Ex-Gay Group Apologizes for Hurting Gay People

Ex-Gay Group Apologizes for Hurting Gay People

Exodus International, perviously known as the group that's tried everything — including iPhone apps — to "cure" gay people, issued a long apology today for "having hurt so many," for promoting "sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents," and for essentially their entire decades-old mission of attempting to "cure" gays and lesbians of their sexual orientations.

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The apology isn't exactly sudden, and it's not a total reversal for the entire movement inspired by Exodus's work. Last year, Chambers renounced the idea of a gay "cure," but not everyone agreed with him, causing a split in the ex-gay movement. Exodus International wasuntil recently part of a larger global network of similarly named groups. Those groups, like this one from Latin America, are still sticking to the original plan to "cure" gays across the world.

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Alan Chambers cites a three-year conversation with a presenter on Oprah's OWN network as the catalyst. "Our America's" Lisa Ling did a series of reports on the group, focusing on Chambers. He namedrops her at the start of his apology. OWN posted a preview of Chambers's apology, which will air in full on Thursday:

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Let's be clear, here: Chambers, and Exodus International, still believe homosexuality is a sin. His beliefs, as far as the apology is concerned, have not changed. It looks like Chambers, however, seems to be distancing himself dramatically from the notion that sexual orientation can be erased and remade, and seems to be pledging to back out of the political fight over gay rights in the U.S., too. "You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours," Chambers writes. While his apology indicates that the North American wing of the ministry will become more generally evangelical instead of a one-issue group, it's not clear what they'll focus on instead, if anything — the website's "fact sheet" still portrays them as a Christian organization concerned with homosexuality. Here's more from the apology:

I have begun thinking again about how to apologize to the people that have been hurt by Exodus International through an experience or by a message. I have heard many firsthand stories from people called ex-gay survivors. Stories of people who went to Exodus affiliated ministries or ministers for help only to experience more trauma. I have heard stories of shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope. In every case that has been brought to my attention, there has been swift action resulting in the removal of these leaders and/or their organizations. But rarely was there an apology or a public acknowledgement by me...

...Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.

Chambers also admits to lying about his "cured" orientation — publicly, he presented himself as evidence that their programs worked, something he first admitted to in 2012.

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It doesn't look like everyone is ready to forgive the ministry, however, which used to promote a form of "therapy" that involved trying to convince LGBT individuals that they'd been molested and "turned" gay by the experience. One therapy participant who was present for the OWN reconciliation wrote an editorial to this effect, arguing that the only thing he'd like to see Exodus do at this point is close.

RT: Ron Paul: ‘Obama’s Syria policy looks a lot like Bush’s Iraq policy’

Did the White House’s remarks about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons sound familiar? Former congressman Ron Paul says the build up to a likely strike on Syria reminds him of the days before the invasion of Iraq.

Paul, the longtime Republican lawmaker from Texas who retired last year following an unsuccessful attempt to gain the GOP nomination for the presidency, published a statement on his website this week criticizing the White House for their latest remarks regarding Syria.

US President Barack Obama said months ago that any proof of Assad using chemical weapons against Syrians would constitute the crossing of a “red line” that would spur American intervention. Last week, the White House said evidence linked Assad’s government to using chemical warfare to kill as many as 150 opposition fighters during the bloody civil war that has so far costs more than 90,000 Syrians their lives, according to United Nation estimates. Washington is now likely to begin arming Syrian rebel fighters and is pondering a possible no-fly zone over Syria.

According to Paul, the latest rhetoric from the White House is something he’s seen before.

“Because of this use of gas, the president claimed, Syria had crossed his ‘red line’ and the US must begin to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian government,” Paul wrote. But at the same time, Paul called into question a previous report from the Washington Post, in which the paper cited White House officials as having decided “weeks ago” to arm Syrian rebels.

“[I]n other words, it was made at a time when the intelligence community did not believe ‘with high confidence’ that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons,” Paul said of that decision. “Further, this plan to transfer weapons to the Syrian rebels had become policy much earlier than that, as the Washington Post reported that the CIA had expanded over the past year its secret bases in Jordan to prepare for the transfer of weapons to the rebels in Syria.”

On his website, Paul wrote that things are starting to seem all too similar to what preceded the invasion of Baghdad in 2003.

“The process was identical to the massive deception campaign that led us into the Iraq War,” Paul claimed.

Just like under President George W. Bush, Paul said the Obama administration is “fixing the intelligence and facts” so it can justify an already determined policy.

“And Congress just goes along, just as they did the last time,” Paul wrote.

Congress has not formally decided how it will heed any calls to arm Syrian rebels just yet, but a number of influential politicians on the Hill have raised their voices already, particularly in light of the White House’s recent claim.

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), an outspoken supporter of the efforts to aid the rebels, said last week that the United States’ failure to act already in the civil war is “disgraceful.”

“For us to sit by, and watch these people being massacred, raped, tortured in the most terrible fashion, meanwhile, the Russians are all in, Hezbollah is all in, and we’re talking about giving them more light weapons? It’s insane,” he said. “Frankly, every day that goes by and we don’t get rid of Bashar Assad, it becomes more and more complicated and difficult.”

Indeed, even Pres. Obama has said that removing Assad from office has been a priority within Washington for quite some time now. But just as with a decade earlier, he’s already finding some opponents in Washington uninterested in opening up another war.

Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) equated the news coming out of the White House as a lot of huff.

“It seems to me they have a great media strategy,” Rogers said. “They don’t have a great Syrian strategy, and I don’t believe any of our members – and we had both Republicans and Democrats on the committee – express concern about where they think we are today, and where we think the administration wants to go.”

“What is the plan? Where are we going in Syria? And what do you want to accomplish?” Rogers asked. “Some of the things that they’ve told us – told the Intelligence Committee – in the past doesn’t comport with what they’re presenting as the direction they want to go. So we’ve asked them to come up and say if we’re going to move in this direction, you’re going to have to come up with a more comprehensive plan.”

“They’ve got a lot of explaining to do to come up and say, ‘Here’s our comprehensive plan on how we move forward on what is a catastrophic situation that’s getting worse every single day in Syria,’” Rogers said.

Speaking to PBS host Charlie Rose in an interview that aired late Monday, Pres. Obama dismissed the claims from the likes of Mr. Paul that the unrest in Syria would spark another war for his administration to be entwined in.

“It is very easy to slip slide your way into deeper and deeper commitments,” Obama told Rose, referring to the possibility of another war in the Middle East.

“Now, on the other side there are folks who say, you know, ‘we are so scarred from Iraq. We should have learned our lesson. We should not have anything to do with it,’” Obama said. “Well, I reject that view as well because the fact of the matter is, is that we’ve got serious interests there.”

“The goals are a stable, non-sectarian, representative Syrian government that is addressing the needs of its people through political processes and peaceful processes,” added the president. “We’re not taking sides in a religious war between Shi’a and Sunni. Really, what we’re trying to do is take sides against extremists of all sorts and in favor of people who are in favor of moderation, tolerance, representative government – and, over the long-term, stability and prosperity for the people of Syria.”

Glenn Beck Bashes DC Establishment At Tea Party Rally: ‘At Least Vegas Admits Its Full Of Crooks And Hookers’

Glenn Beck headlined the Tea Party Patriots’ “Audit the IRS” rally in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, delivering an epic speech that warned his followers that they are losing their basic American rights. He called the government the “chief violator” of those rights and attacked the “mainstream media” for failing to hold those in power accountable.

Beck listed off the “god-given” rights that Americans hold to be “self-evident”: “You have a right not to be executed without trial, not to be held without charge.,not to be searched without warrant, or spied upon without cause.” He said, “the government is no longer the protector of those rights, they are the chief violator of those rights.” As he’s done before, he compared his cause to that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that the abuses the tea party is fighting against are the “exact same abuses” King challenged.

At one point, Beck appeared to challenge House Speaker John Boehner directly, noting how the streets of Washignton, D.C. point directly to his office. “It’s intoxicating. The symbol of our nation make men drunk with power. And then they justify their lust for more by claiming they’re public servants.”

“I realized last night when I came and landed in this city,” Beck said of D.C., “I actually like Vegas more than this city. I realized the only difference between Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. is that at least Vegas has the decency to admit its full of crooks and hookers.”

After saying that both Republicans and Democrats are responsible to driving America down this ominous path, Beck added that “the getaway car was driven by the mainstream media.” Or as he described it, “a media no longer with a straight face can claim the role of journalists.” He told the media, “journalism implies that you print or run stories the powerful do not like. What you are doing is nothing more than public relations.”

Beck drew some of the biggest cheers of his speech when he declared, “We are not violent. We are not racist. We are not anti-immigrant. We are not anti-government. But we will not be silent another day more.”

sage: There are three articles here; each telling the story from a differing viewpoint. Essentially, what started out in Brazil as a protest against an increase in bus fares – a 20 centavos increase (approx 9 cents CDN), which was seen as a huge increase to a poverty stricken people – became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

With the country spending billions to host the upcoming 2014 World Cup (and despite football being the national sport and Pele being a national hero), and even more preparing to host the 2016 Olympics, the protestors were further fueled by endemic government corruption, police brutality and graft, social-services cuts and wasteful spending. And it is these underlying issues that gave them the strength to carry on despite water cannons, rubber bullets and horses’ hooves flying.

But what tickles me pink is the following statement from a citizen: “And this year we rise. We have woken up. We are on the streets like in Turkey and Greece. They have made us wake up about this. …” May we all “wake up” and use our mighty voice to make a difference.

Story 1 – Brazil Protesters Win U-turn on Fare Rises

By Jonathan Watts, The Guardian – June 19, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/brazil-protesters-u-turn-fare-rises

Authorities in Brazil’s two biggest cities have made a U-turn on public transport fare increases in the face of mass protests that have overshadowed the country’s build up to next year’s World Cup.

In advance of major demonstrations on Thursday, the leaders of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro announced that bus and subway price rises will be rescinded, but it is far from certain that this will be enough to mollify public unrest.

Although the demonstrations began on a small scale last week in opposition to the fare rises, they have spread rapidly to encompass a variety of frustrations. A quarter of a million people took to the streets in at least 12 cities on Monday to call for better public services, an end to corruption, punishment for police brutality, and less wasteful spending on the World Cup.

Sporadic protests have continued since and spread to smaller cities, occasionally resulting in violence. Among the most recent incidents was a clash on Wednesday between police and demonstrators in the north-eastern city of Fortaleza ahead of a Confederations Cup

Riot police control crowds before a match between Brazil and Mexico in Fortaleza yesterday. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA

game in the city between Brazil and Mexico. The 15,000 protestors were forced back from the Castelão stadium perimeter with pepper spray, tear gas and – by one account – rubber bullets. A police car was torched and some supporters were obstructed on their way to the game.

President Dilma Rousseff has attempted to placate the protesters by declaring her government willing to listen. She also held meetings with several regional governors, urging them to step back on fare increases and to ensure police restraint.

São Paulo’s mayor Fernando Haddad reluctantly accepted, but said the loss of revenue for fares would affect other areas of the budget. “This will represent a big sacrifice and we will have to reduce investments in other areas,” he said.

The organisers of the demonstrators have yet to respond, but protest groups on Facebook and other social network sites that have rallied the public continue to call for “a million man march” on Thursday. There is also expected to be a protest near the Maracanã ahead of a Confederations Cup game in the afternoon.

Fifa president Sepp Blatter has called on Brazil’s protesters to stop linking their demonstrations to the tournament, which is a dry run for the World Cup. “I can understand that people are not happy, but they should not use football to make their demands heard,” Blatter said on Globo TV, a domestic station.

But several of Brazil’s national team players have expressed their support for the demonstrators. “I see these demonstrators and I know that they are right,” the forward Hulk told a press conference in Fortaleza on Tuesday. “We know Brazil needs to improve in many areas and must let the demonstrators express themselves.”

Fifa’s tournaments have become a focus for many demonstrators, who feel the 12 stadiums the country has built or renovated at huge cost show how public money is spent on projects that benefit construction companies and TV stations rather than hospital and schools.

This argument has been eloquently expressed in English in a popular YouTube video titled “No, I’m not going to the World Cup”, which has drawn more than 1.5m hits.

The video’s narrator, Carla Dauden, said: “Suddenly there is all this money available to build new stadiums and the population is led to believe the World Cup is the change they need for their lives to get better. “But the truth is that most of the money from the games and the stadiums goes straight to Fifa and we don’t see it so we don’t get it and the money from tourists and investors goes to those who already have money.”

The government says the $13.3bn spending on the tournaments is also being used to improve roads, metro services, airports, communications and public security, all of which would help boost the country’s economic and social development.

This point was emphasised by Blatter, who said Fifa did not impose the tournament on the hosts. “Brazil asked to host the World Cup,” Blatter said. “They knew that to host a good World Cup they would naturally have to build stadiums.

“But we said that it was not just for the World Cup. Together with the stadiums there are other constructions: highways, hotels, airports … Items that are for the future. Not just for the World Cup.”

He and Rousseff were booed by the crowd at the opening ceremony of the Confederations Cup on Saturday.

Riot police control crowds before a match between Brazil and Mexico in Fortaleza yesterday. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA

Story 2 – Brazil Protests 2013: It’s About Way More Than Bus Fare

By David Lavin, Policymic – June 18, 2013

http://www.policymic.com/articles/49537/brazil-protests-2013-it-s-about-way-more-than-bus-fare

What began as a localized protest against rising bus fares last week in Brazil has become a national outcry, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators challenging everything from government corruption and the rising cost of living to the billions of dollars invested in the World Cup and Olympic infrastructure.

More than 215,000 citizens took to the streets Monday night in over 40 cities and 12 state capitals in the second week of protests in the country. In Brasilia, the capital, protesters occupied the national Congress. In Rio de Janeiro, an estimated 100,000 mostly peaceful protesters marched, and a breakaway group attacked a state legislative assembly building.

The demonstrations started last week in São Paulo in protest of the increase in a single bus fare from 3 reals to 3.20 (roughly $1.40 to $1.50), but they went national when images of police brutality against the protesters in São Paulo spread rapidly across social media. Brazil’s military police were shown beating unarmed protesters and firing rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters, passersby, and journalists.

A wave of national protests — the largest and most significant in over 20 years — soon followed, with marchers united under chants of “No to violence” and under banners declaring, “It isn’t for 20 cents, it is for our rights” and “Who is the World Cup for?”

Brazil’s public transportation is often slow, dangerous, and crowded, and these fare increases come at a time when Brazil’s decade-long economic success has slowed dramatically. Inflation is on the rise and many basic services are woefully underfunded.

For years, the economy grew, the middle class expanded, and millions rose from poverty. After the country suffered through crushing hyperinflation in the 1980′s and 1990′s, inflation seemed to be finally under control.

But recently the economy has stalled, much-feared inflation is outside of targets, and rising prices on everything from food to transportation have made life more difficult for the average Brazilian.

It is this contrast, between the massive investment in Olympic and World Cup infrastructure, and the lack of investment in the basics Brazilians depend on in their daily lives, that seems to be sparking the unrest.

“The bus fare increase is just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” one protester in Rio de Janeiro said, “We’re tired of the corruption, the violence and not getting the services that are our right.”

Riot police take positions during a protest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Tuesday, June 18. Demonstrations began in response to plans to increase fares for Brazil’s public transportation system but have broadened into wider protests over economic and social issues plaguing the country.

Story 3 – World Cup Only Benefits Outsiders, Say Brazil Protesters

By James Montague, CNN – June 19, 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/18/world/americas/brazil-protests-montague

Belo Horizonte, Brazil (CNN) — At 11 pm, the tired and the injured gathered in Belo Horizonte for one last expression of discontent.

More than a thousand sat in Praca Sete de Setembro, a square in the center of the city, chanting against the government and the police. But they weren’t the crowd’s only enemy. A sign hung from a nearby balcony. It read: “Anti Copa.”

On the pavement the words “A FIFA é Foda” had been painted: “F*** You, FIFA,” in Portuguese. The roads had been blocked off by the military police, who watched the protesters from afar. A bank of police horses chewed on piles of hay left for them on the road.

Daniel Sanabria, a technician in his 20s, stood nearby cradling his arm, an ice pack on top of a bloody bandage. He peeled it off to reveal an ugly red welt on his left hand. “A bullet,” he explained.

The day was supposed to have been something of a coronation for Belo Horizonte, a relatively quiet and small city — if a population of 2.5 million people could ever be called small — surrounded by mountains, an hour’s flight north of Rio de Janeiro.

Its famous Mineirao football stadium had just hosted its first match of the 2013 Confederations Cup, a 6-1 victory for African champions Nigeria against the tiny Pacific islanders of Tahiti.

It was a dry run for next year’s World Cup finals which return to Brazil for the first time since 1950, a chance to prove that the country was ready to host the most world’s most popular sports tournament.

Instead, military and civilian helicopters flew overhead, roads were blocked and military police stationed throughout the city as a series of protests sparked by anger about the cost of living, poor quality education and high transport costs took place at the same time as the match.

The initial spark for the protests was a rise in bus fares in Sao Paulo. The anger was such that, even in a country often caricatured for its deification of soccer, the World Cup, its surrogate cousin the Confederations Cup and the game’s global governing body FIFA, have all become symbolic of corruption and waste.

Protesters believe the tournament has seen the rich line their pockets, while the poor make do with crumbling public services. The World Cup, it seems, has sparked something that has lain dormant for a long time.

And this year we rise. We have woken up. We are on the streets like in Turkey and Greece. They have made us wake up about this.

“Tonight this is about all of Brazil, we are moving against corruption. We have been suffering for too many years,” said Tainara Freitas, a teacher who had remained with the protest until the end.

“And this year we rise. We have woken up. We are on the streets like in Turkey and Greece. They have made us wake up about this. The World Cup in Brazil is about too much money. There are too many poor people suffering. The World Cup isn’t good for Brazil. It will bring tourists and money but this is not good for poor people.”

Earlier in the day 15,000 protesters had marched towards the Mineirao as hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets across the country in the first coordinated mass protests of this size since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the mid 1980s.

Police responded with tear gas, firing rubber bullets into the crowd, and beat protesters who burned barricades in return. I watched Tahiti’s brave performance on the pitch as the protesters gathered outside, speaking to Brazilian sports writer Igor Resende at half time about the match and the reasons for the anger. A few hours later he was in hospital after apparently being shot in the back with a rubber bullet.

“The police came with a brutal force,” recalled Resende. “I didn’t see the protesters do anything. The police threw a bomb and it exploded in the middle of the protest. Then police began to shoot.”

Resende said he was hit in the back by a rubber bullet as he ran away.

“In that moment I just ran. I thought that if I looked back the police would probably shoot me again. I don’t think the police are well prepared. They are badly paid. They have a bad life. They act like this because they are scared.”

But Resende said he has doubt that the police response was related to the Confederations Cup.

“I spoke to one of the highest ranked police guys in state yesterday. He told me 3,500 policeman were on the streets because of the game. They are acting to avoid conflict near the stadiums. The police and FIFA don’t want the protesters near the stadiums.”

For FIFA, who have been critical of Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup, the protests are an unwelcome complication for a tournament already long behind schedule.

“People are using the platform of football and the international media presence to make certain demonstrations,” said FIFA president Sepp Blatter who, alongside the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, was booed by the crowd at the opening ceremony on Saturday.

Speaking in an interview in Rio on Monday, he said: “You will see today is the third day of the competition this will calm down. It will be a wonderful competition.”

But the protests have not calmed down. The day after Blatter’s interview, the biggest demonstrations yet took place. Sanabria and Freitas agreed that the Confederations Cup, which continues for another 12 days, is an opportunity to make their voices heard.

I asked them both what messaged they wanted to send FIFA and the football world.

“Please, please, make more pressure on our government, on the Brazilian government to look out for us,” said Freitas before she made her way back into the protest, Sanabria still clutching his injured hand.

“They are looking out for people outside the country, they aren’t looking for us, for the poor people.”

Considered a traitor in much of the U.S., whistleblower Edward Snowden has become something of a cultural hero in Hong Kong, where he was hiding out for a while. (Reuters)

sage: Wow, I haven’t seen such language in mainstream news in a long, long time. Mr MacDonald, a Senior Washington Correspondent no less, really slams the government for their tired and overused excuse of the non-existent terrorism being the cause of having to relentlessly pursue whistleblowers. And he calls out to the “complacent American public” to wake up to what is happening and the fact that mainstream TV is controlled and gagged.

The second story is another wake-up call and the title says it all.

By Neil MacDonald, CBC News – June 19, 2013

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/06/18/f-rfa-macdonald-leakers

Once again, the powerful organs of U.S. state security have gone to war. And once again, they seem to have the backing of a complacent American public, a sympathetic Congress and some national media outlets that were tamed long ago.

The justification for the offensive is, once again, protecting Americans from terrorists. It’s a reliable trope, the same one used for the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This time, though, the government’s legal and propaganda weaponry — both overt and covert — is trained on a different enemy: the activists, computer geeks, libertarians and, yes, certain journalists who’ve undermined the official secrecy behind which America’s ever-expanding security-industrial complex operates.

The latest target is Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked documents proving the U.S. National Security Agency collects records of just about every phone call, email, upload and download in America.

Snowden is now on the run. Already, he’s widely denounced here as a traitor and possibly even an enemy agent, despite the financial sacrifice of his act and his stated wish to inform the American people about the extent to which their own government spies on them.

Snowden, though, is by no means the only enemy in this new war.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He sought refuge there exactly a year ago today.

Nominally, the British government wants to turn him over to Sweden, where he faces what are widely described in news reports as “rape charges,” even though the sex began as consensual and rape can have a different definition in Sweden than elsewhere.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange waves from a window of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Sunday, alongside Ecuador’s Foreign Affairs Minister Ricardo Patino. On June 19, he will have been there one year. (Associated Press)

In any event, the Swedish charges don’t explain the massive British police presence and surveillance teams outside the embassy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, in a new article titled “The Death of Truth,” writes that the British have spent $4.5 million to bottle up Assange this past year, and seem intent on seeing him turned over to U.S. authorities, who have already prepared, according to a leaked document quoted by Hedges, a sealed indictment for espionage.

No real surprise there. Assange has been labeled a “terrorist” (note the recurring justification) by American lawmakers.

His supporters and fellow activists in hacking groups and other “information liberation” organizations are routinely pulled off flights and interrogated. (The U.S. government, evidently, doesn’t appreciate competition in the field of computer hacking.)

One can only imagine the surveillance that’s been mounted against WikiLeaks’ donors.

Winning the headlines

All this demonization seems to have worked. Assange is generally portrayed in the mainstream U.S. media as some sort of criminal crank.

But it’s also reasonable to regard him as a publisher. You might not like his mission statement, or his indiscriminate choice of material to put out there, but that’s what he is.

And if he’s guilty of treason and abetting terrorism, then logic would dictate the government might take the same view towards the news organizations that collaborated with him: The New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Le Monde, and, yes, CBC News, which published a trove of embarrassing WikiLeaks documents from U.S. diplomatic cables pertaining to Canada.

I was the CBC’s reporter on those stories, so I suppose I’m some sort of unindicted co-conspirator and surveillance target, too.

Exaggeration? Paranoid? Maybe. But consider this: Most of the above-referenced news organizations are not American, and therefore not entitled to any legal protection whatever from the NSA’s near-total powers of intrusion.

Even being American no longer carries the protection it once did. NSA spying aside, the U.S. justice department has not only prosecuted a record number of leakers, it’s begun targeting U.S. journalists who receive and publish government secrets.

The justification: by doing so, news organizations aid terrorists. See a pattern here?

Electronic Big Brother

So far, the U.S. government has not been able to stop Assange, who continues to operate WikiLeaks from inside the Ecuadorian embassy.

Nor has it been able to stifle leakers, such as Snowden, who seem motivated by genuine civic concern that the secret world of data snooping has turned into an uncontrollable monster.

President Barack Obama has also chosen to confirm and defend the existence and scale of covert data collection, even though, paradoxically, his administration says such confirmation only empowers terrorists.

But to win this struggle, the information activists and leakers must win public opinion, and that they have not done.

National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander testifying on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, said surveillance thwarted dozens of terror plots. (Associated Press)

Just about any government intrusion, it appears, is tolerated here as long as it’s held up as fighting terrorism somewhere.

If polls are right, Americans accept the government’s rather dubious contention that massive electronic spying has thwarted “dozens” of terrorist plots (though no one protected the crowd at the Boston Marathon).

When a delegation of security mandarins appeared before Congress Tuesday, their bland assurances that the content of Americans’ emails and phone communications remain protected were deferentially accepted by politicians of both parties —and conveyed live on cable networks.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden’s warnings are largely unheeded; reporters seem at least as interested in his pole-dancing former girlfriend as they are in the substance of his allegations.

This week, in an online discussion on the Guardian’s website, Snowden said U.S. authorities are still lying (just as America’s most senior intelligence official lied to Congress a few months ago, when he denied any data is collected at all).

Analysts for multiple agencies, said Snowden, can basically access and examine any data they want, using all sorts of end runs around privacy laws.

“Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism,” he told one online interviewer, “yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”

In his article, Chris Hedges took a more frightening view. He called the war on secrecy’s opponents “The rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms — propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite — monitor and crush those who dissent.”

Whether you buy that or not, there is no doubt that we now have a government Big Brother looking electronically over our shoulders. The only question is whether you trust him.

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland, the biggest owner of personal data anywhere in the world. (Reuters)

Big Brother is Listening In and No One Seems to Care

By Neil Macdonald, CBC News – June 10, 2013

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/06/07/f-rfa-macdonald-nsa-eavesdropping

Repeat after me: You have nothing to worry about if you don’t talk to terrorists

In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho issued a warning to Americans about the mushrooming power of the federal government’s eavesdropping machinery.

Most people didn’t know the super-secret National Security Agency even existed back then. But Church, the Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, had privileged access, and understood the NSA’s breathtaking capability.

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Last week, 38 years after Church issued his caution, journalists learned the NSA has — for seven years — been almost certainly logging every phone call, every email, every upload and every download in America, creating an aggregation of private data unprecedented in history.

The broad American public, meanwhile, even those rugged individualists who bristle ferociously at any government attempt to learn how many guns they might possess, took the news with almost bovine equanimity.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a modern contemporary of Church who sits on at least four influential Senate

Senator Lindsey Graham, flanked by fellow Republican Senators John McCain (L) and Saxby Chambliss (R). ‘If you don’t talk to terrorists you have nothing to fear.’ (Associated Press)

committees, emerged to lead the herd.

“I’m a Verizon customer,” Graham declared after the publication Thursday of a secret federal court order compelling a subsidiary of the phone carrier to give the NSA all records of all calls by all its customers.

“I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government, if the government is gonna … match up a known terrorist phone with someone in the United States.

“I don’t think you’re talking to terrorists. I know I’m not. So we got nothing to worry about.”

Time to get angry?

Soon after the story broke in the British newspaper The Guardian, it quickly became clear that most other phone companies here were operating under similar top-secret court orders.

(The practice is authorized by George W. Bush-era legislation, but the very existence of the specific orders is an official secret; the companies are forbidden to discuss them.)

Then the Washington Post revealed the NSA is also mining data directly from the servers of the country’s biggest internet companies: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and YouTube, among others.

As the story grew, privacy advocates screamed.

“It’s time to get angry,” said the American Civil Liberties Union, which compared the NSA’s “massive spying on the American people” to having an FBI agent stationed outside every home in America, tracking the movements of citizens.

But this is the post-9/11 era. And while the outright fear-mongering of the Bush administration has dissipated, many Americans clearly agree with Senator Graham.

If you’re not talking to terrorists, one caller told a National Public Radio call-in show, you don’t have a problem.

“If it helps in matters of security, I’m all for it,” a Verizon customer told a CBC camera crew after emerging from one of the phone company’s shops in downtown Washington. “Security is number one.”

The data trawl

It turns out that leading members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, had been briefed on the data trawl from the beginning.

And when President Barack Obama finally spoke, he effectively shrugged. “What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls,” said Obama, as if that were a mere trifle.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

Well, one suspects the intelligence agencies are indeed listening to telephone calls. They have been since telephones were invented.

The amassing of data, though, is a much grander scheme. Basically, the NSA is building a giant haystack of information, and developing software, as one security expert put it, to find the needle.

When the FBI, say, or the CIA identifies a suspect in a plot, the NSA can then see all the calls that suspect’s phone has made, and all the numbers that called that phone, and then all the calls to all those numbers, and so on.

An intelligence agency’s dream, in other words. But at what cost to the privacy of innocent Americans?

Another NSA listening post. This one near Munich, Germany, operated in conjunction with the General Communications Head Quarters of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. (Reuters)

Obama himself put it nicely in 2005, speaking forcefully against the Patriot Act, the very legislation that authorized the secret court orders to the phone companies.

Echoing Frank Church, then-senator Obama told Congress that the U.S. government “has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record, or private document … the phone calls you make, the emails you’ve sent. This legislation gives no rights to appeal … in a court of law.

“No judge will hear your plea, no jury will hear your case. This is just plain wrong.”

Today, though, with exactly that happening, Obama sounds more like George W. Bush, talking about thwarting “folks who might engage in terrorism.”

Canadians too?

Many Democrats and Republicans in Congress support the data trawl. And everyone seems to agree it would have been best had the American public not learned about this practice at all.

Americans, of course, have the right to toss their liberties aside in the name of security. They’ve done that a lot since 9/11.

But anyone who thinks this is just an American story doesn’t understand global intelligence gathering.

The NSA is linked by treaty to official eavesdroppers in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Canada’s agency, the Communications Security Establishment, shares data with the Americans, and vice versa.

It’s also instructive to read the fine print of the secret order forcing Verizon to co-operate with the NSA. No doubt similar wording appears in orders to other phone companies.

Verizon is instructed to hand over not only all call records beginning and terminating in the U.S., but “all call detail records … between the United States and abroad.”

Given the millions of calls daily between Americans and Canadians, it’s a safe bet the colossal, ever-expanding data haystack has a good-size Canadian chunk already.

Senator Lindsey Graham would probably tell Canadians they have nothing to fear, as long as they aren’t talking to the wrong people.

Personally, I prefer the advice of Senator Frank Church. He’s long since passed away, but he was something of a prophet.