Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges "have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information 'inadvertently' collected from domestic US communications without a warrant," Glenn Greenwald and James Ball reported, publishing two leaked documents, which detail the procedures the intelligence agency must follow to target individuals.

Via the Guardian:

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There is some sad irony, then, that the journalist's tragic death has been followed by a storm of wild speculation -- conspiracy theories about car bombs and government assassinations abound through cyberspace. It is the sort of knee-jerk speculation -- concerns expounded based on threadbare evidence and assumptions -- that sits quite at odds with Hastings' legacy of thorough reporting and serious probing.

So here's what we know: At around 4:15 a.m. Tuesday witnesses say a vehicle, later identified as belonging to Hastings, collided with a tree in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Authorities reported that the explosive crash killed a man, but coroner's officials could not immediately confirm whether Hastings was the victim given the charred state of the body. "It sounded like a bomb went off in the middle of the night," a witness told the local news. "I couldn't have written a scene like this for a movie, where the engine flies from the car." A video also appears to show Hastings' Mercedes Benz running a red light at a high speed minutes before the crash.

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When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

... Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.

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In its obituary for the journalist, however, the New York Times towed a line peddled by the government at the time of the McChrystal scandal by casting some doubt on Hastings' reporting. The journalist's widow, Elise Jordan, has been swift to take issue with the Times obit. As HuffPo reported, "Jordan did not take kindly to the Times’ remembrance, and in an email to Times' editor Jill Abramson, asked the paper correct its report before printing it in the morning paper. Abramson sent the note to Bill McDonald, obituaries editor, who rejected the request."

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Crucially, an argument from humans rights law sat at the crux of the case: The ruling established that the. human rights convention applies to soldiers serving on foreign battlefields. Article one of the European Convention for Human Rights requires that governments secure the rights and freedoms of "everyone within their jurisdiction" -- that includes combatants, foreign civilians and -- as this case affirmed -- soldiers. The case followed on from an important 2011 ruling in the European Court of Human Rights, which found that the U.K. had a duty to investigate the killings of Iraqi civilians under British jurisdictions.

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Mueller told a hearing that the FBI had used drones to aid its investigations in a "very, very minimal way, very seldom... Our footprint is very small, and we have very few and of limited use, and we're exploring not only the use but also the necessary guidelines for that use," he said.

Mueller's acknowledgment is only the latest in a series of disclosures about the domestic use of drones. In 2010, it was revealed -- and has since become common knowledge -- that Border Patrol surveils both Canadian and Mexican borders with unmanned aircraft.

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While Icelandic parliamentarian and longtime WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir has already expressed publicly her desire to aid Snowden with any asylum requests, the recent election of a conservative coalition in her country may obstruct such efforts.

Assange, himself marking the one-year anniversary of his stay at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, from where he is avoiding extradition to Sweden, commented, “I feel a great deal of personal sympathy with Mr. Snowden."

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When Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, gave a presentation at the Gel 2013 conference in April, he couldn't have foreseen the bombshell news revelations about the vast extent to which the government was surveilling and hoarding communications data. What he did make clear, though, was just how prevalent the collection of such data was already by tech giants like Google; the ability to pass on such personally identifiable data is intrinsic to Google's financial model. Weinberg pointed out that these online giants are designed in such a way as to track you (that's how they monetize through targeted advertising) -- but this has led to an increasing demand, via court orders, from law enforcement and government agencies for this already tracked online data.

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The report points to longterm conflicts in Mali, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo as contributing heavily to the number of displaced peoples. António Guterres, UN high commissioner for refugees and head of UNHCR, said "These truly are alarming numbers. They reflect individual suffering on a huge scale and they reflect the difficulties of the international community in preventing conflicts and promoting timely solutions for them." The Guardian reported:

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Blaze explains that, given the scale of data collection, the government has amassed what could be called "a National Relationship Database." He writes:

Metadata is our context. And that can reveal far more about us — both individually and as groups — than the words we speak.

Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is therefore a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play.

The better understood the patterns of a particular group’s behavior, the more useful it is. This makes using metadata to identify lone-wolf Al Qaeda sympathizers (a tiny minority about whose social behavior relatively little is known) a lot harder than, say, rooting out Tea Partiers or Wall Street Occupiers, let alone the people with whom we share our beds.

It is, in effect, a National Relationship Database.

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The FIFA website was (and, stunningly, remains) replaced with footage of protesters marching then meeting a vicious police response:

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For the past two weeks, Brazil -- first Sao Paulo and now Rio too -- has been ablaze with protest and riots, which both have everything and very little to do with the raising of public transportation fare from BRL 3.00 to BRL 3.20 which went into effect on June 6. Angry Paulistanos threatened to shut the city down -- and they did.

Dan Amira --  a writer I usually like at New York's Daily Intel -- grossly patronized the Brazilian situation with a post showing images of Brazilians smashing windows and starting fires, titled "17 Photos of Brazilians Overreacting to a Nine-Cent Fare Hike." Amira gives the Brazilians the credit to say that it's not "just"about the fare hike but "the government's priorities in general." Here's the paragraph that hit me like a police baton to the stomach:

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So far, the select intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has already delivered a series of mini-panegyrics to the NSA's PRISM and phone metadata hoarding programs, and to Alexander himself.

Via the Guardian:

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“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said on Monday. The commissioner didn't criticize the surveillance programs themselves, just the secrecy surrounding them:

I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone, it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government... I think the public can understand that. I see no reason why that program was placed in the secret category.

Kelly -- who again and again has rejected greater oversight for his department -- suggested too that the NSA may need more oversight. Azi Paybarah of Capital New York noted the irony in his morning brief:

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According to the Miami Herald, a number of the men on the list are among the over 40 hunger strikers at the camp being force-fed, "for example, Kuwaitis Fawzi al Odah, 36, and Fayez al Kandari, 35, and Yemeni Abdal Malik al Wahab, about 43, who in March, according to his lawyer David Remes, vowed to fast until he got out of the prison 'either dead or alive'," noted the Herald.

Human rights advocates decried the "indefinite detainee" category, which “Under international human rights law all of the detainees should either be charged and fairly tried in federal court, or released," said Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International -- highlighting again how Gitmo sits outside the conventions of international law.

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Via the Guardian:

[The article authors] said that medical staff had a moral duty to allow the prisoners to go on hunger strike without coercing them into treatment. They also called on doctors to refuse to take part in force-feeding.

"Military physicians should refuse to participate in any act that unambiguously violates medical ethics," wrote Dr George Annas, Dr Sondra Crosby and Dr Leonard Glantz, in a three-page article outlining an ethical case against force-feeding of the detainees. All three are senior medical professors at Boston University.

The doctors urged others in the American medical profession to speak out on the issue and provide support for any army doctor who might refuse to participate in the procedure.

... In an interview, Dr Annas said the force-feeding went against international standards of medical ethics. He said that a hunger strike was a legitimate form of protest – not an attempt to commit suicide – and that the portrayal of doctors at Guantánamo as ethically intervening to preserve life was wrong. "That is at the core of this. These people are not trying to commit suicide. They are risking death to make a political point," he said.

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According to a letter obtained by The Associated Press, FEMA said it reviewed the state's appeal to help West but decided that the explosion "is not of the severity and magnitude that warrants a major disaster declaration."

The blast killed 10 first responders and brought national attention to the agricultural community. President Barack Obama traveled to the area to attend a memorial service for the first responders and others who died trying to help.

The FEMA funds would have helped pay for public repairs such as roads, sewer lines, pipes and a school that were destroyed. It does not impact emergency funds FEMA has provided to individual residents. Last month, FEMA estimated the agency and the U.S. Small Business Administration had approved more than $5.6 million in aid and low-interest loans to West residents impacted by the blast.

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In an interview published Wednesday, Snowden said, "People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law ... My "intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate," he added.

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