The Department of Homeland Security is in increasingly hot water over its utterly goatfucked “no-fly” program. Something like 800,000 people are on it, but the DHS insists its classified, and that there’s no oversight or procedure to challenge your inclusion.

Predictably, this has not been popular with, oh, anyone with a brain, which apparently excludes DHS officials.

Anyway, a Stanford PhD student is suing over her inclusion in this list, and that suit is finally at trial. And that’s when the fun starts, because it turns out the DHS has put one of her witnesses on the no-fly list to keep her from testifying. As the witness is the plaintiff’s American-born daughter, this is absolutely NOT going over well with the judge.

Said judge was even less impressed when the DHS lawyers defending the suit lied to him about the situation. This one’s going to be fun to watch; go read the linked article.

Buried in the linked story is a data point that, if true, shows you just exactly how much respect you should have for the DHS program:

It would appear that the lawyers for [plaintiff] Ibrahim are making a (rather compelling, from the evidence) case that bumbling US law enforcement officials confused two very different Malaysian organizations with similar names: Jamaah Islamiyah Malaysia, which is a terrorist organization, and Jamaah Islah Malaysia, “a non-profit professional networking group for Muslims who have returned to Malaysia after post-secondary schooling in the U.S. and Europe.” The two organizations are, as you would imagine, quite different. Ibrahim is involved in the latter, and has no connection to the former, but it sounds like the FBI agents who interviewed her were unaware of the difference.

Fuck me: “Newly anointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week that it would be OK for Internet service providers to charge Netflix and other companies for a faster lane to consumers.”

The Feds are refusing to comply with a court order insisting they disclose the secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, under which they commit who-knows-what.

Yes, this means there are still secret laws and secret courts, and they insist it needs to stay this way. This can’t be allowed to stand.

On more minor notes, it seems that the NSA and FBI have decided that, as far as FOIA requests are concerned, enough’s enough. The NSA is (understandably) getting a LOT more requests — up almost 1000% — but it’s no trouble, as they just deny them all.

The FBI, for its part, has stopped responding to the most prolific requester on the grounds that, well, he might learn something. Guess we can’t have that.

Seriously, fuck ALL these people.

Anybody notice that coke-gobbling Florida rep Trey Radel kinda resembles former Pennsylvania rep Pete Russo?

I’ve actually had this in tab for a few weeks; it’s worth your time to click through and watch the dialog available. Snowden makes some very, very good points. If you don’t have time, here’s the bullet points:

It’s led us to a point in our relationship with the government, where we have an executive — a Department of Justice — that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they’ll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth. And that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

Hard to argue with that. But he keeps going:

This is not about any particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America, that is coming increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic society. If we can’t understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them….

He’s not wrong. Not even a little bit. And the vigor with which he’s been pilloried by those in power shows precisely why he fled rather than work through channels to correct the wrongs he saw happening.

This TechDirt post in response to Rep. Mike Rogers’s hilarious pronouncements (basically, “Since nobody complained when nobody knew about this!”) is pretty fantastic.

Colbert’s bits are stellar here; really TOP NOTCH:

Let’s say, instead of falling in the forest, the tree is standing outside your house and I’m hiding in it watching you shower. So far, I’m not violating your privacy. But the second you see me through the window, suddenly I’m the criminal? What about my privacy? I’m trying to masturbate here. Come to think of it, there are all sorts of victimless crimes like this. We know people getting assaulted because they call the police. But I’ve never heard of anyone calling the cops because they were murdered. Therefore, clearly, no one was killed. **By the same logic, folks, I have not insulted Mike Rogers as long as he never hears me say: The reason Mike Rogers uses circular logic is because his head is jammed up his own ass. **

I admire what historians will now call “The Rogers Doctrine”: when it comes to privacy vs. security, we can have one of them, as long as we don’t know which one it is. That way, we can maintain our constitutional rights. Or, if they do take away our rights, just don’t let us find out. That way, we’ll still have them.

The first example is Apple’s new “Warrant Canary” clause. It works like this: there’s a section in their periodically-released transparency report that states very clearly that

Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.

This report is re-issued periodically. Apple may receive a gag-protected demand for user data at some point, and not be able to say anything about it, but if this happens we can expect this clause to vanish from future transparency disclosures. If it’s gone, Big Brother came calling.

The even better example is how furious and enraged Google’s security team is about the disclosure that the NSA was listening on their internal traffic. As a result, they’ve encrypted every bit of that traffic, which renders the NSA’s taps worthless:

We designed this system to keep criminals out. There’s no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we’ve got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason.

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.

Thank GOD for Snowden’s disclosures.