Bankster Lobbyists Writing Regulatory 'Reform' Legislation

Nearly six years since massive financial fraud and speculative market manipulation drove the global capitalist economy off the rails, congressional grifters in both benighted political parties have turned over the legislative process to bankster lobbyists.

Talk about technocratic efficiency!

Last week, The New York Times revealed that "Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves."

According to emails leaked to the Times, a bill that "sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month--over the objections of the Treasury Department--was essentially Citigroup's."

Despite huge losses during the capitalist economic meltdown, which included heavy exposure to toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) which cost shareholders some 85 percent of asset value by early 2009, by 2012 the bank had built up an enormous cash horde to the tune of $420 billion (£277.7bn), derived from selling some $500 billion (£330.6bn) of "special assets" placed in Citi holdings that were guaranteed from losses by the US Treasury Department; this included untaxed overseas profits of some $35.9 billion (£23.74bn) according to Bloomberg.

As I reported last month, Citigroup was handed some $45 billion (£29.78bn) in TARP funds while the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve secretly backstopped more than $300 billion (£197.31bn) in toxic assets on their books. In addition to receiving "$2.5 trillion [£1.64tn] of support from the American taxpayer through capital infusions, asset guarantees and low-cost loans," as Wall Street on Parade analyst Pam Martens pointed out, like other too-big-to-jail banks such as Wachovia and HSBC, the Citi brand has long been associated with washing dirty cash for drug cartels.

Hit with a toothless Consent Order by the Federal Reserve in March over "deficiencies in the Banks' BSA/AML [Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering] compliance programs," federal regulators charged that Citigroup and their affiliate Banamex "lacked effective systems of governance and internal controls to adequately oversee the activities of the Banks with respect to legal, compliance, and reputational risk related to the Banks' respective BSA/AML compliance programs."

The Federal Reserve "action" followed an anemic Consent Order last year by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) which also cited Citi's failure to "adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers the required BSA/AML program elements due to an inadequate system of internal controls." Additionally, the OCC charged that the "Bank did not develop adequate due diligence on foreign correspondent bank customers and failed to file Suspicious Activity Reports ('SARs') related to its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument activity in a timely manner."

Nevertheless, as with other criminogenic banks such as JPMorgan Chase, similarly hit with an equally toothless Consent Order by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in January, in their infinite wisdom the Federal Reserve averred that their Citigroup action was issued "without this Order constituting an admission or denial by Citigroup of any allegation made or implied by the Board of Governors in connection with this matter, and solely for the purpose of settling this matter without a formal proceeding being filed and without the necessity for protracted or extended hearings or testimony."

In other words, let's sweep this under the rug as quickly as possible and move on. But before we do, let's step back for a moment and wrap our heads around a few salient facts.

Here's a bank with a documented history as the GAO revealed in 1998, of laundering drug money for well-placed Juárez and Gulf Cartel crony Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, charged with amassing a multimillion dollar fortune from narcotics rackets and then squirreling it away in London, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

Does this evoke any memories?

According to GAO investigators, "Mr. Salinas was able to transfer $90 million to $100 million between 1992 and 1994 by using a private banking relationship formed by Citibank New York in 1992. The funds were transferred through Citibank Mexico and Citibank New York to private banking investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland."

Beginning in 1992, Citibank "assisted Mr. Salinas with these transfers and effectively disguised the funds' source and destination, thus breaking the funds' paper trail." And they did so by creating "an offshore private investment company named Trocca, to hold Mr. Salinas's assets, through Cititrust (Cayman) and investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland," and then failed to "prepare a financial profile on him or request a waiver for the profile, as required by then Citibank know your customer policy."

Keep in mind that when Swiss prosecutors completed their money laundering investigation, The New York Times disclosed that "Swiss police investigators have concluded that a brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari played a central role in Mexico's cocaine trade, raking in huge bribes to protect the flow of drugs into the United States."

That Swiss report stated, "When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President of Mexico in 1988, Raúl Salinas de Gortari assumed control over practically all drug shipments through Mexico. Through his influence and bribes paid with drug money, officials of the army and the police supported and protected the flourishing drug business."

Does the name of former Banamex CEO Roberto Hernández ring any bells?

Described as "the single biggest winner" of Mexican bank privatizations engineered by the Bush and Clinton regimes during the 1990s as Narco News disclosed, a subsequent investigation revealed that "Hernández had been accused--publicly and via a criminal complaint--by the daily newspaper Por Esto! of trafficking tons of Colombian cocaine through his Caribbean costa properties on that peninsula since 1997."

And when Citigroup acquired Banamex in 2001 for the then-princely sum of $12.5 billion (£8.27bn), it was described as the largest US-Mexican corporate merger in history. Should it surprise us that this Citi subsidiary was named alongside parent Citigroup by the OCC and Federal Reserve for repeated failures to adequately police dirty money flowing into their coffers?

Members of the House Financial Services Committee should examine why they would turn over the legislative process to a criminal financial cartel!

As Times' journalists Eric Lipton and Ben Protess reported, "Citigroup's recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee's 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)"

Proving yet again, that Washington lawmakers are beholden to their Wall Street masters, MapLight, a nonpartisan research group that "reveals money's influence on politics in the US Congress," disclosed that legislators "serving" on the House Financial Services Committee "approved six bills that would roll back pieces of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to improve regulation of the derivatives market."

Lawmakers who voted "yes" on HR 992, the Orwellian-named Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, "received, on average, 2.6 times more money from top banks than committee members" who voted "no." MapLight further disclosed that lawmakers who voted "yes" on this pernicious piece of legislative detritus "received, on average, 3 times more money from the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector," than committee members who voted "no."

The $700 trillion derivatives market, 93.2 percent of which is controlled by the four largest too-big-to-fail-and-jail US banks, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, is a cash cow and shadow market for crooked financial insiders. HR 992, which rolled-back a key provision of 2010's anemic Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation, Sec. 716, would have required banks to spin off their derivatives activities into separate units that would not have access to federal bank subsidies, i.e., taxpayer bailouts.

"In recent weeks, the Times reported, "Wall Street groups also held fund-raisers for lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one dinner Wednesday night, corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a private room of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor of the bill championed by Citigroup."

Responding to questions, Financial Services Committee member Jim Himes, a former Goldman Sachs banker, third-term Connecticut Democrat and one of the top recipients of Wall Street largess to the tune of $194,500 according to OpenSecrets told the Times: "It's appalling, it's disgusting, it's wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It's unfortunately the world we live in."

No Mr. Himes, it's the world you live in.

While your colleague across the aisle, Stephen Fincher (R-TN), cites Bible verses to justify gutting federal nutritional assistance to 47 million hungry Americans while being the "the second largest recipient of farm subsidies in the United States Congress" according to Forbes, and received some $3.48 million (£2.3m) since 1999 in USDA farm subsidies while doing the "Lord's work" according to the Environmental Working Group, the US Congress, including "liberal" Obama Democrats have promoted every filthy piece of legislation that facilitates Wall Street's plundering of the American people.

Referencing the recent vote on HR 992, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that in the first quarter of 2013, members of the Financial Services Committee "received more than $1.3 million in donations to their campaigns and leadership PACs from the securities and investment industry and commercial banks."

According to OpenSecrets, "By far the largest source of cash from the two industries was the Investment Company Institute, a trade association representing Wall Street firms. The ICI gave at least $129,000 to members of the House Financial Services Committee. Other trade groups representing banks and investment firms, including the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, were also major contributors."

OpenSecrets reported that "Banking industry companies increased their contributions in 2013 to $640,286, from $497,169 in early 2011. Citigroup, in particular, jumped from $19,500 in donations to committee members to $39,500. UBS went from $64,250 to $88,000. Wells Fargo also opened its checkbook a little wider this year, giving $80,000, compared with $31,250 in 2011."

Commenting on this latest gift to Wall Street criminals, the World Socialist Web Site observed: "Flush with the $85 billion in cash printed up and handed to the banks every month by the Federal Reserve, business at the Wall Street casino is booming. Stock values are at record levels and so are bank profits, amidst declining wages and mass poverty."

"Under these conditions," Marxist critic Andre Damon averred, "the banks have been pushing to rip up even the very modest restrictions on financial speculation, while broadening the scope of government bailout laws. The aim is simple: to give banks the maximum ability to speculate without constraint, while getting the maximum possible government assistance if and when the bubble collapses."

None of this should surprise anyone who has paid the least attention to the cronyism and financial parasitism of the Obama regime.

From get-out-of-jail-free-cards passed out to drug money laundering banks by Eric Holder's Justice Department, to the appointments of Citigroup alumnus and Cayman Islands tax-dodger Jacob Lew as Treasury Secretary, Debevoise & Plimpton partner Mary Jo White over at the Securities and Exchange Commission to the nomination of billionaire Hyatt Hotel heiress, subprime mortgage "pioneer" and union-buster Penny Pritzker to lead the Commerce Department, it's a bankster world, all the time.

How's that for Hope and Change™!

Senate Set to Introduce Bill for Broad Email Spying

A Senate proposal claiming to "protect" Americans' email privacy from unwarranted secret state intrusions "has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law," CNET revealed.

As provisions of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) are "updated" to better reflect the insatiable needs of our police state minders, law enforcement groups and corporate lobbyists are clamoring for greater access to our electronic communications.

While doe-eyed "progressives" claim that the reelection of war criminal Barack Obama portends an imminent "2.0 reset" by his administration, actions speak louder than words, particularly as they pertain to Americans' constitutional rights.

Most recently the Hope and Change™ fraudster signaled his intentions by giving Israel a green light to murder Palestinians in the open air prison of Gaza. The silence from "progressive" quarters was worse than deafening as writers Chris Floyd and Arthur Silber pointed out.

What about other "liberal icons," stalwart champions of civil liberties; what have they been up to since the election?

CNET investigative reporter Declan McCullagh informed us that "Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns," and that a "vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week."

Among the proposals found in the Leahy revisions are the following:

• Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.

• Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

• Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant--or subsequent court review--if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

• Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Although a follow-up CNET article reported that Leahy, reacting to widespread opposition, has now "abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power--including warrantless access to Americans' e-mail accounts," given Congress's near universal embrace of the "Total Information Awareness" paradigm, it is a near certainty these measures will return in some form.

"It's an abrupt departure from Leahy's earlier approach," McCullough noted, one "which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications."

But in the best tradition of "bipartisanship," i.e., capitulation to the Security State, "after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys' Association and the National Sheriffs' Association organizations objected to the legislation," Leahy "pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday."

The strongest objections to providing the public with privacy safeguards came, you guessed it, from officials within Obama's Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, CNET reported that the DOJ "offered what amounts to a frontal attack on proposals to amend federal law to better protect Americans' privacy."

"James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, warned that rewriting a 1986 privacy law to grant cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans' cell phones would hinder police investigations."

During Senate testimony back in April, Baker claimed that requiring a search warrant "to obtain stored e-mail could have an 'adverse impact' on criminal investigations. And making location information only available with a search warrant, he said, would hinder 'the government's ability to obtain important information in investigations of serious crimes'."

In other words, even when there is no evidence a crime has been committed the Obama administration is asserting that constitutional safeguards on email stored in the cloud would get in the government's way and impose "an unnecessary burden" on state fishing expeditions by a multitude of law enforcement agencies.

Such fallacious claims come hot on the heels of administration efforts to convince Congress to rewrite wiretapping laws that would require internet firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to build backdoors into their infrastructure for government surveillance.

Earlier this month, Russia Today disclosed that although the FBI "has been adamant about withholding information about their plans to ensure the government can access any encrypted emails or messages sent over the Internet," a federal judge ordered the Bureau to "come clean."

"Washington," RT reported, "hopes to eventually roll out a program that will see that the FBI and other federal agencies are allowed backdoor access to any and all online communications."

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg, in response to charges by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that a government stonewall hindered their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on the FBI's "Going Dark" program, ordered the Department of Justice to conduct "further review of the materials previously withheld."

Although the DOJ's Criminal Division had located 8,425 pages of "potentially responsive information," they only released "one page in full and 6 pages in part, and withheld 51 pages in full." How's that for "transparency"!

And with new Justice Department guidelines allowing "counterterrorism officials" to "lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism" as The Washington Post reported earlier this year, any and every scrap of electronic detritus generated by the billions of cell phone calls, text messages, emails and web searches made by Americans every day is considered fair game by government snoops.

The trend towards retaining more and more data by intelligence agencies and local police has accelerated with technological advances. As The New York Times reported in August, "not so long ago even the most aggressive government surveillance had to be selective: the cost of data storage was too high and the capacity too low to keep everything."

"Not anymore." According to to John Villasenor, a "senior fellow" at the elitist Brookings Institution, as data storage costs plummet "it will soon be technically feasible and affordable to record and store everything that can be recorded about what everyone in a country says or does."

The Brookings analyst averred that "estimates ... to store the audio from telephone calls made by an average person in the course of a year would require about 3.3 gigabytes and cost just 17 cents to store, a price that is expected to fall to 2 cents by 2015."

"Tracking a person's movements for a year, collected from their cellphone, would take so little space as to carry a trivial cost," the Times averred. "Storing video takes far more space, but the price is dropping so steadily that storing millions of hours of material will not be a problem soon."

But wouldn't securocrats drown in these vast oceans of electronic data? Not really. A "parallel revolution in search technology" will soon allow even the dimmest bulb at DHS or the FBI "to efficiently find anything of interest in the data."

This "parallel revolution" was hinted at by investigative journalist James Bamford. In his March piece in Wired Magazine, Bamford described efforts by the National Security Agency to build "super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages."

In 2009, "they made a big breakthrough," a former "senior intelligence official" told Wired. "The NSA believes it's on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm--opening up hoards of data."

"That," the former official noted, "is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in," Bamford wrote.

"What can't be broken today may be broken tomorrow. 'Then you can see what they were saying in the past,' he says. 'By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.' The danger, the former official says, is that it's not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it's also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans' email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade."

And if it can be intercepted, mined and stored, it can be searched, giving government snoops an unprecedented window into our lives.

More troubling still, with ECPA "reform" on the horizon, CNET disclosed that "Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies--including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission--to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant."

In addition to the SEC, civil subpoena authority would be granted to diverse agencies such as the "Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review Commission," McCullough wrote.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that investigative digging by concerned citizens and journalists into the filthy shenanigans and "shitty deals" foisted on the public by banks, shady brokerage houses, mortgage lenders, defense corporations, petrochemical and mining interests, or unions out to "organize the unorganized," would be viewed as a dire threat to the current corporatist set-up.

According to draft proposals leaked to CNET we learn that if passed the new law "would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reported last month, the organization "is seeking documents about DHS Internet monitoring that some Justice Department officials believe may 'run afoul of privacy laws forbidding government surveillance of private Internet traffic'."

"In February 2011," EPIC disclosed that "the Department of Homeland Security announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data."

The DHS initiative "would gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and messages boards' and disseminate information to 'federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners'."

"The program would be executed, in part," EPIC also revealed, "by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users. The agency stated it would store personal information for up to five years."

Ironically enough, in October the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report, Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers, which found "that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded 'intelligence' of uneven quality--oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism."

"Despite reviewing 13 months' worth of reporting originating from fusion centers from April 1, 2009 to April 30, 2010," Senate staff averred, "the Subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot."

In their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS, the privacy watchdogs obtained nearly three hundreds pages of documents which revealed that the sprawling bureaucracy "is monitoring political dissent." According to EPIC, the documents described widespread surveillance by the agency and included "contracts and statements of work with General Dynamics for 24/7 media and social network monitoring and periodic reports to DHS. The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that 'reflect adversely' on DHS or the U.S. government."

Meanwhile, Senate Subcommittee investigators also found that the agency's disbursement practices were so shoddy that "DHS revealed that it was unable to provide an accurate tally of how much it had granted to states and cities to support fusion centers efforts, instead producing broad estimates of the total amount of Federal dollars spent on fusion center activities from 2003 to 2011, estimates which ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion."

But as I have pointed out many times, the machinery of state repression is lubricated with cold cash bestowed by taxpayers on privileged corporate insiders. Earlier this month, Washington Technology reported that "the top 20 contractors at the Homeland Security Department represent more than a third of all business done by contract at the department during fiscal 2011."

According to the report, "DHS spent $5.1 billion with the top 20 companies, and $14.2 billion on all contractors," with "IT and systems integration firms," integral to constructing and running the secret state's panopticon, topping the list.

• • •

Since the 9/11 provocation, intrusive surveillance of the American people by a host of shadowy government agencies and private corporations clearly demonstrates there is broad ruling class consensus for expanding authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule under an unconstitutional "Unitary Executive."

Recent revelations by The Washington Post that the Obama regime "has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'," starkly reveals that when the president can spy on or kill whomever he pleases, on his own initiative and without the checks and balances enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights is effectively a dead letter.

While we do not know what form a "new and improved" ECPA will take when it emerges from the bipartisan congressional snake pit, the prospects for ever emerging from America's "friendly fascist" nightmare are growing dimmer.

NSA Spying: 'If We Tell You, We'll Have to Kill You'

When Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008, a privacy-killing law that gutted First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections for Americans while granting immunity to giant telecoms that assisted the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless wiretapping programs, we were assured that the government "does not spy" on our communications.

Yet scarcely a year after FAA was signed into law by President Bush, The New York Times revealed that under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama, NSA continued the previous regime's illegal practices, intercepting "private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."

The wholesale vacuuming-up of private communications by the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy were described by unnamed "senior officials" as the "'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans;" in other words, a mere technical "glitch" in an otherwise "balanced" program.

But what most Americans are blissfully unaware of is the fact that they carry in their pockets what have been described as near-perfect spy devices: their cellphones.

Earlier this week, The New York Times disclosed that "cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations."

The report by carriers, made in response to congressional inquiries "document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests."

"I never expected it to be this massive," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), the co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, "who requested the reports from nine carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon."

Markey told the Times that the prevalence of cellphone surveillance by law enforcement agencies raised the specter of "digital dragnets" that threaten the privacy of most customers.

While the sheer volume of requests by local, state and federal police for user data may have startled Congress, which by-and-large has turned a blind eye when it comes to privacy depredations at all levels of government, it is hardly a complete picture of the pervasive nature of the problem.

In 2009 security watchdog Christopher Soghoian reported on his Slight Paranoia web site that just one firm, Sprint Nextel, "provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers." (emphasis added)

According to Soghoian, "Internet service providers and telecommunications companies play a significant, yet little known role in law enforcement and intelligence gathering."

"Government agents routinely obtain customer records from these firms," Soghoian averred, "detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time."

While there are indeed "exigent circumstances" which may require law enforcement to demand instant access to GPS data or other customer records--a kidnapping or child abduction in progress--in the main however, it appears that most warrant-free requests fall under a more sinister category: fishing expedition.

Commenting on congressional revelations, ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese informed us that data supplied to the Times represents "a vast undercount of the number of Americans who have been affected by this tracking. Sprint disclosed that it received approximately 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 (a subpoena is a written request for information from law enforcement that isn't reviewed by a judge) and that 'each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers.' In addition, several carriers disclosed that they sometimes provide all the information from a particular cell tower or particular area."

Although several geolocation privacy bills that require warrants to obtain records are pending in Congress, it should be clear there is no consensus among ruling class elites for protecting the privacy rights of Americans or reining-in overly-intrusive police agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case.

Under Obama, illegal surveillance programs once hidden behind code-named black projects such as STELLAR WIND and PINWALE have been greatly expanded. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus which encourages and permits the secret state to carry out warrantless wiretapping and data mining have been "regularized" to such a degree (under the rubric of "keeping us safe") they're no longer even regarded as controversial.

More than three years ago, Obama promised to "fix" illegal policies which surfaced under the previous Bush government. However, an anonymous "senior official" told the Times there were certain "technical problems" that led the agency "to inadvertently 'target' groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred."

It was further revealed that some of the groups "inadvertently" targeted by NSA and other spy satrapies (CIA, DHS, FBI, et. al.) included Muslim Americans, anarchist and socialist groups, libertarians, civil liberties organizations, antiwar activists as well as individual supporters of the secrecy-spilling web site WikiLeaks.

Just last week the Bradley Manning Support Network disclosed that "A letter dated May 18, 2012, which purports to originate from the US Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), rejects a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted for data the government has collected on the Bradley Manning Support Network. The letter states that 'an active investigation is in progress with an undetermined completion date'."

As readers recall, Manning is the Army private accused by the government of releasing hundreds of thousands of secret files to WikiLeaks. He currently faces charges that could lead to decades of incarceration.

"At this time," Network supporters wrote, "it is unclear whether the investigation cited in the FOIA denial simply refers to the government's ongoing legal retaliation against Bradley Manning, or whether there is actually some other separate investigation targeting the Support Network."

It's a sure bet, given the administration's ongoing war against whistleblowers, that the Army as well the Justice Department has the Manning Support Network--along with WikiLeaks--in their gun sights.

And with the construction of NSA's giant $2 billion Utah Data Center nearing completion, as James Bamford reported in Wired Magazine in March, the agency's ability "to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks" will soon take a qualitative leap forward--at our expense.

With FAA currently up for renewal, and with congressional grifters on both sides of the aisle pushing for a five-year, amendment-free extension as demanded by the administration, the secret state is refusing to provide privacy advocates--both in and outside government--with any information whatsoever on how just many violations have occurred on a regular basis under the law's admittedly loose guidelines.

In May, senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked NSA to divulge information about how many Americans communications have been spied upon by the agency.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded by saying that it was "not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the FAA."

Both senators oppose FAA's extension on civil liberties grounds and in the face of the government's stonewall, Wyden placed a "hold" on the legislation.

In a statement published on his web site Wyden explained why he was blocking unanimous consent requests to pass FAA's five-year extension.

"The purpose of this 2008 legislation was to give the government new authorities to collect the communications of people who are believed to be foreigners outside the United States, while still preserving the privacy of people inside the United States," Wyden wrote.

"Before Congress votes to renew these authorities it is important to understand how they are working in practice. In particular, it is important for Congress to better understand how many people inside the United States have had their communications collected or reviewed under the authorities granted by the FISA Amendments Act."

"I am concerned, of course, that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act," Wyden averred, "it is possible that this number could be quite large. Since all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting surveillance of that American."

Ludicrously enough, in response to the senator's requests I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote that the NSA Inspector General "and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons." (emphasis added)

McCullough's irony-rich obfuscation, published by Wired, argued that even providing an estimate on how many Americans were spied upon would be "beyond the capacity" of the NSA's in-house watchdog. "I defer to [the NSA inspector general's] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA's mission."

Just as the Bush administration scotched citizen lawsuits that demanded accountability from the nation's telecommunication providers over their collaboration with NSA's illegal programs, so too has the Obama regime sought to derail government accountability by invoking an alleged "state secrets privilege."

Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that "Three whistleblowers--all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA)--have come forward to give evidence in ... EFF's lawsuit against the government's illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA."

In a July 2 motion filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, "the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the 'secret room' at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006."

Those three former NSA officials--William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe--were themselves targets of government persecution over allegations that they provided information to The New York Times in their 2005 revelation of illegal domestic spying by the Agency.

Drake, who pled guilty last year to a misdemeanor after the Justice Department's Espionage Act charges collapsed, was initially prosecuted by the administration--as a spy no less--for providing evidence to The Baltimore Sun of massive waste, fraud and corruption in NSA's Trailblazer program.

The $1.2 billion corporate boondoggle, overseen by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and project partners Boeing, Computer Sciences Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton was eventually shut down in 2006.

In the wake of initial reporting by the Times, USA Today disclosed that NSA "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth."

In fact, the same firms who assisted the Agency in creating "'a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders," are busy as proverbial bees providing geolocational information to law enforcement and secret state agencies.

As EFF averred, "Jewel v. NSA is back in district court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in late 2011. In the motion for partial summary judgment filed today, EFF asked the court to reject the stale state secrets arguments that the government has been using in its attempts to sidetrack this important litigation and instead apply the processes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that require the court to determine whether electronic surveillance was conducted legally."

While EFF should be commended for their efforts, prospects for a full accounting of serious state constitutional violations of Americans' right face an uphill battle.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out Monday, "The latest revelations about cell phone monitoring, when added to the long record of antidemocratic attacks carried out since the declaration of the 'war on terror'--from the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the Obama administration's assertion of the right to summarily execute anyone, including US citizens, anywhere in the world—provide chilling evidence of the real and growing threat of an American police state."

Efforts in that direction by the Obama administration are gathering steam.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also reported Monday that "The White House has released a new Executive Order seeking to ensure the continuity of government communications during a national emergency."

That Executive Order, issued July 6 by the White House, grants new powers to the Department of Homeland Security, "including the ability to collect certain public communications information," EPIC averred.

But it does far more than that. "Under the Executive Order the White House has also granted the Department the authority to seize private facilities when necessary, effectively shutting down or limiting civilian communications."

As researcher Peter Dale Scott disclosed in numerous analyses on so-called "Continuity of Government" planning, COG is code for the suspension of constitutional guarantees and the imposition of martial law by the National Security State.

In 2010, Scott pointed out in Japan Focus: "Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the implementation of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG plans were implemented on that day in 2001, before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on pages 38 and 326. It was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David."

In fact, the first ninety days after 9/11 "saw the swift implementation of the key features attributed to COG planning ... in the 1980s: warrantless detentions, warrantless deportations, and the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The clearest example was the administration's Project Endgame--a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone. This implemented the central feature of the massive detention exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis Giuffrida and Oliver North in 1984."

The proposed five-year extension of the FISA Amendments Act, coupled with indefinite detention provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the president's "kill list" and now, a new Executive Order granting DHS the power to "seize" private communications' facilities in the wake of a "national emergency" have accelerated these dictatorial trends.