For years many have assumed Token Libertarian Girl, aka Julie Borowski, had taken to vlogging because of a learning disability that left her unable to read and write.
Apparently this was a clever ruse by a truly Machavellian political strategist.
While much of D.C. was shut down by crippling snow and power outages, Borowski and her associates seized control of FreedomWorks today, displacing Matt Kibbe as CEO of the group, supplanting him as the writer of FreedomWorks‘s twice daily fundraising appeals. The Borowski faction had been planning a coup for some time, but seized the opportunity of a city paralyzed by weather when they found an old box of guns left behind by former FreedomWorks founder Dick Armey in a storage closet.
Bruce,
John Boehner isn’t doing everything he can to defend your civil liberties. In fact, last year when Rep. Thomas Masssie passed an amendment to protect your liberty and block the NSA’s unconstitutional spying, Speaker Boehner cut a backroom deal and made sure the amendment never became law.
Robert Redford plays his first super-villain, a neo-nazi conspirator in a world where drones, the NSA, and your Obamacare and IRS records are used to predetermine if you are a traitor to the regime who should be taken out, Minority Report style.
National Review didn’t particularly like it, but they didn’t like Ayn Rand or Edward Snowden either. reason magazine (Kurt Loder) liked it better. I give it a solid B as a movie; I’d give its politics at least an A-. Kevin McCarthy said on Fox and Friends Sunday that it was one of the three best movies of the year so far, and urged movie-goers to skip the IMAX or 3D versions (I’d agree, though I did do 3D), and pointed out that the 8 films in the “Avengers” series based on Marvel comix (Thor etc.) have collectively earned $5 billion to date. Tonight the first Captain America movie airs on FX at 5:30 pm eastern (I never saw it so I can’t comment.) I am tempted to offer that if any DC libertarians want to go see it I’d go with them, but it isn’t really good enough for that; though it was good enough that I will now try to catch the first one on cable, at least while I am puttering around the house.
Revenge star Emily VanCamp has a medium size role as the main eye candy after Chris Evans, though Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow remains sexy. Below Sebastian Stan (also cute enough but mainly appears in the film as a killer cyborg), who plays the titular “winter soldier,” waxes philosophical and actually mentions Kurzweil and the singularity – smell him! And discusses Johansson’s other AI type move Her.
In a debate with College Libertarians at George Washington University, College Democrats defend James Clapper, the Obama regime, the Patriot Act, and NSA surveillance. Maybe they are job hunting?
This week saw not one but two attacks from leftovers on libertarian led efforts to expose NSA abuses, both warning that NSA critics were too enamored of anti-government positions and candidates, threatening to undermine the New Deal warfare-welfare state and even the federally funded jobs of the leftovers themselves.
The New Republic ran a piece by a federally funded academentian Sean Wilencz which attacked Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange for insufficient fealty to Stalin..er… I mean FDR. Complete with guilt by association and arm chair psychologizing dredging up the child hood traumas and Internet chats of his targets, this piece demonstrates that Princeton and other state funded disinformation and re-education centers should all be defunded immediately, with their priesthoods tossed out on the streets where they could learn to make an honest living mopping floors. A quote: ” ‘I have a Walther P22,’ he [Snowden] wrote. ‘It’s my only gun, but I love it to death.’ The Walther P22, a fairly standard handgun, is not especially fearsome, but Snowden’s affection for it hinted at some of his developing affinities.”. Which led wag Scott Beiser to observe: “Oh noes! Snowden is a closet hoplosexual!”
And two unknown concubines of the multimillionaire lobbyist Podesta brothers at their Center for American Progress fret that people are now reading the Bill of Rights all the way to the end, even the 10th Amendment, now that they have heard they have rights the federal government has been abridging.
BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP AND IAN MILLHISER @ “think” “Progress”“Beware Of Libertarians Bearing Gifts: Why A Bipartisan Move Against The NSA Could Kill The New Deal“
What does the NSA need if it wants to spy on you? Even before legal permission, there’s the basics: electricity to run its computers and water to feed the servers that stores the reams of data they acquire. Enterprising state legislators in six states have seized upon this almost-too-obvious insight, and used it to draft legislation that would quite literally turn off the NSA’s lights in their states.
This might seem like a good idea to NSA critics unhappy with President Obama’s reform proposals, but the constitutional theory it depends on is profoundly dangerous. It poses a serious threat to that liberal touchstone, a federal regulatory and welfare state equal to the problems of growing corporate power and poverty.
Ultimately, this proposal to depower the NSA reveals that there’s only so much that can be accomplished by right-left coalitions. Unless each side can agree to abandon tactics that threaten the other’s sacred cows, the members of these coalitions must constantly be on guard against the man standing behind them waiting to stick a knife in their back.
Turning Off The Lights
Each of the six states (Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Washington, Oklahoma, and California) base their proposals onmodel legislation developed by the OffNow coalition, a group organized by the radically libertarian Tenth Amendment Center. So too will legislators in the next three states (Michigan, Arizona, and Utah) that plan to propose lights-off legislation. So OffNow, and by extension the Tenth Amendment center, is more-or-less running the show here.
How does the legislation work? Basically, it prohibits any state entity and many corporations from:
Provid[ing] services, or participat[ing] or assist[ing] in any way with the providing of services to a federal agency, federal agent, or corporation providing services to the federal government which is involved in the collection of electronic data or metadata of any person(s) pursuant to any action not based on a warrant that particularly describes the person(s), place(s) and thing(s) to be searched or seized.
Elsewhere, the legislation provides that any corporation “that provides services to or on behalf of this state” which violates this prohibition “shall be forever ineligible to act on behalf of, or provide services to, this state or any political subdivision of this state.” So if a state’s utilities — electricity, water, sewage and so forth — are owned by the state, they are forbidden from providing any service to the NSA. And if a state’s utilities are privately owned, they must choose between cutting off service to the NSA or permanently losing their ability to do business with the state.
In most states, this would be largely symbolic: the NSA doesn’t have installations everywhere. But both Washingtonand Utah house significant NSA facilities, and it would actually be quite painful for the agency to move them.
Wielding state power over industry to shut down federal surveillance is a weirdly cross-ideological idea. It combines conservative/libertarian disdain for the federal government with liberal enthusiasm for regulation to address both sides’ concerns about NSA metadata collection. That’s why in the two blue states with this legislation, Washington andCalifornia, the bills are cosponsored by a Democrat and a Republican.
But progressives excited by the bill should cool it. Much of this bill is unconstitutional, and many of the parts that remain should be.
The Power To Destroy
The bill is rooted in a theory that, in James Madison’s words, would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.” More immediately, it could empower conservative state lawmakers to cut off Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, to frustrate civil rights enforcement or even to prevent federal law enforcement from investigating criminals.
The Tenth Amendment Center is one of the leading proponents of “nullification,” an unconstitutional theory which claims that states can unilaterally invalidate federal laws simply by passing their own law claiming that the federal provision is invalid. Yet their proposal to cut of water and power to the NSA rests on a slightly different constitutional theory than pure nullification. Under something known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” the Supreme Court generally does not permit the federal government to command a state to take a particular action. Thus, for example, if the federal government wants to criminalize marijuana, then it can order federal agents to arrest marijuana users, or it can encourage states to prosecute marijuana users by offering them federal funds if they do so, but it cannot simply order a state to prosecute someone the state does not wish to prosecute. Washington and Colorado get to have their own drug laws and their police force is under no obligation to enforce federal law.
Apply this rule to the NSA, and it follows that the federal government cannot force a state to have its own domestic spying program, or to loan its own agents to the NSA. If the federal government wants to engage in surveillance, it must use its own money and its own officers to do so unless a state voluntarily agrees to provide assistance.
But what if a state orders its state-owned power company to deny electricity to the NSA? Or if the state refuses to contract with any company that also provides basic services to the federal government? On the surface, these decisions seem to be covered by the anti-commandeering doctrine as well. Why should the federal government be allowed to direct the state’s business relations any more than it directs its police force?
Chief Justice John Marshall provided a really good answer to this question nearly two centuries ago. In the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the state of Maryland attempted to tax a federally chartered bank. Marshall wrote for a unanimous Court to explain why state taxation of federal entities was not allowed. “[T]he power to tax involves the power to destroy,” he explained, and “the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create” the bank that the U.S. Constitution entrusted to the federal government. More recent Supreme Court decisions have explained that states may not enact laws that “stand . . . as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.”
If the power to tax includes the power to destroy, so too does the power to cut off water, power and other essential services to a federal agency such as the NSA. Federal offices could not possibly manage the kind of record keeping and communications necessary to operate in a modern society without access to electricity. Indeed, the OffNow coalition’s website is quite explicit about the fact that they believe that the power to cut off utilities is the power to destroy the NSA’s ability to operate — the NSA’s “massive supercomputers monitoring your personal information are water-cooled. They can’t function without the resources to keep them at operating temperature. That water is scheduled to be provided by the Jordan Valley River Conservancy District, ‘a political subdivision of the state of Utah.’”
This tactic, of using state power to prevent the federal government from operating, should trouble progressives regardless of how they feel about the NSA’s surveillance program. If Utah can cut of water or electricity to the NSA, what’s to prevent Texas from cutting off power to federal agencies that provide health care to poor people, or North Carolina from turning the lights off on federal voting rights attorneys challenging their comprehensive voter suppression law?
Burning It Down
Don’t doubt for a minute that, if the Tenth Amendment Center succeeds in establishing a precedent for nullification-via-power-outages, they will immediately deploy this and similar tactics to implement other parts of their sweeping libertarian agency. Some of their other initiatives include bills purporting to nullify federal gun laws and the Affordable Care Act, as well as a truly surreal proposal to undermine the Federal Reserve by requiring citizens to pay their state taxes in gold or silver.
Nor are these the least of the Tenth Amendment Center’s ambitions. A resolution introduced in the New Hampshire legislature and pushed by the Center lays out an expansive list of potential federal laws that it objects to on constitutional grounds — one of them is “prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition” — and then claims that the Constitution shall become null and void if the federal government enacts any of the laws the resolution deems objectionable, and “all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually.”
The Tenth Amendment Center, in other words, is not simply distrustful of centralized power. They fear the federal government with such pathological intensity that they’ve actually suggested dissolving the Union in its entirety if Congress, the President or the federal judiciary takes any action that violates their idiosyncratic view of the Constitution. Their position on states’ rights makes John C. Calhoun look like a moderate.
So however attractive reining in the NSA this way might seem, it’s a Trojan Horse: a legal strategy that has the potential to big down the major federal accomplishments liberals most deeply cherish. Good thing the depower bills are unlikely to pass in any state. Regardless, however, this incident tells us something important about the various proposals for a left-libertarian alliance to rein the security state you see bandied about.
Realistically, that’s the alliance you’d need you take serious, nationwide action on spying outside of the executive branch; see the vote count on Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI)’s just-barely defeated bill to end NSA metadata collection. It’s the same coalition that could help accomplish worthy goals like reforming federal drug laws or racist prison sentencing guidelines.
On issues like those — where the policy fix is legally simple, and the goals are fully shared — the left-libertarian alliance has the potential to do a lot of good. But the state-level drive to turn off the NSA’s lights demonstrates the limits of this marriage. Lawmaking necessarily sets precedents. In some cases, those precedents come from the judiciary — giving official sanction to tactics once acknowledged to be unconstitutional. But the mere act of enacting a law and getting away with it can normalize radical tactics as well. Hidden provisions of a law or the legal theory behind it can change the country as surely as the legislation’s intended end.
That means the more legally complicated a policy becomes, the less likely there’ll be any workable left-libertarian compromise to be had over it. Libertarians who endorse a constitutional theory that radically limits federal power will be happy to craft legislation consistent with that theory; liberals will find the implications of such a law repulsive. Conversely, even libertarians who might like the idea of providing everyone with health care in principle can’t get on board with the Affordable Care Act — the theory of federal power it relies on justifies too much for their tastes.
Any liberal-libertarian alliance, then, will necessarily be tactical and limited, or else one side will invariably lose out. With such fundamental disagreements, the center cannot hold, even on issues like NSA spying where the sides are broadly in agreement. Ideology, in very practical terms, matters.
President Obama just finished a long, long disquisition on the NSA, which most critics viewed as an attempt to distract from this week’s revelations about his Benghazi cover up, the continued economic crisis, and Obama’s plummet in the polls. James Bamford, an earlier NSA whisteblower, gave a great talk about the NSA at the National Press Club last night. In questions afterwards he stated that Obama was worse than Bush on civil liberties, we now live in a turnkey totalitarian state where everything is set up to turn on totalitarian control at any time, and that the left is mainly silent because Democrats are elected. It will be on C Span soon.
Local Libertarian Jason Scheurer is writing it up for publication later today maybe at Breitbart. Here is Jason asking a question. (If you are still seeing this note, we are still uploading video so come back again later.)
American companies that produce software, networks and now satellites are losing market share internationally, as consumers abroad opt out of contracts with companies like Cisco Systems and other American IT and telecommunications vendors who cooperate with the NSA or whose products are believed to contain surveillance malware.
Brazil president Dilma Roussef
By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, November 28, 2013
A statement said a joint venture between Telebras and Embraer would deliver the geostationary satellite for strategic communications by late 2016.
Embraer said the satellite would ensure Brazil’s “sovereignty over strategic communications in both the civilian and military areas.”
Brasilia has been angered by reports of US electronic spying on Brazilian government communications, as well as phone call data and emails of millions of Brazilians.
Those disclosures, drawn from revelations by US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, led Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to reprimand the United States at the UN General Assembly session in September and to scrap a planned state visit to Washington.
Visiona Tecnologia Espacial, a joint venture between Embraer and Telebras, will be responsible for integrating the Defense and Strategic Communications Geostationary Satellite (SGDC) system, Embraer said.
“The SGDC system not only will meet the needs of Telebras’ National Broadband Program (PNBL) and the strategic communications of the Brazilian Armed Forces, but it is also an opportunity for Brazil to ensure the sovereignty of its strategic communications in both the civilian and military areas,” said Telebras President Caio Bonilha.
The SGDC system involves the ministries of communications, defense and science and Technology, an Embraer statement said.
It said the satellite would be operated by Telebras on the civilian band and by the defense ministry on the military band.
French-Italian firm Thales Alenia Space (TAS) is to supply the satellite while European satellite launch company Arianespace is to launch it.
The suppliers are to transfer technology to Brazilian companies, a process that will be supervised by the Brazilian National Space Agency, Embraer said.
It stressed that the SGDC system will provide full security for the government’s strategic communications and military communications as it “will be controled in Brazil at stations that are located in military areas, under the coordination of Telebras and the defense ministry.”
“Satellites that currently provide services to Brazil are either controled by stations outside of the country or the control is in the hands of companies run by foreign capital,” Embraer said.
“In either of the cases there are risks of interrupted services, in situations of international conflict or due to the political or economic interests of others,” it added.
Brazil’s state-owned Embratel launched the first South American communications satellite in 1985.
One can only wonder if this bag of (biege) Nixonian dirty tricks was really only going to be used against Muslims accused of inciting terrorism. Who of course have no rights once so accused.
NSA planned to shame ‘radicalizers’ by revealing their porn-browsing history: report
The latest document leaked by Edward Snowden reveals the National Security Agency sought to undermine the reputations of six people, including one U.S. person, who the agency believed incited terrorist activity through social media. Two of the targets could be smeared by targeting the hypocrisy of their public statements vs. their private ‘online promiscuity.’
The National Security Agency proposed smearing supposed terrorist sympathizers by publicizing their visits to porn sites, according to a new report.
The NSA document provided by Edward Snowden and released late Tuesday reveals that the agency had targeted six Muslims who could be undermined by highlighting the hypocrisy of their “personal vulnerabilities,” according to the new story in the Huffington Post.
The report does not identify the targets, who the NSA dubs “radicalizers” — people who allegedly incite terrorist activity through rhetoric.
Information that could damage the targets’ reputations includes “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls,” the Huffington Post reported, citing the documents dated Oct. 3, 2012.
The six targets live outside the U.S., though one is classified as a “U.S. person,” meaning he is either a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and entitled to greater legal protections, according to the report.
None of the targets were accused of terrorism — rather, they allegedly inspired others by expressing “controversial ideas” through social media, the Huffington Post reported.
The information was gleaned mostly through “Sunni extremist communications,” according to the top-secret documents.
One of the targets allegedly spread the message that “non-Muslims are a threat to Islam” — a claim that could be countered by highlighting his “online promiscuity,” according to documents.
THE GUARDIAN/REUTERS
The latest disclosure from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency targeted six Muslims — including two who had tendencies for ‘online promiscuity.’
The NSA said the same accusation of raunchy browsing history could be used against a “respected academic” who says that “offensive jihad is justified.”
It is unclear if the NSA actually carried out the smear campaigns, or if the agency initiated contact with the targets. Their names were redacted by the Huffington Post. The Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Agency were listed as recipients of the NSA documents.
The ongoing disclosures have rocked the secretive NSA and spurred a debate about the balance between national security and privacy.
Among the revelations are that the NSA collects call data on essentially all phone calls made within the U.S., that it has direct access to the servers of major Internet companies, and that it also broke into the internal data streams of companies such as Google and Yahoo.
On Tuesday the Washington Post reported that Microsoft was preparing to aggressively pursue new encryption of traffic through its servers following revelations about NSA spying.
The Insomniac Libertarian 