Via Reason: NSA Ends One Particular Type of Domestic Email Data Collection – Hit & Run : Reason.com
No more gathering communications from Americans that were ‘about’ a foreign target.
Let’s hear it for a little bit more communication privacy for Americans! Charlie Savage at The New York Times is reporting via sources that the National Security Agency (NSA) is ending a particular type of intrusive surveillance that scanned the contents of Americans’ emails for key words.
Specifically, the NSA monitors messages for references of foreign individuals under their surveillance, even when such communications originate here domestically from Americans. This is often referred to in shorthand as “about” searches, meaning they’re looking for messages that are “about” people they’re watching, not just from or to these people. The NSA argues that this is legal as part of its job to gather intelligence about potential foreign threats. But this happens without warrants and and the implication here is at the very least the scanning of the contents of Americans’ communications without evidence of wrongdoing.
Furthermore it appears as though NSA employees were not able to confine themselves to collecting just the communications that referenced the foreign target. This technical issue had been raised before in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC): Through this process, the NSA was collecting and potentially getting access to all sorts of communications it wasn’t supposed to be looking at, even if one were to accept that the “about” searches were legal.
The NSA’s business is as much about misinformation as it is about information gathering, so pardon me for not actually … you know … believing that they are stopping or even slowing down their vacuuming up of American electronic data.
I just hope that this means that they will be slightly less likely to allow the information gathered to continue to be misused by politicians attempting to influence elections.
Rahm Emanuel ‘s Gun-controlled Chicago already has yielded more than 1,000 shooting victims as of April 27 of this year alone.
Via breitbart: Gun-Controlled Chicago: Over 1,000 Shooting Victims This Year
Cool!
I had one thousand by April 27 in the pub pool!
Working in Chiraq has its perks.
Much more here: Here’s What Ronald Reagan Did When Kids Went Ape At UC-Berkeley
What a Real Leader Does When Facing Petty Thugs
Where is Ronald Reagan when we need him? He would have put a stop to it all right quick. Reagan had made campus unrest at Berkeley one of his major campaign issues when he announced his candidacy for California governor in 1964:
[D]o we no longer think it necessary to teach self-respect, self-discipline, and respect for law and order? Will we allow a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy dissident minority? Will we meet their neurotic vulgarities with vacillation and weakness? Or will we tell those entrusted with administering the university we expect them to enforce a code based on decency, common sense, and dedication to the high and noble purpose of that university?
Not unlike another wildly popular, yet wildly unpopular politician, Reagan was elected partly to restore law and order.
Another idea who’s time has once again come…
I Am a Victim of Your Hateful Hate Crimes, You Hate-Criminals
As a person of absolutely no color who embodies an intersectional reality that includes my utter lack of genderfluidity and my unemployment-questioning, differently-veteraned, and non-pagan experiences, I am totally oppressed by progressivism’s hegemonic power structure.
I am also the victim of a systemic system of hostile paradigms that denies my truth regarding my phallo-possessory identity.
My struggle is real, and my male-identifying genitalia will no longer be silent!
I bear a heavy burden in the form of my pasty, easily-sunburned skin. For too long, the fact that a previous Schlichter was booted out of Stuttgart in 1750 has meant that I have been subject to the hateful discourse of unabashed Fritzophobes. And that’s when society hasn’t stolen my Teutonic legacy outright. You are culturally appropriating my cold, emotionless people’s heritage every time you are punctual and efficient.
Read the whole hilarious thing: I Am a Victim of Your Hateful Hate Crimes, You Hate-Criminals
Hat tip: Instapundit
If 100 trillion metric tons of molten carbon will be released into our atmosphere over time through the natural process of volcanism, does that not dwarf the 10 billion metric tons that, according to EPA estimates, was released into the atmosphere in 2011? I would suggest that this study may provide legitimate questions in regard to the usefulness of draconian government regulation in regard to carbon emissions
Read the article: Blog: Volcanoes, CO2, and climate change
Via The Hill: Trump says he may break up 9th Circuit Court after rulings go against him
President Trump is considering breaking up the 9th Circuit Court after a federal district court judge in its jurisdiction blocked his order to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities.”
In a Wednesday interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump said “there are many people who want to break up the 9th Circuit. It’s outrageous.”
In the interview, Trump accused liberals of “judge-shopping” for a court that would strike down his executive order.
“I mean, the language on the ban, it reads so easy that a reasonably good student in the first grade will fully understand it. And they don’t even mention the words in their rejection on the ban,” Trump said.
Trump claimed the court oversteps its authority and that his opponents “immediately run” to the court for “semi-automatic” rulings.
Can President Trump really break up the 9th circuit court? Darned right he can. As posted here in February:
Trump could Abolish ‘anti-American’ Ninth Circuit judges, Here’s how …
The Senate and House could both simultaneously pass a bill to Abolish the 9th Circuit. Then send the Abolishment Bill to Trump and he can sign it.
That day the 9th Circuit Court will be gone, and the judges will no longer have a court to preside over, making them “retired”.
That would put an end to the “Judicial Legislation” the 9th is famous for, and warn other Judges that their political actions can and will have political consequences.
The Executive and Legislature could then create several new circuit courts with all new judges of their choosing. As the man once said, “Elections have consequences”.
There is well established precedent for this, just ask Newt Gingrich.
At a 2011 GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa, Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly noted that at least two conservative former attorneys general had blasted Gingrich’s “dangerous” and “totally irresponsible” plan because it would alter the balance of powers.
“It alters the balance because the courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful,” Gingrich admitted. “I’ve been working on this project since 2002 when the Ninth Circuit court said that ‘one nation under God’ is unconstitutional in the Pledge of Allegiance. And I decided that if you had judges that were so radically anti-American that they thought ‘one nation under God’ was wrong, they shouldn’t be on the court.”
“Like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, I would be prepared to take on the judiciary if, in fact, it did not restrict what it was doing,” he added.
As for those conservative former attorneys general, Gingrich wanted to know if they had studied “Jefferson, who in 1802 abolished 18 out of 35 federal judges?”
“I would suggest to you, actually as a historian, I may understand this better than lawyers, and as lawyers, those two attorneys general are behaving exactly like law schools which have overly empowered lawyers that they can dictate to the rest of us,” he insisted.
See Newt’s video from 2011 at the link: Gingrich: Abolish ‘anti-American’ Ninth Circuit judges
An idea whose time has come in my opinion.
Read the historical precedent here: Judiciary Act of 1802 | United States law | Britannica.com
Update: Here’s the interview Exclusive interview: Trump ‘absolutely’ looking at breaking up 9th Circuit
