Stable Genius Liberal

Edward Snowden tells South China Morning Post he took Booz Allen job to collect NSA information

That qualifies as espionage.

Glenn Greenwald Takes Apart David Gregory for Trying to Criminalize Journalism

GREENWALD: I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalist should be charged with felonies.

Worth watching. David Gregory, are you serious?

Senators say NSA phone records played little role in stopping terror plots

“saying ‘these programs’ have disrupted ‘dozens of terrorist plots’ is misleading if the bulk phone-records collection is actually providing little or no unique value.”

Worth a read.

Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant

Newest Greenwald scoop.

Evidence that the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata

I thought that voice was too costly to store, but it just might be that a large set of phone calls are stored to be collected later by court order.

Untitled

shipwrecktrain: Yeah, pretty much.

High-income kids who don’t graduate from college are 2.5 times more likely to end up rich than low-income kids who do get a degree

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s just moved to Denmark.

The argument that we should tolerate growing inequality because of our great mobility is based on fiction. We have growing inequality and shrinking mobility.

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate surveillance,” in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique surveillance,” in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.

Worth a read. The defender of the NSA policy seem to think this is a simple matter of privacy. It isn’t.

Lindsey Graham: ‘If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it’

Censoring the mail is ok, but restricting gun purchases for people on the terror watch list is not?

James Clapper must go

according to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Clapper was given a full day’s advance notice that the question was coming, and yet he nonetheless still opted to lie.