The War on Drugs has never looked more antiquated after receiving a major blow in public opinion, and by the Justice Department. And while the nation moves forward on the issue, ground zero of Cannabis legalization takes a step backward. We’ll reflect on what might be a legitimate turn for the better, in one of the larger embarrassments for the United States.
But first: An interview with Lavabit’s founder brings into focus the depth and reach of the Obama Administration’s attempt to cover up their warrantless surveillance programs.
Plus our follow up, your feedback, and much much more.
On this week’s Unfilter.
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— Show Notes —
NSA Fallout
Today’s top-secret document leaked by Snowden reveals that “procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data.”
FAA 702 is a reference to section 702 of a 2008 law that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those amendments created a warrantless surveillance process that could be employed by NSA analysts, but Congress never intended it to be used domestically against American citizens: A congressional report accompanying the law claimed it allows electronic surveillance only of “persons located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
“The panel will not report to the DNI. As the DNI’s statement yesterday made clear, the review group will brief its interim findings to the president within 60 days of its establishment, and provide a final report with recommendations no later than December 15 2013.”
She added: "As we announced on Friday, the review group will be made up of independent, outside experts. The DNI’s role is one of facilitation, and the group is not under the direction of or led by the DNI.
“The members require security clearances and access to classified information so they need to be administratively connected to the government, and the DNI’s office is the right place to provide that. The review process and findings will be the group’s.”
Levison said he started Lavabit 10 years ago to capitalize on public concerns about the Patriot Act, offering customers a paid service — between $8 and $16 a year — that would encrypt their emails in ways that would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement agents to decipher. He said that until he shut down, his small company was generating about $100,000 in revenue annually with about 10,000 users paying for the encryption service.
But inviting Hayden to do exactly that is what establishment media outlets do continually. Just yesterday, Face the Nation featured Hayden as the premiere guest to speak authoritatively about how trustworthy the NSA is, how safe it keeps us, and how wise President Obama is for insisting that all of its programs continue. As usual, no mention was made of the role he played in secretly implementing an illegal warrantless spying program aimed directly at the American people.
You’ve got this metadata. It’s now [currently] queried under very, very narrow circumstances. If the nation suffers an attack, there are other things you could do with that metadata. There are other tools. So in that kind of emergency perhaps you would go to the court and say, ‘In addition to these very limited queries we’re allowed to do, we actually want to launch some complex algorithms against it.’"
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Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, says he was wrong to ignore marijuana’s medical potential when he wrote an opinion piece in 2009 called "Why I would Vote No on Pot
Polling shows people are increasingly open to the notion that not all drugs should be outlawed. A survey by Pew Research Center back in March found a majority of Americans – 52 percent – now say marijuana should be legal. More strikingly, 72 percent agreed that government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth, and three in four agreed the drug has “legitimate medical uses.”
Today in America, one in every 15 black men is behind bars.
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta cuts through the smoke and travels around the world to uncover the highs and lows of cannabis.
New Questions in Hastings Death
Michael Hastings was working on an expose on CIA director John Brennan at the time of his suspicious death, the wife of the Rolling Stone journalist said on Monday.
Last month, a source sent San Diego 6 News an email from Fred Burton, the president of CIA contractor Straffor. The email claims that Brennan was leading the “witch hunts” against journalists.
Text of the email, which was posted on WikiLeaks, read: “Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.”
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