US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home Dave Lindorff

Happy Independence Day as America celebrates with a military parade in the capital city.

If vigilance is the price of freedom, Americans need to wake up and stand up as the vise jaws close.

This Can't Be Happening
US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home

Dave Lindorff

See also

The Rutherford Insititute
It’s Time to Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America
John W. Whitehead

Also

AlterNet
True patriots are rebels, not bootlickers

Meteor Blades

Ted Rall — Empty Symbolism – Why the Freedom Act Sucks

Marketed as pro-privacy reform of the rancid Patriot Act, the USA Freedom Act is about to become law. Though nothing could be further from the truth, many Americans will believe that the NSA is being reined in, and move on another issue.

The Freedom Act has been characterized as another vindication of Edward Snowden — and, considering the fact that we wouldn’t be discussing the balance between individual privacy rights and national security if he hadn’t made the NSA’s spying against us public, it is.

We’re also being told that the Freedom Act will protect us from the NSA.

It won’t....

Ted Rall
Empty Symbolism – Why the Freedom Act Sucks
ht Dan Lynch

AFP — New documents show NSA routinely spied on phone records unrelated to terrorism cases

US intelligence officials declassified documents Tuesday revealing the National Security Agency violated privacy rules for three years when it sifted phone records of Americans with no suspected links to terrorists.

The revelations raised fresh questions about the NSA’s ability to manage the massive amount of data it collects and whether the US government is able to safeguard the privacy of its citizens.

The government was forced to disclose the documents by a judge’s order after a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group promoting digital privacy rights and free speech.

The Raw Story
New documents show NSA routinely spied on phone records unrelated to terrorism cases
Agence Presse-France

Tech Dirt — Feds Abused Anti-Terrorism Database To Track Chelsea Manning Supporter, Seize His Computer

Feds Abused Anti-Terrorism Database To Track Chelsea Manning Supporter, Seize His Computer (via Techdirt)

We've written a number of times about the so-called Constitution-free zone that extends 100 miles inward from the borders of the United States, a place where the Border Patrol, along with the DHS and ICE, exercise the "right" to search electronic devices…

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Glenn Greenwald — Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy

Pew finds that, for the first time since 9/11, Americans are now more worried about civil liberties abuses than terrorism

Tide turning?

The Guardian (UK)

Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy

Glenn Greenwald

Ali Watkins — Sen. Wyden says he tried to warn of massive surveillance program

“If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will live to regret it,” [Sen Wyden] said.

“Sen. Mark Udall and I tried again and again to get the executive branch to be straight with the American public, but under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code,” he said. “And we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.”

Wyden blasted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the body that must approve surveillance requests, saying that the veil of secrecy behind which it functions negates the concept of balanced oversight. The court’s secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are too broad, he said, and render the legislation unrecognizable.

“I tell Oregonians that there are effectively two Patriot Acts,” he said. “The first is the one they can read on their laptop in Medford or Portland, analyze and understand,” Wyden said. “Then there’s the real Patriot Act – the secret interpretation of the law that the government is actually relying on.”

McClatchy News
Sen. Wyden says he tried to warn of massive surveillance program
Ali Watkins | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Glenn Greenwald — Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying Shows Why U.S. Wants to Silence Edward Snowden

GG: I’ve been writing for years about the fact that civil liberties abuses and excessive government invasions are really the issue that can bridge the ideological gap and create these transpartisan, transideological coalitions more than probably any other. And then you’ve seen this over the past 10 years. The ACLU has long partnered with right-wing groups like the Christian Coalition to challenge the PATRIOT Act. And I think what you’re seeing is lots of support for Mr. Snowden and for our NSA reporting on the left, groups like Amnesty International and the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, lots of liberals and progressives who have been outspoken in their support of these disclosures, but you also see a lot of support for it on the right, as well, from people who take seriously their rhetoric about limited government and the rights of individuals and the need for safeguarding individual privacy.

Democracy Now
Glenn Greenwald: Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying Shows Why U.S. Wants to Silence Edward Snowden
Interview with Juan González

Gaius Publius — Rep. Holt to introduce bill to repeal Patriot Act & 2008 FISA Act

While the rest of the country was celebrating our independence, House Dem. Rush Holt (NJ-12) was doing something about it — drafting legislation to repeal both thePatriot Act of 2001 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

America Blog
Rep. Holt to introduce bill to repeal Patriot Act & 2008 FISA Act
Gaius Publius

(h/t Kevin Fathi)

Fascism Alert — Corey Robin: Think you have nothing to hide from surveillance? Think again.

The selective invocation and application of criminal prosecutions and penalties is one of the oldest tools of repressive government. (Anyone wanting a refresher should consult Otto Kirchheimer’s classic discussion of “patterns of prosecution” in his Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends. As Kirchheimer writes, “Modern administrative practices create infinite ways to become liable to criminal prosecution.”) The sheer sprawl of federal (and don’t forget state and local) law—and the surveillance of men and women that now accompanies that sprawl—only enables this furhter.

Think you have nothing to hide from surveillance? Think again.
Corey Robin

Read in conjunction with Franz Kafka, The Trial; George Orwell, 1984, and the files of Stasi, KGB, and other secret police in fascist and totalitarian regimes along with the secret tribunals and show trials.

For the first time in its history the US as a secret police agency (DHS) that operates with the military, blurring the lines between civilian and military. Moreover, the president has assumed dictatorial powers indistinguishable from other tyrants. due to secrecy. 

This is a very slippery slope for the US to be sliding down. It is undermining American soft power as the "beacon of liberty" and the "shining city on the hill" of purported American exceptionalism as the world discovers that America has feet of clay.

Peter Z. Scheer — Prosecutors Use Patriot Act to Shut Down Virtual Currency Operator

Reuters:
The U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-money laundering unit, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), issued guidance in March that labeled digital currency firms as money transmitters, thereby obliging them to put in place anti-money laundering programs and register with FinCEN.

Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, a top exchange for Bitcoin, the best known virtual currency, failed to register with FinCEN earlier this month and had its U.S. dollar accounts seized by authorities.

Truthdig
Prosecutors Use Patriot Act to Shut Down Virtual Currency Operator
Peter Z. Scheer

Et tu, Joe?

Read it at Washington's Blog
Joe Biden Drafted the Core of the Patriot Act in 1995 … Before the Oklahoma City Bombing

Gives new meaning to "Reality has a liberal bias."