Police State

The terrorist chatter is beyond anything heard since before 9/11, but the police state knows nothing else. Either the police state is unable to figure out the threat, in which case it is stupid, or it's lying, in which case it's evil. I hope it's lying.

State legislation to regulate drone use will be useless.

The only Goldman-Sachs employee to serve jail time is a programmer accused of stealing code.

The NSA shares data with other agencies, but they want more.

"Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency’s surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say. "

But...

"“It’s a very common complaint about N.S.A.,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a former senior intelligence official at the White House and at the office of the director of national intelligence. “They collect all this information, but it’s difficult for the other agencies to get access to what they want.”

“The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them.”"

They'll get it all. Especially the IRS.

Right after Snowden began releasing documents, NSA defenders said NSA had disrupted dozens of terrorist plots with its programs. Now we learn that too was a lie.

"The NSA has previously claimed that 54 terrorist plots had been disrupted ‘over the lifetime’ of the bulk phone records collection and the separate program collecting the internet habits and communications of people believed to be non-Americans. On Wednesday, Inglis said that at most one plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone."

At most one, meaning zero.