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Hito, the piece you seem to be overlooking is that the intentions of a government - or any organization - can change over time. Even if those currently in power remain committed to your freedoms, right up until the day they leave office, new officials will eventually be elected or appointed. And those new officials may not be as committed to the freedoms you enjoy today. What if someone decides in secret one day that you are a threat to the "Homeland"? While you may be unable or unwilling to consider that possibility, I'd encourage you to start paying some heed to it. History is full of examples of bad folks grabbing power from good folks, and of good folks turning into bad folks, and of folks who started out acting good and then ended up acting bad. Plenty of Germans were happy to see Hitler become a dictator, as he promised a renewed country with goodies for all but a very few. It was only after he became der Führer that the dangers of that form of government began to manifest themselves. Just because you're happy to open yourself up to those in power today doesn't mean you'll be happy if tomorrow's government officials become anti-freedom, anti-gay, or - Heaven forfend! - anti-Ferragamo. Unless we're all soothsayers, we can't predict that future. All we can do is try to set up a government that is based on the rule of law - law that we all get to know about, and law that we all get to vote on - and then fight like hell to protect that form of government. If we start giving up our active roles in how that government operates, there will be no shortage of folks who will be eager to mold that government to their own ends. If you are in a position to be one of the inner circle, you may be fine. But, should you find yourself an outsider one day, you may regret having surrendered your voice.

We shouldn't have to "come up with ways" to counter government programs of any sort. The ability to lead a quiet and peaceful, productive life is called a right. The feds are interfering with those rights and it is only getting worse. The government cannot make one safe. In a free and open society there is always the risk that someone will do something "unsafe". That includes your neighbor getting drunk and killing someone or a terrorist attack. We may be on the verge of a police state now. I urge everyone to think this over. Best regards, RA1

You guys can't be serious that you just discovered The American Press sucks? On so many levels does it suck. I have been long disappointed in our press and rail against it constantly for following ratings and circulation numbers or courting on-air guests with soft ball interviews, all of it ginned up by controversy more than hard news. It infects all of our press including the big boys. That doesn't mean they are entirely asleep at the wheel but they follow distractions more than they should, which has to dilute their product. Most, if not all, of our press is fixated on domestic politics minutia, chasing controversies real or manufactured, he said/she said exchanges, conducting meaningless polls, etc. Being in the weeds so much of the time, our guys lack the view to see possible blemishes in the landscape that bear a little prospecting. Sort of like ants at a picnic scurrying around to find any source of sugar or starch they can carry off... to establish their 'rep' (everybody wants to be Woodward or Bernstein) or to please the bean counters at their organizations with ratings/circulation fodder. Some hope to turn a sad occurrence like Benghazi into a brazen Watergate with lives lost or seeking to inflate some other minor scandal into a bloody train wreck, if not high crimes and misdemeanors. I'm thinking more about ambitious reporters trying to polish their resume for the Pulitzer rather than authentic news organizations for which they report. Any organization pushing that type of story is more a political organ of one party or the other, and yes, the left does it too (it was prevalent in the Bush years.) If you have followed the UK domestic press then you know it has been a basket case of clowns and snakes. Their tabloids and Murdoch have stained the domestic product beyond imagination. But there are a few gems. For some time I've have respected the UK Press that covers this side of the Pond and world wide: Reuters, The Financial Times, The Economist, now the Guardian. They report real and substantial news in contrast to the crap passed off as real news over here. They have been covering us more in the last decade due, I believe, to the War on Terror which the UK has played a big role in and also due to the financial meltdown initiated over here that did even more damage there. Thus some of what we do here has consequence to them. I believe their success covering us compared with the domestic product lies in their distance to the landscape here. They are not mired in our silly fixations on Palin, or on votes repealing Obama Care for the 38th time or the hundreds of other breaking-news items of similar ilk over the last 6 years. They report many fewer stories and generally of some real importance. Because of their limited foot print over here they have to be big game hunters and make their shots count. Nobody needs the UK covering the House repealing Obama Care again! They understand that in the UK and here too. I'm thankful their reporting skills have been focused on this side of the pond.

Hello, guys. This is Epi again. And again in Italy. I spent a couple of days in beautiful Bologna (it is hard to believe but it is not a very turistic city); with no time to try the good escorts offering at Gay Romeo. Now I am in Rome. I went yesterday to Sauna Europa Multiclub, in Via Aureliana, not far from Termini Station and very close to Piazza Barberini and Via Vittorio Veneto. Probably the best gay sauna here. The place is quite large, distributed in three floors -- the wed parts are in the basement, with (free) rooms. People say the building is one of the many partaining to the Holy See.... The pope(s) also have at least a tenant of doubtful fame.... The sauna is a good place for cruising. And you are alone, one can always ask for a massage before leaving empty handed! There ere are two shifts of 4 masseurs each (the first one from 13h to 18h, then the second until midnight). I met a strong guy from Roumania, who asked for a good tip to get involved (80 euro... and not too cooperative, hélas. But his younger brother, working in the second shift, was moovie star handsome). Today I was bussy with my paper but put Growl on my phone .... it was just too good: I chatted with two gorgeous guys, but I could get only one date (both were for free, of course). Beautiful 30 something Vincenzo: nice muscled body, short haircut (blond hair with some white at the temples), sparkling green eyes... A very good fucXXX, to say the truth. It seems to me that there are around a lot of great looking guys, who are eager to meet older people -- at least members of the bear community. The smartphones finally work very well 'connecting people' in conservaive Italy!! Epi

I found this very interesting. I walk past this place all the time. At least 2-3times a month. And for about 5 months, a couple times weekly as I was dating a guy who worked down the street from this restaurant. As the article states, it really just look like any other lanchonete in the city and no reason at all to make a special stop at this one among the thousands of others. Not to far of a walk to Club 117 and even easier via the metro)only two stops or the onibus 422 which stops the next block up on the other side of the street in front of Livreria Galileu. Café Lamas: Classic Meals, with a Side of History From the street, Café Lamas looks almost intentionally nondescript. A fluorescent-lit bar with a glass case of snacks and a few metal chairs would make it identical to any other lanchonete (snack bar) across the city, if it weren’t for the shadowy doorway behind the bar’s aisle. Behind that door awaits a blast from the past. Café Lamas is Rio de Janeiro’s oldest restaurant – a respectable 138 years old in a city that is rapidly putting on a new face as it buzzes with Olympic, hotel and condominium construction – and the place radiates a sense of history and tradition. Bow-tied waiters politely bend as guests enter the dining room, which is dimly illuminated by lamps on ornate cast-iron mounts. Frosted lettering on mirrors around the dining room promotes the “new delicious Lamas dessert,” which proud co-owner Milton Brito admits is actually no longer new. An all-white statue of a curvaceous woman wrapped in the Brazilian flag sweetly smiles down on diners from one wall. The statue was once colored the green, yellow and blue of the flag, until a member of the military visited Lamas during the 1964-85 dictatorship and demanded that the colors be removed. “He thought it was somehow against the national flag,” explained Brito. The Brazilian Communist Party held its meetings in Lamas during the same period, as did many of the first members of Brazil’s now-ruling Workers’ Party. That’s because Lamas was a rare venue that stayed open around the clock. “It was always frequented by artists, journalists, writers, businessmen, university students,” said Brito, adding that being open 24/7 made it a place Rio’s all-night carousers could set as a fail-proof location to meet up with friends. “Because it didn’t close, everything happened at Lamas.” In 1976, the construction of the metro forced the restaurant to move to a new location about two blocks away. “People said, ‘Lamas had to accept progress,’” Brito said of the eviction. While the original Lamas hosted all-night pool tournaments and drinking contests, the newer location seems to have tamed its old capacity for vice, closing at a more “respectable” 3 a.m., with some black-and-white photos on the wall the only evidence of the former pool hall. And while Lamas may have once been a Communist Party stronghold, its menu prices today are far from proletarian. Indeed, as Brito is proud to note, the restaurant’s eclectic mix of distinguished guests has included Walt Disney, Bianca Jagger and current Supreme Court justice Joaquim Barbosa, seen as a national idol for taking a hard line against Workers’ Party politicians involved in a corruption case called the mensalão, or the “big monthly payoff.” As for the food, keep in mind this dica (tip): traditional Brazilian cuisine is first and foremost about fellowship. Heaping portions are meant to be shared among several diners. Though artesanal dishes with small portions and attention to detail are increasingly popular in Rio’s chic contemporary eateries, to old-time cariocas (like the ones who run Café Lamas), this trend is just a little too individualistic. Cariocas also often value pure ingredients over spice, meaning that Lamas’s menu leans heavily in a meat-and-potatoes direction. Yet there are Lamas dishes that will grab the attention of even a well-traveled eater. The molho de alcaparra, a buttery sauce with capers and parsley, is a Portuguese-influenced side dish that makes a rich dip for the cebola frita, fried onions, or the batata portuguesa, which is a bit like a thick potato chip. The filé à Osvaldo Aranha – a filet mignon au jus covered in crispy toasted garlic bits – is named for a well-known early-20th-century politician and diplomat who committed suicide in the nearby former presidential palace, who took his beef this way at Lamas. Café Lamas also stands out for its fine selection of domestic and imported bottled beers – a rarity in a city that gets its kicks from a pale draft beer called chopp. Índica, a crisp India Pale Ale made by Brazil’s Colorado brewery, is a refreshing palate cleanser between rich courses. For dessert, a must-try house specialty – found nowhere else in Rio – is the creme de abacate com licor de cacau, a moussey avocado ice cream drizzled with cacao liquor and garnished with a lime wedge (cariocas treat avocados as a sweet). Another quintessentially Rio dessert is the goiabada com catupiry, guava paste served with a slightly salty white cheese. A gringa friend in Rio, initially overwhelmed by the large portions of meat-centric plates and heavy sauces, told us she came to understand the local approach to dining when someone gave her the following dica: Think of eating a traditional Brazilian meal as “laying bricks” – consuming heavy, hearty food to build up strength before a long day at work. At Lamas, part of the fabric of Rio de Janeiro, cariocas have been happily laying those bricks for decades. Address: Rua Marquês de Abrantes, 18 loja A, Flamengo Telephone: +55 21 2556 0799 Web: www.cafelamas.com.br Hours: 9:30am-3am

one great week in Rio club 117 is as good as ever Hope to find Iphguy tonight at 117. on monday i skipped going to 117 and did hotel date. have yet to make it down to MM last night andra was back in town from now work in S.P. T

A BoyToy forum member e-mailed me some questions and asked me to answer them. So here goes: What is the cost of the cabine and how long do we rent them for? Are the cabines the same price all week long except free Tuesday? i understand the cabines/suites are for 45 min??? And on free Tuesday the suites are for 30min??? Cabines = The free small space at Meio Mundo - no bathroom Rooms/Quartos = The larger rooms that offer a sheet/lencol and condom/lube included Suites = At Clube 117 with toilet, sink and shower en-suite They go for one hour. That is what is posted and if one asks at the reception, that is the response. However, the free cabines at New Meio Mundo and the Tuesday freebie at Clube 117 are for either 40 or 45 minutes. My brain fails me for the difference. On nights other than Tuesday at Clube 117, the suites go for 25Reais for ONE hour. Each night at New Meio Mundo, the nicer rooms with sheets and condoms/lube included go for 15Reais, 20 Reais and 25Reais. Don't let the boys tell you differently that it is only 30 minutes on free nights and 40 or 45 minutes on other nights. They are just trying to do a fast turnaround. This past Tuesday night, after showering and going back to the locker room to dress, I passed by Lindomar, a beauty from Curitiba who has been around since 2005 or 2006. Very nice guy, brought him back to my home on a couple of occasions. He hugged me very tight and his long hard penis pressed quite forcefully into my abdomen. I told him that I needed to leave to make my boat but he was trying to make it very difficult for me. I then said to him "puro puto" or "pure whore". He just started to smile and nod his head and repeated the same back to me. In essence, I called him on it. Same difference with what the boys parrot to you about the time lengths for the cabines/rooms/suites. Are we supposed to tip the barmen and the cute waiters? Towel boy/toalhiero? I find the waiters lacking at Clube 117, so I never thought about it. I have once tipped the current good waiter at Meio Mundo. And in the past I have infrequently at Meio Mundo. It is a hassle to remember to carry a 5 Reais bill up the stairs from the locker. And after getting dressed, I hate to make the trek back up the stairs to the bar to leave a tip. Around Christmas, I do give my 2 or 3 favorites 20 Reais each. I never put money in the tip boxes. I doubt how much goes into the owners and managers pockets and doesn't reach the employee team. I normally do not tip the towel boy if he is only bringing me flip-flops/Havaianas/sandalias/chinelos when I arrive. However, if I am bringing in anything extra like a package or two or my shopping cart, I always give whoever is helping me 5Reais. On rare occasions, 10Reais. Now big question, this happened on Wednesday night. One of the boys late, came up to me, he did not know my name, and i did not know his name, he said he had no clients can could i give him 10R for his exit fee. what would you have done? If he had a cute smile, gave me a kiss and a hug, felt my dick, played with my nipples, Yep. Otherwise, Nope. There entry is not your responsibility. They know the requirements and you are not there caixa electronica/automatica. They can plead poor, having the crocodile tears, tell you all lies... NEXT! Now, if you have been with them in the past and you liked them and it was a good programa, I would. Last Tuesday, someone I have been with a few times at 117 but had told him that I wasn't interested that day, was a bit off as he hadn't shaved and supposedly didn't have the money to buy a disposable from the desk for 4Reais. He has brought enough to pay his entry and fare back home, but that was it. Whether it was true or not, have no clue. But he claimed the disposable cost 4Reais and he looked a bit sketchy with a three-day beard. The Bradley Cooper-look has not made it to Rio. Almost all shave almost everything. Anyway, I gave him 5Reais and "Desejos Por Bom Negocios" or "Wishes For Good Business."

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007 Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.05 EDT A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program. In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data." Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said. An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM. The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US. It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants. Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata. Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online. Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies. Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US". The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the Fisa Amendments Act in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces. When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more. The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy. The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users. The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US. "Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all." The new measures introduced in the FAA redefines "electronic surveillance" to exclude anyone "reasonably believed" to be outside the USA – a technical change which reduces the bar to initiating surveillance. The act also gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general power to permit obtaining intelligence information, and indemnifies internet companies against any actions arising as a result of co-operating with authorities' requests. In short, where previously the NSA needed individual authorisations, and confirmation that all parties were outside the USA, they now need only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA. The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming "access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning". In the document, the NSA hails the PRISM program as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA". It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google. The NSA document indicates that it is planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider. The agency also seeks, in its words, to "expand collection services from existing providers". The revelations echo fears raised on the Senate floor last year during the expedited debate on the renewal of the FAA powers which underpin the PRISM program, which occurred just days before the act expired. Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware specifically warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs meant there was no way to know if safeguards within the act were working. "The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don't know how well any of these safeguards actually work," he said. "The law doesn't forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can't say and average Americans can't know." Other senators also raised concerns. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon attempted, without success, to find out any information on how many phone calls or emails had been intercepted under the program. When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a "report". According to the NSA, "over 2,000 PRISM-based reports" are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year. In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data. "It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications. "This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation." Additional reporting by James Ball and Dominic Rushe http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-2%20Special%20trail:Network%20front%20-%20special%20trail:Position1

Like the airlock idea, but a wormhole... imagine if he's humanity's first contact with an alien race? They'd burn this planet to a cinder!

On whistleblowers and government threats of investigationNo healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 June 2013 08.04 EDT James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, who called the Guardian's revelations 'reprehensible'. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come. But I do want to make two points. One is about whistleblowers, and the other is about threats of investigations emanating from Washington: 1) Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here. I'll say more about all that shortly, but for now: as these whistleblowing acts becoming increasingly demonized ("reprehensible", declared Director of National Intelligence James Clapper yesterday), please just spend a moment considering the options available to someone with access to numerous Top Secret documents. They could easily enrich themselves by selling those documents for huge sums of money to foreign intelligence services. They could seek to harm the US government by acting at the direction of a foreign adversary and covertly pass those secrets to them. They could gratuitously expose the identity of covert agents. None of the whistleblowers persecuted by the Obama administration as part of its unprecedented attack on whistleblowers has done any of that: not one of them. Nor have those who are responsible for these current disclosures. They did not act with any self-interest in mind. The opposite is true: they undertook great personal risk and sacrifice for one overarching reason: to make their fellow citizens aware of what their government is doing in the dark. Their objective is to educate, to democratize, to create accountability for those in power. The people who do this are heroes. They are the embodiment of heroism. They do it knowing exactly what is likely to be done to them by the planet's most powerful government, but they do it regardless. They don't benefit in any way from these acts. I don't want to over-simplify: human beings are complex, and usually act with multiple, mixed motives. But read this outstanding essay on this week's disclosures from The Atlantic's security expert, Bruce Schneier, to understand why these brave acts are so crucial. Those who step forward to blow these whistles rarely benefit at all. The ones who benefit are you. You discover what you should know but what is hidden from you: namely, the most consequential acts being taken by those with the greatest power, and how those actions are affecting your life, your country and your world. In 2008, candidate Obama decreed that "often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out," and he hailed whistleblowing as: "acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." The current incarnation of Obama prosecutes those same whistlelblowers at double the number of all previous presidents combined, and spent the campaign season boasting about it. The 2008 version of Obama was right. As the various attacks are inevitably unleashed on the whistleblower(s) here, they deserve the gratitude and - especially - the support of everyone, including media outlets, for the noble acts that they have undertaken for the good of all of us. When it comes to what the Surveillance State is building and doing in the dark, we are much more informed today than we were yesterday, and will be much more informed tomorrow than we are today, thanks to them. (2) Like puppets reading from a script, various Washington officials almost immediately began spouting all sorts of threats about "investigations" they intend to launch about these disclosures. This has been their playbook for several years now: they want to deter and intimidate anyone and everyone who might shed light on what they're doing with their abusive, manipulative exploitation of the power of law to punish those who bring about transparency. That isn't going to work. It's beginning completely to backfire on them. It's precisely because such behavior reveals their true character, their propensity to abuse power, that more and more people are determined to bring about accountability and transparency for what they do. They can threaten to investigate all they want. But as this week makes clear, and will continue to make clear, the ones who will actually be investigated are them. The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals. This dynamic - the hallmark of a healthy and free society - has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That's the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable. There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they've done we're all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner. These endless investigations and prosecutions and threats are designed to bolster that fear-driven dynamic. But it isn't working. It's doing the opposite. The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That's what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that's what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency - the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions - the more quickly that backlash will arrive. I'm going to go ahead and take the Constitution at its word that we're guaranteed the right of a free press. So, obviously, are other people doing so. And that means that it isn't the people who are being threatened who deserve and will get the investigations, but those issuing the threats who will get that. That's why there's a free press. That's what adversarial journalism means. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/whistleblowers-and-leak-investigations

Some think we have already lost or to quote Walt Kelly and Pogo, "We have met the enemy and they are us". Best regards, RA1

It sure seems there would be a market opening for foreign companies to begin replicating at least some of the services offered by U. S. communications and social media companies, and then adding a privacy guarantee that U. S. companies can't match. Not that foreign companies could yet replicate all of the communications infrastructure of U. S. companies, and not that they would remain forever free of NSA's tentacles, but they could certainly take some business from the U. S. companies whose brands are now being tarnished by their cozy relationship with the NSA. Even a modest flight of customers from the information sieve of U. S. companies to more secure communications through foreign companies with a stronger privacy story should get the attention of CEO's and stockholders in U. S. companies. Once these big-bucks campaign donors start seeing their bonuses and fortunes dwindle, maybe the politicians would start to get the message that U. S. voters have so far been unable to deliver. As for me, I've had to hold my nose the last few times I voted for Senator Feinstein. I'm not planning to vote for her again. In fact, I may not vote for any politician in the future who does not have a strong privacy element in her or his campaign platform. I'm also planning to cut back, just a little but whenever practical, in my phone use and to make a modest donation to the ACLU. Tiny steps, no doubt, but hopefully matched by others who are getting equally fed up with government intrusion into their personal lives. I'm willing to rethink my position if strong evidence is presented that these runaway surveillance tactics have borne substantial fruit, but I'm certainly not moved by mealy-mouthed statements that some unnamed 'terrorist' somewhere, somehow, was defused just as he was fixin' to stuff a cherry bomb up his ass and climb on a bus. Any politician or government official who thinks we are 'winning the war on terror' by dismantling the civil liberties of U. S. citizens might do well to look up the definition of 'winning'.

ihpguy thanks for the information. so the boys have been short timing me, i was told 30 min on free night, and 45min on the other nights at club 117 not that i want to be a clock watcher, but its good to know how long one has time to play T

From NYT:U.S. Confirms That It Gathers Online Data Overseas Alex Wong/Getty Images Senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss spoke to reporters Thursday about the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Verizon phone records. By CHARLIE SAVAGE, EDWARD WYATT and PETER BAKER Published: June 6, 2013 WASHINGTON — The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night. The N.S.A. and other government agencies declined to comment about the disclosures. The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration. Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state. The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified documents obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday afternoon. In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful requests for information. “It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.” The Prism program grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with the matter. The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach. Before the disclosure of the Internet company surveillance program on Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security. Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the kind of surveillance at issue “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism personnel 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.” He added: “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.” The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program. The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying. Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America’s own vast surveillance operations. But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it. “A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr. Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.” Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective. Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the N.S.A. “on an ongoing daily basis” until July logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported. “As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act.” “Therefore, it is lawful,” she said. “It has been briefed to Congress.” While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of calling information to the N.S.A. Randy Milch, an executive vice president and general counsel, wrote that “the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.” Sprint and AT&T have also received demands for data from national security officials, according to people familiar with the requests. Those companies as well as T-Mobile and CenturyLink declined to say Thursday whether they were or had been under a similar court order. Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program defended it in part by noting that it was only for “metadata” — like logs of calls sent and received — and did not involve listening in on people’s conversations. The Internet company program appeared to involve eavesdropping on the contents of communications of foreigners. The senior administration official said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to obtain an order from a national security court to conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without individualized warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil. The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is controversial in part because Americans’ e-mails and phone calls can be swept into the database without an individualized court order when they communicate with people overseas. While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies’ servers, several of the companies — including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements. “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” the company said in a statement. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.” While murky questions remained about the Internet company program, the confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks. Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national security investigation. Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon — have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was classified. On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted — or is even effective. But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of broad, bipartisan support for the program. “If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.” And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He gave no details. It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications metadata and mining the database to identify associates — called a “community of interest” — of a suspected terrorist. In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule of law. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Confirms Gathering of Web Data Overseas. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Faster than a speeding electron. Actually, at about exactly that speed. About this and your other remarks on this UK paper providing better US coverage than our own press, The Guardian did publish something recently on its deliberate expansion of US coverage over the past couple of years, and this being one of its biggest, maybe THE biggest, growth areas in its readership. If I find it, I'll post it. Clearly as you said the dearth of serious journalism this side of the pond gives them and others such as say The Economist an opening. I don't know anything about the business model of The Guardian, how their ad revenues are doing print vs. online, etc. But they do offer their full content online with no pay wall such as at WSJ has for most of its content now, nor a limited number of free article views/month and then pay wall as NYT and others do. They do have, and have long been known for, a stoutly liberal editorial stance. (One crack goes, They are The Guardian of Manchester, but have anointed themselves guardian of the free world.) They are of course forthright about this and, I find, consistently conscientious to keep the reporting evidence-based, well and explicitly sourced and documented. In all, a welcome relief from the formless mush that we increasingly get in lieu of real journalism here.

Remembrance of wars worth fighting.

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to serversSilicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history Dominic Rushe and James Ball in New York guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 19.48 EDT Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers. The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US." Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM. However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency. The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge. An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said. Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said: "We do not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law." A Google spokesman said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data." Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007. Executives said they were "confused" by the NSA claims. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it. The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

The New York Times is livid: "...The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it..." Editorial President Obama’s Dragnet By THE EDITORIAL BOARD Published: June 6, 2013 Within hours of the disclosure that the 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. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive 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 9/11 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 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. A senior administration official quoted in The Times 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.” 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 who 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 repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy. The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today 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.” 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.” 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 Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator 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.” 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 issuing 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.” This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?_r=0

Others are noting the same thing. Obama Administration Confirms Massive Surveillance Program Of U.S. Citizens JONATHAN TURLEY Res ipsa loquitur ("The thing itself speaks") Published 1, June 6, 2013 While the media in the United States (with some notable exceptions) have been criticized for relatively soft coverage of attacks on civil liberties by the Obama Administration, the British press appears to be filling the gap. The Guardian is reporting on a massive surveillance program by the Obama Administration where the government has ordered Verizon (and presumably other carriers) to turn over all calls made within the United States and calls between the United States and other countries. The surveillance was conducted under an order from our controversial secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and demanded by the Justice Department and the FBI. The Administration has confirmed the existence of the program — another blow to civil liberties under Attorney General Eric Holder and this president. It also adds another area where Obama officials appear less than candid with Congress. The order signed by Judge Roger Vinson requires the company to turn over the phone numbers, location, duration, time and unique identifiers for all calls for all citizens. There is no effort to confine the search for individuals connected to any investigation. It is a sweeping surveillance on all citizens. Of course, just as Democrats have remained quiet over the recent attacks on the free press, it is not clear if even this abuse will generate opposition in Congress. Civil libertarians have been complaining for years about these programs and have met a wall of silence from Democrats protecting President Obama and Eric Holder. In February, the Administration succeeded in blocking a challenge to its surveillance policies by arguing that any confirmation of such programs would put American lives at risk. Now that the case is dismissed, they have simply acknowledged the program. The decision is Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, and it is a true nightmare for civil liberties. The Supreme Court rejected the standing of civil liberties groups and citizens to challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs. President Obama has long been criticized for his opposition to such lawsuits and his Justice Department has continued a successful attack on the ability of citizens to challenge the unconstitutional actions of their government in the war on terror. The 5-4 opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. insulates such programs from judicial review in yet another narrowing of standing rules. Alito rejected the ability of an array of journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates to challenge the constitutionality of the 2008 law allowing secret surveillance without meeting constitutional standards of probable cause. Alito simply said that the parties could not prove that they were subject to surveillance — since the Obama Administration has classified such evidence — and insisted that their fears and precautionary actions are merely efforts to “manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of nonimminent harms.” Alito wrote that just because no one may be able to challenge the law is no reason to recognize standing — a position that guts the separation of powers principles underlying judicial review. He also cites to the secret FISA as judicial review — a truly laughable proposition. I have been in that court as a NSA legal intern and the thought that it constitutes any real form of review is a preposterous notion. I have written and testified on this court in the past. Now we can see the inevitable consequence of this secret court and the Administration’s surveillance program. The Administration is creating a massive databank for all calls, including calls within the United States. This surveillance program is the result of a sense of political immunity reflected in this Administration. With some Democrats blindly following this President, there appears no concern over excessive surveillance or the ever-expanding security state. It is the final evidence of how Obama has truly crippled the civil liberties movement in the United States. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/06/06/obama-administration-confirms-massive-surveillance-program-by-nsa/

I am a privacy advocate but from their actions if not their sentiments I am willing to surmise that the general US public is not. Or, perhaps they are just not considering what they are doing and the various consequences. I support my claim by the widespread use of facebook and other "social media". At first all this was seemingly completely innocent; friends keeping up with friends, but many now know that almost anyone can know all too much about one's life. I have never understood this phenomenon but then I have never sent "Christmas letters" and the like to friends and family. Regardless of what private citizens do, the government has no right to usurp what many believe to be Constitutional rights. Eventually, the Patriot Act may be and should be found to be illegal or unconstitutional. Best regards, RA1

Verizon court order: telephone call metadata and what it can showThe US insists call data is not private information, but critics say it allows government to build detailed picture of individuals' lives James Ball guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 10.12 EDT The US government has long argued that 'metadata' isn't private or personal: it's the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP When does mass data collection get personal? When it comes to the contents of our communications – what we say on the phone, or in emails – most people agree that's private information, and so does US law and the constitution. But when it comes to who we speak to, and where we were when we did it, matters get far hazier. That clash has been highlighted by a top secret court order obtained by the Guardian, which reveals the large-scale collection by the NSA of the call records of millions of Verizon customers, daily, since April. The court order doesn't allow the NSA to collect any information whatsoever on the contents of phone calls, or even to obtain any names or addresses of customers. What's covered instead is known as "metadata": the phone number of every caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each of the participants when the call happened. All of this information is being collected on millions of calls every day – every conversation taking place within the US, or between the US and a foreign country is collected. The government has long argued that this information isn't private or personal. It is, they say, the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter: what's written on the outside is simple, functional information that's essentially already public. That forms the basis of collection: because it's not personal information, but rather "transactional" or "business" data, there's no need to show probable cause to collect it. Collection is also helped by the fact this information is already disclosed by callers to their carriers – because your phone number is shared with your provider, you're not treating it as private. But that is not a view shared by privacy advocates. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that by knowing who an individual speaks to, and when, and for how long, intelligence agencies can build up a detailed picture of that person, their social network, and more. Collecting information on where people are during the calls colours in that picture even further. One recent case that highlights this tension is the recent subpoenas of the call records of Associated Press journalists, which led to clashes between the media and the White House over what was widely seen as intrusion into a free press. The information collected on the AP was telephony metadata: precisely what the court order against Verizon shows is being collected by the NSA on millions of Americans every day. Gary Pruitt, the president of the Associated Press, set forth how monitoring even these "envelopes" could become a serious intrusion: "These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know." The view on whether such "transactional" data is personal, and how intrusive it can be, is also being tested in the appellate courts, and the supreme court is likely to see more cases on the issue in the near future. Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that even location information on its own could reveal a person's secrets: "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups," it read, "and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts." The primary purpose of large-scale databases such as the NSA's call records is generally said to be data-mining: rather than examining individuals, algorithms are used to find patterns of unusual activity that may mark terrorism or criminal conspiracies. However, collection and storage of this information gives government a power it's previously lacked: easy and retroactive surveillance. If authorities become interested in an individual at a later stage, and obtain their number, officials can look back through the data and gather their movements, social network, and more – possibly for several years (although the secret court order only allows for three months of data collection). In essence, you're being watched; the government just doesn't know your name while it's doing it. Until now, such actions have been kept a tightly guarded and classified secret, speculated upon, suspected, and occasionally disclosed by sources, but never proven by documents. Now the confirmation is in the open, the American public have the opportunity to decide which definition of private information they prefer: that of the privacy advocates, or that of the NSA and White House. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/phone-call-metadata-information-authorities

The justification tango begins. Obama administration defends NSA collection of Verizon phone recordsWhite House upholds 'critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats' as senior politicians condemn surveillance • Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman in Washington guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 11.54 EDT Obama administration said the practice was 'a critical tool in protecting the nation'. Photograph: Rex Features The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans' phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier. Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government. But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States". The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. The disclosure has reignited longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers. Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama. The White House stressed that orders such as the one disclosed by the Guardian would only cover data about the calls rather than their content. A senior administration official said: "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counter-terrorism personnel 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. "As we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorising intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorises such collection. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." The administration stressed that the court order obtained by the Guardian relates to call data, and does not allow the government to listen in to anyone's calls. This point was also made by the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein. "This is just meta data. There is no content involved," she told reporters on Capitol Hill. "In other words, no content of a communication. … The records can only be accessed under heightened standards." Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images However, in 2013, such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off. "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents," said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. "It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies." The order names Verizon Business Services, a division of Verizon Communications. In its first-quarter earnings report, published in April, Verizon Communications listed about 10 million commercial lines out of a total of 121 million customers. The court order does not specify what type of lines are being tracked. It is not clear whether any additional orders exist to cover Verizon's wireless and residential customers, or those of other phone carriers. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific, named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. The Verizon order expressly bars the company from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself. "We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman said on Wednesday. 'Secret blanket surveillance'Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress." News of the order brought swift condemnation from senior US politicians. Former vice-president Al Gore described the "secret blanket surveillance" as "obscenely outrageous". "In [the] digital era, privacy must be a priority," he said. The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities. For about two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. Udall, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said on Wednesday night: "While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking." Russell Tice, a retired National Security Agency intelligence analyst and whistleblower, said: "What is going on is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined." Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability. "I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity ... to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now." The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the secret court order was unprecedented. "As far as we know this order from the Fisa court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon [business services] subscribers anywhere in the US. "The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it." Mark Rumold, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "This is confirmation of what we've long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country. We hope more than anything else that the government will allow a judge to decide whether this is constitutional, and we can finally put an end to this practice." Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor of New York, described the revelations as "a shocking report that really exploded overnight". "A lot of people are waking up now and I think they will be horrified," he said. "It is not just the civil libertarian wings of the Republican and Democratic parties; I think most Americans will be really surprised that their government is having access to all of the phone calls they make." "I don't think the administration's response [so far] is anywhere near adequate. I think you will see a lot of questions being asked in the coming days." Oregon senator Jeff Merkley said: "This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans' privacy. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-2%20Special%20trail:Network%20front%20-%20special%20trail:Position1

One analysis of how Russia got this way, and what may come next. After Putin: How Russia’s liberalism might be revived Autumn 2008 by Boris Kapustin The Russian liberal intelligentsia fell victim to its own idealism, says Boris Kapustin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But to challenge Vladimir Putin’s “regime of authoritarian capitalism” he advises taking a leaf from Vaclav Havel’s book of 20 years ago that headed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia Russian liberalism is not just in crisis, politically speaking it has ceased to exist. It is not represented in the parliament, it has disappeared as a focus of public debates, even among intellectuals, and its claims to be a credible and politically attractive ideology now seem vain if not preposterous. I use the term “Russian liberalism” as an umbrella concept embracing the political practices and agencies, both of the neoliberal and social liberal types, which identified the Russian “exit from Communism” with the establishment of the rule of law, political and ideological pluralism, the market economy and “openness to the West”, if not its imitation. Neither the repressive nature of the present regime nor the innate hostility of the Russian “cultural tradition” towards liberalism can explain this calamity. These are pseudo-explanations that serve Russian liberals as pretexts for their own self-exculpation. If liberalism is to be reborn in Russia, one must understand the political causes of its demise. Liberalism failed as an ideology in Russia in the wake of communism’s collapse. Now Russian liberals must free themselves from the burden of the Boris Yeltsin legacy – its unabashed neoliberalism – and confront the type of capitalism expressed by the present Russian regime’s “authoritarian capitalism.” MATTERS OF OPINION No free market, please, we’re Russian! According to a recent Gallup poll, more Russians say that a market economy would be wrong for their country’s future than those who think it to be the right direction. The difference between the two camps has somewhat narrowed in recent years though. In 2007, 41% said that the creation of a market economy largely free from state control would not be right for Russia, down from 44% in 2006. This compared to 35% who said the opposite, up from 32% the previous year. Fear of voicing political views rises in ex-Soviet republics Gallup polls in 14 former Soviet states show that, almost across the board, people are increasingly afraid to speak their mind on political issues. In seven of the states, a majority now say that their fellow citizens are afraid to openly express political opinions. The most dramatic increases were in Georgia and the EU member state Lithuania, where at least twice as many people in 2007, compared to 2006, said that “many” or “most” of their fellow citizens were afraid to express their political views. In Tajikistan and Armenia, seven out of 10 of those surveyed in 2007 expressed this view, compared to about half in 2006. http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/ The mass anti-communist movement at the end of Russia’s perestroika era was liberal in spirit. Liberty and human rights, equality and justice, non-violence and the rejection of economic and political dirigisme made up the “nodal points” of its alternative to the status quo. Unfortunately, self-proclaimed “democrats” opted for sequencing reforms according to a formula of market first, democracy next. Suffice to say that, at least in the specific circumstances of Russia, such sequencing resulted in a distorted and socially harmful free market presided over by a bunch of warring oligarchs. Instead of promoting a transition from Communism to the “blessed plateau” of democratic capitalism, it allowed the undemocratic misdeeds of Yeltsin’s regime and the appalling depravity of the huge portions of the population of Russia. But instead of showing outrage, many liberals considered this as a reasonable price that Russia had to pay for being pulled out from communism. Liberals continued to trumpet their values of human rights and private property, voicing few reservations about “Yeltsin’s policy” in the name of liberty and justice for all, including the millions of downtrodden. This is what determined the moral and political bankruptcy of post-communist Russian liberalism. Having sided with the new masters of Russia as the only force capable of implementing a Western path to democratic capitalism, Russian liberals forsook their independent popular base and became dependent on the goodwill of those who wielded power. This dependence blinded them to the shocking lawlessness of Yeltsin’s bloody coup d’état in October 1993, to the rigged results of the referendum on the new Constitution, and thence to the massive manipulations of the disgraceful elections of 1996, and to the significance of the financial collapse of 1998. Up to the end of the 1990s, the regime of authoritarian capitalism had not been consolidated. The future autocrats still needed the Russian liberal intelligentsia as one of their props. So when Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s President he was careful to preserve the semblance of the liberals’ participation in politics, even co-opting certain of them as “advisors”, “experts” and functionaries of the regime. Those who were determined to put their liberal beliefs into practice were later ejected from their positions and the rest were assimilated into the rising and solidifying bureaucracy of authoritarian capitalism. The liberals’ “moment of truth” arrived with the new century, when the regime realised that it could henceforth perpetuate itself without recourse to the liberal intelligentsia. The liberals were found politically redundant and the regime abandoned rather than persecuted them. On their own, the liberals could not survive politically. This is what predetermined the electoral failures in 2003 of parties like Yabloko and the Union of the Rightist Forces. It could charitably be said that the Russian liberal intelligentsia suffered from its own excessive idealism, and that its somewhat naïve dedication to ideals lacked practical executioners. This faith made too many of them misread the rise of authoritarian capitalism as no more than the zigzags and temporary setbacks of Russia’s transition to democracy. More soberly, however, the liberal intelligentsia, or at least its upper layers, should be viewed as one of the main benefactors of the Yeltsin epoch. They capitalised lucratively on this role, emerging as the main recipients of countless Western grants and honoraria; they were the “patricians of democracy” whose credentials were certified by their positions in respectable and often affluent Western NGOs and charitable foundations. They seemed the spiritual mediators of newly booming trade between Russia and the West. The same liberals today castigate the regime, and with good reason. The absence of an independent judiciary, severe limitations of the freedom of the mass media, rampant corruption in all branches of bureaucracy and the systematic harassment of nearly all opposition are genuine ills. It is one thing, though, to articulate all these grievances and quite another to set out an attractive and politically mobilising ideology. Russia’s liberals have to send forth a message that resonates with the broader public. The resonance can’t just be some sort of rehearsal of the “superstitions” of the people; it means coming up with a compelling alternative. The opposition’s platform is by and large not to recognise the legitimacy of the present regime. True, the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2007 and 2008 were unfair, but can their unfairness be realistically equated to a usurpation of power? A historically unprecedented number of Russians, well over 50%, now express themselves as satisfied with the status quo, and that’s something that can’t be ignored. A majority of Russian people feel no anger at the loss of what we might term Yeltsin’s democracy which they perceive as having been a plaything in the hands of unscrupulous elites that had no actual value for the people. The burial of Yeltsin’s democracy may have passed generally unnoticed, but the benefits the people have received from the Putin epoch are clearly visible. They can’t be measured exclusively in terms of material advantage, but no less important is the fact that social life in Russia has ceased to be chaotic, and political life is no longer insultingly grotesque, even though it has become boring. Order has appeared as a buzzword of the day – with all its conservative overtones. Order is by no means an ultimate political good, but it is an indispensable pre-requisite of all political progress and is appreciated as such. But it is doubtful that in the eyes of many Russians Putin’s regime – or, to update things, Putin’s and Medvedev’s regime – has any intrinsic value. For them, it is nevertheless better than the terror of unpredictability, buffoonery and free-riding that was so typical of the Yeltsin epoch. This rational preference can’t be ignored or misinterpreted, but it condemns Russian liberals to a state of political non-existence. Russians will only stand up in support of a different kind of democracy providing it offers a tangible social content and has a bearing on their everyday lives. It would also be unfair to the Putin epoch to turn a blind eye to the continuity it brought with what preceded it. This continuity saw a maturing of the type of capitalism introduced back in 1992. During the Putin epoch it has rid itself of the extravagances and irregularities of its early years, when it was the people who were the most painfully affected, but it has for all that retained its oppressive, corporatist, oligarchic and profoundly unjust characteristics. The gap between Russia’s rich and the poor has increased during the Putin years and is now indecently wide. So although there is continuity, it is a continuity that has preserved the symbiosis of property and power even though its institutional format has changed. Under Yeltsin, it saw the privatisation of political power by several oligopolies, which in its purest form manifested itself in the “regime of seven banks” (semibankirtschina in Russian) that ensured the president’s re-election in 1996 on condition that he should forfeit his “sovereign” power. Under Putin, this bargain was reversed: the several clans that man the upper echelons of the state acquired control over the main economic resources. The political-economic nature of the symbiosis as a private phenomenon has not been changed by this, but its institutional-legal construction, the ideological modus operandi and the undisputed winners have all altered. For the mass of Russians, these changes have proved to be important. State-based authority tends to be more sensitive to their sufferings than do the private sector’s capitalist oligarchs. Russia’s skyrocketing oil and gas revenues since the turn of the century have made policies for sharing out the country’s newly-acquired wealth financially possible. The regime has thus been able to reinforce its power. If the opposition liberals want to escape from their confinement to the political salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg, they must come to grips with Russia’s new political and economic realities. They must reveal to public opinion the present system’s inherent tensions, and they must address actual grievances by proposing feasible and popular political courses of action. It is not enough to recycle the mantra of human rights violations because it is grass roots actions that are required. Russia’s liberals might find it worthwhile to begin with what Vaclav Havel, when discussing how communism in the Soviet bloc could be resisted, dubbed small-scale work. It was a strategy of very concrete small deeds which although seemingly unambitious politically enhanced an alternative public morality, promoted independent networks of cooperation and steeped the reform movement’s would-be leaders in a realistic and non-elitist democratic culture. In today’s Russia, the likelihood of such a development would seem meager unless a severe economic crisis were to undercut the stability of Putin’s authoritarian capitalism. But do not human dedication, fortitude and tenacity occasionally change the flow of history? After all, before 1989 very few people took Vaclav Havel for a clairvoyant. http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21238/language/en-US/Default.aspx

1. You truly don’t care who Julia Roberts is sleeping with. 2. You understand the difference between 43 brands of imported vodka. 3. You can call anyone “honey” including pets. 4. You know someone who definitely was in the emergency room with Richard Gere and the gerbil. 5. You understand the immense importance of good lighting. 6. You can be at a crowded disco the size of two football fields and still spot a toupee. 7. You can tell a woman you love her bathing suit, and truly mean her bathing suit. 8. You can explain the nuances between steady date, boyfriend and lover. 9. You really have “been there, done that.” 10. Your women friends will tell you everything you want to know about their boyfriends. And that means everything. 11. You’re the only type of male who gets to say “fabulous.” 12. You can have naked pictures of men you don’t know in your home. 13. You can have naked men you don’t know in your home. 14. You know how to handle the telephone like a Stradivarius. 15. You understand why the good Lord invented spandex. 16. You understand why the good Lord didn’t intend everyone to wear it. 17. You know how to get back at just about everyone. And have. 18. You know that the most important part of a party’s decor is the catering staff. 19. You only wear polyester when you mean to. 20. You can smile to let someone know you can’t stand them. 21. You can freeze a troll from 20 feet away. 22. You’re good pals with women other people can’t stand. 23. You’ve always got an opinion. 24. You’ve read the book, seen the movie, done the musical. 25. You know how to dress strategically. 26. Your car has an amusing female name. 27. You’re the only one at your high school reunion who looks a lot better than you did in high school. 28. You’ve got at least one framed picture of a pet. 29. If your mattress could talk, it would be Joan Rivers. 30. You know that sex complicates things. So? 31. You know that being called a “cheap slut” isn’t actually an insult. 32. There’s a married guy somewhere who is terrified of you. 33. Nobody tells you what to do in bed…unless you tell them what to tell you. 34. You have a medicine chest stocked for any occasion. 35. You have at least one movie musical on video. 36. You’re not embarrassed to sing in a piano bar. 37. You’re embarrassed by people who sing in piano bars. 38. You never hold a grudge for longer than a decade or two. 39. You know how to make an entrance. 40. You know when to make an exit. 41. You worry about people you don’t even know – like Liza Minnelli. 42. You choose the most fabulous greeting cards. 43. You know how to program your VCR. 44. You’ve got sunscreen at every conceivable SPF level. 45. You have a cologne display worthy of Bloomingdales. 46. You understand, viscerally, Joan Crawford. 47. Some of your best friends are your ex lovers. 48. You know when to play dumb. 49. You know what to do for a hangover. 50. Yes, you do have a condom. 51. You’ve called someone “girlfriend” who is neither a girl nor a friend. 52. One or more of the following apply to you: a) You adore Judy Garland You hate Judy Garland c) You hate people who adore Judy Garland. d) You hate people who hate Judy Garland. e) You don’t give a damn about Judy Garland. f) Who is Judy Garland? 53. You can supply the last names to the following list: a) Bernadette Chita c) Barbra 54. You made Donna Summer a star. 55. You made Donna Summer a has-been. 56. Tanning salons were invented for you. 57. You’ve made sunbathing a performance art. 58. You know when the party’s over. 59. You know where to go after the party’s over. 60. You’re fearless about fighting the elements, especially gravity. 61. When you hear “a stitch in time saves nine” you think of a) Your grandma Your face lift c) John Wayne Bobbit 62. You know that pigs and bears are not necessarily rural wildlife. 63. Your roommate can be your roommate and not your “roommate.” 64. You know that referring to someone as “a real lady” isn’t necessarily a compliment. 65. Your favorite dinner accessory may also be your dinner companion. 66. If your cat is a female, you swear it’s a lesbian. 67. If your cat is a male, you swear it’s a lesbian. 68. You sing along heartily with songs that make most females cringe, like “Stand by your man”. 69. You’ve been to a bris, a barmitzvah, a christening, a first communion and too many weddings and you have a carefully considered evaluation of the food after each. 70. You’ll never have to hear your mother complain about your wife. 71. A two-seater convertible seems perfectly practical to you. 72. You have a favorite Disney character and it’s usually a nasty one. 73. You’ve left someone totally speechless. 74. You’ve shaved something other than your face. 75. All your friends do not have to “get along”. 76. You have large collection of anniversary pictures. They may be with different guys, however. 77. Your love handles are actually used as such. 78. When someone turns his back on you, you actually consider it an opportunity. 79. You’ve got a large assortment of movie-star biographies. 80. You’ve got the most interesting coffee table books. 81. You know where to find a meat rack and it ain’t in your kitchen drawer. 82. You have a sexual persuasion with its own flag. 83. At some moment in your life you’ve envisioned having back-up girls. 84. You know your enemies. 85. After a workout at the gym, you feel like a new man. And he’s right there in the shower. 86 You’re Barbra Streisand’s biggest fan. 87. You know that Barbra Streisand’s biggest fan is Barbra Streisand. 88 Not only have you added spice to your life – sometimes you’ve added side dishes. 89. You know that “small talk” can be about spirituality or politics, and “important issues” can be about hair. 90. You’ve actually lived out some of your fantasies. 91. Unlike most straight women, you have no problem being treated solely as a sex object. 92. You have no doubts about the accuracy of the Kinsey Report. 93. You know, by heart, every line in: a) All about Eve The Rocky Horror Picture Show c) Your face 94. You are ALWAYS ready for your close-up. 95. You have 412 ways to tell someone to get lost. 136 are non-verbal. 96. You can lip-sync to at least one Supreme’s song. 97. You have a carefully selected Yiddish vocabulary. 98. Even if you’re in Kansas, you’re not in Kansas anymore. 99. You know exactly how many martinis it takes. 100. When throwing a party, you know how to put out quite a spread. Sometimes after the party too.

Air Canada is trying (once again) a"new" low cost product called Rouge. Here are some pictures featuring some adorable fellas (I particularly like the tall fella wearing glasses) in the new uniforms. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/canadian-airline-introduces-hip-uniforms-for-flight-attendants

Pacific Southwest was a great airline. I didn't ride them much because I live so far away but did business with one of their subsidiaries quite a bit. Best regards, RA1

By Variety – 12 hours ago French police have named actress Sharon Stone as their prime suspect in the daring heist, in which more than $1.4 million in jewels were stolen from a hotel room during the Cannes Film Festival. According to authorities, they zeroed in on the “Basic Instinct” star as their prime suspect after an IMDb search helped them realize the actress hasn’t been a movie star in almost a decade, which made her attendance at the Cannes Film Festival extremely suspicious, they noted. “Sharon Stone’s last starring role in a major theatrical release was in 2006’s ‘Basic Instinct 2,’ which should have gone to straight-to-DVD anyway,” a spokesperson for the Nice police told Hollywood & Swine. “So what possible business does Sharon Stone have attending the 2013 Cannes Film Festival other than to steal expensive jewels? No one including Ms. Stone has been able to give us a good answer.” When French detectives brought Stone in for questioning earlier today for her alleged involvement in the jewelry theft, she immediately began reciting popular lines from her infamous interrogation scene in 1992’s “Basic Instinct.” She then tried to intimidate detectives by uncrossing her legs, but officers explained to the Oscar-nommed actress that no one has wanted to see that since the ’90s. Stone reportedly told detectives she was at the festival to see her former co-star Michael Douglas’ new Liberace biopic, “Behind the Candelabra.” Detectives quickly dismissed this as an unlikely motive for traveling across the globe to France, when like most of America, Stone could have waited until the film premiered on HBO. Detectives believe what may help them prove Stone is responsible for the jewel heist is the actress’s long and notorious history of theft. Detectives have numerous sworn affidavits by co-stars from her brief guest-starring stint on “Law & Order: SVU,” where Stone is accused of trying to steal every scene she was in by overacting. http://movies.yahoo.com/news/sharon-stone-named-suspect-cannes-jewel-heist-220054091.html