In Spy News

In Mike Konczal’s post, What’s New in the New Surveillance State?, he notes:

In some sense, the issue of the government spying and collecting data on its citizens isn’t a new problem. One of my favorite tweets of the past week was Brooke Jarvis noting “Collapsing bridges alongside massive spy networks… Ah, the Jeffersonian ideal of government.”

I wonder if TJ could have imagined a Senator like Saxby Chambliss, who doesn’t see a need for hearings on the Snowden revelations, because his constituents haven’t called him to complain [about a classified program they didn’t know existed.]

MsExPat lives in Hong Kong a wrote a long piece explaining Six reasons why choosing Hong Kong is a brilliant move by Edward Snowden.

I have a feeling that his media appearances are designed to improve the support for him among the people of Hong Kong.

For those of you without a program, Digby notes from a CNet article that there are actually four different entities being discussed:

For your phone there is Mainway for the meta data, and Nucleon for the content;
For your Internet there is Marina for the meta data, and Prism for the content.

Now, as to the kerfuffle over whether analysts have access to whatever they want, the answer is only if they sign a copy of a permission request that states they are 51% sure that the requested content involves foreigners. This is immediately approved by the FISA court. When it turns out that it was a former girlfriend calling her lawyer about the restraining order, nothing apparently happens, because the analyst was only 51% sure.

Folks, 51% is definitely not ‘probable cause’, nor is it ‘reasonable suspicion’. Hell, 51% doesn’t qualify as a hunch, or a wild ass guess. That is coin toss territory, not analysis, but that’s all that is required to see the content.