Apparently Murdoch is really annoyed with the detention of David Miranda by the UK, as well as all of the spying on people, while he is losing big bucks over the spying that his newspapers have done.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the NSA story using their own sources, which corroborates many of the points in The Guardian‘s coverage. One of the things the WSJ is reporting really gets to me: NSA doesn’t know what Snowden took. Apparently they don’t have audit trails or logging that reflects what system administrators are doing. If they don’t have that rather basic level of management in place, they really can’t claim that the data they are hoovering up is secure, nor can they claim it isn’t being routinely abused. They just don’t know, and have no way of finding out in the system they created.

CBS reports NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ emails, FISA court records show, but the ‘records’ are really judgments by the court that NSA was acting in violation of the Fourth Amendment for at least three years, and misled the court as to exactly what it was doing. This gives me real confidence in the system of ‘checks and balances’. 😈

Kevin Gosztola adds a bit of background on the Toobin-Greenwald issue: Jeffrey Toobin Preaches on Sanctity of Government Secrets Despite Once Stealing Classified Documents. Well, Toobin did it for a good reason – to help sell the book he was writing, not some silly reason like exposing government misdeeds.

The actions taken by the UK government against The Guardian have helped to shift the focus away from personalities towards the real story – your government is using terrorism as an excuse to violate your civil rights and Constitutional protections.

Digby posted on the 35-year sentence, but went further and compared it to that of mass murderer William Calley, convicted for the Mi Lai massacre:

Sentenced to life imprisonment, Calley spent only three days in the stockade at Fort Benning before President Nixon ordered his release to house arrest. Three years later he was a free man, paroled by the Secretary of the Army.

Bradley Manning spent more time in confinement before his court martial, than William Calley spent after being convicted of mass murder.

One of the first things that came out of what Bradley Manning leaked was a video of American forces killing unarmed civilians, including two employees of Reuters. The US government apparently feels it is a misdemeanor to kill civilians, but a major felony to tell people about it.