The US Justice Department is being sued after failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on a federal surveillance program that has targeted the email and phone conversations of Americans throughout the last five years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy groups that fights to protect civil liberties in the digital age, filed a lawsuit on Thursday this week that names the Department of Justice as the sole defendant. - The EFF charges that the DoJ violated the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, by failing to expedite previous requests filed with the government for documents relating to a 2008 amendment included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that year’s update to FISA, feds were awarded legal wiggle room to collect and comb through any communication originating in the United States that is sent abroad through email or phone, all under the guise of national security. The EFF and others attest that the government has extensively violated the US Constitution by doing as such, though, and is now suing the DoJ not for ongoing abuse of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, but for the department’s failure to quickly honor the FOIA request and for wrongful withholding of agency records.

“The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explains in an official statement to the media that was released in conjunction with this week’s lawsuit. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions unconstitutional.”

Wired: EFF Sues to Get Secret Court Rulings Showing Feds Violated Spy Law

Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech: Yesterday, at an ABC News panel, Mitt Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Wednesday’s speech from Paul Ryan certainly took that disdain for truth to heart, as his address was filled with falsehoods from start to finish. Let’s start with the chronologically impossible. Ryan spoke about the GM plant in his hometown of Janesville:

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

Set aside the fact that Paul Ryan, in a fit of anti-Randianism, asked for government funds to save the plant. Set aside that he voted for the big-government auto bailout. Ryan also conveniently forgot to mention that GM announced the closure of the plant in early June 2008. In fact, Ryan and then-Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold (D) and Herb Kohl (D) sent a letter that month to GM CEO Rick Wagoner asking him to reconsider. This was not just before Barack Obama was inaugurated or even elected; it was the same day he won his own party’s nomination. There was no way Obama could have saved that auto plant without also discovering time travel.

Glenn Greenwald: Election 2012 and the media: a vast rightwing conspiracy of stupid - Wednesday night, the GOP's nominee for vice-president, Paul Ryan, delivered a speech loaded with pure, fundamental deceit on its core claims. Yet CNN's Wolf Blitzer chiefly admired 'his beautiful family'.

Joseph Kishore: Romney outlines right-wing agenda in acceptance speech - Apart from this, Romney’s speech, like the convention as a whole, was filled with the vacuous sophisms and insipid rhetoric that are universal in American politics. The speech was broken up by chants of “USA! USA!” from the assembled gathering of right-wing delegates, the semi-fascistic [trash] of American capitalism.

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power. - The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

Dan Gillmor: What Mark Mazzetti's Maureen Dowd CIA tipoff means for the New York Times
Mary Louise: Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Wikipedia: Operation Mockingbird

Apple confirmed Thursday that it has rejected Drones+ from its App Store. The app is designed to alert users whenever someone has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. - Wired’s Danger Room reported that the app, developed by New York-based developer Josh Begley, has been turned down three times. Begley told Wired that he doesn’t understand why the app should be rejected, saying that it’s simply aggregates news that’s already posted elsewhere. When asked for comment, Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the app was turned down because it runs afoul of an App Store guideline against apps that have “objectionable content.” While the app is focused on a narrow subset of news that could be found elsewhere, Begley said that he wanted to use the program to raise awareness about U.S. drone activity. He told Wired that he’s “back to the drawing board” on his idea, though he’s considering trying the app on the Android Market.

The 270 workers would be tried under the "common purpose" doctrine because they were in the crowd which confronted police on 16 August, an official said. Police opened fire, killing 34 miners and sparking a national outcry. The decision to charge the workers was "madness", said former ruling ANC party youth leader Julius Malema.

"The policemen who killed those people are not in custody, not even one of them. This is madness," said Mr Malema, who was expelled from the ANC (African National Congress) earlier this year following a series of disagreements with President Jacob Zuma. "The whole world saw the policemen kill those people."

The killing of the 34 was the most deadly police action since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.

Alex Lantier: South Africa to prosecute strikers targeted by police massacre at Marikana

In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,

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"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

The proven record of Prescott Bush's involvement in financing the Nazi war machine dovetails with the fact that he was part of a criminal cabal that actively sought to impose a fascist coup in America.

Once, right-wing thugs only came out to attack immigrants at night. Now they do so in daylight, unafraid of the consequences because there rarely are any. In recent weeks, the number and severity of the attacks have increased – on 12 August, a 19-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker was fatally stabbed by a gang on motorcycles just streets away from the Greek parliament – and if migrants report attacks to police, they risk being arrested. Not only are crimes against immigrants in Greece considered low priority, much of Golden Dawn's support base comes from police ranks. Exit polls in the May 2012 elections suggested that in some urban districts up to 50 per cent of Greek police voted for the racist group, which now holds 7 per cent of the seats in parliament. The stabbings, beatings and motorbike attacks have become so routine that in many parts of the capital, immigrants are afraid to go out alone.