The campaign to tar Snowden and Greenwald and help the NSA

[NeonLX]

I see Brian Williams from NBC is going to conduct an earth-shaking interview with Snowden on prime time teevee. It was advertised during the Toady Show. All of the pix of Snowden in the preview were blurry and he had a paranoid look on his face in each shot. Brian Williams appeared crystal clear while wearing his serious face.

[Hunter]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 22747.html



So do I understand this right, GG is saying the final and biggest release that will blow the lid off it all is going to be coming soon and it will be him NAMING ACTUAL NAMES of ALL US citizens whose lives are being recorded twenty four seven. That may be a long list, and should be interesting!

The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.

Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.

“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’," he said.

“Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... z32sU3cRKt
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter

[JackRiddler]

So bks, following the surprise firing of Ted Rall and David Sirota from Pando Daily (see below), what Ames writes about Omidyar and First Look looks more and more like a case of projection. I had not realized that Pando bought NSFWCorp and that's how they got Ames, but it sure puts claims that Omidyar somehow bought exclusive rights to the Snowden material (which, clearly, he didn't) in a different light.

Note also this article by Pando publisher Sara Lacy, about what a great guy Peter Thiel is, and how unfair the accusations against him have been, only the last line of which reads, "Peter Thiel is an investor in PandoDaily."

http://valleywag.gawker.com/pando-abruptly-fired-two-high-profile-staffers-without-1595758189

Pando Abruptly Fired Two High-Profile Staffers Without Notice or Cause

Over the weekend, Pando fired two of its hardest-hitting editorial staffers, David Sirota and Ted Rall, both nationally syndicated veteran journalists. Sirota recently broke a big story about Chris Christie's administration awarding pension contracts to hedge funds, private equity groups, and venture capital firms whose employees donated to the governor's reelection.

In February, Pando raised $1.2 million in financing from some powerful venture capitalists, including Accel Partners and Founders Fund, both of which invested in prior funding rounds.

Sirota's scoop about Chris Christie breaking anti-corruption laws was shared and liked 10,000 times on Facebook. According to Quantcast, Pando is only pulling in 859,000 monthly uniques globally and 579,000 uniques in the U.S.

An anonymous source alerted Valleywag to the firings. Neither Rall nor Sirota would comment on why they were fired. But there was a consensus among sources that the decision was not related to budgetary concerns. "It was completely from Sarah Lacy. Paul was the executioner. Apparently it came from complaints from investors in Pando," according to one Valleywag source. "Sarah basically said there was not enough tech and too much politics."

I am not certain about the terms of their departure, but I heard Rall was fired without severance but will be compensated through the pay period.

In response to questions from Valleywag, Sirota said: "I had an amazing time working with Pando to break huge stories and never once received any negative feedback from my editors, including when they let me go."

Rall is a popular political cartoonist. His tenure at Pando lasted less than a month. Within those few weeks, he broke the story that some Uber drivers made less than minimum wage contrary to the company's claims.

He told Valleywag the decision was "really truly out of a clear blue sky. I literally never got anything but A++ reviews." Rall had recently attended Pando's Southland conference, where Sarah Lacy, the site's founder, conducted nearly all of the interviews, including a panel with Al Gore. Despite her dominance over the softball tone of conference, Lacy's Twitter bio makes no mention of Pando or link to the site. She describes herself as "a reporter/author in silicon valley." Carr's bio, on the other hand, says "I edit Pando."

Both Rall and Sirota were hired by Paul Carr. Sirota joined Pando as part of its acquisition of NSFWCorp. As part of the deal, Sirota was supposed to anchor a long-form investigative unit at Pando.

"I loved working for Paul Carr. I had complete editorial freedom," said Rall. "When I wrote stuff that he disagreed with, he not only posted them without comment, he promoted them. I thought, 'Here's a guy with a lot of integrity.'"

That complaint about the lack of tech coverage seems tenuous considering that Sirota and Rall both cover the intersection of tech and politics, taking a broader perspective than your standard press release reblog, which is what the NSFWCorp acquisition promised. The flow of tech money into politics is an increasingly vital topic. Earlier this month, for example, Chris Christie traveled to Silicon Valley for fundraising.

Both journalists were arguably the most visible writers on the site, next to Mark Ames, who also joined through NSFWCorp. "A lot of people followed me to Pando and would follow me anywhere," said Rall.

Sources did not specify which of Pando's investors allegedly objected to their work or the direction the site was taking. Previous investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Menlo Ventures, and more.

If that was the impetus for the decision, the lack of transparency around the firings would run counter to what Pando has claimed to stand for.

When Lacy launched the company in 2012, she clearly stated her ambitions to become the site of record for Silicon Valley, insisting that financing from those same Silicon Valley insiders would not alter the nature of the reporting. At the time, TechCrunch was mired in the scandal over Arrington's conflicts of interests and its internal battle with AOL. Despite some breaking coverage from good reporters and occasionally combative pieces, Lacy's dream withered as her bombastic and self-congratulatory style, interspersed with fawning coverage of some of the techies in her orbit, dominated public perception of the site.

At the time of the acquisition, Lacy said:

"The NSFWCORP brand and voice will be going away, and everything will now be under the Pando brand," PandoDaily Editor-in-Chief Sarah Lacy writes. "The old NSFWCORP team will adapt to our audience and style, at the same time as our voice expands to cover more of tech and startups' impact on the globe."

I just reached out to Paul Carr and will update the post when I hear back.

Update: Carr offered the following statement by email:

Completely wrong.

I'm not going to comment on specific editorial changes which, as a startup, we make all the time. But any decision to hire or fire writers would be mine. Sarah doesn't run the newsroom, I do. Investors have zero say on editorial hiring or firing and I hope my track record of critical coverage of Pando investors shows how laughable the idea of them having input on my decision is. We don't have VCs on our board for this exact reason, and no investors owns any stake that would allow them to make that kind of call.

To be clear: any suggestion that investors have any impact — ever — on which writers we hire or fire, or what we write, is 100% false. There's plenty of both politics and tech on Pando, and there will continue to be. I'm about to hit publish on three intensely political pieces by John Dolan, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine later today. Sounds like your source has an agenda. But then I suppose they all do.

When I asked Carr whether he disputed that Sirota and Rall were fired without notice or cause, he responded:

I'm not commenting on specific personnel issues but, yes, I'm disputing the entirety of your story including that. Your source is just flat wrong. I don't know how much clearer I can be.

To clarify, I spoke with both Sirota and Rall before publishing, who acknowledged that they were let go.

If you have information about Pando, please contact the author of this post at nitasha@gawker.com.

[bks]

Peter Thiel is a well-known piece of shit, a DARPA-linked early investor in Facebook and generally a scourge on humanity. None of which has anything to do with the quality of Pando's reporting on Omidyar or FirstLook.

Far as I'm concerned, if Thiel or other investors are pulling the strings in the newsroom it's just more evidence that the 'editorial independence' granted by an oligarchical paymaster ain't what it's cracked up to be.

A pox on both the houses of the investors in The Intercept and Pando.

[JackRiddler]

Peter Thiel is a well-known piece of shit, a DARPA-linked early investor in Facebook and generally a scourge on humanity. None of which has anything to do with the quality of Pando's reporting on Omidyar or FirstLook.

[1] Far as I'm concerned, if Thiel or other investors are pulling the strings in the newsroom it's just more evidence that the 'editorial independence' granted by an oligarchical paymaster ain't what it's cracked up to be.
[2] A pox on both the houses of the investors in The Intercept and Pando.

I added numbers to your last two paragraphs. Of course on the first, but the second is too easy an attitude.

Even with Her Satanic Majesty, the NYT, you would bother to distinguish between, say, James Risen and Judy Miller, and say the one is an investigator working within certain limits (he was stopped from publishing on the surveillance program before the election, remember), while the other is an out-and-out propaganda agent of a criminal network (that had ensconsed itself in government and will doubtless do so again). Given that we still live in the world run by the 1% of the 1%, I'd say you should judge not only by the overarching categories of institution but (also) step by step, by the work that comes out.

Recall also that (as seen on RI) this Thiel was linked to the HB Gary "Palantir" alliance that. Thanks to the Anon leak, this was revealed to have recommended targeting Greenwald as a Wikileaks ally. As with the point I made at our Left Forum presentation, perhaps that motivated Greenwald to find the cover of his own billionaire?

You don't know what deal they've cut, or what pressures he may be subject to, but I see that GG's stories cohere and bring out new information and have had impact, and he has also had the excuse of a framework set up by Snowden (whether we believe that: separate question).

I see that Ames on the other hand has done great work before but in his attacks on Greenwald makes it personal and displays logical gaps. And that these are now specifically done through the same Pando part-owned by the same Thiel who was also linked to HB Gary and its plan to attack the same GG. And that this Pando just fired Rall and Sirota, who had been pro-Snowden (not that this was the direct reason for them purging their political reporters), and beyond these three names (of Rall, Ames and Sirota) it really is little more than a trivial tech-business company gossip sheet.

So on the whole it's Pando that looks less transparent and more suspicious to me than First Look, so far, and given again the parameters of our being stuck stuck stuck stuck in this world where the capital rules, so that billionaires are often in charge. You may say lesser of the two evils, but I have yet to see that First Look's "evil" is established. Omidyar's, pretty much, and unsurprisingly: billionaire usually does mean that.

The Left Forum vid is still not up at Joe Friendly's site. Was that really only 25 days ago?!

.

[JackRiddler]

https://www.facebook.com/groups/OWSOWS/ ... 288150478/

Glenn Greenwald's Big NSA Story Gets Squashed. Wonder Why? I Mean, Can't You Guess?

On Monday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitter that his long-awaited NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight.

By Tuesday morning, much to the dismay of myself and many others it appeared that the site - which since its rollout has been disappointly devoid of new material - has caved to government pressure tactics did not post the story. According to a rather cryptic Tweet by Greenwald later on Monday,

"After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing". Might any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the "terrorists" and could a permanent delay be in the works?

While I have remained a skeptic to the allegations that the new First Look Media venture that lured Greenwald with the siren song of creating a new and uncompromising investigative journalism forum that was an alternative to the entrenched corrupt state-corporate media the pulling of the big story only serves to bolster them.

When you throw in with the billionaire wolves you will sooner or later being devoured and EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's agenda has already been found by some, for example journalist Chris Floyd to be suspect with support to both the coup government in Kiev as well as the right-wing regime of the newly elected Narendra Modi of India.

The problem is that at the end of the day all of these one-percenter elite pigs stick together and Greenwald should have been far more judicious in his association with one of them.

It would have been a brilliant touch were the story of NSA surveillance of domestic political dissidents and well known figures were to have broken during the week of the orgy of flag-sucking excess that is the Fourth of July and Greenwald may have ill-advisedly tipped his hand during that interview with GQ "The Man Who Knows Too Much" when he alluded to fireworks:

I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that.

The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

For now at least the fireworks show has been postponed, with the incessant fear-mongering that has now overtaken the USA!, USA!, USA! over the new Islamic caliphate and Obama sending more American troops back into Iraq it is probably better than even money that it will be cancelled altogether in the interests of national security.

[JackRiddler]

So Greenwald's big story so far is that the NSA was targeting five U.S. citizens, Muslim American organizational leaders with no background or context whatsoever of either crime or terrorism. A severe constitutional violation, but not yet the promised "fireworks" of an enormous list of dissidents and opposition figures. Still, as Ratner goes into it in the following, in which he focuses also on the surveillance of lawyers and thus the undermining of the right to legal counsel, "Where is the outrage?"!

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?opt ... A.facebook

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. And welcome to this edition of The Ratner Report.

Now joining us is the man behind the report, Michael Ratner. He's the President emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and he's a regular contributor to The Real News.

Thanks for being with us, Michael. So, Michael, what are you working on this week?

RATNER: Well, this week was an important week in terms of NSA, FBI spying. A particular story came out in the new online magazine called The Intercept. It was by Glenn Greenwald and--I think his name is Murtaza Hussain. And it was about NSA and FBI spying on Muslim leaders, particularly Muslim leaders who were lawyers, civil rights leaders, and academics. And he focused on the spying that was really email spying--as far as we know, all of their emails for certain periods--of these five really important Muslim American leaders, all U.S. citizens, as I said, lawyers, academics, and civil rights activists, none of them were accused of a crime. None of them were even under suspicion of a crime. It was spying, I would say, pure and simple, but not so pure and simple. It was spying on lawful political activity of these people, spying on people who were advocating for the rights of Muslims, and for the rights, in one case, a Palestinians. It was also spying on a lawyer who represented various people in the context of what the U.S. considers terrorism cases. But the key fact linking them all is that they were Muslims.

Now, the story came out of a very long list of emails that Snowden had apparently revealed to the journalists. It was something like, I mean, thousands of emails of people who were surveilled in some way, their email accounts. On that list were 202 Americans. They couldn't identify everybody on the list--it was only the emails. But they were able to identify certainly these five.

Of course, in my view, as a human rights lawyer, it should make no difference whether one is an American citizen or not. Why should American citizen have any higher degree of privacy than someone overseas? But under our Constitution, at least the way the courts have interpreted it, it's more serious when you spy on an American citizen. And so the fact that these five were American citizens is of some significance in our country. Of course, that they were Muslims is to me of great significance as well.

There's a number of strands that come out of this story. One is--and the most important to me--is that this is completely unjustified and illegal, the targeting of Muslims because of their religion. I think about what if these were Mormons, what if they were Jews. Wouldn't this country be screaming about what happened? Well, we haven't seen screaming about what happened to these leaders. Let's hope that screaming begins.

The key to understanding this story, to me, is in part, from my work, the context I've worked on since 9/11. It's not surprising to me that the NSA and the FBI has focused on Muslims. They've been doing that for a long time. I saw it right after 9/11 when completely unjustifiably the FBI picked up young Muslim men all over the United States, put them in jails, and wouldn't let them out of those prisons until the FBI cleared them for release. Think about it. The people were innocent, but they still had to get cleared by the FBI rather than the other way around. The FBI had to prove their guilt before they can be held in held in prison. So that's what instance. Another one immediately after 9/11: picking up of young Muslim men, forcing them to be fingerprinted, and forcing them to answer questions, really, to some extent, on pain of deportation. So we see that the attacks on Muslims have been--their origin's way, way back.

Or think of another one which I worked on from the beginning, Guantánamo. Do any of our viewers imagine that there would have been a Guantanamo set up for Mormons or for Christians, other Christians, or for Jewish people? Not imaginable. Do we imagine that place would be open if it contained another ethnicity or another religion other than Muslims?

Or think about here in New York. New York for a long time until our Mayor finally disbanded it, New York had a separate unit of the police department that was to spy on Muslims. And it spied everywhere. It spied in New York. In the case that the Center is working on, it spied on mosques, restaurants, places of work of Muslims in New Jersey. We've tried to stop it. We've brought lawsuits against it. So far we haven't won. DeBlasio did disband that unit finally, but we believe that spying on Muslims is still going on.

Think about this. The New York City Police Department produced a film for training called The Third Jihad, basically just complete smearing of Muslims, including a picture of the White House with a Muslim flag on top of it. So this isn't new. Think about the entrapments that have happened since 9/11 of Muslim young men, of people who would never have committed a crime but for the entrapments.

So what we're seeing created in the United States and the fact that these five leaders of the Muslim community were targeted is not just a hostile work environment like we always alledge around race and sexual gender issues, but a hostile country toward Muslims, and you could even say more broadly as you look at our war machines all over the world, a hostile world for Muslims. So that's one strand that comes out of this important revelation about spying on these five leaders.

A second is that they spied on people who were attacking--or they're attacking, actually, those who are fighting back against this spying on Muslims. So in one case, a man named Nihad Awad, who is head of CAIR, Council on American-Islamic Relations, the biggest civil rights organization the United States, he is one of the five figures that was spied on. The Center for Constitutional Rights, where I work, put out a statement saying this is akin to when the U.S. spied on Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, Jesse Jackson, and other civil rights leaders. To their credit, 45 civil rights organizations have come out and said this spying on a civil rights leader is outrageous. So a second part of this NSA spying story, FBI spying story is it actually attacks those who are trying to make changes in support of Muslim civil rights this country.

A third aspect that's been important to me as a lawyer, of course, is the fact that one of these people--in fact, two of them were lawyers. A particular person, Asim Ghafoor, is a Muslim lawyer who has clients who the U.S. claims were involved in terrorism-related cases. Communications with lawyers and your clients are attorney-client protected. A government can't spy on them. It can't look at them. They're not allowed to do that. If they could do that, the government would tailor its case so that your client would always be convicted. And yet here we have FBI, NSA spying on a lawyer, violating the attorney-client privilege as far as I can tell so far in that case.

I believe that there really no longer is attorney-client privilege protection in this country for people like those at my office, for people like Asim Ghafoor, and for others who represent in particular Muslims. The Center tried to bring this out in a case that we brought to stop what we believe is government spying on our communications, our lawyers' communications with our Guantanamo clients. We went to court. We thought we had a very good case. The government claimed we couldn't absolutely prove we were spied on, and the case was dismissed. But here we now have a case of a lawyer clearly, clearly who's been spied on by the government.

Sadly to me, the NSA guidelines on when they can spy on lawyers, which seem to indicate they can do it--they can do it in the case of the lawyers at the Center who have Guantanamo clients, and they can do it in my case when I talk to my client Julian Assange and others from WikiLeaks outside the United States. The NSA says as long as there's no indictment of those people or public indictment, they can go ahead and spy on attorney-client communications. At least it's left open that they can do it, and I think it's very likely they are doing it.

And recently, you know, there's a board set up. It's called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It's set up by the government to see when's the government going beyond what it should, when's it not. It's basically not much of a board. It's not much protection. But they also have indicated that there's a good chance that lawyer-communications with their clients can be spied on--in the case that I gave, for example, Assange overseas.

I, actually, and the Center have a long history with this. When I first got to the Center, one of its founders was Arthur Kinoy. It was revealed that Arthur, that when he worked as a lawyer for the United Electrical Workers, that his legal conversations about what their core strategy would be against the government was spied on by the government and actions taken based on what they learned the legal strategy of the UE was doing.

Shockingly, and really shockingly to me as we conclude my take on this story, is there hasn't been more of an outcry about the fact that these five Muslim leaders--and many others, perhaps--have been spied on by the NSA and the FBI. And what I'm worried about is in a few years we'll hear mea culpas like we did about the spying on King and others. And the question for me is: why aren't our major media coming out now and saying, this is outrageous, it has to stop? Why isn't Obama saying, this has to stop? Why are we allowing to be created in this country a targeted, vulnerable population that is being repressed not just by the government--but, of course, that's what this is about--but by the media as well. But we allowed it to happen with the Japanese in the Second World War when we put them into camps. It's been allowed to happen with other populations in this country. It's time to say we're not going to let it happen to Muslims any longer.

WORONCZUK: Alright. Michael Ratner, thank you for that report.

RATNER: Thank you for having me on The Real News.

WORONCZUK: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

[JackRiddler]

By the way, the issue of Marcy Wheeler leaving the Intercept (which I believe remains uncommented on by any of the principals) didn't stop her from writing this in support. (Article thanks to seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 10, 2014 7:34 am.)

Another thing pointed out in the other thread worth noting is how the NSA lied the whole time by denying Snowden's claim that as a mere analyst with a contractor he had easy access to the full surveillance take. That he was able to liberate these files on the (illegal, etc.) NSA's COINTELPRO-like surveillance of Muslim American leaders shows otherwise.

THURSDAY, JUL 10, 2014 06:43 AM CDT
First Amendment’s racial tumult: Why Greenwald’s latest revelation matters

We're now wiretapping minority groups -- just as we once did with African-Americans. Here's what we've become

MARCY WHEELER

In a much-anticipated story, the Intercept has profiled five Muslim-Americans who were wiretapped under FISA. Of the five, four are affiliated with — in two cases the founders of — Muslim-American civil society organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization), the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance and the American-Iranian Council. The fifth person profiled represented Muslim organizations, including a charity accused of ties to terrorism, in legal matters.

The Intercept story raises the specter that the government has resumed wiretapping civil society organizations representing minorities, just as it did when it surveilled African-American groups under COINTELPRO.

The Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement today, denying a claim the Intercept did not make explicitly (and making no mention of the article) that these men were spied on because of their First Amendment protected activity. “It is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.” The Intercept instead suggests that these men were wiretapped because of their associations plus their Muslim descent.

The DOJ/ODNI statement goes on to claim no one can be surveilled for First Amendment activities – some First Amendment activities, that is — specifically. “No U.S. person can be the subject of surveillance based solely on First Amendment activities, such as staging public rallies, organizing campaigns, writing critical essays, or expressing personal beliefs.”

Of course, that formulation leaves out several parts of the First Amendment, such as religion (though they mentioned that earlier in the statement) and association, which goes unmentioned in the statement.

That’s significant because the government has argued that it may spy on people because of association via communication. In a 2008 memo describing who could be spied on under the phone and Internet dragnets, for example, it argued freedom of association was just an “extension of the other constitutional protections” under the First Amendment. Based on that claim, the government protections against spying for First Amendment reasons “are not intended … to preclude entirely the conclusion of association based on communications contact observed in communications metadata.”

In other words, the government has maintained that it can spy on Americans based on whom they talk to via email or on the phone.

Tellingly, that memo does not appear to cite a 1957 Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Alabama, which protects the membership of formal organizations like the African-American civil rights group — and like these Muslim-American organizations. The NAACP decision held that “the right of the members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in so doing … come[s] within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

While the government’s response to the Intercept story suggests the government claims to respect specific actions — staging a public rally — it’s not clear that its spying respects the right to belong to organizations that do such things.

All that is particularly important given the government’s reported spying on Nihad Awad, the co-founder and executive director of CAIR, from 2006 until 2008. During that same period, DOJ included CAIR on a list of “unindicted co-conspirators” in a material support for terrorism case; a judge later found release of the list violated CAIR’s Fifth Amendment rights. The FBI also refused to turn over records it held on CAIR under a FOIA request.

Just as important, CAIR is already suing the government based on a First Amendment claim to association rights. It is a named plaintiff in the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit challenging NSA’s phone dragnet. The suit argues that by collecting all the phone records of the plaintiffs – which show both their own communications and those they advocate on behalf of – has harmed their ability to engage in that advocacy.

According to the dragnet orders, Awad’s targeting under FISA means his phone number (and presumably email addresses) could be used to seed the phone dragnet with no further approval process. It’s likely, then, that the government not only collected Awad’s email content, but mapped his contacts, as well as anyone three degrees of separation from him. It’s likely, that is, the government mapped out the associations of CAIR going back to 2006.

Just before the Intercept published this article last week, the government told journalists it never had a FISA warrant on Awad, in spite of the NSA spreadsheet showing it had, which delayed the publication of the story.

It’s possible, however, that DOJ’s refusal to comment about Awad’s targeting — and its careful silence about freedom of association — stems from a hope it can avoid litigating the question of whether NSA can spy on Americans because of their associations, whether they be emails to someone targeted by the government, or aggressive advocacy for a target’s rights.

Note, DOJ already destroyed the records that would have covered this period; EFF claims it did so in violation of a protection order issued in 2008.

In the 1970s, the FBI got caught spying on advocacy organizations, particularly those advocating for the rights of African-Americans. Because of this Intercept story, we may well find out whether it believes it has a legal right to do so still.

[/quote]