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The Obama Administration has doubled their efforts to protect and defend the NSA’s massive surveillance programs, launching a four star campaign publicly and behind closed doors to derail initiatives to neuter the NSA’s spying apparatus. We’ll share the details.
The birthplace of America’s middle class files for bankruptcy this week, but things are never as simple as they seem. Syria’s getting complicated we got an update
Then it’s your feedback, our follow up, and much much more…
On this week’s Unfilter.
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— Show Notes —
”Birthplace of the Middle Class” FIles for Bankruptcy
Flanked by posters of the city’s skyline with the words “Reinventing Detroit,” the state-appointed emergency manager said Friday that he hopes the roughly $19 billion bankruptcy will provide the fiscal breathing room needed to repair the city’s infrastructure and restore basic services.
The filing makes the city the largest in the United States to file for bankruptcy.
The City Council, which had contested the governor’s decision to bring in an emergency manager, decided in a closed-door session on Thursday not to pursue its challenge further
Mayor Dave Bing had opposed an emergency manager for Detroit
Detroit is Michigan’s sixth city currently under the supervision of an outside manager who has the power to alter labor contracts, sell off city assets and slash spending without the normal checks and balances that elected officials face.
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NSA Defends Their Spying Program
With a high-stakes showdown vote looming in the House, White House press secretary Jay Carney issued an unusual, nighttime statement on the eve of Wednesday’s vote. The measure by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., would cancel statutory authority for the secret program, a move that Carney contended would “hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community’s counterterrorism tools.”
Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, made a last-minute trip to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to urge lawmakers to reject the measure in separate, closed-door sessions with Republicans and Democrats. Seven Republican committee chairmen issued a similar plea in a widely circulated letter to their colleagues.
Proposed by Michigan Republican Congressman Justin Amash with the support of liberal Democratic Congressman John Conyers — would end authority for NSA to collect telephone calling records that pertain to individuals who are not the target of a counter-terrorism investigation.
A Texas member of Congress told Hearst Newspapers and the Houston Chronicle that the House threats to circumscribe NSA surveillance had “spooked” the Obama administration.
The response? Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, has been dispatched to Capitol Hill for back-to-back, closed-door briefings for House Republicans and House Democrats on NSA’s need for the program.
A second member of the Texas congressional delegation said the Obama administration had offered members of Congress so-called “talking points” on behalf of continued NSA surveillance so that lawmakers would have NSA’s justifications at the ready when they return home to their congressional districts in August for the season of town-hall meetings with constituents.
“There’s no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.
I filed a request last week for e-mails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.
A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search e-mails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.
Where in the World is Snowden
A Russian state news agency says former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden was granted documents on Wednesday that will allow him to leave a Moscow airport where he has been holed up for more than a month.
“They talked and Mr.
Kucherena handed Snowden a package with documents, among which
was the certificate that now allows him to leave the transit zone
and go through Russian customs.”
First among the new procedures is a “two-man rule” — based on the model of how nuclear weapons are handled — that requires two computer systems administrators to work simultaneously when they are inside systems that contain highly classified material.
“This makes our job more difficult,” Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the N.S.A. and the commander of the military’s Cyber Command, told the Aspen Security Forum, an annual meeting on security issues. He described future plans to keep the most sensitive data in a highly encrypted form, sharply limiting the number of system administrators — like Mr. Snowden — who can move data throughout the nation’s intelligence agencies and the Defense Department.
Syria Keeps Getting Worse
In a letter to Congress, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said a no-fly zone could cost up to $1 billion per month for a year, and deeper involvement would be hard to avoid.
The Pakistani Taliban is composed of extremists from around the world.
Abbasi, a close associate of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud, told CNN that 120 fighters are already in Syria and another batch of 150 fighters will arrive this week.
“We shall be sending more volunteers, but cannot give exact numbers at this moment. But we will provide whatever support is needed by our Syrian brothers,” Abbasi told CNN.
The fighters, Abbasi said, were sent after the Pakistani Taliban received a request from a top-ranking militant. They will be under the command-and-control structure of al Qaeda in Syria, as it is leading the operation, he said.
Fall preview: Shutdown thrown around, debt limit fight looming
“I’m excited about the speech, not because I think the speech is going to change any minds,” he said.
CHUCK TODD: This speech, this “pivot,” to the economy. It’s like deja pivot, when it comes to the economy. But it seems, really, they are signalling that they are going to have a campaign approach to this fight with Congress, when it comes to the debt ceiling, when it comes to the sequestration 2.0. All of the decisions that are coming to a head in the fall, they are basically saying, hey, we’re going to travel the country.
House Republicans and Senate Democrats remain more than $90 billion apart on 2014 discretionary spending, with prospects for a House-Senate conference on the budget dwindling daily. Obama has issued veto threats for two spending bills already approved by the House, and the Appropriations panels in both chambers know many of their bills might not ever reach the floor. The fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, but both sides are already preparing for a continuing resolution to fund the government into next year.
“Obama’s job-approval rating fell to 45% [in a new WSJ-NBC poll], its lowest level since late 2011, while overall disapproval of Congress was at 83%, the highest level ever for Journal polling. Just 29% of Americans now say the country is on the right track, a 19-month low and well below the 41% who felt that way at the end of last year … Obama’s 45% approval rating matches that of George W. Bush at this stage in his second term
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