Usa Thread

[unit731]

By JESSE J. HOLLAND

 

Associated Press

 

 

"WASHINGTON -- A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for police to take a DNA swab from anyone they arrest for a serious crime, endorsing a practice now followed by more than half the states as well as the federal government.

The justices differed strikingly on how big a step that was.

"Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's five-justice majority. The ruling backed a Maryland law allowing DNA swabbing of people arrested for serious crimes."

 

LINK

 

More invasion of personal rights given up by the liberals on Supreme Court.

[cavanami]

One of the glaring faults with the US Justice system...the Supreme Court members are appointed for life!

 

For years, the selection of the Supreme Court has not had the US citizen in mind.

 

It is now staffed in the interests of the gov and big biz...IMO.

[cavanami]

The USA has the best politicians that $$$ can buy!!!!!!!

 

I'm sure that Israel would be looking for anything in return :surprised:

 

Former President Bill Clinton paid $500K for 45-minute speech in Israel

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/3/former-president-bill-clinton-paid-500k-45-minute-/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

 

The Jewish National Fund paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a 45-minute speech in Israel to honor Israeli President Shimon Peres for his 90th birthday, according to the New York Post...

[unit731]

The money went from one private foundation to another not for profit foundation.

 

Not the Israel government and not Bill Clinton personally.

 

This is quite common.

I have been known to give speeches in Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy. All of the fees collected for such go directly to my non-profit foundation.

It's only later that I collect an annual salary provided by the foundation. Then the money returns to me. Sometimes I have to travel to the Cayman Islands, Switzerland or Thailand to collect the annual salary. But the foundation pays for all of my transportation and hotel accomdations.

I thought everyone did this.

How do the rest of you pay for your trips to LOS?

 

 

 

 

"The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet Leyisrael) will pay former U.S. President Bill Clinton $500,000 in return for his coming to Israel to give a speech at a gala evening in Rehovot, and at a JNF event. He will also take part in the President's Conference, where Peres will be honored by celebrities, including Barbara Streisand and Robert De Niro.

The money will reportedly go to the Bill Clinton Foundation."

 

LINK

[Flashermac]

That means poor Bill will have to scrape by on the measly $109 million that he and Hillsie are estimated to be worth. Life can be so cruel.

[cavanami]

The money will reportedly go to the Bill Clinton Foundation.

 

Key word.

 

...and how much of Bill's expenses will be sucked off the $$$

 

I'm sure Bill will fly economy class to keep the expenses down

[Flashermac]

President Obama’s Dragnet

 

Editorial, New York Times

 

 

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

 

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

 

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

 

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

 

Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.

 

A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,†because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.â€

 

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists†without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose.

 

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

 

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

 

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.â€

 

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

 

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.â€

 

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

 

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.â€

 

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,†they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.â€

 

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

 

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,†he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.†He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.â€

 

Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.c...gnet.html?_r=0

[cavanami]

Prez. O has continued the abuses and even increased them!

 

Until one of these traitor-politicians gets hung in the public square, the abuses

and continue and increase even more!

[Flashermac]

 

Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House: They're Spying on Us!

 

 

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.

 

It made little difference.

 

Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state—one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs. If anything, things have gotten worse.

 

- Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone.

- Seizing telephone records at the Associated Press in violation of Justice Department guidelines.

- Accusing a respected Fox News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job.

- Detaining terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite promises to end the ill-considered Bush policy.

 

Even the IRS scandal, while not a matter of foreign policy, strikes at the heart of growing concerns among Americans that their privacy is government's playpen.

 

And now this: The Guardian newspaper reports that the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of one of the nation's largest phone companies, Verizon.

 

If the story is accurate, the action appears to be legal. The order was signed by a judge from a secret court that oversees domestic surveillance. It may also be necessary; U.S. intelligence needs every advantage it can get over the nation's enemies.

 

But for several reasons the news is chilling.

 

1. Verizon probably isn't the only company coughing up its documents. Odds are incredibly strong that the government is prying into your telephone records today.

 

2. Issued in April, the NSA order "could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued," according to The Washington Post. "It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."

 

3. This appears to be a "rubber stamp," order, reissued every few months since 2001. As is the case with all government programs, the systematic snooping into your telephone records is unlikely to ever expire without public outcry.

 

4. Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.

 

5. The Bush-Obama White House hates transparency. President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were justifiably criticized by Democrats (none more successfully so than Obama himself) for their penchant for secrecy. Obama promised that he would run history's most transparent administration. By almost any measure, on domestic and well as foreign policies, Obama has broken that promise.

 

It is the lack of transparency that is most galling about the security versus civil liberties debate under Obama, because it shows his lack of faith in the public. Americans know a high level of secrecy and dirty work is needed to keep them safe. Most trust their president. Many approve of his job performance.

 

Still, they expect and deserve an open discussion about how to fight terrorism without undermining the Constitution.

 

Obama started that conversation with a recent address on the drone program, media leaks and the need to move American off a constant war footing. It was a compelling and well-considered argument for the balance he is claiming to strike.

 

But he made the speech under pressure, and reluctantly. It only came amid new revelations about the drone program and the disclosure of newsroom spying (the Guardian may well be in Obama's sights next). Under Bush, the warrantless-wiretap program only stopped after it was publicly disclosed. In that way, the Guardian story is not a surprise, so why didn't Obama long ago acknowledge, explain, and justify such an intrusion into privacy?

 

Obama has promised to adjust the drone and leaks investigation policies, essentially acknowledging that his administration had gone too far in the name of security. Do you believe him?

 

One thing we've learned about the Bush-Obama White House is that words don't matter. Watch what they do.

 

 

http://www.nationalj...-on-us-20130606

[cavanami]

...and when the local police step in to clean up some of the illegals in the USA...the Federal gov sits on their azz, does NOTHING

and then when the local police do something, they squash it!!!

 

Can you say...the US citizens are totally fucked???

 

http://news.yahoo.com/ariz-sheriff-suspends-immigration-efforts-082619052.html

 

An Arizona sheriff who led the way for local police across the country to take up immigration enforcement is reconsidering his crackdowns — and other law enforcement officials who followed his lead are expected to eventually back away, too.

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff for metropolitan Phoenix, has temporarily suspended all his immigration efforts after a federal judge concluded two weeks ago that the sheriff's office had racially profiled Latinos in its patrols, Arpaio spokesman Brandon Jones told The Associated Press.

Arpaio critics, including the federal government, are gaining ground in their fight to get the sheriff out of immigration enforcement. Even before the ruling, Washington had stripped Arpaio's office of its special federal immigration arrest powers and started to phase out the program across the country amid complaints that it led to abuses by local officers. The Arpaio ruling is expected to impact state immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, where local officers question people's immigration status in certain instances.

The national mood on immigration also has changed dramatically. Fewer states are seeking their own immigration laws, and proponents for Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration system have public opinion on their side...