toritto's Open Salon Blog

Truth is Coming - Ed Snowden

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:06:58 -0400

Excerpts from an on-line interview between Edward Snowden, America's most wanted, and the Guardian newspaper in the U.K.

"I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries—the majority of them are our allies—but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless."

"snip" (hehe)

He was asked to elaborate on how much "direct access" the NSA had to phone-call records and if analysts could listen to the content of domestic calls without a warrant.

"The reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on—it's all the same," Snowden replied. "The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications."

Under authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Snowden continued, "Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as 'incidental' collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications":

All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time—and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

"snip"

Snowden was also asked why he did not fly directly to Iceland, where he told the Guardian he would have preferred to seek asylum:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

Snowden, who said he had not had contact with the Chinese, scoffed at speculation that he would provide classified information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum.

"This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk 'RED CHINA!' reaction to anything involving [Hong Kong] or the [People's Republic of China] and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct," Snowden replied. "Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."

He also responded to the argument, made by U.S. officials, that the NSA spy program has foiled dozens of terror plots:

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 that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. 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.

Snowden thinks his revelation of the NSA spy program gives President Barack Obama "an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it."

Snowden added that he's become disillusioned with the public debate over his leak:

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

Edward Snowden finally noted that the truth about the government spying program he revealed will eventually come out, regardless of what happens to him.

"All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,"

"Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped. "

No Stairs

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 05:06:07 -0400

I live in a house with no stairs.

Eighteen hundred thirty two square feet

three bedrooms, two baths two car garage.

A lanai.

Houses with stairs are for the young.

People who live in houses with stairs

go to work everyday

have kids and a dog.

Coming downstairs in the morning

is the beginning of a commute.

Kids go upstairs to their rooms

before slamming the door.

Men walk upstairs behind their wives

admiring the turn of her hip

knowing they will soon be taking off

her night gown.

I am alone in my house with no stairs.

Me and my cat.

Cats are less trouble.

You don’t have to walk them.

I don’t need stairs anymore.

The kids are gone off living their own lives.

There is no woman to follow

upstairs at night.

When I get up in the morning

there is no place I have to be.

There is laundry day.

Food shopping day.

Vacuum the house with no stairs day.

Doctor's appointment day.

And I can always do it tomorrow.

I can spend stormy days

in my robe if I like.

No one is coming

to the door.

I live in half the house.

The back half.

Near the television and the microwave.

Near the lanai where I have my espresso

and a Macanudo.

I dust the other half of the house

while spending my day

writing poetry.

Who has it better?

And I think about what went before

All the choices, great and poor

and how I never thought I'd miss

the slamming of that old screen door.

Poppa Was a Union Man

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:06:52 -0400

a repost for Father's Day

Danny and Mary in front of our little house - circa late 1950s

The ghost in the doorway is me.

My father was a union man; a member in good standing of the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union of America. In the 1960s the name was shortened to the Laborers International Union.

Domenico was the youngest son of Italian immigrants making their way in a new country.Everyone called him Danny. As a young man he was quite good looking in that Italian sort of way. Slender, muscular and dark with a pencil mustache.

Danny had only one problem.He had epilepsy.

He had been hit by a car as a child while riding his bicycle and suffered a head injury. At least that is what I have been told by people who would know. Maybe it is true. Maybe not.

Epilepsy was something one never talked about in those days.

Ever.

The general attitude of people at the time was (a) its hereditary - or worse - contagious ; (b) it was associated with "feeble mindedness" and violence and (c) many thought those with epilepsy needed to be institutionalized.

Eugenics was all the rage in America.Many states would not permit those with epilepsy to marry. Missouri was the last to repeal this law in 1980!. Blood banks wouldn’t take your blood until 1987. Employers would fire you after the first seizure on the job. General practitioner physicians had little to offer you and patients were afraid they would be reported to the health department.

Danny had to leave school after the 8^th grade because of the disease. No epileptics allowed.

I was twelve years old the first time I saw my father seize. It was the first time I saw him cry because it happened in front of me.

My mother warned me not to breathe a word of it to anyone - not to my friends, not at school, not to my younger brothers.

During the depression dad joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. There was no work for an Italian with an 8th grade education. It seemed like a good idea. He was sent to California to work at Yosemite - and then sent home after a seizure.

He was of course unfit for military service when war came.

By this time he had married my mother, Mary. She had lived across the street with her 4 brothers and sisters. Her mother died and the State in it’s wisdom would not permit an Italian immigant with no wife to raise five children. She was sent to an orphanage in Tarrytown, New York.

When she turned 18 she had to leave the orphanage so she returned home with her little suitcase. Her father, my maternal grandfather had remarried and was not interested in taking his grown children in - even temporarily. My mom had a few bucks, no job and couldn't drive. My father’s mother, Grandma Laura took her in off of the streets.

Love blossomed and Danny and Mary married in November 1941.

Danny now had responsibilities. The primary issue was how to make a living.

He had no education. He had no health insurance nor the money to see a neuro-specialist. Our local Italian pharmacist gave him Dilantin and Phenobarbitol without prescription which poppa took everyday. Many times as a kid I picked up his drugs. Nobody would suspect a kid.

Eventually he got a job; the only job he could get. He got a job as a common laborer, pushing a wheel barrow eight hours a day for an Italian owned constrution company. A few months after starting work he joined the union. He carried cement and mortar from the mixers to the brick layers. Nothing but brawn and sweat. No brains required. No thinking required. Just the labor of a poor man with a wife and eventually three kids. They knew he had epilepsy.

He did the work everyday his working life. He went to work rain or shine. If it rained he came home. You didn’t get paid when you didn’t work. Many weeks in Winter he had no work.

Union membership came with health benefits. He got his epilepsy under reasonable control - I only saw him have two more seizures all of his life.

When we needed a bigger apartment with the birth of my youngest brother we rented a small house. Several years later the owner wanted it for his own son. We moved.

Poppa was able to buy us a two bedroom "bungalow" on the fringes of Coney Island - on a dirt street. I slept on a Castro Convertible in the living room while my two brothers shared a tiny bedroom in bunk beds.

Poppa paid $5,000 for the house. The former owners held the mortgage privately. It wasn't much of a house even by standards of the day but we always had a roof over our heads and food on our table and serviceable clothes to wear. We always had the necessities of life. No vacations. No fancy car - a '51 blue Chevy. Hand me down clothes. But we were never hungry or homeless.

Poppa never earned more than $10,000 in any year his entire life. Most years it was more like $7,000 - 8,000.

He was able to shelter, clothe and raise a family on what he was able to earn himself. Mom was always home for us. He was paid a living wage for his sweat. The owners still made plenty of money as did their competitors, the Trumps who also were building low-mid rise apartment buildings all over Brooklyn and Queens. Donald Trump's father paid union wages and still left a fortune of $400 million to Donald and his siblings.

And he was able to make his way in the world only because he was a union man. He had a dignity and pride in his work and would point out apartment building and projects that he had worked on if we passed them on a Sunday drive.

He never considered his work demeaning or of no consequence - his sweat mark is still everywhere in Bensonhurst and Flushing. His work had a dignity of its own because a union wage allowed him to care for those he loved.

He never felt like a slave. He was a worker and was never ashamed of what he did or what he was. And he knew what he was. He wasn't "middle class" or "white collar". He had no way to make a living but to sell his labor. He knew he was a worker and in solidarity with all others who had no accumulated wealth to live on. But because he earned a living wage he had dignity.

It was all he ever wanted. A fair wage, a little house, an education and a future for his children; a comfortable old age.

He could look forward to a union pension when he retired as well as social security. He never made it. He died at 56 from emphysema - probably from all of those years breathing in cement dust.

His two remaining living sons wound up bankers and Wall Streeters - but we never forgot from whence we came - and all the others now making the journey.

A living wage gives dignity to work and to the men and women who toil at those "menial" jobs. It gives them the self respect to look you in the eye without shame, knowing they too can care for their own. If you can support your family or support yourself on what you earn, the job is no longer by definition "menial"

This nation will not live up to its ideals until all within her jurisdiction can obtain basic medical care. All within her jurisdiction receive adequate nourishment; all within her jurisdiction have shelter; all receive a quality education. And all who work full time receive an adequate wage.

Don't say we don't have the money. We know where the money is.

My dad's proudest achievement aside from his marriage to my mom and his three sons was that he and his older brother Angelo helped build the United Nations complex - which he viewed as a monument to those who sweated in its construction. They made their little contribution to something they knew was important; something they knew would last.

Whenever I passed it I thought of them.

And although I haven't been to F.D.R. Drive in years I would like to assure them.

It’s still there Pop and Uncle Angelo. It’s still there.

Happy Father's Day.

An exerpt from "Toritto's Blog - A Memoir of a Life in Posts"

http://www.amazon.com/Torittos-Blog-Memoir-Life-Posts/dp/1478399643/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1349439232&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=toritto%27s+blog+scaraangello

Grandma's Windows

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 22:06:09 -0400

Moonlight never shined

across her bed of dark pecan

through the small minded windows

of America.

No view of stars or sunny sky

no ever changing blue or gray.

A glass pane cordoning

the outside from the in;

Windows that moved up and down

refusing to open;

painted shut, held rigid

by decades of enamel and decay

facing inward on

a tenement courtyard

untouched by moonlight;

no framed scene of tree or sea.

When young she never noticed

the long Winter night

while filling the oil lamp

or by a candle's light

for the moon shined bright through

the tall windows of Naples;

windows that opened outward; outward

to the people and the world.

Along the path of dreams

she comes back to you

yet the sum of her trysts

is less than one morning's vision of you

through a tall open window.

Lesbian Life

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:06:29 -0400

Remember when Obama came out in support of same sex marriage?

The Sunday morning "news" shows and respected journalists were yammering about whether or not coming out for same sex marriage would help or hurt Obama’s re-election efforts.

"Sixty percent of those polled indicate his stance wouldhave no effect on their vote; 16% said they are less likely to vote for him while yadayadayada."

While the fight goes on over DOMA in the SCOTUS, my married lesbian niece and her partner in Massachusetts live their lives. My niece has a three year old biological daughter (from the bank) and her partner just had a daughter today with the same father, making the girls half sisters.

They have a lovely home, work every day, pay their taxes, shop for food, service the car, shovel the snow, cut the grass, haul pellets for the wood stoves, go to church (Unitarians - yeah I know; that don't count right?), worry about the quality of schools, worry about "having two mommies", save for college educations, pay their health insurance. etc. They get along with their neighbors, have straight and gay friends, see family regularly and on holidays, even go on vacation once in a while - and bother no one.

Exciting the lesbian life ain't it?

They have family who love and support them in their life's quest for happiness. I am among them.

When they married I got a special call - would I be there? It was important to them. We were there - me and my girls and their men - with bells on. One of the best fun weddings I ever attended.

Should they have lived a lie because other people think they should? Perhaps have married men and faked it?

I think not, though each of them is lovely and could have easily found a man if that was what they wanted. They took the harder road.

Should they live as a second class citizens because someone else thinks they should?

I think not.

Meanwhile be assured, if you had any doubt, straight people still get married in Massachusetts.

Twenty five years from now folks will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. It is people like my niece who are changing facts on the ground. They are building new families, not waiting for others to give them approval. Eventually the law will catch up.

Meanwhile join me in celebrating the arrival of Chloe with her big sister Grace!