Bewarethewumpus

James Clapper, President Obama’s top national security official, is probably best known for having been caught lying outright to Congress about NSA activities, behavior which (as some baseball players found out) happens to be a felony under federal law. But – like torturers and Wall Street tycoons before him – Clapper has been not only shielded from prosecution, and not only allowed to keep his job; he has has now been anointed the arbiter of others’ criminality, as he parades around the country calling American journalists “accomplices”. Yesterday, as Wired’s Dave Kravets reports, the “clearly frustrated” Clapper went before a Senate committee (different than the one he got caught lying to) to announce that the Snowden disclosures are helping the terrorists:

We’re beginning to see changes in the communications behavior of adversaries: particularly terrorists. A disturbing trend, which I anticipate will continue . . . Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods, and tradecraft. And the insights they’re gaining are making our job in the intelligence community much, much harder. And this includes putting the lives of members or assets of the intelligence community at risk, as well as those of our armed forces, diplomats, and our citizens.

As Kravets notes, “Clapper is not the most credible source on Snowden and the NSA leaks.” Moreover, it’s hardly surprising that Clapper is furious at these disclosures given that “Snowden’s very first leak last June” – revelation of the domestic surveillance program – “had the side-effect of revealing that Clapper had misled the public and Congress about NSA spying.” And, needless to say, Clapper offered no evidence at all to support his assertions yesterday; he knows that, unlike Kravets, most establishment media outlets will uncritically trumpet his claims without demanding evidence or even noting that he has none.

But in general, it’s hardly surprising that national security officials claim that unwanted disclosures help terrorists. Fear-mongering comes naturally to those who wield political power. Particularly in post-9/11 America, shouting “terrorists!” has been the favorite tactic of the leadership of both parties to spread fear and thus induce submission.

In a recent New York Times op-ed detailing how exploitation of terrorism fears is the key to sustaining the modern surveillance state, Northwestern University Philosophy Professor Peter Ludlow wrote that “since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning … on the danger of a terrorist attack”. He recounted that ”Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble” and that “Hobbes in ‘The Leviathan’ argued that fear effectively motivates the creation of a social contract in which citizens cede their freedoms to the sovereign.” It would be surprising if people like Clapper didn’t do this.

But what has struck me is how seriously many media figures take this claim. In the vast majority of interviews I’ve done about NSA reporting, interviewers adopt a grave tone in their voice and trumpet the claims from U.S. officials that our reporting is helping the terrorists. They treat these claims as though they’re the by-product of some sort of careful, deliberative, unique assessment rather than what it is: the evidence-free tactics national security state officials reflexively invoke to discredit all national security journalism they dislike. Let’s review a bit of history to see how true that is.

Here, for instance, is Dick Cheney, in a June, 2006 speech, condemning The New York Times for its reporting on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping and SWIFT banking programs, sounding exactly like James Clapper yesterday, along with countless Democratic commentators and blogs over the last year:

Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made it harder to defend America against attack by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs.

First they reported the terrorist surveillance program, which monitors international communications when one end is outside the United States and one end is connected with or associated with al Qaeda. Now the Times has disclosed the terrorist financial tracking program.

On both occasions, the Times had been asked not to publish those stories by senior administration officials. They went ahead anyway. The leaks to The New York Times and the publishing of those leaks is very damaging to our national security.

The ability to intercept al Qaeda communications and to track their sources of financing are essential if we’re going to successfully prosecute the global war on terror. Our capabilities in these areas help explain why we have been so successful in preventing further attacks like 9/11. And putting this information on the front page makes it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks. Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts. These kinds of stories also adversely affect our relationships with people who work with us against the terrorists. In the future, they will be less likely to cooperate if they think the United States is incapable of keeping secrets.

Cheney was joined by George Bush, who called the NYT’s reporting “disgraceful” and said: “The fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.” Bush White House spokesman Tony Snow added: “In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counterterrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trail.”

Bush made exactly the same accusations in 2005 as Clapper did yesterday after the NYT back then (finally) revealed the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program. “My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy….It is a shameful act by somebody who has got secrets of the United States government and feels like they need to disclose them publicly.” A week later, Bush officials announced a criminal investigation of the leaks and said: “Our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, [and] endangers our country.”

Meanwhile, the GOP-led House actually passed a formal resolution condemning the NYT and “call[ing] on news organizations to avoid exposing Americans ‘to the threat of further terror attacks” by revealing U.S. government methods of tracking terrorists.” Then House Majority Leader John Boehner said: “We’ve just tipped off all of the terrorists around the world that here is another way that we could have caught you, but now you know about it.” Rep. Mike Oxley, the GOP Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, called the paper’s reporting “treasonous”, saying: “We are at war, ladies and gentlemen. Now some of you folks find that an inconvenient fact.” GOP Congressman Peter King called for the prosecution of the Times journalists and editors responsible for the stories – “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” he said – just as he’s done for journalists involved in the current NSA reporting.

These same platitudes have been hauled out by U.S. officials for decades. When Daniel Ellsberg disclosed the Pentagon Papers, Nixon officials repeatedly smeared him - with no evidence – as likely working in conjunction with Russia (sound familiar?), while he and the NYT were repeatedly accused of damaging national security, putting our men and women in uniform in harm’s way, and helping America’s enemies.

Political officials hate transparency.They would rather be able to hide what they’re doing. They therefore try to demonize those who impose transparency with the most extreme and discrediting accusations they can concoct (you’re helping terrorists kill Americans!). The more transparency one imposes on them, the more extreme and desperate this accusatory rhetoric becomes. This is not complicated. It’s all very basic.

James Clapper is saying exactly what Dick Cheney and George Bush before him said, and those three said what John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger said before them about Ellsberg. It’s all spouted with no evidence. It’s rote and reflexive. It’s designed to smear and fear-monger. As Professor Ludlow notes, “Fear is even used to prevent us from questioning the decisions supposedly being made for our safety.”

Maybe it’s time for journalists to cease being the leading advocates for state secrecy and instead take seriously their claimed role as watchdogs. At the very least, demand evidence before these sorts of highly predictable, cliched attacks are heralded as something to be taken seriously. As it is, they’re just cartoons: ones that are played over and over and over.

Murtaza Hussain contributed research and reporting.

The post Clapper Reads From the Bush/Cheney/Nixon Playbook to Fear-Monger Over Transparency appeared first on The Intercept.

For nine years, the U.S. government refused to let a Stanford PhD student named Rahinah Ibrahim back in the country after putting her on the no-fly list for no apparent reason. For eight years, U.S. government lawyers fought Ibrahim’s request that she be told why. Last April, despite his promise in 2009 to do so only in only the most extreme cases, Attorney General Eric Holder tried to block Ibrahim’s case by asserting the state secrets privilege, declaring under penalty of perjury that the information she wanted “could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to national security.”

Last week, a federal judge publicly revealed the government’s explanation for Ibrahim’s long ordeal: an FBI agent had “checked the wrong box,” resulting in her falling under suspicion as a terrorist. Even when the government found and corrected the error years later, they still refused to allow Ibrahim to return to the country or learn on what grounds she had been banned in the first place.

Holder, in his April declaration, restated his own new state secrets policy, that “[t]he Department will not defend an invocation of the privilege in order to: (i) conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (ii) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency of the United States Government”.

Then he did exactly what he had said he wouldn’t do.

The bogus national security claims invoked were even more outrageous because they were used to continue the persecution of someone the government knew to be innocent.

Ibrahim’s ordeal started on January 2, 2005, when she arrived at San Francisco International Airport to catch a flight to Malaysia for a Stanford-sponsored academic conference. A citizen of Malaysia, she had been living in the United States for four years on a student visa. But when a ticket agent saw her name on the no-fly list, he called the police.

Despite being wheelchair-bound due to complications from a medical procedure, Ibrahim was handcuffed and taken to a detention cell where she was reportedly humiliated and threatened by San Francisco police officers. She was denied access to medication she had been travelling with, despite suffering excruciating pain due to a recent surgery. Her obvious medical distress apparently won her no sympathy. As she recounted in an interview about the incident years later: “My back felt as if it was hit by an electric shock with every beat of my heart and I repeatedly asked for painkillers and nearly collapsed, but they ignored me.” Shaking and in tears, she was eventually allowed to board her flight to Malaysia but found herself banned from returning on the way back.

In an effort to clear her name and return to her life in the United States, Ibrahim launched a lawsuit against the U.S. government challenging her placement on the federal no-fly list. However at every step of the process government officials impeded her ability to challenge or even examine the allegations against her by invoking the state secrets privilege.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered her removal from the no-fly list in January. And last week, he unsealed a redacted 38-page court filing disclosing the “mistaken information” that led the government to throw an innocent woman’s life into turmoil.

As a 2008 presidential candidate, Barack Obama specifically criticized the Bush administration’s abusive state secrets policy. The Obama/Biden “Plan to Change Washington” critically noted that “the Bush administration has invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other administration to get cases thrown out of court.”

After taking office, Obama declared: “We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government….I will never hide the truth because it’s uncomfortable.”

But he then proceeded to cite the state secrets privilege to stonewall lawsuits on such topics as CIA torture and extrajudicial assassinations. A lawsuit filed by Binyam Mohammed – a man subjected to extraordinary rendition who suffered “medieval” torture including the slashing of his chest and genitals with a scalpel –was thrown out after the Obama Department of Justice invoked the privilege, with DOJ attorney Douglas N. Letter asserting at the time: “This case cannot be litigated…the judges shouldn’t play with fire in this national security situation.”

The troubling questions regarding the abuse of the state secrets privilege are obvious: If officials of the federal government are willing to use it to conceal a bureaucratic error, how far would they be willing to go to cover up serious crimes such as torture and assassination?

For her part, Ibrahim said by video-link at the trial: “I would like my children not to hate America because of what happened to me … I would like for nobody to have to go through what happened to me.”

The post Obama DOJ’s New Abuse of State-Secrets Privilege Revealed appeared first on The Intercept.

(949): The bad news is that I stole all your drugs. The good news is that ITS KICKING IN!

(310): You popped the Plan B pill then clapped twice, said "mischief managed" and headed tward the bar.

Author : chesterchatfield

“So then, you know what he does? He falls to his knees. His knees, like in happiness. I mean can you imagine? Lived on an island for six years alone- hasn’t said a single word since they rescued him, then, gets off the helicopter and at the very sight of L.A. – polluted, disgustin’, stinkin’ Los Angeles- at his first sight of civilization he falls to knees and says one word. Just one word. You wanna know what it was? Hallelujah. Hallelujah! He was praisin’ God! Ain’t that ironic? Beautiful tropic island vs. L.A.” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Always thought it was a weird story.”

I nodded at the man, lost in my own thoughts. He was just another independent, one of several I had run into in the last several months. A matted beard made it hard to distinguish age, but old enough that he wouldn’t last long out here, skirting cities.

By the next morning, he’d disappeared. Wandering— maybe he’d get caught. Maybe they would Change him and he would never have to sleep on the cold, hard, ground again.

Family gone, lost in the wilderness, I just walked, heading towards civilization with no goal at all. I wished I’d invited that man to come with me. Maybe we could have been happy together.

I kept on hiking.

That night I dreamed my father came home from work and he was Changed. He was wearing a clean new blazer and his curly hair was straightened, parted symmetrically down the middle. He gently explained that he was now perfect and we had to be too. My brothers refused and they all started fighting until they were just a heap of bodies on the floor. My mother and I buried them, and she stared calmly down at their graves. Then she finally looked up at me with glassy eyes and whispered, “Hallelujah.”

I awoke in a cold sweat, trying to hold onto the dream as it slipped away. I opened my eyes to the newly risen sun.

After another two days I finally got a glimpse of light. City lights, revealing the valley where my relatives used to live. I hoped they were down there somewhere, perfect and happy.

I stood at the base of the very last hill, then trekked up slowly, stopping to rest just before the top, drawing out the time before I had to look out over the other side. I tried to imagine some Changed guards watching, waiting to catch a glimpse of me and send in the cavalry. Maybe I would sneak past them and become a hero; rescue the thousands of perfect people living in the city. Ha. Or maybe they didn’t give a rat’s ass if I wandered into their shiny city or starved out here in the cold.

I walked the last few steps backwards, facing the mountains. Then I turned and just stood, taking it all in.

For miles, there was only row after row of cookie-cutter houses. They each had one sleek black car parked in the driveway. In the distance rows and rows of dark buildings sat like silent sentinels. Same height and distance apart from the others, lined with symmetrical windows.

I shivered as I stood on my hill, observing everything from an elevated view.

I thought of that nameless old man’s story and reached up a hand to touch my rough, sunburned face.

“Hallelujah, indeed.”

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Oh my goodness. Here I am, sitting in the Gawker Media offices on another Friday morning, just trying to get through the day, when suddenly Ubisoft releases 13 minutes of footage from South Park: The Stick of Truth and now I can't stop giggling at my desk and this is all quite embarrassing.

Stick of Truth is out on March 4 for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. It might be the greatest game ever made. (Note: it might not actually be the greatest game ever made. We'll keep you updated once we actually play it.)

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Being a Pokémon master takes time and patience—beating a game in the franchise usually takes at least a couple dozen of hours. Now imagine trying to beat a Pokémon game while thousands of other people also control your avatar.

Now imagine that these thousands of people will do whatever they want to your avatar, as they may not even care if you beat the game at all.

If it sounds like madness, it kind of is. As of this writing, there are nearly seven thousand people watching a Pokémon stream of the original games, Red and Blue (it's not clear which one it is). Here's where it gets interesting: someone has set the emulator such that it takes inputs from the chat on the side of the Twitch stream. The game only seems to recognizes the four D-Pad directions, A, B, Start and Select. The stream is called "Twitch Plays Pokemon," and so far, it's glorious. Here's a chunk of footage from last night, though you can also watch it live here.

Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on TwitchTV

If you've ever watched a well-populated stream on Twitch before, you know how fast the chat on the side can move—it can be impossible to read what anyone is saying. Despite that inevitable chaos, the game takes all the inputs in real time, as you can see in the footage—what this means in practice is that the game progresses as if the main character was drunk and confused. It's rather amusing.

Progresses is the key word here: sure, playing Pokémon via Twitch chat means that there is a massive lack of coordination, resulting in situations where it may take minutes for a character to walk through one measly door. Still, Twitch chat is doing it. At the moment, they're trying their best to get past the Cerulean City gym, which is requiring them to grind a little together. Meaning somehow, at some point, they beat the first gym together (Cerulean is the second gym in the original games). I know—watching, it may seem baffling as to how Twitch chat has managed that, given that it has spent the last dozen hours trying to beat said gym and given that some people are clearly interested in trolling the game. But it has! The wonders of the internet never cease.

I wonder how long it'll take them to beat the whole game? You can watch Twitch's progress here.

(Top image via Wario64)

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Zach Weissmueller says:

A few years ago, I shared with you a video about the pattern of police raids on private property happening in California's Antelope Valley.

Well, a rather tragic and infuriating story brought me back to the desert. It's the story of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer, whose home was raided by the LA County Sheriff's Dept. (which has been at the center of a number of scandals in recent years), in search of meth. No meth was found, but Eugene Mallory was shot dead in his own bedroom.

This video takes you inside Mallory's home, to the scene of the incident, and scrutinizes the Sheriff Department's official account. How was a warrant obtained, but not a single shred of evidence pointing to meth production found on the property? Why did deputies first claim Mallory was charging at them and then change their story? Why did one officer only yell "drop the gun" after he had already shot Mallory six times?

Police Shoot, Kill 80-Year-Old Man In His Own Bed, Don't Find the Drugs They Were Looking For

One of the RIAA's best friends in congress, Jerry Nadler, has been appointed to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet by Obama Congressional Democrats. The history of this committee is nothing short of grotesque: every time it looks like a copyright moderate/friend of the Internet might get appointed to it, it is declared redundant and shut down. Then, once the danger has passed and there's another loony, Internet-hating, censorship-happy copyright maximialist in place to fill a vacant seat, the committee once again becomes relevant and is resurrected.

The Burgess Shale, discovered in 1909 in the Canadian Rockies, has long been considered one of the greatest fossil sites ever found. Now, an extension of the site has been discovered, which rivals the original in quantity and quality of specimens, including rare fossil evidence of soft tissue.

The commander of the Iraqi militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reportedly blew up 21 suicide bombers in training when he made an error during a live explosives exercise. 15 other trainees were injured. The popular imagination paints terrorists as hundred-foot-tall supermen with the power to destroy entire states simply by staring crosseyed at them, but the reality is that people who are willing to be suicide bombers -- and those who exploit them -- may not be very bright at all.

Do not follow this troublemaker, @RubenBolling.

And whatever you do, do not join the INNER HIVE, which is surely some kind of secret cabal of secular, humanist, moral-relativist, evolution-hugging mathe-manics who get comic strips emailed to them BEFORE publication, which is clearly unnatural.

Freeweibo, an anti-censorship organization that works on free speech issues in China, has discovered that the Chinese version of Microsoft's Bing search-engine censors its US version to match the censored results that would be shown within China. Search terms such as "Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate" return results dominated by censored Chinese news outlets like Baidu Baike and Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. The same searches run on the English version of Bing return pages from Wikipedia, BBC, the New York Times, etc.

Google's Chinese-language competitor displays much more parity between the Chinese and English editions -- the Chinese Google results for controversial subjects include Chinese articles from the BBC and Wikipedia.

Microsoft will not comment on the matter.

Update: Microsoft has commented:

"Bing does not apply China's legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China," Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz notes in a prepared statement. "Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results-removal notification for some searches noted in the report, but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.

As of 10PM Pacific on 12 Feb, many of the "controversial" search terms still generate results pages dominated by Chinese state media.

The information was first collected by censorship blog Greatfire.org. Author Charlie Smith said he had originally discovered the discrepancies while checking for information on his own website, FreeWeibo.com, a site for anonymously searching Chinese social media.

“The first thing we noticed was our index page was not showing up. It specifically did not show the homepage. But it was in Google,” he said.

“It’s a bit crazy. Any Chinese person who is searching in Chinese from overseas is being treated as if they have the same rights as a resident of mainland China. So we won’t show them the accurate search results if they search for Dalai Lama. What you get is state controlled propaganda,” he said. “Except they don’t tell you the results have been censored. If you were in China they would at least tell you that.”

“We thought there had been a mistake so we wrote to Microsoft and they said ‘no comment,’” he said.

Microsoft did not return calls for comment from the Guardian.

Bing censoring Chinese language search results for users in the US [Dominic Rushe/The Guardian]

(via /.)

New Comic: The Old Ways

Uh, thanks, Grandma.

Tuesday, February 11 — 12:00 AM

It’s time for the Olympics again, and that means Mario and Sonic are going head-to-head in a battl–wait, what the!?

Yep, for those of you who missed it, Sonic and crew (especially our bulky boy Knuckles up there) are getting a somewhat-dramatic reworking in “Sonic Boom,” an upcoming CGI TV show and Wii U game. A few forumers were wondering if I’d make a comic about this, and with the Winter Olympics just starting up, the timing seemed right for this kind of gag.

The extra-long legs at the end was a gag I came up with at the last moment and decided to milk it for all it was worth, ’cause why not? Sorry that you keep getting the strangest BitF comics, Sonic…!

-By Matthew

Michael Botticelli, the deputy director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, tried to play coy with Rep. Earl Blumenauer about the administration's willfully ignorant position on marijuana prohibition, but the congressman wasn't going to have any of it, and gave him a terrific tongue-lashing.

In the end, Botticelli mustered up some unconvincing false outrage and played his "won't someone think of the children" card. I feel sorry for Botticelli, because he looks like he wants to blurt out the truth but he knows his boss will have his head if he does.

After the Sandy Hook shootings, at presidential behest, $10 million was allocated to to explore links between gun violence and video games. A year later, Mike Rose reports that nothing seems to be happening.

It's been more than a year since the meeting with Biden, and more than a year since Obama called for $10 million to be set aside for research into whether new media, such as violent video games, influence root causes of gun violence. In that time, you probably haven't heard much about that research. That's because it never actually happened, nor did any funding change hands. As discovered in my various talks with individuals and researchers close to discussions, any potential research efforts from Congress broke down fairly rapidly following the meeting with Biden, and hardly anything has been said since.

An unsuprising P.S. to this round of the game scapegoating scarehouse: despite screaming tabloid suggestions that he was inspired to kill by Call of Duty, it turned out that Adam Lanza wasn't a hardcore gamer at all. He liked innocuous kid-friendly fare such as Dance Dance Revolution and Super Mario. The report into his rampage focused on the fact that he was a) mentally ill and b) had easy access to guns and ammunition.

Here's what we know in a nutshell: The best research into the field has found very little evidence of a link between violence in games and real-life violence, and past research suggests that video game violence has even less impact that other media, like television for example. There is absolutely no consensus amongst researchers -- and even when a group does claim to find that link, they are quickly rebutted by numerous others.

"Even the most ridiculous design has a purpose" says the creator of this virtual countdown timer in the building game Minecraft. Well, the purpose of this design is to remind us of our place in the universe with a clock that will run for longer than there will be computers to simulate it.

YouTuber spumwack wanted to make the most useless machine he could think of in Minecraft. After a few designs, he eventually came up with a door attached to a clock. The useless part? The clock won't finish counting until after our entire (real) universe has decayed to inert nothingness. He does an excellent job explaining all of the changes the world, society, and the universe will go through as he shows off the contraption.

Although amid all the large scale explanations, I thought the second clock was the most relevant:

The second clock is a little more ambitious. 22 hours from now, it will finish its cycle and most people who have watched this video will forget what they saw and will likely never think about it ever again.

If you'd like to run the clock yourself, you can download his Minecraft world from a link in the video's description.

The Universe Death Clock via @tweetsauce

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McGruff the Crime Dog was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Monday for possession of 1,000 pot plants and more than two dozen weapons, including a grenade launcher. John Russell Morales, 41, an actor who once played McGruff, was arrested in 2011. (NBC News)