A new bipartisan bill would prohibit California’s cooperation with warrantless snooping by the National Security Agency.

Senate Bill 828 is by state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. Invoking the Bill of Rights’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, SB828 would affect the state, its employees, its governmental subdivisions and even corporations providing services for the state.

According to the language of the bill, all those affected are barred from “materially supporting or assisting” any “federal agency or federal agent in collecting electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not based on a warrant that particularly describes the person, place, and thing to be searched or seized.”

That broad wording would extend legal protections against surveillance to non-citizens and citizens alike. Snooping with a warrant still would be allowed.

Additionally, SB828 bans the use of electronic data and metadata obtained without a warrant in state and local criminal investigations or prosecutions.

Dubbed the “Fourth Amendment Protection Act,” the bill would put California on a collision course with a major federal policy for the second time in recent years. Last October, the lawmakers passed the Trust Act. It introduced sweeping measures to shelter illegal immigrants from federal action.

Over strenuous objections of those favoring tighter immigration laws, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Trust Act with a suite of other bills that activists estimated would keep some 20,000 undocumented people out of federal detention every year.

Anti-surveillance momentum

Nationally, California legislators stuck their necks out with the Trust Act.

But with SB828, they wouldn’t be alone. One of the bill’s two co-sponsors, State Sen. Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, invoked similar measures passed by state legislatures in Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, Utah and Washington.

Anderson explained the bill “would stop NSA access to DMV records, Covered California records, state records, even voting records that might otherwise be confiscated at will.” Although “unequivocally dedicated to stopping terrorism,” Anderson insisted that Americans “must be ever vigilant that our desire for safety does not come at the expense of the freedoms and liberty our enemies seek to destroy.”

A press release describing the impact of the bill was also issued by Lieu. “State-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency,” he said, in “indiscriminate spying on its own citizens” that “violates the Fourth Amendment.”
 
Last year, the release noted, Lieu successfully spearheaded a bipartisan resolution “urging Congress to reconsider its vote for the NSA to stop its unconstitutional practices.” That resolution, SR16, also called on President Obama to end “the NSA’s blanket, unreasonable, and unconstitutional collection of all Americans’ telephone records,” singling out overbroad uses of the PATRIOT Act for reform.

Earlier this year, Anderson and Lieu teamed up to push Sacramento to cut off the NSA from access to basic utilities and services in California. Then as now, Lieu explicitly compared NSA surveillance to the federal government’s wholesale detention of Japanese-Americans during World War Two, warning that the “last time the federal government massively violated the U.S. Constitution, over 100,000 innocent Americans were rounded up and interned.”

California leadership

As the debate continues in Congress over the scope and force of federal law surrounding America’s surveillance regime, elected officials in California face an opportunity to take a notable lead on the issue.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was recently at the center of an unusually fierce dispute with the CIA over detention and interrogation. The controversy came to a head when Feinstein discovered that the CIA had secretly spied on Senate staffers working on a committee report critical of the agency’s practices.

Previously, Feinstein herself had been criticized for a lax attitude toward surveillance issues. The last time the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court turned down a government request to conduct electronic surveillance was in 2009.

Events will unfold quickly in California once legislators determine whether or not to support the bill. If passed, SB828 would go into immediate effect as an “urgency statute.”

“COMPTON, Calif. – When sheriff’s deputies here noticed a burst of necklace snatchings from women walking through town, they turned to an unlikely source to help solve the crimes: a retired Air Force veteran named Ross McNutt.

“McNutt and his Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, persuaded the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to use his surveillance technology to monitor Compton’s streets from the air and track suspects from the moment the snatching occurred.

“The system, known as wide-area surveillance, is something of a time machine – the entire city is filmed and recorded in real time. Imagine Google Earth with a rewind button and the ability to play back the movement of cars and people as they scurry about the city.

“’We literally watched all of Compton during the time that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,’ McNutt said. ‘Our goal was to basically jump to where reported crimes occurred and see what information we could generate that would help investigators solve the crimes.'”

A driver in L.A.? Consider yourself guilty by default

Officials’ appetite for knowing everything about everyone is hardly limited to what’s going on in Compton. This is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported on March 19:

“‘Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

“The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that ‘all [license plate] data is investigatory.’ The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter.

“This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under ‘general warrants’ that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

“ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. This happens without an officer targeting a specific vehicle and without any level of criminal suspicion. The ALPR system immediately extracts the key data from the image — the plate number and time, date and location where it was captured — and runs that data against various hot lists. At the instant the plate is photographed not even the computer system itself — let alone the officer in the squad car — knows whether the plate is linked to criminal activity.

“Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.”

Scary stuff. Remember Lord Acton, everyone: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” To the extent that mass surveillance helps convey a sense of absolute power to those who see the vast information it provides, corruption related to government surveillance is likely to be a staple of our lives from now on.

Great, just great.

1) Don’t trust a state that gathers secrets on everyone.

2) Really don’t trust a state that has remote killing powers and gathers secrets on everyone.

3) And really, really don’t trust a state that thinks killing people without due process is OK if the national security machine says so.

Some of the movie-biz trade coverage seems faintly surprised that “Captain America” was still a gigantic worldwide blockbuster after its first 10 days:

“Captain America which stays at the Top of the box office world and continues to rack up dollars; it’s total cume domestically will be about $158M after its second weekend. The Winter Soldier, which had A CinemaScores across the board, dropped less than the first Captain America did in 2011, which was 61%. And, because of its equally strong presence in international markets (about $60M more from this past weekend), Captain America: The Winter Soldier now stands tall with a $476.1M worldwide cume with one more territory to open – Japan. It’s 163% ahead of the first Cap which made, all in, $370.5M worldwide.”

That’s from Deadline Hollywood. Its author shouldn’t have been surprised. In the movie, the U.S. is depicted as being borderline-fascistic because of Total Information Awareness-style info-gathering and a much-more sophisticated version of the present U.S. programs which kill perceived enemies with pilotless drones.

Worldwide popularity reflects anti-Americanism

That depiction tracks semi-precisely with the low opinion of America held by much of the world over the past decade, at least after the Obama honeymoon ended overseas. (Will it ever end here?)

The Bush 43-Obama zeitgeist is in trouble if pop culture sides with “Captain America” the movie and the superhero. Pop culture is very much like the domestic version of “soft power” — as the Obama team showed when it actually got tons of traction for its insane argument that Romney’s 2012 comment about “binders full of women” was somehow a sexist “Mein Kampf.”

Don’t trust the government is a powerful argument to many of the people who pay close attention to how the world works. If it becomes a message that pop culture explains and amplifies to those who pay less attention, hallelujah.

And it seems unlikely that “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is an outlier in the ever-growing Marvel cinematic empire. “The Avengers” certainly brought up the don’t-trust-the-government theme.

More more more!

Can governments kill their citizens without a trial?

A final note: When Sen. Rand Paul demanded a year ago that Attorney General Eric Holder say American citizens couldn’t be killed unilaterally by government drones, it was widely derided as a stunt. A few more movies like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and that question will become a staple of press conferences involving presidential candidates for the rest of time.

Good.

Perhaps she is having second thoughts after she attacked the CIA for searching the computers of Congress itself, in particular her Intelligence Committee. The Washington Post reported:

A behind-the-scenes battle between the CIA and Congress erupted in public Tuesday as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the agency of breaking laws and breaching constitutional principles in an alleged effort to undermine the panel’s multi-year investigation of a controversial interrogation program.

Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of ­secretly removing documents, searching computers used by the committee and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators by requesting an FBI inquiry of their conduct — charges that CIA Director John Brennan disputed within hours of her appearance on the Senate floor.

Feinstein described the escalating conflict as a “defining moment” for Congress’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies and cited “grave concerns” that the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.”

Indeed, it is a “defining moment.” If the allegations are true, then the CIA, which is part of the executive branch, effectively invaded the legislative branch of government.

The CIA’s own Website stipulates:

By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting foreign intelligence concerning the domestic activities of US citizens. Its mission is to collect information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence. 

The question now is whether Feinstein and other members of Congress actually will investigate what really happened not only with the alleged bugging of Congress, but the many other abuses — not just alleged, but real — of the CIA, NSA, etc.

Are we a government of laws, or a government of spies?

The TechCrunch web site regularly cites examples of how “techno-militarization” has come to the Golden State, including this December story from Oakland:

“Oakland’s City Council voted to move ahead with controversial city surveillance center during a raucous council meeting Tuesday morning that only ended when the police cleared out the chambers.

“The council voted 6-1 to approve an incremental resolution allowing the city to hire a new contractor to assemble the Domain Awareness Center, a surveillance hub that would allow police and city officials to continuously monitor video cameras, gunshot detectors and license-plate readers across the city.

“Dozens of Oakland residents, deeply worried the center would allow the city to spy on people’s everyday lives, tried to turn the resolution into a referendum on surveillance and persuade council members to stall, or scrap, the process.”

The East Bay Express thinks it’s already turned up evidence that Oakland authorities plan to use the Domain Awareness Center to suppress dissent:

“So what is the real purpose of the massive $10.9 million surveillance system? The records we examined show that the DAC is an open-ended project that would create a surveillance system that could watch the entire city and is designed to easily incorporate new high-tech features in the future. And one of the uses that has piqued the interest of city staffers is the deployment of the DAC to track political protesters and monitor large demonstrations.

“Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was alarmed when we showed her emails that revealed that the Oakland Police Department has already started using the DAC to keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity. ‘The fact that the focus so far has been on political protests, rather than the violent crime that’s impacting Oakland residents, is troubling, and telling about how the city plans to use the DAC,’ she said.”

Big police brother is watching you

Here’s another Northern California example from the Center for Investigative Reporting:

“A year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center – one of dozens of law enforcement intelligence-sharing centers set up after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records flowing in from police using the devices across 14 counties, documents and interviews show.

“The extent of the center’s data collection has never been revealed. Neither has the involvement of Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm with extensive ties to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, has invested $2 million in the firm.

“The jurisdictions supplying license-plate data to the intelligence center stretch from Monterey County to the Oregon border. According to contract documents, the database will be capable of handling at least 100 million records and be accessible to local and state law enforcement across the region.

“Law enforcement agencies throughout Northern California will be able to access the data, as will state and federal authorities.”

Per reports, at least 32 government agencies in the Bay Area are now using license-plate readers.

Here’s an example from Southern California, from a CBS 8/San Diego report:

“A massive data collection operation is underway in San Diego county to store and search millions of photographs. The photos are being taken by license plate reading cameras mounted on law enforcement vehicles all across the county.”

‘A new relationship between the individual and the state’

There are many more such examples. Collectively, they make a key premise of gloomy tech intellectuals impossible to dispute: We’re seeing a sea change in technology and policing, with huge long-term implications for privacy and the relationship between the individual and the state — and there hasn’t even been a real discussion about it.

Even though we’ve seen it coming for years.

Of course, authorities go in the opposite direction when technology has the potential to embarrass them:

“SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A San Francisco Fire Department ban on video cameras now explicitly includes helmet-mounted devices that film emergency scenes, according to Chief Joanne Hayes-White.

“The edict comes after images taken in the aftermath of the July 6 Asiana Airlines crash at the San Francisco airport led to questions about first responders’ actions, which resulted in a survivor being run over by a fire truck.”

If things like this don’t make you cynical, you’re well-medicated.

State Senators Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, and Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, introduced legislation on Monday that would ban state agencies, officials and corporations that provide services to the state from supporting or assisting the federal government to spy or collect data on Californians, unless the government first obtains a warrant. The lawmakers say that they introduced Senate Bill 828 following “the repeated federal admissions of widespread spying on innocent American citizens.”

“The National Security Agency’s massive level of spying and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a direct threat to our liberty and freedom,” Lieu said in a statement announcing the bill's introduction. “Let’s be clear: when the government deliberately violates the Constitution on a mass basis, it poses a clear and present danger to our liberties.”

The bill, which is introduced as an urgency measure, requires two-thirds support in both houses of the Legislature. With Anderson, a prominent conservative Republican as a co-author, it is likely to pick up additional support.

“I support this bill because I support the Constitution, our Fourth Amendment rights and our freedoms to live in the United States of America,” Anderson said.

Response to Snowden revelations

Lieu's legislation comes in response to last summer's revelations by former defense contractor and government whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Americans for years.  In December, a federal judge ruled that the “almost-Orwellian” bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is likely unconstitutional.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” Judge Richard Leon wrote in his December ruling.

Later in the month, another federal judge, District Judge William H. Pauley III, ruled in favor of the program, describing it as a key tool in the war on terrorism. That ruling has buoyed the argument on Capitol Hill that such widespread warrantless surveillance is in the interest of national security.

“I would hope that Judge Pauley's opinion will lessen at least some of the adulation for Edward Snowden as well as the rabid anti-NSA hysteria which has become so pervasive,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.

Lieu's military service brings credibility on national security

Supporters of warrantless government surveillance programs, such as King, will have a challenging time lecturing Lieu about national security. That's because Lieu is a decorated member of the armed services. Last year, while on the Legislature's spring break, the lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves was awarded with the Air Force Meritorious Service Medal.

Lieu, who understands national security, recognizes that an unchecked federal government poses a threat to Americans.

“I agree with the NSA that the world is a dangerous place,” Lieu said. “That is why our founders enacted the Bill of Rights. They understood the grave dangers of an out-of-control federal government.”

Tech firms based in California

The bill is expected to have national implications as the biggest names in technology are largely based in California. Silicon Valley-based technology firms could embrace Lieu's bill in a bid to repair their image after many of them have been accused of being complicit in government surveillance.

According to the Guardian, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook cooperated with the NSA spying and were paid millions of dollars for costs incurred from the Prism surveillance program.

State resources shouldn't be used for indiscriminate spying

Some legal experts question whether the bill could survive a challenge from the federal government.

“It is no different from a state saying it would not help the federal government carry out an order to desegregate schools,” Erwin Chemerinsky told the Daily Breeze; he's the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine and shares Lieu's concerns on NSA surveillance,”States cannot interfere with or impede the achievement of a federal objective.”

Lieu says that it comes down to a question of whether state resources should be used on unconstitutional practices.

“State-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency from indiscriminate spying on its own citizens and gathering electronic or metadata that violates the Fourth Amendment,” Lieu said.

A national security expert told UT San Diego columnist Steven Greenhut that, even if the legislation is blocked in federal court, it can have a symbolic impact. Last year, Lieu introduced Senate Resolution 16, a measure that urged Congress to stop its unconstitutional practices.

“Even if the bill is in a sense symbolic, it can have a real effect,” Ivan Eland, a national security expert with the Oakland-based Independent Institute, told the UT San Diego.

“In what you can interpret as either an act of corporate altruism, corporate lobbying, or a mix of both, two giant retailers — Walmart and Walgreens — have agreed to save the Obama Administration from who knows how many horror-story anecdotes by agreeing to fill 30 days of free prescriptions for ObamaCare enrollees. The question is, though, what happens to the data and patient information these retailers collect?”

No wonder Big Pharma backed Obamacare: more “patients” for its potions, and more data on Americans.

It gets worse:

“According to one Walgreens pharmacist Breitbart News spoke with Tuesday, in April the DEA started requiring pharmacies to ask an increased number of medical questions and show a photo ID for certain medications. There have also been reports that through ObamaCare the federal government is compiling data based on a series of new and intrusive question doctors are required to ask.”

So, suppose you have a skiing accident and break a leg. It gets set in the hospital. The doctor gives you a prescription for codeine to kill the pain. You’re in the databases of: the doctor, the hospital, the pharmacist, the DEA — and who knows who or what else, probably the NSA, which keeps data on everything.

So, then the DEA puts a flag on you in its databases. Which allows it to check all your other data. They notice your best friend was in rehab a couple of years ago. So maybe you’re giving him some of the codeine. Your Ralph’s card shows you purchased some vodka last week. They don’t know, or care, that it was for a party you went to and you didn’t drink any of it.

They find out you bought a rifle recently and registered it under California’s new law under which the state keeps permanent records.

They check the Netflix database and your favorite movie seems to be “Scarface,” starring Al Pacino. You also emailed a joke to a friend with the famous line from the movie, “Okay. You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!”

They’re building a “pattern” of your life, and it’s obvious that you could be a drug dealer. You need to be watched even more carefully.

You wake up in the middle of the night to a strong pounding on your door and shouted profanities outside, as police flashers illuminate your front yard….

Also breathtaking is what was the payload of the latest rocket, launched yesterday. NASA reported on an NSA (the government acronyms become confusing):

“The United Launch Alliance (ULA) have launched their Atlas V rocket on the NROL-39 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. Liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was on schedule at the opening of the launch window at 23:13 local time Thursday (07:13 UTC on Friday).

“Atlas V Mission:

“The primary payload for Thursday’s launch was a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, NROL-39, whose launch was contracted in 2003 as part of the second block-purchase of Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) launches; Buy 2.”

In the upper right of this article is the logo of the mission. Notice the arrogance: nothing is beyond their reach. They spy on, and control, everything in your life.

Daniel McAdams writes on LewRockwell.com:

“As the rest of the world — the US public included — reels from ongoing revelations that the NSA has infiltrated like a virus into the most private corners of our lives, the US Intelligence-Industrial-Complex presses on with a total absence of self-reflection.

“Entrepreneur and privacy hero Kim Dotcom points out that the latest spy satellite launched yesterday by the megabillion dollar National Reconnaissance Office carries with it a kind of extended middle finger to the entire world.

“NROL-39, as the mission is affectionately called, features as its logo an angry octopus whose tentacles are extending over the globe. Its slogan: ‘Nothing is beyond our reach.’

“Nothing. Total surveillance. Such arrogance seems foolhardy, terrifying, and dangerous. And, of course, totalitarian.”

The government is an octopus squeezing the liberty out of us.

That could change as foreign countries have become upset at the NSA’s ubiquitous snooping, even on friendly countries. According to The Hindu:

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the US-centric internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the US National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to US tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

And according to WashingtonsBlog.com about BRICS (stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa):

A consortium of telecom and undersea cable companies competing for the contracts for the proposed BRICS cable show what they think the project should look like [see above graphic]…

The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off.  Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s 2nd largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th….

China is also dropping IBM hardware like a hot potato due to security concerns.  Intel and AMD may not be far behind.

Economic powerhouse Germany is also rolling out a system that would keep all data within Germany’s national borders.

If these countries drop our technology to avoid NSA snooping, that will mean fewer jobs for Americans, especially Californians. Once again, our own government will have sabotaged us.

This reminds me of the old Soviet Union, which closely controlled technology. For example, every copier had to be licensed, with examples of each copier’s “footprint” — every copier left telltale marks in its copies, sort of like fingerprints — kept on file with the KGB. Thus, if a copier was used to produce copies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” and the copies were discovered after a dissident was tortured, the origin of the copies also could be found, and the rebels arrested.

Computers, including the few personal computers imported from the West, also were tightly controlled.

Such tight security retarded scientific development, which depends on the free flow of information. Which in turn retarded the Soviet economy until it finally collapsed in 1991.

Et tu, America?

Indeed, the one area not impacted in the least by a government shutdown will be the police/surveillance state and its various militarized agencies, spying programs and personnel. Take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by a government shutdown, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities – priorities which have, as I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, little to do with serving taxpayers and everything to do with maintaining power and control, while being sold to the public under the guise of national security.

Domestic surveillance. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders….

NSA domestic programs. Government shutdown or not, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone using programs such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE. By cracking the security of all major smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, NSA agents harvest such information as contacts, text messages, and location data. And then there are the NSA agents who will continue to use and abuse their surveillance powers for personal means, to spy on girlfriends, lovers and first dates.

So, today you can feel safe because the essential parts of government still are working for you. They are making sure that any dangerous thoughts you have are being recorded, so you can be corrected in the future. The government is making sure that the government still is in charge of our lives, so the government can keep protecting us and providing for us.

Nothing to worry about. Move along.