to keep up with the surveillance state:

As privacy and security researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed in 2009, "Sprint Nextel" and other telecom giants "provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009."

Soghoian wrote that this "massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers," a service eagerly provided our political minders by the telecoms as the secrecy-shredding web site Cryptome revealed with their publication of dozens of Online Spying Guides.

As we now know, secret state agencies such as NSA and the FBI routinely grab customer records from the telecoms to obtain dialed telephone numbers, text messages, emails and instant messages, as well as web pages browsed and search engine queries in addition to a staggering mountain of geolocational data, oftentimes with a simple, warrantless request.

The NSA's so-called "President's Surveillance Program" for example, vacuums-up huge volumes of "transactional" records gleaned from domestic emails and internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel itineraries and phone records from other secret state satrapies as well as banks, credit reporting agencies and data-mining firms.

As The Wall Street Journal reported more than three years ago, "the NSA's enterprise" is linked to "a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light."

Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman revealed that "the effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed," the tip of a vast surveillance iceberg.

But such programs could not function without the close, one might argue incestuous, collaboration between the secret state and their corporate partners as The Washington Post disclosed last year in their "Top Secret America" investigation.

In fact, as Soghoian and other researchers have learned, internet service providers and the telecoms "all have special departments, many open 24 hours per day, whose staff do nothing but respond to legal requests. Their entire purpose is to facilitate the disclosure of their customers' records to law enforcement and intelligence agencies--all following the letter of the law, of course."

Plaintiffs Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski said they neither "opted-in" to Google's surveillance features nor approved of being tracked, by their phones no less, asserting that Android's tracking capability puts "users at serous risk of privacy invasions, including stalking," according to their complaint.

And with congressional grifters on both sides of the aisle poised to hold hearings this month about the controversy, it appears that smartphone manufacturers will have some 'splainin' to do. Right-wing congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) told the Journal that Apple "apparently 'lied' to him and another lawmaker last year when it said its phones don't collect and transmit location-based data when location services such as mapping are turned off."

The NSA and their telecom buddies have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Obama's government, along with the entirely bogus "cyberwarfare" scaremongers.

Would Obama personally ask someone at the CIA to target a political dissident who isn't a Muslim (Anwar al-Walaki)?  I doubt it.  But then, he wouldn't need to.

[Salty]

Holy CHRIST.
I had that on my subscription, I added it when you recommended it before but haven't read any of it until just now.

What drives me into fury is:
- With all the rage and frothing you see from teabaggers you never EVER hear them complain about this legitimate threat to personal freedom.
- I find myself less angry with news I casually hear about Obama*. He seems so harmless compared to Bush but he's worse. His seeming innocence, the light many liberals see him in allows him to perpetrate this sort of shit.

*By that I mean his administration and their policies, not just him of course.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Holy CHRIST.
I had that on my subscription, I added it when you recommended it before but haven't read any of it until just now.

What drives me into fury is:
- With all the rage and frothing you see from teabaggers you never EVER hear them complain about this legitimate threat to personal freedom.
- I find myself less angry with news I casually hear about Obama*. He seems so harmless compared to Bush but he's worse. His seeming innocence, the light many liberals see him in allows him to perpetrate this sort of shit.

*By that I mean his administration and their policies, not just him of course.

Ive had a conspiracy brewing in my head that this is completely intended. Think about it, most people have no idea about the ACTUAL bad shit hes doing because theyre too busy listening to how hes a secret muslim whos likes to rape kittens with socialism. Its impossible for anyone in the political sphere to launch any legitimate criticism against him because it gets drowned out by all the tea bagger bullshit.

The typical "balanced" debate on news stations consists of one guy thinks Obama is black jesus come to save us from white guilt and global warming with universal healthcare, and another who thinks hes going to build a monument to Karl Marx in place of the Statue of Liberty using white slave labor.

Thats why he took so long to release his birth certificate, because as long as that stupidity was frothing around it took eyes off the real issues.
                                     
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[Telarus]

More importantly, look at the 'minor' stories which happened in the news cycle within days of the long form being released.