Will Verizon stop sending my communication info to NSA on July 19?

The NSA global spying scandal broke a month ago.
Today I read the four page SECRET order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) (published by The Guardian newspaper in Britain) signed by Judge Rodger Vinson on April 25, 2013 directing Verizon to turn over to the NSA,

on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration
of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, 
an electronic copy of the following tangible things: 
all call detail records or "telephony metadata" 
created by Verizon for communications 
(i) between the United States and abroad; or 
(ii) wholly within the United States, 
including local telephone calls.

The order expires on Friday, July 19, 2013 at 5:00 p.m, ET.  
My home, office, Internet, GPS and cell phone service are all provided by Verizon. The "metadata" is highly revealing!

This is one of the most chilling things I have ever read -- a current official document that authorizes my government to spy on ME right now. It authorizes spying on me, my family, and everybody that I communicate with that is taking place RIGHT NOW!


The order expires on Friday, July 19, 2013 at 5:00 p.m, ET.  

What happens then?
Is the NSA going to the FISC to get an extension of the order? Perhaps the FISC is preparing the paperwork to get such an extension right now?

Or will I, and 144,799,999 other Verizon customers in the U.S., be "free" to communicate without the NSA monitoring our calls and communications after July 19? Should I feel "free" then, or should I presume that the spying will continue, this time, again secretly.


Those who read this blog know that I frequently criticize the government, especially President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, in often strong terms. To what extent is the routine spying on ME also being tagged or flagged to pull information aside about my political activities or my personal activities?

What kinds of routine pursuits of my curiosity would trigger some kind of profile that would result in more of an investigation of me? What kinds of lawful activities that I engage in might trigger a more intense review of my private communications?

What if I had looked up on the Internet the location of a gun store or gun show? Or a medical marijuana dispensary? Or the address of a government office building? Or made reservations to travel to Colorado or Washington, or Mexico? Do my communication with people in other countries about drug policy, politics, the economy, the criminal cartels, etc. trigger special surveillance? What about my appearance in movies like the currently-showing "How To Make Money Selling Drugs"? Is the government tracking my movements as reported on the GPS of my Verizon smartphone? Are my orders over the Internet of books and other things from Amazon.com or movies from Netflix being tracked? Is the government tracking my viewing of articles on the Internet?


Are there Americans who already see this surveillance as perhaps the ultimate reason to disengage from the political process and the responsibilities of citizenship? Keep a low profile! "Don't fight City Hall!"

One of the key features of a totalitarian state is that the public fears the state. To challenge the state is dangerous. The defining feature in the creation of that fear is extensive surveillance of private communication and travel. That surveillance was the hallmark of Stalin's regime, Hitler's regime, the Maoist regime, and the current repressive regimes in China, Russia and other nations.

Read the secret order yourself. . . if you dare!

Another interesting feature of the order is that it provides it shall be declassified on "12 April 2038." That's 25 years from now. If this secret order had not been leaked by Edward Snowden, none of us would have known about this massive spying operation for 25 years.

What would "declassification" mean in 2038? Does it mean that 4 pages of paper would be removed from a safe in a secret government building and placed into a file folder in cardboard box somewhere in a government warehouse?

Declassification on 12 April 2038. I will be 88 years old. Would I then have the energy to protest that old invasion of my privacy? (Or would I already be in prison for being too much of a citizen, namely, an enemy of the state?)

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New York's Mayor Bloomberg: "we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little"

New York's mayor, Mike Bloomberg, is so fiercely defending the NYPD racially discrimnatory "stop and frisk" policy, his judgment has become impaired.
Today he said, "incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little." Look at this data and consider whether this makes any sense.

Two years ago I asked for a criminal and investigation of the New York City government, including Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD leadership, by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. My request follows:

June 23, 2011

The Honorable Thomas E. Perez

Assistant Attorney General

Civil Rights Division

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20530

VIA CERTIFIED MAIL

Re: Request to investigate, enjoin and prosecute violations of

42 U.S.C. 14141 and 18 U.S.C. 242

by the New York Police Department and the City of New York

Dear Mr. Perez:

            Enclosed isa ten page memo prepared by Harry G. Levine, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Queens College of the City University of New York, submitted to the New York State Senate on June 15, 2011, regarding marihuana possession arrests by the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the City of New York from 1977 to 2010.

            In 1977, the State of New York enacted the Marihuana Reform Act of 1977. The legislature found “that arrests, criminal prosecutions, and criminal penalties are inappropriate for people who possess small quantities of marihuana for personal use. Every year, this process needlessly scars thousands of lives. . .” The legislature enacted New York State Penal Law section 221.05, which provides that such possession is a violation, carrying a maximum fine of $100 for a first offense. However, if marihuana is possessed “open to public view,” the offense is a class B misdemeanor (NY Penal Law section 221.10).

            Dr. Levine focused on the past fifteen years of arrests and found that the NYPD made 536,320 marihuana possession misdemeanor arrests between 1996 and 2010. In 2010, there were 50,383 such arrests. These many arrests (instead of the issuance of a ticket for the violation of NYS Penal Law section 221.05) are the result of the practice of police officers requesting or demanding that suspects empty their pockets. If they possess marihuana and comply with the officers’ request, the marihuana is then “open to public view” triggering the class B misdemeanor and an arrest.

            The extraordinarily large numbers of marihuana “open to public view” arrests constitute one out of seven of all arrests in New York City. These tens of thousands of arrests cannot be a mere coincidence resulting from the independent exercise of discretion by thousands of individual officers.  This department-wide program of issuing such orders, developed with the knowledge that the orders will be complied with and that compliance will trigger arrests of the thousands of targeted individuals, deprives these persons of their liberty through trickery, constitutes a violation of the subjects’ Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, and the subjects’ right to due process in the administration of justice.

Dr. Levine’s very extensive analysis of the data regarding these arrests reveals that “for many years, New York City has arrested African Americans at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at nearly four times the rate of whites. . . For the last 15 years, 87 % of the people arrested for marijuana possession have been blacks and Latinos, who use marijuana at lower rates than young whites.” (emphasis in the original at p. 2).  The charts and tables accompanying the memo report arrest rates in New York police precincts that correspond to the racial and ethnic makeup of the precinct that demonstrate an unmistakable policy of racial discrimination in the enforcement of this law. The extraordinary disparity in the rates of arrests across the city is inexplicable except as the result of a deliberate policy that targets African American and Latinos for stops and searches.

Because they are plainly targeted because of their race and ethnicity, the African American and Latino arrestees have had their privileges or immunities of citizenship abridged and have been denied equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and in violation of federal law.

The official police data analyzed by Dr. Levine makes out a prima facie case that the NYPD, its command staff, and the City of New York and its leadership charged with supervising the NYPD,

“engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers or by officials or employees of any governmental agency with responsibility for the administration of juvenile justice or the incarceration of juveniles that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States,”

in violation of 42 U.S.C. 14141.

            In addition, the official data and circumstances described in Dr. Levine’s memo set forth a long-term, massive, organization-wide felonious course of conduct that is plainly designed to deprive African American and Latino residents of the City of New York of their Constitutional and legal rights under color of law, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 242.

            Dr. Levine’s careful analysis finds that these arrests target young people. Twenty-three percent of those arrested in 2010 were teenagers! These arrests target persons who have never been convicted of a crime. These arrests “scar thousands of lives” of young people by unwarrantedly creating criminal records with well-known collateral legal consequences, including denial of education, housing, and for non-citizens, deportation. That this policy of arrests is directly contrary to the purpose and intent of the New York State law regarding marihuana possession further illuminates the despicable character of this unlawful conduct by the NYPD and the City of New York.

I call upon you to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division to:

-- open an investigation into the NYPD marihuana arrest program;

-- commence an action to enjoin the unwarranted racially discriminatory arrest and criminal prosecution of tens of thousands of African American and Latino persons annually for conduct that under New York law is a mere violation subject to a maximum fine of $100.00;

-- obtain an appropriate monetary judgment to punish and deter this egregious conduct; and

-- prosecute and appropriately punish those government officials responsible for developing, managing, supervising and approving this plainly unlawful program to violate constitutional rights.

Thank you very much for your prompt attention to this complaint.

                                                                        Sincerely yours,

                                                                        Eric E. Sterling, J.D.

                                                                        President

                                                                        Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

cc:  Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr.

Enclosure

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Medical marijuana can treat infantile seizures -- the tragic price of federal delay of medical use of marijuana

The Washington Post produced an excellent 10 minute video on the use of specially bred strains of medical marijuana to treat infantile seizures that, untreated, lead to catastrophic developmental delays and disabilities. It features an Indiana family bankrupted by the costs of the conventional and ineffective treatments choosing to move to Colorado where legal, regulated medical marijuana is available for pediatric care.

A mother wonders, if the heavy stigma that surrounds the medical use of marijuana had been removed years ago (California passed its medical marijuana law in 1996. DEA's Chief Administrative Law Judge ruled in favor of medical marijuana in 1988!) would she have sought treatment for her boy at a much earlier age, sparing him the disability he suffers from? Her 10 year-old boy, after a decade of the "conventional," FDA-approved medications, now functions at the level of a 4 year-old, still not toilet trained nor able to recognize colors or letters.

Everyone laments that the FDA is not involved in the research and development of these treatments. That FDA involvement is not the fault of the babies, their parents, their doctors, or the medical marijuana researchers. The non-involvement of the FDA is fundamentally the fault of President Barack Obama, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Attorney General Eric Holder (whose wife is a widely respected physician).

The Obama Administration has disregarded the political advantages of endorsing a scientific embrace of medical marijuana in order to appease law enforcement bureaucracies and lobbyists from numerous law enforcement officer organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Police. I think it is plausible that the Administration has also been influenced by the politically powerful pharmaceutical industries which are likely to lose market share for numerous product lines if medical marijuana is legal at the federal level, but I have not seen evidence that documents this hypothesis.

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Fast moving developments: Feds responding to Washington and Colorado: Obama, Leahy, Holder. Where's Biden?

The stasis in Washington on marijuana policy is breaking because of the Washington and Colorado votes to legalize marijuana.
President Obama will be on Barbara Walters on ABC TV on Dec. 14 answering questions. Ethan Nadelmann very astutely interprets the President's words on Huffington Post.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) has said he will hold hearings early next year on the federal response and on Dec. 6, 2012 wrote  this letter to Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy to inquire about federal policy. Leahy notes that there are legislative options for Congress to resolve the apparent conflict between Washington and Colorado law and current federal law, such as legalizing possession of one ounce.
Attorney General Eric Holder said on Dec. 11 that a policy pronouncement will be announced "relatively soon" in answer to a question.

Ethan Nadelmann notes that Obama is at last taking the issue seriously after previously joking about it, when asked.
Second, Obama's comment that users are not a "top priority" for federal enforcement is not news and says nothing.
Third, and significantly, Obama said that he does not support widespread marijuana legalization "at this point." That's the language he used responding to questions about same-sex marriage, until he supported it.
Fourth, and most importantly, Obama said we "need to have a conversation," about marijuana legalization to "reconcile" federal and state law. This is not a statement that conveys an insistence on an inflexible application of federal supremacy to obstruct state law.
Of course, as Nadelmann asked, who is going to be part of this conversation? Is it simply an internal Department of Justice conversation? Will Members of Congress such as Chairman Leahy or U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), who introduced H.R. 6606? Will officials from Colorado and Washington and the public be included in this conversation?

Is the policy that Eric Holder may be announcing going to pre-empt the conversation, or will it be stalled until there is a conversation?

And what is the role of Vice President Joe Biden? He has had oversight of the crime and drugs portfolio inside the White House. Former ONDCP staffer Kevin Sabet told Rolling Stone,

"The vice president has a special interest in this issue...As long as he is vice president, we're very far off from legalization being a reality."

Taking Dr. Sabet seriously, a petition campaign on the White House petition site targeting Vice President Biden has been launched. As of this writing it had over 8,600 signatures -- 25,000 are needed to trigger a reply.

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Martin Lee: Medical marijuana raids to appease "Fast and Furious" critics

According to the excerpt from acclaimed drug historian Martin Lee's latest book, Smoke Signals, published in TruthOut, he argues that the 2011-2012 campaign against California medical marijuana dispensaries was designed to deflect partisan political criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice for the blunders of the "Fast and Furious" BATF undercover operation. "Fast and Furious" was intended to discover how the Mexican drug cartels were acquiring high-powered American firearms. But the guns "walked" (BATF lost track of a couple thousand of them), the weapons ended up in the hands of the criminals and a several were used to shoot or kill U.S. law enforcement agents.

The GOP-controlled House Government Reform Committee, having an opportunity to be outraged at BATF, a unit of the Justice Department, demanded to know what Holder knew about the raids. He stonewalled. Some Members of Congress have sought his resignation, and the House of Representatives has voted him to be in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the Committee's subpoena. It is a big political embarrassment for the Administration.

But Lee's “explanation” does not hold water. It is an interesting hypothesis unsupported by any facts or analysis of the context and history.

Aside from the complete lack of evidence in Lee's explanation, the ostensible political rationale does not make any sense. There is no evidence that the Representatives “gunning” for Holder and Obama regarding Fast and Furious were especially outspoken critics of medical marijuana to the degree that their ire with law enforcement incompetence in the Fast and Furious case might be mollified by a concerted enforcement effort against medical marijuana.

The premise is flawed. Anyone who has followed the 40-year history of the hatred of the NRA, and its congressional allies, for the BATF knows that nothing is going to substitute for an attack on BATF. I was in the middle of this hatred starting in March 1981 when President Reagan was shot, until I left Capitol Hill in 1989. I set up at least a dozen hearings on some aspect of gun control in that time. I handled the House consideration of the NRA's "wet dream" (the Firearms Owners Protection of Act of 1986), the "cop killer bullet" legislation, the undetectable plastic handgun imbroglio, and development of the "Brady Bill" that we got out of the Judiciary Committee in 1988. (Speaker Tom Foley kept the bill from going to the House floor). For comparison, the loathing for BATF on the part of scores of Members of Congress is probably greater than the loathing of the Pentagon felt by many liberals during the depths of the Vietnam War.

Simply consider how a political/enforcement shell game, such as the one Lee suggests motivated the medical marijuana policy change from the 2009 Ogden memorandum, would be executed. There is no evidence, for example, that Administration critics were given private briefings immediately in advance or after medical marijuana raids or enforcement initiatives, such as sending forfeiture-threatening letters to landlords or notices to banks. In the kind of campaign Lee imagines, this would be a prototypical step to give the critics politically useful opportunity to make a timely or newsworthy condemnation of the “evil” of medical marijuana. That is the kind of special political consideration that would be used to curry favor on Capitol Hill that Lee imagines. In addition, there is no evidence that the raids were targeted in the districts of Holder’s critics to especially appease them.

In fact, given that the critics were pro-gun, the BATF letter to all Federal firearms licensees stating, if licensed gun sellers have knowledge that a prospective gun buyer is a legal state medical marijuana patient they are in violation of the Gun Control Act prohibition on sales of guns to known illegal drug users, made no sense. It created political outrage in the Mountain West where almost everyone owns a firearm. That letter could not have been part of an effort to use medical marijuana enforcement to mollify Administration critics of BATF as Lee asserts.

Fundamentally, the medical marijuana raids themselves were not as Lee says, “an all-out vendetta.” They were, to a shocking degree, so ad hoc, unfocused, uncoordinated and poorly announced to the press and public that it is inconceivable that anyone in the Administration believed these raids could be held up as an exemplar of DoJ law enforcement competence and vigor. If anything, the discombobulated character of the DoJ attack on medical marijuana operations invited further attack upon the Obama administration by its enemies as further evidence of law enforcement incompetence.

While the attacks have shuttered hundreds of dispensaries, including numerous first class operations, and have devastated many friends of drug policy reform, objectively, as a concerted law enforcement initiative – especially one designed for a political purpose -- it has been a shockingly incoherent mess. A better analogy of how DoJ has gone after medical marijuana is that of unconnected guerrilla operations, with units striking here and there with the hope of disheartening a much stronger enemy, but not substantially changing the political reality or the balance of power.

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Holder and U.S. Attorney sued by Americans for Safe Access for violating 10th Amendment

On October 27, Americans for Safe Access filed suit against Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of the Northern District of California as the representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice accusing it of acting in violation of the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for threatening California cities that were implementing the California's medical marijuana laws.

The Tenth Amendment provides, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved the the States respectively, or to the people." Various powers prohibited to the States are set forth in Article I, section 10.

The Tenth Amendment has rarely been the ground for litigation and the Supreme Court has said little about its meaning and scope.

This could be another ground breaking case of constitutional interpretation arising from the conflict between the People of California and the U.S government around the use of marijuana for medical purposes. In the last big case, Raich, the government won, 6 to 3, a restatement of a very broad reach for national government power under the commerce clause.

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Sen. Grassley -- marijuana is a gateway drug

U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) often is the lone skeptic to challenge some pointless or abusive government program.

But regarding the complex issues of drugs, he wears the absolutist blinders of many who have family members who suffer with substance abuse tragedies. Reputedly a sibling has been an alcoholic for a long time, and the Senator is a teetotaler.

USA Today notes that following Attorney General Eric Holder's off-the-cuff policy-making regarding federal medical marijuana enforcement, many states are taking another look at their medical marijuana laws. But Sen. Grassley is quoted, "Marijuana is a gateway to higher drugs." This is a shibboleth ["a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usu. regarded by others as empty of real meaning" -- Merriam - Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.].

Instead of quoting a man who has spent nearly his entire adult life (the last 53 years) hustling votes starting when he was 23 years old in 1956 -- a man who calls himself "just a hog farmer from New Hartford, Iowa" -- USA Today could have consulted the scientists of the Institute of Medicine, affiliated with the National Research Council, who studied marijuana for the report, "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Scientific Base."

Those scientists found, "There is no evidence that marijuana serves as a stepping stone on the basis of its particular physiological effect." (p. 99).

"..the gateway theory is a social theory. The latter does not suggest that the pharmacological qualities of marijuana make it a risk factor for progression to other drug use. Instead the legal status of marijuana makes it a gateway drug." (p.99)

"However, it does not appear to be a gateway drug to the extent that it is the cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse..." (p. 101)

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