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Another campaign worker for 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has pleaded guilty to election fraud charges and perjury in Virginia.

On Tuesday, according to WVIR, Charlotte VA's NBC affiliate, 28-year old Adam Ward pleaded guilty to 36 counts related to submitting forged signatures in the failed attempt by the Gingrich campaign to qualify for the state's 2012 GOP Presidential Primary ballot.

Just 10,000 legitimate signatures were needed to qualify for the ballot. The Gingrich campaign turned in more than that, but thousands of them, it turns out --- in an incident that far outpaces anything ACORN was even ever falsely accused of --- were faked. State authorities say they were unable to verify some 4,000 signatures out of more than 11,000 turned in by the Gingrich campaign.

In April, another Gingrich worker, 31-year old Jennifery Derrebery, pleaded guilty to similar felonies, after prosecutors said she had "turned over stacks of signed and notarized forms to the Virginia Board of Elections containing roughly 400 signatures --- nearly all of them fraudulent."

At the time of Derrebery's plea, WVIR reported that she was cooperating with prosecutors who said the "investigation is still active, and may result in additional arrests."

In an exclusive report in January of 2012, The BRAD BLOG originally broke the story confirming VA's criminal election fraud probe of Gingrich and his campaign, after what state election officials described to us as "definitely an illegal act."

That "illegal act" was believed, at the time, to have involved some 1,500 fraudulent signatures, as overheard being described by candidate Gingrich himself. He had been caught on video tape, in December of 2011, speaking to a supporter in Iowa, attempting to downplay the failure to qualify for the VA ballot as "just a mistake"...

"We turned in 11,100 --- we needed 10,000 --- 1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud," Gingrich is seen and heard saying in video originally aired by CNN.

The former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives said his campaign had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

The news today of a second conviction in the case confirms that the effort was a conspiracy, larger than just the "one guy" to whom Gingrich originally chalked up the "mistake".

When The BRAD BLOG originally noted Gingrich's video-taped remarks in Iowa, we had observed that "If the same standards are applied to Newt Gingrich as have, for years, been applied to the now-defunct ACORN organization by both Republicans and their media arm, Fox 'News,' then it seems Newt Gingrich's campaign has committed thousands of acts of voter fraud."

While the now-defunct, four-decade old community organization had been accused of all matter of wrong-doing by Republicans, largely angered by ACORN's wildly successful voter registration efforts, the group has never been found guilty of gaming any election, or even helping to cast even one single fraudulent vote.

That didn't stop Gingrich himself, however, from inaccurately and opportunistically charging in a 2009 op-ed that "ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud."

In fact, ACORN routinely double-checked all voter registrations for validity after they were turned in by their workers. They then flagged questionable registrations as potentially fraudulent before turning them, and the responsible workers, in to election and law enforcement officials (as required by law). Gingrich's campaign appears to have done no such thing.

When the number of fraudulent signatures submitted by the Gingrich campaign was believed to be just 1,500, as described by the candidate, Tommy Christopher at Mediaite observed that what his campaign did "was arguably worse than what ACORN was accused of."

"ACORN had a much better ratio of valid registrations to fraudulent ones than Gingrich," write Christopher. "13% of Gingrich's signatures were bogus, while ACORN's error rate was around 1.5%, according to Project Vote. Most of the ACORN applications that were rejected were duplicates, not fraudulent ones."

The Republican Party has continually misrepresented the ACORN worker cases for years in order to push for new laws requiring state-issued Photo ID at the polling place for voting, even though such laws would not deter the type of fraud they were accusing ACORN of having committed. They are pushing for such laws not because it will deter incredibly rare acts of in-person impersonation at the polling place, but because such restrictions will disproportionately disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters, such as minorities, students, the poor and the elderly.

Contrary to GOP claims, The BRAD BLOG documented, throughout the Presidential election cycle last year, a pervasive record of recent and apparent election fraud carried out by high-ranking Republicans, many of whom had previously been (inappropriately) critical of non-existent "voter fraud" by ACORN. See, for example, this article, as written last August, after four U.S. House staffers of then Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) were indicted on charges of ballot petition fraud almost identical to those which Gingrich's campaign workers have now pleaded guilty to.

That article offers a quick round-up of some of the most recent cases of alleged and/or confirmed voter fraud and election fraud by high-ranking Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White, the CA Republican Party, Rep. Todd Akin, James O'Keefe, Ann Coulter and several others.

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

I had the pleasure of guest hosting for Ed Schultz today on his radio show.

It was my first time hosting for Big Eddie, after being a guest on his show at various times over many years. We had much fun today in the bargain! My thanks to him and his crew for so generously and helpfully welcoming me aboard. My thanks also to the folks at my radio home base, KPFK/Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, for helping us pull it all off at very short notice.

I hope you'll have fun as well, listening to the show, if you missed it live today. The entire program is archived below (sans commercials!)

My guests included three great, independent, progressive journalists (four, if you include Desi Doyen, who also joined us, as usual):

• MARCY WHEELER , from EmptyWheel.net with the latest on today's House Intel Oversight hearing on Edward Snowden's NSA disclosures.
• ARI BERMAN from The Nation to discuss the this week's Supreme Court rulings on Voting Rights and Voter registration.
• DAVID DAYEN, formerly of Firedoglake.com on his new, disturbing article in the New Republic on how mortgage service providers are strong-arming the victims of the Moore, OK tornado (and other recent natural disasters).
• PLUS! A whole bunch of other stuff, a lot of calls, and plenty of thoughts (and occasional rants) on the surveillance state and the politics of it all. As one very generous emailer wrote me after the show: "You cut right through this unfortunate 'where does that leave the President?' talk." --- Well, good! That was my hope!

The audio archives of today's show follow below. Enjoy!

* * *

(Each "Hour" actually 38 mins, now that commercials are removed.)

HOUR 1: I introduce myself to Ed Schultz listeners who may not know me. Much ranting ensues. Then, Ari Berman joins us to discuss SCOTUS and their voting rights rulings, and we fit in a quick call from someone who disagrees with me, kinda, on the NSA matter...
Download MP3 or listen online below...
[See post to listen to audio]

HOUR 2: More NSA, as Marcy Wheeler checks in, followed by lots of phone calls for the rest of the hour!...
Download MP3 or listen online below...
[See post to listen to audio]

HOUR 3: We talk with David Dayen about his disturbing new article; Desi Doyen joins us for some Green News Report; and we shoot it out with more callers...
Download MP3 or listen online below...
[See post to listen to audio]

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Breaking: L.A. bans single use plastic bags; New study warns 2/3rds of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground; Autism risk linked to air pollution - again; Keystone XL pipeline won't use state-of-the-art technology; Alaska hotter than Florida; PLUS: The world's 1st solar plane an antidote to cynicism? ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Syngenta's dirty tricks campaign to discredit scientists, protect profits; China launches major cap & trade program to cut CO2 emissions; Look out below: Antarctica melting from underneath; Singapore chokes on smoke from deforestation; Many US airports facing threat of sea level rise; Temps in 2300: 'Too hot to live'; Environmental groups delay lawsuit, wait for Obama; NASA: Arctic methane melt at "amazing levels" ... PLUS: VIDEO: Meet the CNBC talking heads dismiss climate science ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• VIDEO: Moniz Explains To GOP Member How He Knows Humans Are Warming The Planet: ‘I Know How To Count’ (Climate Progress)
• L.A. Bans Single-Use Plastic Bans:
• VIDEO: L.A. City Council OKs ban on plastic grocery and carryout bags (LA Times):
  Los Angeles on Tuesday became the largest city in the nation to move toward a ban on plastic grocery bags, with the City Council barring them in supermarkets, convenience stores and any big retailer that sells groceries.
  ...
  Opponents of the ban referred to the paper bag fee as an unfair tax. And they argued that it will hurt business in the region, particularly the plastic-bag makers that operate in the southeast section of Los Angeles County.
• Celebrate A Plastic Bag Free L.A. County! (L.A. Dept. of Water & Power)
• All-Time Heat Records Broken in . . . Alaska?! (Climate Central):
  In fact, it was warmer in Talkeetna, which is about 110 miles north of Anchorage, than it was in Miami, based on data from the National Weather Service. In Valdez, which sits along the cool waters of Prince William Sound, the temperature reached a remarkable 90°F Monday.
• UNBURNED: 80% of Fossil Fuel 'Should Stay in the Ground":
• Read the Report: THE CRITICAL DECADE 2013 (Climate Commission, Australia)
• VIDEO: Climate Commission report says 80 per cent of fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground (Australia Broadcasting Company) [emphasis added]:
  Professor Lesley Hughes, who co-authored the report, says there will be catastrophic consequences for the environment if the world does not move away from fossil fuels. "In order to achieve that goal of stabilising the climate at 2 degrees or less, we simply have to leave about 80 per cent of the world's fossil fuel reserves in the ground. We cannot afford to burn them and still have a stable and safe climate," she said.
• 80% of Fossil Fuels 'Should Stay in the Ground' (Price of Oil Blog):
  Since the first report, Australia has experienced record temperatures... The number of record hot days has more than doubled in Australia in the last 50 years.
• AUS: Coal industry vital despite Climate Commission's warnings against fossil fuels (ABC)
• Air Pollution Linked to Autism Risk - AGAIN:
• Autism Tied to Air Pollution, Brain-Wiring Disconnection (Bloomberg) [emphasis added]:
  Researchers seeking the roots of autism have linked the disorder to chemicals in air pollution and, in a separate study, found that language difficulties of the disorder may be due to a disconnect in brain wiring.
• Autism, Air Pollution Link Confirmed By First National Study (Huffington Post Green):
  "Women who were exposed to the highest levels of diesel or mercury in the air were twice as likely to have a child with autism than women who lived in the cleanest parts of the sample," study author Andrea Roberts, a research associate with the Harvard School of Public Health.
• Illinois Gets First-Ever Fracking Regulations:
• Fracking Bill Triggers Rift Among Illinois Green Groups (Inside Climate News):
  Grassroots activists say they feel 'betrayed' by mainstream environmental organizations that helped write the state's new fracking regulations.
• Illinois Gas Drilling Rules: Governor Pat Quinn Signs New Fracking Regulations Into Law (AP)
• Governor Quinn Signs Illinois Fracking Bill
• KXL: TransCanada Won't Use Best Pipeline Spill Detection Technology:
• Keystone XL Pipeline Shuns High-Tech Oil Spill Detectors (BusinessWeek):
  Pipeline companies have been slow to adopt new leak detection technology, including infrared equipment on helicopters flying 80 miles an hour or acoustic sensors that can identify the sound of oil seeping from a pinhole-sized opening. Instead of tools that can find even the smallest leaks, TransCanada will search for spills using software-based methods and traditional flyovers and surveys.
• KXL's Outdated Oil Spill Technology (Price Of Oil)
• TransCanada in Damage Control Mode Over Flaws in Newly Laid Southern Leg of Keystone XL Pipeline (Public Citizen)
• This May Be the Antidote to Cynicism: Solar Impulse and Energy Sec. Ernie Moniz:
• Energy chief: Flying across US in high-tech solar plane to boost cleaner energy use on ground (Washington Post) [emphasis added]:
  It's not that the experimental European plane is going to change the way the rest of us fly, Moniz said. But it may change the way we drive and the buildings we live in sooner than we think. The high-flying lightweight technology will pay off on the ground far more readily than in the air. This project should lead to cleaner appliances, greener cars and more energy-efficient building.
• Why you should care about Solar Impulse and renewable energy's long, long journey (Washington Post):
  If you were asleep, and the news passed you by, stop for a second and take stock. There's a reason you should care - and care deeply - about the journey of Solar Impulse.
  ...
  Solar Impulse's flight across America could unlock the future potential of solar energy. There's a reason why the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum welcomed the arrival of Solar Impulse in Washington with open arms, and why Department of Energy chief Ernest Moniz said the journey highlighted "a cleaner energy future for the nation."
• VIDEO: Secretary Moniz Speaks at Solar Impulse Press Conference (Dept. of Energy Youtube Channel)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• Fracking presents new strains on water supplies in some drought-stricken areas of the US (Washington Post) [emphasis added]:
  The latest domestic energy boom is sweeping through some of the nation's driest pockets, drawing millions of gallons of water to unlock oil and gas reserves from beneath the Earth's surface.... [T]he exploration method is increasing competition for the precious resource, driving up the price of water and burdening already depleted aquifers and rivers in certain drought-stricken stretches...."There is a new player for water, which is oil and gas," said Peppler, of Mead, Colo. "And certainly they are in a position to pay a whole lot more than we are."
• States, green groups delay lawsuit amid Obama climate rumors (The Hill's e2 Wire):
  "Due to public reports that the President will be announcing major action on climate change very soon, the Attorney General has decided to postpone a lawsuit on this matter for a short period of time," said Melissa Grace, spokeswoman for New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
• Environmental Rules Delayed As White House Slows Reviews (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
  The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.
• Documents: Syngenta's Secret Campaign to Protect Atrazine, Discredit Critics (Environmental Health News):
  To protect profits threatened by a lawsuit over its controversial herbicide atrazine, Syngenta Crop Protection launched an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign that included hiring a detective agency to investigate scientists on a federal advisory panel, looking into the personal life of a judge and commissioning a psychological profile of a leading scientist critical of atrazine.
• Chrysler Agrees to Repair SUVs on Fire Risk After Probe (Bloomberg)
• VIDEO: Meet The CNBC Figures Dismissing Climate Science (Media Matters)
• Singapore chokes on haze from deforestation fires (MongaBay):
  Singapore and Malaysian officials have asked Indonesia to take "urgent measures" to address forest fires in Sumatra that are sending choking haze northward, reports AFP.
• China Launches Major Cap & Trade Emissions Program (Scientific American):
  To control greenhouse gases the Chinese government is experimenting with pilot programs in seven cities and regions that use markets
• Look Out Below: Antarctic Melting From Underneath (Climate Central):
  Ice experts have long known that Antarctica is losing ice at the margins of its vast ice sheets, where the frozen continent meets the sea — presumably, they thought, from icebergs breaking off and floating away. According to a report published in Science, however, more than half the ice loss is coming from warming ocean waters, which are melting the ice from underneath.
• U.S. Airports Face Increasing Threat From Rising Seas (Climate Central)
• NASA Finds 'Amazing' Levels Of Arctic Methane And CO2, Asks 'Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?' (Climate Progress):
  A NASA science team has observed "amazing and potentially troubling" levels of methane and CO2 from the rapidly warming Arctic. Given the staggering amount of carbon trapped in the permafrost - and the fact that methane is a very potent heat-trapping gas - the space agency is now asking: "Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?"
• Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction (Sydney Morning Herald) [emphasis added]:
  HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn. New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies. The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300.
• We Have Met the Unknown Unknowns and They are Us (Legal Planet):
  There are uncertainties about climate science such as tipping points and feedback effects. But these pale in comparison to the biggest source of uncertainties: people. Here are some of the major things we don't know and really can't know about future society.
• Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments

Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page

I'm prepping to guest host the Ed Schultz Radio Show tomorrow morning (9a-Noon PT, Noon-3p ET), so, for now, I'm gonna leave you with just the request that you go read some of the transcripts and/or videos available at USA Today.

Over the weekend, they published a conversation with three NSA whistleblowers (and one from DoJ) from during the Bush era. They all laud the latest NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden for coming forward with his leaks, and say that "he succeeded where we failed" in getting the attention of the public as to what, they say, is going on, and the concerns about secret data gathering operations that the public need to be aware of.

"They say the documents leaked by Edward Snowden ... proves their claims of sweeping government surveillance of millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing," as USA Today describes the conversation. "They say those revelations only hint at the programs' reach."

Please go to the page and read some of the transcripts and/or watch the video conversation, which I don't have time to highlight at the moment: "3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so".

Here is just the very beginning of the conversation...

Q: Did Edward Snowden do the right thing in going public?

William Binney: We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.

Q: So Snowden did the right thing?

Binney: Yes, I think he did.

Q: You three wouldn't criticize him for going public from the start?

J. Kirk Wiebe: Correct.

Binney: In fact, I think he saw and read about what our experience was, and that was part of his decision-making.

Wiebe: We failed, yes.

Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted — and it was for blowing the whistle.

Also related and of note, from Thomas Drake, one of the whistleblowers included in the USA Today conversation above --- his column from last week: "Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution."

In a ruling hailed by voting rights advocates today, Arizona's requirement that newly registered voters submit proof of citizenship with their registration has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision. Justice Antonin Scalia authored the opinion for the majority, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The court rejected provisions of Proposition 200, a ballot measure approved by AZ voters in 2004, which mandated that state election officials reject all applications to register to vote that did not include documentary proof of citizenship. Those documents, however, are not currently required by the Federal Form for voter registration, as approved by the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) pursuant to provisions of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

Today's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona [PDF], is grounded upon the plenary power given to Congress by the Elections Clause (Art. I §4 of the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to preempt state regulations governing the "Times, Places and Manner" of holding federal elections. The court found that the NVRA mandate that states "accept and use" the Federal Form for voter registration takes precedence, and that Prop 200 is invalid because it conflicts with the Congressional intent that the NVRA help ease the ability of citizens to register to vote.

Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia observed that if a state could "demand of Federal Form applicants every additional piece of information the State requires…the Federal Form ceases to perform any meaningful function, and would be a feeble means of 'increas[ing] the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for Federal office.'"

This does not close the door on the issue altogether, however. Justice Scalia noted that, pursuant to the NVRA, any state can ask that "the EAC alter the Federal Form to include information the State deems necessary to determine eligibility." If the EAC then rejects such a request, the state "may challenge the EAC's rejection of that request [in court]"...

As AP's Jesse Holland reported, although Louisiana followed such a course by obtaining EAC approval of that state's requirements for additional documentation to be attached to the Federal Form, the availability of that option has been complicated by the fact that, currently, there are no EAC Commissioners --- apparently, as observed by U.C. Irvine Law Prof. Rick Hasen, because "influential Republicans" are of "the view that the EAC is a failed experiment and nothing should be done to revive it."

In fact, while the President put forward nominations for the two Democratic slots on the four person commission, Republicans have failed to either nominate their own two candidates, or allow for confirmation hearings on the Democratic nominees. This stalemate has persisted, at this point, for years.

As can be expected, there have been competing reactions to this new decision.

At one end of the spectrum is, as noted in the above-cited AP report, Chapman Univ. Law Professor, Tom Caso, who complained that the Court's decision has "opened the door" to non-citizen voting --- this, despite Justice Scalia's assurance that the NVRA (and, therefore, this Supreme Court decision) "does not preclude States from 'deny[ing] registration based on information in their possession establishing the applicant's ineligibility.'"

At the other end, one finds the statement of Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, proclaiming that the Court's decision in this case "protects the more than 30,000 individuals whose registration applications were rejected following the passage of Proposition 200, nearly 17 percent of whom were Latinos."

Writing for The Nation and citing a brief by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) [PDF] last March, Ari Berman reports that "The law has needlessly prevented eligible voters from registering and has made voter registration work more difficult. 'The proportion of all voter registrations in [Phoenix's] Maricopa County attributable to community-based drives decreased from 24% in 2004 to 7% in 2005, 5% in 2006 and 6% in 2007,' found MALDEF."

Hailing today's ruling, the NAACP not only pointed to the fact that the case was originally filed by "Jesus Gonzalez, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was rejected for registration under Arizona Proposition 200," but noted that the state failed "to identify a single instance" in which a non-citizen voted.

This is in line with The BRAD BLOG's previous investigations with respect to a recent attempted voter purge of suspected "non-citizen" voters from Florida's eligible voter rolls. As a result of a months long investigation, The BRAD BLOG was able to verify only nine (9) non-citizens on the rolls out of some 182,000 voters who had been the targets of a reckless and dishonest purge that had been concocted by the Sunshine state's Republican Governor, Rick Scott, and by his hand-picked, Republican Secretary of State Scott Detzner.

As with polling place Photo ID laws, regulations like those contained in the now invalidated Arizona Proposition 200 are far more likely to prevent perfectly legal citizens from exercising their right to vote than to prevent illicit votes from non-eligible voters.

AP also notes, today's "decision on voter registration has broader implications because other states have similar requirements, such as Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee, and still others are contemplating such legislation."

Voting Rights advocates and SCOTUS watchers are still awaiting the court's ruling, which could come as early as this Thursday, on a case with even farther reaching aspects. The court may strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in that upcoming decision. That Section of the long-standing federal law requires that certain jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination receive preclearance from the federal government before instituting new election-related laws. Section 5 was invoked this year to block discriminatory polling place Photo ID restrictions laws in states such as South Carolina and Texas. Without Section 5, voting rights advocates fear, it will be much more difficult to block voter suppression efforts until after the damage from such laws has already been done.

Ironically, because of its past history of discrimination, Arizona became a "covered jurisdiction" under the VRA in 1975. In 2005, the same AZ Proposition 200, which the Supreme Court struck down today, was pre-cleared under Section 5 by the George W. Bush/Alberto Gonzales Justice Department

* * *Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing.

Earlier this week, CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald about the baseless claim made by Rep. Peter King (R-NY), on Fox "News", that Greenwald was "threatening to disclose" the identities of covert American CIA operatives.

Additionally, and in flagrant disregard for the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, King had earlier disgraced himself by calling for the arrest of journalist Greenwald, who originally broke the news on a number of the disclosures made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. (The additional irony here, of course, is that King himself actually is an avowed supporter of terrorism.)

Cooper and Greenwald then discussed the claim that American national security has been harmed by the disclosures made by Snowden, and why both citizens and journalists should never merely accept, at face value, such claims from public officials...

ANDERSON COOPER: King also says that you should be prosecuted because of what you've already published, saying it puts American lives at risk…When Wikileaks released huge amounts of information…a lot of people said, you know, "They had blood on their hands. Julian Assange has had blood on his hands." But then U.S. officials privately admitted to people in Congress and even publicly that even though the revelations were embarrassing, were a problem, that they couldn’t name anyone who really had lost their lives because of it. So now, when people are saying that you have put American lives at risk, do you believe that at all?

GLENN GREENWALD: No. And Anderson, that point that you just made, in my opinion, is really the crucial point, for anybody listening, to take away. Every single time the American government has things that they’ve done in secret exposed or revealed to the world and they're embarrassed by it, the tactic that they use is to try and scare people into believing that they have to overlook what they have done --- they have to trust American officials to exercise power in the dark, lest they be attacked; that their security and safety depend upon placing this value in political officials. And I really think it’s the supreme obligation of every journalist and every citizen when they hear an American official say --- 'this story about us jeopardizes national security' --- to demand specifics; to ask, what exactly it is that has jeopardized national security.

King's blatant lies about Greenwald ought to underscore his point that such officials are not to be merely trusted.

Video of Anderson Cooper's 6/12/2013 interview of Glenn Greenwald follows below...

There's a reason I argued we are now living on Planet Partisan the other day. In what is now, apparently, our continuing series on partisans attempting to justify their all-new positions on the massive, secret, US national security surveillance state by completely ignoring and/or reversing their very strong previously held positions, we first had...

• On Monday: Obama (2007) v. Obama (2013)
• On Wednesday: Hannity (Bush Era) v. Hannity (Obama Era)

And now we have this...

I did a quick hit on Ed Schultz' radio show, which is always fun, on Thursday. The audio is posted below.

Ed seems to be somewhat conflicted on what to make of the Edward Snowden issue. I tried to help unconflict him a bit...

Download MP3 or listen online below [Appx 12 mins]...
[See post to listen to audio]

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: CO wildfire now most destructive in state history; Another chemical plant explodes, this time in LA; Supreme Court rules on TX v. OK water war; New oil spills in Brazil and Canada; PLUS: Mayor Bloomberg's $20B Sandy recovery and climate change plan for NYC ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of nat gas boom; Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction; Will coastal cities follow NYC's climate lead?; 1970s pollution led to African drought; Tea Party takes on utility over lack of solar energy; 'Understory' fires burning in drier Amazon rainforest; White House delays environmental, energy rules... PLUS: NASA Finds ‘Amazing’ Levels Of Arctic Methane And CO2, Asks ‘Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?’ ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• Black Forest Fire: Most Destructive In CO History:
• AGU VIDEO: Big Meadows Fire: Connecting the dots between warming winters and wildfires while at AGU Chapman Conference in Colorado (American Geophysical Union)
• Climate Change To Spawn More Wildfires (Discovery.com):
  Severe wildfires are becoming common in the northern Rockies, as a result of climate change. By the end of the century, large fires are likely to strike 10 times more often.
• 360-plus homes destroyed in Colo. Springs wildfire (AP)
• LIVE UPDATES: Parts of Colorado Springs now under mandatory evac. for Black Forest Fire (KDVR-TV Denver)
• Black Forest Fire Now Most Destructive in Colorado History, 360 Homes Lost And No Containment (Climate Progress):
  As Mother Jones explains, climate change is intensifying the extreme heat, drought, and other conditions that fuel devastating wildfires. As forests become hotter and drier, and milder winters lead to an increase in infestations such as the pine bark beetle, a recent report authored by U.S. Forest Service scientists predicts that the acreage burned by wildfires will double by 2050 to about 20 million acres annually.
• How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse: In Colorado, extreme weather is fueling fierce fires. Again. (Mother Jones)
• Louisiana: Another Chemical Plant Explosion:
• UPDATE: 1 Dead, 73 Injured in Louisiana Chemical Plant Explosion (Huffington Post Green)
• Dozens hurt in explosion, fire at Louisiana chemical plant (CBS News)
• LIVE Coverage: 33 injured in plant explosion (WAFB-TV Baton Rouge)
• Supreme Court Rules in TX v. OK Water War:
• Supreme Court Backs Oklahoma Over Texas Water District (Texas Tribune)
• Details: Tarrant Regional Water District v. Herrmann (SCOTUSBlog) [emphasis added]:
  The Court held that the Red River Compact, which allocates water rights within the Red River basin among the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, does not pre-empt the Oklahoma water statutes. The case is significant for the pace of economic development in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, and for the right of Oklahoma to control the use of water in rivers that traverse the state.
• Texas Allocates $5 Million for New Mexico Water Lawsuit (Texas Tribune)
• New Spills, Now in Brazil and Canada:
• Toxic Waste Spill in Alberta Biggest of Recent Disasters in North America (Toronto Globe & Mail):
  The substance is the inky black colour of oil, and the treetops are brown. Across a broad expanse of northern Alberta muskeg, the landscape is dead. It has been poisoned by a huge spill of 9.5 million litres of toxic waste from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta, the third major leak in a region whose residents are now questioning whether enough is being done to maintain aging energy infrastructure.
• National Energy Board Responds to Crude Oil Release west of Merritt, BC (Nat'l Energy Board, Canada)
• Brazil 'on alert' over an oil spill from Ecuador (BBC):
  Brazil is "on alert" over an oil spill that originated in Ecuador and is travelling downstream towards the Brazilian Amazon.
• TransCanada prepped local police for prosecuting pipeline foes (E & E News)
• How Can We Cope with the Dirty Water from Fracking? (Scientific American): Advanced membranes, unusual solvents and new drilling processes could clean and recycle a growing flood of contaminated water
• Pipeline Whistleblower Reveals Dangerous "Culture of Noncompliance": Former TransCanada employee testifies on pervasive "coercion" with grave risks for public safety (Common Dreams)
• NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $20B Post-Sandy Recovery Plan:
• New York lays out $20 billion plan to adapt to climate change (Reuters):
  Sandy killed more than 100 people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, knocked out power to millions and cost New York City an estimated $19 billion in damages and lost economic activity. Bloomberg said a storm of Sandy's strength would cost nearly five times that amount if it hit the city in the middle of this century because of rising sea levels.
  ...
  In addition to new walls, dune systems and tidal barriers, the plan envisaged $1.2 billion in loans and grants to help owners make buildings more resilient to floods and proposed changes to the building code.
• Bloomberg Outlines $20 Billion Storm Protection Plan (NY Times)
• Bloomberg unveils ambitious plan to protect NYC from climate change (Grist)
• Bloomberg Braces Big Apple for Mounting Costs of Climate Change (NRDC)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• NASA Finds ‘Amazing’ Levels Of Arctic Methane And CO2, Asks ‘Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?’ (Climate Progress):
  A NASA science team has observed “amazing and potentially troubling” levels of methane and CO2 from the rapidly warming Arctic. Given the staggering amount of carbon trapped in the permafrost — and the fact that methane is a very potent heat-trapping gas — the space agency is now asking: “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”
• Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of US natural gas boom: report: Reduction in carbon emissions triggered by America's shift from coal to gas is being offset by a sharp rise in methane (Guardian UK)
• Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction (Sydney Morning Herald) [emphasis added]:
  HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.
  
  New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies. The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300.
• Environmental Rules Delayed As White House Slows Reviews (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
  The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.
• New York's Sea-Level Plan: Will It Play in Miami? (National Geographic) [emphasis added]:
  Rising seas threaten other cities more than New York.
  First, as the time when we could prevent dangerous climate change slips away, the time for costly investments to protect ourselves has arrived. Second, for some cities, less well situated or less wealthy than New York, protection is going to be extremely challenging—and in some cases perhaps impossible.
• Study: Pollution Led to African Drought (Voice of America)
• Fires have burned 3 percent of Amazon rainforest in 12 years, NASA says (CS Monitor):
  Scientists find that hard-to-track fires in forest ‘understory’ have done even greater damage to rainforest than traditional deforestation
• Tea Party Takes on Utility Over Lack of Solar Energy (The Energy Collective):
  The fight to bring cheaper, clean energy to Georgia is uniting some unlikely allies. Renewable energy advocates and leaders of the Atlanta Tea Party are taking on utility giant Southern Co., and its subsidiary Georgia Power, over resisting the call to expand its development of solar energy.
• Republican Congressman Demands Obama Apologize To Oklahoma For Investing In Climate Change Research (Climate Progress)
• Fish Nets Found to Kill Large Numbers of Birds (NY Times):
  Fishing vessels that deploy gill nets snare and drown at least 400,000 seabirds every year, and the actual figure could be considerably higher, according to research published in the June edition of an academic journal devoted to conservation.
• Sunrun CEO: Why Utilities Are Attacking Net Metering (GreenTech Media):
  “They have a profit opportunity when they own solar, but not with net-metered solar.”
• US coal sold too low, taxpayers lose millions -government watchdog (Reuters) [emphasis added]:
  U.S. officials who administer a federal coal program have undervalued the fuel, costing taxpayers $62 million in some recent mining leases alone, said a government report released on Tuesday. About 40 percent of the coal sold in the United States is drawn from federal land and the program is administered by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which is required to seek a fair price on behalf of taxpayers.
• Carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 percent in 2012, IEA report says (Washington Post) [emphasis added]:
  The agency said continuing that pace could mean a temperature increase over pre-industrial times of as much as 5.3 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), which IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned "would be a disaster for all countries."
• VIDEO: Water in the Anthropocene (CSIRO): Water in the Anthropocene is a 3-minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle. Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene. Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways.
• We Have Met the Unknown Unknowns and They are Us (Legal Planet):
  There are uncertainties about climate science such as tipping points and feedback effects. But these pale in comparison to the biggest source of uncertainties: people. Here are some of the major things we don't know and really can't know about future society.
• Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments

Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page

In his column over the weekend, lauding the "conscience and patriotism" of NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg cited a 1975 warning about the NSA from Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee tasked with investigating unlawful intelligence gathering by the NSA, CIA and FBI following the Watergate scandal.

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America," Church said, "and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

On Wednesday, during a fascinating interview on The BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, Ellsberg said directly, in the wake of Snowden's disclosures: "We're in the abyss. What he feared has come to pass."

The Guardian has asserted that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden "will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning," do it seemed the perfect time to chat with Ellsberg about all of this.

He offered a number of thoughts about Snowden himself, from one of the few people in the world who may have real insight into what the 29-year old leaker must be thinking and dealing with right about now, and why he may have chosen to both leave the country and then come out publicly. He describes Snowden as "a patriotic American, and to call him a traitor reveals a real misunderstanding of our founding documents."

"What he has revealed, of course, is documentary evidence of a broadly, blatantly unconstitutional program here which negates the Fourth Amendment," Ellsberg said. "And if it continues in this way, I think it makes democracy essentially impossible or meaningless."

As usual, Ellsberg pulled no punches in his comments on the dangers of our privatized surveillance state; the failure of our Congressional intelligence oversight committees (which he describes as "fraudulent" and "totally broken"); and on those who have been critical of Snowden and of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist from The Guardian who has broken most of the scoops on Snowden's leaked documents.

He said that folks like attorney Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker and author Thomas Friedman at New York Times and Senator Dianne Feinstein "are being very strongly discredited," by their attacks on Snowden. "The criticisms they're making, I think, are very discreditable to them in their profession," he says.

And, while answering to my request for a response to Josh Marshall's recent piece at TPM, in which Marshall weights his own conscience on this matter and frankly revealing his natural tendency to support the government over whistleblowers in cases like this, Ellsberg was particularly pointed. "Marshall has a lot to be said for him as a blogger," he said, before adding: "I think what he said there is stupid and mistaken and does not do him credit." He went on to describe some of Marshall's comments as "slander" against Snowden.

One other point that merits highlight here for now, before I let ya listen below. The difference between Ellsberg's circumstances and those in play today.

Ellsberg noted that after leaking top secret Defense Department documents to the New York Times in 1971, detailing how the Johnson Administration had lied the nation into the Vietnam War, President Nixon, at the time, ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist's office and discussed having Ellsberg "eliminated".

"All the things that were done to me then," he noted chillingly, "including a CIA profile on me, a burglary of my former psychiatrist's office in order to get information to blackmail me with, all of those things were illegal, as one might think that they ought to be."

"They're legal now, since 9/11, with the PATRIOT Act, which on that very basis alone should be repealed. In other words, this is a case right now with Snowden that shows very dramatically the dangers of that PATRIOT Act, used as it is. So the fact is, that all these things are legal. And even the one of possibly eliminating him"...

"We're In the abyss," indeed...

Download MP3 or listen online below...
[See post to listen to audio]

* * *

UPDATE: Complete text transcript of interview now here. [Courtesy Emily Levy]

Several days ago, I posted a video showing the stark differences between the positions on massive surveillance programs by candidate Barack Obama in 2007 and President Barack Obama in 2013.

And now, since we're nothing if not "fair and balanced", here is a short video of Sean Hannity of Fox "News" repeatedly lauding massive NSA surveillance programs during the George W. Bush Administration...and then decrying the very same programs as "tyranny" and a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution now that Obama is doing it.

With all due respect to Hannity --- and I have none --- his over the top hypocrisy then versus now trumps even Obama's, hands down. Not to mention the small detail that the programs, as carried out under Bush were, at the time, illegal, while under Obama they have been made "legal". (Or so we are told. There is so much secrecy around them, of course, it is virtually impossible for the public to know either way.) Enjoy!...

Also recently related: "Republicans Suddenly Decide to Care About Big Government Overreach"

Just a quick note to mention that, after several weeks of the latest KPFK/Pacifica Radio fund drive, The BradCast will be back LIVE today (6p ET/3p PT), and my guest will be the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Seeing as how The Guardian has asserted that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden "will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning," it seems a good time to chat with him about all of this.

You can listen LIVE to the show at 3p PT/6p ET on air at 90.7FM in Los Angeles (and other points of the terrestial dial around southern California), as well as via the TuneIn radio app, or streaming at KPFK's website. (The show is also now heard on the Progressive Voices channel on TuneIn at 6p ET on Saturdays and Sundays as well, btw!)

I also wanted to take a second to publicly thank Kevin D'Haeze of the video production house Rock Island Media for answering our public request for help in creating a new logo for The BradCast! You can see it up above.

Kevin's work, creativity and patience with my ridiculous requests was exemplary during the entire process. I'm endlessly grateful, and couldn't recommend him or his production house any more. For an idea of what they do to actually make a living, check out their website and cool promo video below...

Thanks again, Kevin! And now...since crowd-sourcing worked so well on this one...if anyone out there feels like helping me out with some serious WordPress programming (not just template design!) please let me know that as well!

Ever since last week's disclosures about our massive surveillance state began pouring out from the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, via leaked documents from NSA contractor Edward Snowden, detractors of the leaks have been pillorying them both for, among other things, supposedly putting national security at risk.

The attacks have come from both the Right and non-Right this time around, unlike during the Bush Administration when the attacks on whistleblowing came largely from the Right (and from some elected Democrats.)

At the end of this article over the weekend, I wrote a bit about how bizarre it's been to see partisan Obama supporters literally switching places with their partisan Bush-supporting counterparts, using arguments that are virtually identical to those by made by Republicans to defend Bush on these very same matters during his administration. Those same arguments, almost to the phrase, are now employed by many Democrats to defend the Obama DoJ's crackdown on whistleblowers, secret subpoenas of journalists and, now, as a call to arms against Snowden and Greenwald both for, somehow, putting the nation in danger. (At the same time, as I've also noted on several occassions, it's also amazing to witness some Republicans who've suddenly discovered a new found concern about Big Government Executive Branch overreach and the secret surveillance of U.S. citizens.)

Related to all of this, and true to many of those who have been critical of Snowden and Greenwald from both the Democratic and Republican side, is that while the recent disclosures have put us at risk (or something), as they argue, the issue of our massive, secret, privatized, surveillance state is, nonetheless, a very important issue about which we must have a public debate as a nation. On that, detractors from both sides seem to agree.

Here are just a few examples of that and some thoughts on how twisted this logic seems to be...

Josh Marshall at TPM wrote soon after the disclosures began coming to light, that "Snowden and many others have now said that these leaks are important and justified because the public needs to decide whether this is done in their name." Marshall says he "basically...disagree[s] with that", and then adds...

But it does raise a basic point that it is inherently difficult for the public to make fully informed decisions about intelligence work done in its name.

In a more recent, very frank piece acknowledging some of his conflicting thoughts on all of this, Marshall also admits...

I think debating the way we balance privacy and security is a good thing and I’m saying I’m against what is arguably the best way to trigger one of those debates.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) on MSNBC stated his opposition to Snowden's leaks and called for his prosecution. But then, when asked by Andrea Mitchell if he believes the sweeping nature of the surveillance, as detailed in the documents released by Snowden, is too broad and needs to be narrowed, Thune responded...

I think that's a really good question, Andrea, and I think that's one that members of Congress are going to want to know the answer to. I suspect there's going to be a real push for additional Congressional oversight of some of these programs. Are we over-collecting? Have these programs been successful? Are members of Congress fully briefed? And, more importantly too, the American people? I think those are all very valid questions, many of which are going to be asked this week, and I think that, hopefully, we'll have an opportunity, through some additional oversight, to get members of Congress more fully briefed and to get some of these questions answered. ... I do believe we need to get the facts. ... That's a health debate to have.

My friend Bob Cesca at The Daily Banter, in an article widely cited by Obama supporters over the last several days, charges (with no small amount of bloggy bombast and a fair share of unsubstantiated assertions) that the "NSA bombshell story [is] falling apart under scrutiny"! He then goes on to slam Greenwald's story for "careening way off the empirical rails into hysterical, kneejerk acceptance of half-assed information". But he also concedes:

Yes, there continues to be a serious cause for concern when it comes to government spying and overreach with its counter-terrorism efforts. ... we should be aware of what’s going on — checking [the government] when it gets out of control.

Finally, for now, top level Presidential advisers of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama seem to agree. Bush's former unapologetically partisan Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has taken the opportunity to stand four-square with Obama and his spying programs, for which he credits his old boss for putting in place. He has taken to Twitter to thump his chest, calling for the DoJ to "throw the book" at Snowden, and to taunt: "Real whistleblowers don't flee the country". Then, he admitted on CNN...

This is a good policy debate to be engaged in. ... This is a good debate to have.

...And Obama's former Senior Adviser David Axelrod on MSNBC, also decried the leaks, before admitting...

We should be vigilant about [these programs] because there are legitimate concerns...The question is what we as a country are willing to do and willing to sacrifice for [staying safe against terrorist threats].

Well, that's all nice. It seems all of them, while disagreeing with Snowden's leaks, agree with his stated purpose, and each other, on one very key --- arguably the most important --- point.

"I’m no different from anybody else," Snowden told Greenwald in a video interview released over the weekend. "I’m just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what’s happening, and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.'"

So even his critics all seem to agree with Snowden that the public needs to debate and decide about these programs and policies. But it begs the question of the Snowden/Greenwald critics: If not for the very disclosures they decry, what exactly would have spurred this debate in the first place? How would the public be able to decide what programs and polices are right or wrong --- particularly if they are unaware of them?

As Greenwald responded to Fleischer on CNN, Snowden's disclosures are "the only reason we are debating it. ... That's why whistleblowers like that should be praised and not prosecuted, because it's what enables journalists to then shine a light on those programs so that we can have the debates that both Ari Fleischer and I both agree we should be having."

He is right. The only reason we are discussing these issues now is thanks to Snowden and Greenwald. And, in response to many of the Democrats now arguing "there's nothing new in these disclosures, we've known about these programs for years" --- an argument that is not factually accurate, but we'll stipulate for the moment that it is --- if you've known about them for years, why are you only debating the merits now? Is it because you're cool with a massive, virtually unaccountable, nearly impossible to oversee, secret surveillance state? Well, that couldn't be it, otherwise you wouldn't be calling now for a public debate on these issues, since you see no problems with them.

But most directly to the point: How can we have any kind of debate about these programs if we have no idea what they are, how they operate, and what they do? We only know about some pieces of them now, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden (and those who have come before him).

Obama's former advisor Axelrod tried to argue to Lawrence O'Donnel on MSNBC that Snowden "could have gone to the Congress," for example, rather than the press. "There are a couple of Senators, Wyden and Udall, who've been critical," he said, before O'Donnell (who has also been critical of Snowden) broke in: "But they'd gone on the Senate floor and they weren't getting anywhere, because they couldn't say publicly what they knew. So they couldn't get anywhere either."

That's true. For just some of the available evidence, see this 2011 letter from the two Democratic Senators, both of them members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, imploring Attorney General Eric Holder for more transparency on these questionable programs and policies. And here they are again in 2012, virtually begging Holder to make the "secret legal intepretations" of the public FISA law known, warning "most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" by the secret FISA court.

"As we see it," they write [underscores in original], "there is now a significant gap between what most American 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."

So, seriously, you want a conversation about this stuff? A national debate? Me too! But how can we talk about what we don't know and what, by law, even the companies whose systems are being exploited for secret surveillance --- and, indeed, the very Congressional committees charged with oversight of the programs --- are not allowed to even discuss publicly?

Cesca writes, in his piece excoriating Greenwald's reporting: "It’s a shame because there’s a way to have this debate without selling out to misinformation." Setting aside the debatable "misinformation" comment, it's unclear how, exactly, we are supposed "to have this debate" without people like Snowden and Greenwald. These programs have secretly been in place for years, reportedly. What has kept Cesca, or all of the others, from having this debate before now? Did they not care about these issues? Or, more likely, might it be that it takes a courageous whistleblower coming out with documents to actually demonstrate the very real concerns about these programs?

As I noted on Abby Martin's TV show on Tuesday night, were it not for whistleblowers like Snowden who went public with similar issues during the Bush Administration, it seems unlikely Congress would have re-written the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law (poorly or otherwise) in response in 2008. This is how changes to secret policies are made --- when they become un-secret, see the light of day, and are finally debated in public.

As Rachel Maddow reported last night, thanks to the leaks already, intelligence officers are finally now briefing hundreds of Congress members on these programs, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are asking the government for more transparency about the secret programs they are involved with, but not allowed to speak about, and a bi-partisan group of eight U.S. Senators are now filing a bill that would "require the attorney general to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions, 'allowing Americans to know how broad of a legal authority the government is claiming to spy on Americans under the Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.'" Again, all thanks to the leaked disclosures over the past week.

Attack Snowden and Greenwald all you like, if you think that's the smartest thing to do for some reason. But to charge that they have somehow put us at risk --- by one leaking documents of seemingly very serious concern and the other committing the grave act of journalism on them --- before then acknowledging the need for a national discussion on these issues which we wouldn't otherwise be having without the both of them coming forward, seems incredibly bizarre and astonishingly unselfaware.

But I think that's where we live right now. I've taken to calling it Planet Partisan.

I was on Abby Martin's Breaking the Set program on RT America this evening. The video is posted below.

We discussed the NSA leaks and everything related to it, including, briefly, my own disturbing experience --- which I have in common with Glenn Greenwald --- when we were both targeted by a cyber-scheme devised by government defense contractors set to turn tools developed for the "War on Terror" against us, at the behest of major corporate interests.

That is some of what The BRAD BLOG's legal analyst, Ernie Canning was attempting to warn about in his piece this morning on the many broad dangers of what has now become a massive, privatized, largely unaccountable, secret U.S. national security and surveillance state....

[I join Abby just after the 4:00 minute mark, for about 9 minutes.]

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Record jump in carbon emissions on track for 5°C increase in world temps; US & China reach major climate agreement; Another court victory for Monsanto; PLUS: As California breaks new solar records, one of the state's old nuclear plant will now shut forever ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): BP ends Gulf cleanup operations; Coal Subsidy: IG says US sold public's coal too cheap; KXL: Transcanada recruited local police against opponents; More pests developing resistant to GMO crops; Egypt warns Ethiopia against Nile mega-dam; Ocean acidification killing baby oysters; Methane leaks from fracking could negate US emissions cuts ... PLUS: What to make of a warming "plateau," and what happens when it ends ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• VIDEO: Stephen Colbert Skewers Monsanto's Fugitive GMO Wheat (Colbert Report)
• Monsanto Wins Appeal Against Organic Farmers:
• Organic growers lose decision in suit versus Monsanto over seeds (Reuters):
  In its ruling Monday, the appellate court said the organic growers must rely on Monsanto assurances on the company's website that it will not sue them so long as the mix is very slight.
• Appeals Court Makes Monsanto Promise Not To Sue Organic Farmers (Think Progress)
• IEA: World on Track for 5°C Rise = 9°F:
• What's Behind the New Warning on Global Carbon Emissions? (National Geographic) [emphasis added]:
  If the world waits until 2020 to take action on global climate change, it will undoubtedly be too late, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns in a new report.

  However, the Paris-based agency, which is tasked with maintaining global energy security, identified four proven policies, each relying on current technology, that could be implemented immediately.

• VIDEO: Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map report - Presentation by Fatih Birol, Chief Economist (IEA)
• IEA Report: Re-Drawing the Energy-Climate Map (World Energy Outlook, IEA)
• Carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 percent in 2012, IEA report says (Washington Post) [emphasis added]:
  The agency said continuing that pace could mean a temperature increase over pre-industrial times of as much as 5.3 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), which IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned “would be a disaster for all countries.”

  “This puts us on a difficult and dangerous trajectory,” Birol said. “If we don’t do anything between now and 2020, it will be very difficult because there will be a lot of carbon already in the atmosphere and the energy infrastructure will be locked in.”

• After release of report, UN climate change official reiterates now is ‘crucial moment’ to act (UNFCC)
• The IEA thinks we can still avoid 2°C of global warming. Here’s how.
• IEA report: Global energy emissions hit record high in 2012 (The Hill's e2 Wire)
• Four solutions to meet climate targets - at no net cost (Renew Economy)
• Climate science tells us the alarm bells are ringing (Op-ed, Washington Post)
• IEA: Five key charts on energy and climate (GreenPeace)
• U.S., China Reach Major Climate Agreement on HFCs:
• US-China summit ends with accord on all but cyber-espionage (Guardian UK):
  Obama's meeting with Xi overshadowed by revelations of NSA's snooping - but deals are made on N Korea and HFCs emissions
• Who Is Fooling Who When It Comes to Combating Climate Change? (Scientific American)
• U.S. and China team up to fight climate-changing HFCs (Grist)
• Nuclear: San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant to Close:
• Nuclear Power Plant in Limbo Decides to Close (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
  The company has $2.7 billion saved up for decommissioning, which is about 90 percent of what is required.... Division of costs between Edison's shareholders and ratepayers, its insurers and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which supplied the heat exchangers, has not been determined.
• San Onofre nuclear power plant to be closed permanently (LA Times):
  Southern California Edison's move ushers in a new era for energy in the region. The effect on rates isn't yet known.
• VIDEO: Local News on San Onofre Power Plant Closing (Fox8 San Diego)
• Solar Energy Breaks Generation Records in CA, Germany:
• California Smashes Solar Record With 2 GW Generated Across State Grid (Clean Technica)
• Germany’s PV Generation Peaked at 23.4 Gigawatts on June 6 (GreenTech Media)
• 2013 Q1 Update: U.S. Solar Industry Keeps Chugging Along (Forbes)
• US Installs Record 723 Megawatts of Solar PV in Q1 2013 (GreenTech Media)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• BP Ends Oil Spill Cleanup In Gulf, Except For Louisiana (AP):
  Reports of oil sightings in Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida will soon be the U.S. Coast Guard's responsibility to investigate.
• US coal sold too low, taxpayers lose millions -government watchdog (Reuters) [emphasis added]:
  U.S. officials who administer a federal coal program have undervalued the fuel, costing taxpayers $62 million in some recent mining leases alone, said a government report released on Tuesday. About 40 percent of the coal sold in the United States is drawn from federal land and the program is administered by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which is required to seek a fair price on behalf of taxpayers.
• TransCanada prepped local police for prosecuting pipeline foes (E & E News):
  The PowerPoint presentation given to EnergyWire by Bold Nebraska, a group organizing Plains-area locals against the $5.3 billion heavy crude line, illustrates the extent of the company's preparations to face continued civil disobedience by environmentalists mobilized against further development of the carbon-rich Canadian oil sands. The briefing, dated December 2012, includes names and photos of more than 20 activists arrested for protesting Keystone XL, including actress Daryl Hannah...
• 'No Nile, no Egypt', Cairo warns over Ethiopia dam (Reuters):
  Egypt's foreign minister, vowing not to give up "a single drop of water from the Nile", said on Sunday he would go to Addis Ababa to discuss a giant dam that Ethiopia has begun building in defiance of Cairo's objections.
• Growing Number of Pests Developing Resistance to GM Crops (Yale e360):
  An increasing number of pest species are developing resistance to crops genetically engineered to be toxic to insects, according to new research. In an analysis of 77 studies conducted in eight countries, a team of U.S. and French scientists found that five of 13 major pest species had become resistant to so-called Bt cotton or corn plants, which are genetically modified to exude a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that is toxic to insects. Three of the cases occurred in the U.S., where half of all Bt plantings occur.
• Late and lame, farm bill finally clears Senate (Grist):
  You may recall that once there was hope for major reform in the legislation: Strip away the subsidies supporting giant monocultures, and move that money to support the kind of farming that makes people, and the environment, healthier. Remember that? Yeah, not going to happen.
• NRDC chief: Fracking 'most complicated thing I've encountered' (The Hill's e2 Wire):
  She explained that fracking presents a double-edged sword of sorts. It's facilitated a growth in domestic natural gas, which has half the carbon content of coal. But at the same time, Beinecke said, it's still a carbon fuel. On top of that, Beinecke said it's still unclear what fracking might do to public health.
• Ocean acidification pushing young oysters into "death race" (MongaBay):
  The scientists found that while ocean acidification in the region was not yet reached the levels where it would begin dissolving adult oyster shells, current levels were making it increasingly difficult for more vulnerable oyster larvae to build their shells.
• Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of US natural gas boom: report (Guardian UK):
  Reduction in carbon emissions triggered by America's shift from coal to gas is being offset by a sharp rise in methane
• Court ruling called a game changer for renewable power (EnergyWire):
  A federal appeals court found last week that it's unconstitutional for Michigan to discriminate against out-of-state renewable electricity --- a decision being described as giving a major edge to clean power in the legal fight over the future of the U.S. grid.
• VIDEO: Water in the Anthropocene (CSIRO):
Water in the Anthropocene is a 3-minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle. Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene. Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways.
• By Degrees: What to Make of a Warming Plateau (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
  What happened when the mid-20th-century lull came to an end? You guessed it: an extremely rapid warming of the planet. So, if past is prologue, this current plateau will end at some point, too, and a new era of rapid global warming will begin. ...We might one day find ourselves looking back on the crazy weather of the 2010s with a deep yearning for those halcyon days.
• The 'Social Cost Of Carbon' Is Almost Double What The Government Previously Thought (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
  The U.S. government updated its estimate of how much carbon pollution harms the economy. They found that their previous estimated costs were too low - ranging from 50 to 100 percent depending on the year and the estimate.
• Number of the Day: $675 million in saved energy costs during 2012 thank to LED lights (Treehugger):
  This would be the equivalent of about $37 billion in annual energy costs!
• We Have Met the Unknown Unknowns and They are Us (Legal Planet):
  There are uncertainties about climate science such as tipping points and feedback effects. But these pale in comparison to the biggest source of uncertainties: people. Here are some of the major things we don't know and really can't know about future society.
• Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments

Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses (Grist)

FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page

Whistleblower Edward Snowden did more than simply expose a level of NSA surveillance that suggests the entire system has grown dangerously close to that of "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984.

In disclosing that he served at the NSA as a third-party contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden's revelations touch upon the disturbing fact that the U.S. has become not only a national security surveillance state, but a privatized national security surveillance state. Our national security apparatus is now run, in no small part, by massive private corporations whose financial interests may be better served by operating in secret and by exploiting and exaggerating public fears.

As reported by The New York Times on Monday, Booz Allen "has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States." The company "reported revenues of $5.76 billion for the fiscal year ended in March."

The majority shareholder in Booz Allen is The Carlyle Group, the massive global asset management firm whose defense industry contracts raised questions of a conflict of interest during the George W. Bush administration in light of the direct financial ties and active rolls in Carlyle maintained by Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush, his Sec. of State, James Baker, III, Ronald Reagan's Defense Sec. Frank Carlucci and even Shafiq Bin Laden (Osama's brother).

These new revelations serve as a reminder that 9/11 did more than serve as an economic boon for the military-industrial complex. The events of that horrible day gave rise to an endless "war on terror," to the starkly swift passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and eventually, along with it, --- as Sen. Russ Feingold, the only U.S. Senator to vote against the Act, predicted at the time --- to the massive reach of the NSA surveillance state. Feingold's prediction echoed the ominous warning provided by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) some thirty years earlier, that if the NSA's surveillance capabilities were ever allowed to go unchecked, there would be "no place to hide."

But what Senators Feingold and Church do not seem to have anticipated was that this Orwellian level of surveillance capabilities would be placed into the hands of private cyber security contractors, and their billionaire benefactors, whose financial interests lie in an exaggerated state of fear and secrecy. The merger between the NSA and private corporate power raises the specter that this never-ending "war on terror" has given rise to a national security apparatus whose real purpose is to protect wealth and privilege against the threat democracy poses to our increasingly stark levels of inequality.

So, is it terrorism or democracy which is the real target of an omnipresent NSA surveillance capability? Or is it something else entirely?...

Profitable surveillance

One intriguing feature in Snowden's revelations is that he reportedly left his position at the CIA, where the average salary for a counterintelligence analyst is $75,000/year, to take a similar position with Booz Allen as an NSA analyst for $200,000/year.

That point led Jeffrey Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld to Tweet on Sunday night: "For those of you wondering how a 29 yr old was earning $200K/yr, imagine what Booz Allen was billing him out for."

As revealed in the above-cited New York Times article, "Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year." It was hardly alone. According to Daniel Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight there are "a million private contractors" that have been "cleared to handle highly sensitive matters."

NYT goes on to report:

Companies like Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and the Computer Sciences Corporation also engage directly in gathering information and providing analysis and advice to government officials. Booz Allen employees work inside the facilities at the N.S.A.

And it's not just on U.S. soil and not just inside NSA. NextGov's Aliya Sternstein reported on Monday that a full "One-third of the 1,000 personnel slated to handle cyber weapons for Marine Corps troops overseas will be contractors, according to the chief of the service's cyber command."

The problem entails not only greater expenditures of public monies for the profit-margins of private contractors, but a conflict-of-interest in which those who are profiting from the activity have a vested interest in seeing that perceptions of terrorist threats are omnipresent and unending so as to maximize the profits to be derived from an all-encompassing surveillance state.

To seal the deal, by law, almost complete secrecy masks the profits derived from our insecurity.

Revolving door

As with so many other "public-private partnerships" inside government agencies, the symbiotic relationship between private profits and government policies is embodied in the revolving door between the private contractors and the government agencies which funnel public monies to those contractors. The result: a revolving door that implicates a conflict-of-interest in so many of the "leak" protestations we have been hearing over the past week.

Per The New York Times, James R. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who described the revelations made by Glenn Greenwald as "reprehensible" and as having put "the security of Americans" at risk, is a former Booz Allen executive. (Sidenote: He also appears to have been somewhat less than forthright in his various protestations and explanations of the surveillance programs in question, to date.) John M. McConnell, on the other hand, who had served as the Director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush is, himself, now an employee of Booz Allen.

Round and round it goes, where it stops...well, apparently it never stops, so never mind.

Known misuse of surveillance

There is absolutely no reason to simply "trust" the government or private contractors with the power that accompanies virtually unfettered secret access to all communications. Indeed, the editor of this site, Brad Friedman, together with Glenn Greenwald and other private citizens, already experienced the misuse of these so-called counter-terrorism cyber security tools. Friedman, et al., became the targets of a secret scheme devised for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by its high-powered D.C. law firm and three private U.S. cyber security contractors. For those who think there's nothing to hide if they haven't done anything wrong, think again! The scheme was designed to smear, defraud, plant fake documents, hack and spy upon the Chamber’s perceived enemies in hopes of discrediting them. The scheme was to have used the very tools, developed by contractors with taxpayer monies, for use in the so-called "war on terror".

In a similar vein, as reported by SourceWatch, on May 20 the Center for Media and Democracy released a detailed report on "How the Nation's 'Counter Terrorism' Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Monitored the Occupy Movement".

The key findings in the report include the use of undercover agents not only to infiltrate Occupy groups, but to infiltrate groups taking issue with the infamous Koch-funded, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); Department of Homeland Security "data mining" of social media; application of facial recognition software against the Occupy movement by government counter-terrorism employees; the creation of an "information sharing environment" between law enforcement and major corporations; and the FBI's application of "'Operation Tripwire,' an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups."

Given that report, and so much of what we've learned over the past week, and the decade and more before it, one has to ask: What is the real target of the privatized national security surveillance state, terrorists or democracy...or just pure profit?

One thing is for certain. For companies, like The Carlyle Group, data mining has become the new Gold Rush.

* * *

UPDATE: Readers are encouraged to view this video segment from Democracy Now!, which includes an interview of Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence and a description of the privatized national security apparatus provided by former NSA and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden, as a "digital Blackwater."

UPDATE: The ACLU, as a Verizon customer, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in which it alleged that the NSA Mass Call Tracking (MCT) system exceeds the cyber spy agency's statutory authority. It seeks a declaration that MCT violates the ACLU's rights under the Fourth Amendment. It asks that the MCT system be permanently enjoined.

* * *Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing.

Huh...

[Hat-tip Lee Camp on the Twitters]

29-year old former CIA technical assistant and current NSA third-party contractor Edward Snowden has decided to out himself as the source of the leaked national security documents exposing the U.S. government's massive secret telephone records collection and secret access to nine major Internet services providers, as published by journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian over the course of the past week.

"Any analyst, at any time, can target anyone...anywhere," he tells Greenwald in a video interview published this morning by the Guardian, as recorded in Hong Kong where Snowden has taken refuge for the time being. He adds that, "increasingly", secret intelligence collection is "happening domestically."

"Not all analysts have the ability to target everything," he explains. "But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the President if I had a personal email."

Prior to his decision to leak certain classified and top secret documents about "this massive surveillance machine" he said is being secretly built by the government --- documents which, he says, he reviewed specifically to make sure nobody was personally exposed by them --- Greenwald reports, in a separate article, that he "had 'a very comfortable life' that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves."

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he is quoted as telling the Guardian. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

Thanks to his leaks from the NSA, "Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning" writes Greenwald, with fellow Guardian journalists Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras today.

"The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," Snowden tells Greenwald in the fascinating video interview...

NSA and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence where ever it can by any means possible, that it believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored, as far as intelligence gathered overseas. Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically. And to do that, they --- the NSA, specifically --- targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time, simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so.

A decade ago, Snowden had enlisted in the U.S. Army in hopes of going to Iraq with the Special Forces, the Guardian reports. He became disenchanted, he says, when "Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone." Following a serious injury during training, he was discharged, and eventually made his way into the intelligence field, and now the pages of history.

When asked why he decided to expose these programs, and now come out publicly about them at this time, as opposed to staying in the shadows until otherwise discovered, Snowden explains in the video...

I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model --- when you are subverting the power of government, that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, ya know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, it'll kind of give its officials a mandate to go 'Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side'.

But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens, but they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of 'these people are against the country, they're against the government'.

But, I'm not. I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office and watches what's happening and goes 'This is something that's not our place to decide.' The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong. And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them, and say I didn't change these, I didn't modify the story. This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.

"Why should people care about surveillance?," Greenwald asked Snowden, who replies:

Because even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude, to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody --- even by a wrong call --- and then they can use this system to go back and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

In a two-page September 21, 2011 letter sent by Democratic Senators Ron Wyden (OR) and Mark Udall (CO), both members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, to Attorney General Eric Holder, stressing their concern about government misrepresentation of our current surveillance laws, the Senators pointed out what they describe as a stark gap between our current laws and our actual, secret implementation of those policies.

"We have been concerned for some time," they wrote, "that the U.S. Government is relying on secret interpretations of surveillance authorities that --- in our judgement --- differ significantly from the public's understanding of what is permitted under U.S. law."

The two men, privy to many of the classified policies now partially exposed thanks to Snowden's leaks, said that they believed there needs to be more public transparency of those policies and programs.

"We believe that policymakers can have legitimate differences of opinion about what types of domestic surveillance should be permitted, but we also believe that the American people should be able to learn what their government thinks that the law means, so that voters have the ability to ratify or reject decisions that elected officials make on their behalf."

While Snowden was not asked specifically, during the Guardian video, to speak to the concerns of the Senators, his closing response seemed to do exactly that:

In the months head, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse, until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments --- we consider that to be a stipulation of policy, rather than a stipulation of law.

Because of that, a new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that 'because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world' --- ya know, some new and unpredicted threat --- 'we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It'll be turnkey tyranny.

As progressive blogger "Digby" observed, about the video interview with Snowden taped three days ago and released this morning: "Whistleblowers are often an odd lot. You have to be to take on the powerful like this. I know that I would never in a million years have the balls to do what he has done. Except for his amazing bravery, he seems surprisingly normal."

Indeed, he does. There is little doubt that he will now be maligned in the way that Greenwald, remarkably, has been over the past several days. While Greenwald was one of the staunchest, unyeilding critics of the Bush Administration for years, attacked regularly as a 'radical liberal' by the Right at that time, he is now being similar assaulted by Democrats who are furious about his consistent stand on issues of civil liberties.

What has been most remarkable, however, from my observations over the past several weeks --- beginning initially with the news that the Obama Administration's DoJ had secretly subpoenaed broad telephone records from Associated Press reporters and had identified Fox "News" journalist James Rosen as a "co-conspirator" in another leak case, right up to the disclosures over the past week --- is how many Democrats have taken up virtually identical talking points and positions in order to defend the Obama Administration, as those used by Republicans to defend George W. Bush while he was carrying out many of the exact same actions.

Curiously, many Obama loyalists don't seem to notice the astounding irony of using those same tactics and talking points to defend the President after having decried them when used by Bush loyalists during the first decade of the century.

At the same time, many Bush loyalists are conveniently pretending to forget the nearly-identical arguments once made in blind defense of Bush, now that they hope to use them to attack President Obama. Either that, or, like Dubya's former Press Secretary Ari Fleisher who said yesterday that he's "proud, actually, as a Republican to be backing what President Obama has done", they are simply ringing in to endorse the same Big Government policies they once supported under Bush, even while falsely claiming, both then and now, to be "conservatives" who staunchly oppose broad government overreach and unbridled intrusion into the private lives and Constitutional rights of American citizens.

The political world has, in some respects, now completely turned upside down. But whether or not you agree with Snowden's brave decision to leak this information to the public, or whether or not you agree with the policies exposed by them, we are all now much better educated about what our government is doing in our name, and, therefore, better able to make informed decisions about that government and those policies.

That is, of course, the very point of the very best whistleblowing, which 2008 candidate Obama once described as "acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars [and that] should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration."

And now we have the "courage and patriotism" of yet another American whistleblower and several dedicated and unflinching journalists (from a British publication) to thank for it.

CORRECTION: I had initially misidentified the states represented by Senators Wyden and Udall. That has now been corrected above. My apologies for the error.

The first part of this segment from last Thursday night's Last Word on MSNBC includes a quick summary by NBC's Pete Williams of the first two different blockbuster releases of classified NatSec documents by the UK Guardian's Glen Greenwald this week. (Those two stories are here and here, and came before his third one on Friday.)

If you're familiar with those stories, you can skip to the 5:15 mark in the video below, where Greenwald's appearance begins, and as he responds to threats of investigation, etc. by Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) and others concerning his release of these documents journalism.

The first part of Greenwald's response: "Let them go ahead and investigate. There's this document called the Constitution, and one of the things it guarantees is the right of a free press. Which means, as a citizen and as a journalist, I have the absolute Constitutional right to go on and report on what it is my government is doing in the dark and inform my fellow citizens about that action ... And I intend to continue to shine light on that and Dianne Feinstein can beat her chest all she wants and call for investigations and none of that's gonna stop and none of it's gonna change"...

That's what journalism should look like, and what every journalist should sound like, in my opinion.

I'm very proud to call Greenwald both a colleague and a fellow target of secretly planned cyberattacks back in 2011 by incredibly powerful corporate/government forces (one of whom, by the way, may well be one of the government Defense Dept. contractors involved in the second of Greenwald's leak reports this week.)

One more point on all of this I'd like to cite, for now...

After his first and second blockbuster publication of classified documents this week, and just prior to his third this morning, Greenwald offered a few thoughts on whistleblowers and the threats of investigation and prosecution that are already being made by the government.

His full thoughts are here and two points.

First, he offers his thoughts on true whistleblowers, who he describes as "heroes", with which I agree. Greenwald also notes the difference between 2008 candidate Obama --- who lauded whistleblowers as "often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government" and whistleblowing itself as "acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars [and that] should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration" --- with the President Obama who has prosecuted more than double the number of whistleblowers "of all previous Presidents combined". He also notes that Obama spent the 2012 campaign season "boasting about it."

In his second point, Greenwald speaks directly, and bravely, again to the issue of the threats of investigation, and why it's important for him, and other journalists, and to our nation, that journalists not be cowed by such threats...

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.

Thank you, Glenn.