I’m just throwing this out for comment.

Kevin Drum:

“Direct access” implies that NSA can just root around in Google’s servers whenever they want. That’s big news. Conversely, a story about how companies transfer information to NSA after they get a court order is a complete nothing. Who cares what technical means are used to transfer data to NSA? What we care about is what kind of information NSA is getting, and nothing in the PRISM story has given us any insight into that.

If Snowden really has the technical chops he claims to have, he should have cleared this up. But Greenwald and Gellman apparently didn’t ask about it, and Snowden apparently didn’t volunteer anything. (I say “apparently” because I don’t know for sure who said what to whom.) This suggests either that Snowden didn’t know what this phrase meant or else chose not to explain it properly. Either one raises some red flags.

Do read Drum’s entire post.

Update: Rick Perlstein corroborates that “direct access” probably doesn’t mean what some people assumed it meant.

Michele Bachmann explains the dire consequences of immigration reform.

Immigration reform now, I say.

Josh Marshall has a long and thoughtful post up about security leaks and leakers and what to do about them. In a nutshell, he does not condone leaks for the sake of leaks, or making sensitive information public just because one can. Such an act must be predicated on a belief that the entire U.S. foreign policy apparatus is thoroughly evil and must be destroyed. On the other hand, if the leak exposes some particular course of wrongdoing, to force the government to change or abandon a specific policy, that’s an entirely different matter.

Diplomats and the military both require a certain amount of secrecy to function. It’s the nature of the beasts. Anyone demanding absolute transparency where national security and foreign affairs are concerned is not being rational. Someone sworn into that secrecy ought to think long and hard about breaking his oath. It should be a gut-wrenching decision undertaken only for the best reasons. Think Brutus in Julius Caesar — Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Not that betraying Caesar was necessarily the right thing, but you get the drift.

Josh Marshall writes,

The Snowden case is less clear to me. … the public definitely has an interest in knowing just how we’re using surveillance technology and how we’re balancing risks versus privacy. The best critique of my whole position that I can think of is that 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.

But it’s more than that. Snowden is doing more than triggering a debate. I think it’s clear he’s trying to upend, damage – choose your verb – the US intelligence apparatus and policieis he opposes. The fact that what he’s doing is against the law speaks for itself. I don’t think anyone doubts that narrow point. But he’s not just opening the thing up for debate. He’s taking it upon himself to make certain things no longer possible, or much harder to do. To me that’s a betrayal. I think it’s easy to exaggerate how much damage these disclosures cause. But I don’t buy that there are no consequences. And it goes to the point I was making in an earlier post. Who gets to decide? The totality of the officeholders who’ve been elected democratically – for better or worse – to make these decisions? Or Edward Snowden, some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law?

It’s been a great many years since I read Abe Fortas’s Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience, but as I remember one of his points is that if you’re going to break a law even for a righteous reason, you should be willing to take the punishment. It has to be that important to you, that you’re willing to go to jail for it. It has to be that important to the next person who considers breaking a law. This is a serious matter. Motivations must be selfless. If people think they’re going to be pardoned and lauded as heroes for an act of civil disobedience, it’s no longer a selfless act. The decision becomes too easy. It shouldn’t be easy. I’m not saying it’s always wrong; sometimes it’s right. But it shouldn’t be easy.

I have no opinion whether Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, is a big jerk or the best dude ever. The more important point (other than the focus on what the feds have been up to) is explained by Robert O’Harrow Jr., Dana Priest and Marjorie Censer in WaPo — that a humungous amount of intelligence is being gathered by outside contractors, who get paid a gazillion taxpayer bucks for it, and the actual federal government is not even supervising much of this.

Never before have so many U.S. intelligence workers been hired so quickly, or been given access to secret government information through networked computers. In recent years, about one in four intelligence workers has been a contractor, and 70 percent or more of the intelligence community’s secret budget has gone to private firms. …

… But in the rush to fill jobs, the government has relied on faulty procedures to vet intelligence workers, documents and interviews show. At the same time, intelligence agencies have not hired enough in-house government workers to manage and oversee the contractors, contracting specialists said.

The rush to fill jobs began right after 9/11, of course, and this whole behemoth private intelligence gathering operation was set up by the Bush Administration. But I can’t see that the Obama Administration has done much to change it.

By the mid-2000s, all of the intelligence agencies had become dependent on private contractors such as Snowden — who says he made $200,000 a year — to perform everything from information technology installation and maintenance to intelligence analysis and agent protection.

This article says Snowden never finished high school. There are plans to add another 10,000 employees to the behemoth, so get your resume in now.

Private contractors working for the CIA recruited spies, protected CIA directors, helped snatch suspected extremists off the streets of Italy and even interrogated suspected terrorists in secret prisons aboard.

The Defense Security Service, the agency that grants security clearances to many of the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies, became so overwhelmed with that task that on April 28, 2006, it shut down the clearance process altogether. Its backlog of pending cases had reached 700,000, and it had run out of money to process any more. The government’s solution was to hire more contractors to administer the security clearance reviews.

Are we feeling safer yet?

The McLean-based Booz Allen has almost 25,000 employees and recorded $5.8 billion in revenue for fiscal 2013, earning $219 million in profit. Its profits have been soaring in recent years. Nearly all of its revenue comes as a result of “strong and longstanding relationships with a diverse group of clients at all levels of the U.S. government,” the company said in a financial filing.

The largest shareholder of the firm is the Carlyle Group, which owns more than two thirds of the shares.

Oh, my dears, it has been years since I’ve thought of the Carlyle Group. Talk about a blast from the past. You’ll remember that the Carlyle Group connected the Bush and bin Laden families in business. I understand the bin Ladens liquidated their holdings in Carlyle after 9/11. But the point is that anybody from anywhere can buy into Carlyle, and it owns two-thirds of a private corporation running U.S. security operations.

This is stupid. Seriously.

Update: Why Snowden was paid $200,000 a year.

Rampant waste of human protoplasm Sen. Rand Paul says he is going to fight the NSA’s surveillance programs with a Supreme Court challenge. He wants internet providers and phone companies and anybody else who feels so moved to join a class action lawsuit to challenge the programs on constitutional grounds.

Whether corporations would want to join such a lawsuit is an open question. Whether the current SCOTUS would find the programs unconstitutional is a coin toss. And who knows how long this effort would take?

What I do know is that Congress — y’know, Senator, that place where I assume you show up for work sometimes — could shut the whole mess down right now by revising or rescinding the Patriot Act. And y’all could take back some of your constitutional war powers while you’re at it. There’s a lad.

Noam Scheiber writes that the Republican Party is the Titanic, and the Affordable Care Act is the iceberg.

Conservatives are counting on the implementation of Obamacare to be a train wreck of epic proportions, which will allow them to triumph in the 2014 midterms, not to mention the 2016 presidential election. They believe this as fervently as they believed Romney was winning 2012 in a landslide.

If you want to appreciate how truly incorrigible conservatives are on the subject, I recommend watching them grapple with the early news about Obamacare implementation, which has suggested the program could work better than anticipated. It’s a bit like watching a speculator learn he’s bet his life savings on a failing company—which is to say, chock full of denial and elaborate self-delusion.

To soothe their troubled spirits and bridge the cognitive dissonance, Avik Roy of Forbes published a highly dishonest screed purporting to prove that insurance rates were about to skyrocket up. Scheiber continues,

“Obamacare drives up insurance premiums by up to 146 percent in California,” screamed The Daily Caller. Even after a succession of wonks highlighted the glaring flaws, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal leaned on Roy to declare an “ObamaCare Bait and Switch.”

I hope the Administration is preparing a big information campaign that will explain to everyone what’s expected next year, because I don’t think most people know. But other than that, I don’t see a train wreck coming.

Ed Kilgore discussed why the Right is so obsessed with Obamacare. Of course, many of them seriously believe it is socialism. But this reason stood out for me.

They think they’re on the right side of public opinion as well as of history. It’s sometimes hard to remember how rarely Republicans, even when they are winning elections, are on the positive side of public opinion on a specific issue. The polls showing consistent majorities of the public disliking Obamacare is a deeply satisfying phenomenon for the Right. It’s so satisfying, indeed, that conservatives to a remarkable extent almost never come to grips with the evidence that a sizable chunk of Obamacare opponents support a larger government role in health care—such as the socialist abomination of Medicare For All—and that an even larger chunk seem to favor nearly all the individual elements of the ACA. Never mind: consistent majorities oppose Obama’s namesake accomplishment, and that’s a firm rock on which all other political strategies and messages can and must depend.

I think that by November 2014, most of the electorate will have realized Obamacare isn’t so bad after all, and might even be doing some good. So whether it will have any real impact on the midterms remains to be seen.

Cory Booker is running for Frank Lautenberg’s U.S. Senate seat.

There are days I do things beside dredge the Intertubes looking for news, and this has been one of those days. So I’m going to defer to other bloggers on the NSA/FBI/PRISM data mining story.

Good overview of what’s been happening and the constitutional issues involved — “How All Three Branches Conspired to Threaten Your Privacy” by Scott Lemieux

See also “President Obama’s War” by Charles Pierce and “PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway” by Dan Amira.

Earlier this week the First Lady was heckled at a private fundraiser, and the way she handled the heckler drew both praise and criticism. I’ve seen the incident reported a couple of ways, but my impression is that the FLOTUS gave the audience (who had paid to be there) a choice between who they wanted to speak, her or Ms. Heckler. And if the heckler took over the program, the FLOTUS said, she would leave.

This NPR story suggests that lots of liberal commenters thought the FLOTUS was out of line, and not the heckler, who interrupted the First Lady’s speech about providing a better future for our children with the demand that the President sign an executive order banning discrimination against gays working for federal contractors.

Heckling is very much justified when it’s about some issue Power isn’t addressing, or is addressing stupidly. But there is a bill the President supports making its way through the legislative process that addresses the issue, and there’s a solid argument to be made that, in the long run, it’s much better to settle this matter through law than through an executive order that would be weaker and that a future POTUS could rescind. It seems to me this week’s heckler was serving no real purpose other than to hear herself heckle.

I also think interrupting a speaker should be a last resort thing. Was there going to be Q&A time after the prepared remarks? Was the First Lady planning to shake hands and schmooze a bit with the participants? In other words, would there have been another point in the program at which the heckler could have spoken her mind without interrupting the speech? If so, what was the purpose of interrupting the speech, especially at a private event?

The thing with heckling is that there’s a soft, fuzzy line between bravely speaking truth to power and just being an asshole. And, yes, perception is in the eye of the beholder. But there’s skillful and fearless heckling and asshole heckling, and to me, the heckler in question was mostly the latter.

I’ve been at events and also taken classes that were hijacked by an audience member/class participant, and sometimes the only purpose actually served is that whatever everyone else was there to see didn’t happen. And sometimes that’s a righteous thing, and sometimes it’s just rude. And well-meaning people will disagree with each other about which is what.

However, seems to me there are vocational hecklers who believe heckling is always righteous, under all circumstances, and I’m saying it isn’t. Nor should it always be condoned and encouraged. Sometimes people need to be told to stuff a sock in it and sit down.

It’s also the case that some people looking at this week’s incident see a privileged white twit disrespecting a black First Lady, and there may be something to that.

See also Michelle Obama is Awesome. Hecklers, not so much.