$1.08 for a single egg.

God bless America.

Anyway, I'd love if people (especially Dr Steve) would listen to the linked discussion, and respond.

Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.

So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.

Now contrast that with one of Snowden's recent comments in an online chat with the Guardian:

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond?

Snowden: US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive (sic) that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. 

Here is a link to a new USA Today piece featuring Binney, and two other former NSA employees (Thomas Drake and J Kirk Wiebe), and their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, a former DOJ attorney.  I find Binney to be a much more attractive character than Edward Snowden, e.g., consider the following:

Q: There's a question being debated whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor.

Binney: Certainly he performed a really great public service to begin with by exposing these programs and making the government in a sense publicly accountable for what they're doing. At least now they are going to have some kind of open discussion like that.

But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries.

Your perspective is greatly appreciated.

I am curious if you are at all familiar with the claims of William Binney, specifically, that a great change occurred at NSA following 9/11.  I have watched several interviews with him, and he comes across as eccentric, but not necessarily a crackpot (he will deny the more extreme suggestions of his interlocutors, for example).  His story comes at least in part as a tale of bureaucratic grasping for additional funds, which I have no trouble believing.  The claims of deliberate subversion of the Constitution are a little harder to believe.

I definitely recommend skipping the Q&A at the end of the HOPE talk - crazy gets laid on thick.

Y'all will probably want to read this Washington Post article.

I also recommend checking  out these interviews with Bill Binney, if you have the time:

Democracy Now!

Daily Caller

Hacker Conference

If you think Binney's credible, then the last link is the most informative.

I was assuming that Greenwald would have been provided some proof of this by Snowden if it is true, and will publish after official denials.  If the Guardian is silent after official denials, then it's probably false.  I would hope this would come up during the Sunday shows, but I guess there's a possibility that it won't.

I'm guessing we'll find out if this is true or not within the next 24 hours.  Stay tuned, folks.

A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA "may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States." A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically -- on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to "target" a specific American citizen.

Sounds about right.

Crickets.

I mentioned this previously.  I'm firmly convinced that if it were to come out tomorrow that the NSA was doing exactly this, some of those defending the metadata database would defend the phone call database, using the arguments you've mentioned above (although I think that most politicians would recognize at that point that it's time to abandon defending this stuff).

I was thinking about camping out in the Supreme Court with a giant "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" sign later this year.  I guess I'll have to scrap that now. Roberts would probably just declare it to be a tax, anyway.

I just want to say Santorum gave what I thought was the best speech at the Republican Convention (admittedly, I didn't see all of them, praise FSM).  Speeches are just speeches, though, and can't compete with building railroads out of magical metal and carrying the world on your shoulders without any help from any [CoC Violation] janitors.

Oh, sorry, I forgot, I'm supposed to be an "extreme libertarian" now, so something something something spreading Santorum man-on-dog yadda yadda yadda.

+1.