U.S. Government Now Monitoring Your Phone Calls

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/06/one-nation-under-surveillance-u-s-government-now-monitoring-your-phone-calls/

Last evening, The Guardian newspaper published a document classified by the U.S. government as Top Secret, revealing that the Obama administration is engaged in a domestic surveillance program involving the phone records of tens of millions of Americans. 

The Guardian article is written by Glenn Greenwald, formerly a columnist for Salon and author of the 2011 book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. The publisher describes the book as a no-holds-barred indictment of a two-tiered system of justice that "ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world…[Greenwald] shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud." 

This morning, the New York Times is characterizing the surveillance program as "collecting business communications records." The Times appears to base that assumption on the fact that the company that has been secretly releasing the phone records is Verizon Business Network Services. But according to BusinessWeek, that division of Verizon "serves residential customers, businesses, and communications wholesalers, as well as federal, state, and local government entities." Ironically, it also provides security products to its customers. 

If one objective of the government was to learn which federal government workers were leaking information to journalists, this would appear to provide those records for calls made using Verizon. It is not yet known if other telecommunication companies were involved. 

The Top Secret court order was issued by Judge Roger Vinson on April 25 of this year and is set to expire on July 19, 2013 if not renewed. Vinson serves on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) which has authority in these matters under the U.S.A. Patriot Act. The court order was requested by the FBI but the order instructs Verizon to turn over the records to the National Security Agency (NSA). 

The court order does not apply to the contents of the communications, just the metadata which would include the phone numbers of both parties on a call, location, call duration, and time the calls were made. The court order includes calls made within the United States as well as calls "between the United States and abroad." 

The reaction from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was swift.

rest http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/06/one-nation-under-surveillance-u-s-government-now-monitoring-your-phone-calls/

NSA Demands Verizon Telephone Records for All U.S. Calls

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/nsa-demands-verizon-telephone-records-all-us-calls?utm_source=OV+Newsletter+List+2&utm_campaign=9cf121e67a-OV_Daily_Newsletter6_6_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5f6757bd76-9cf121e67a-10859405

The National Security Agency demanded that telecommunications giant, Verizon, hand over all phone records for calls made in the United States.

Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian reported a top secret court order requires that Verizon turn over records "on an ongoing daily basis" for all calls "wholly within the United States, including local calls" and also "between the United States and abroad."

The order does not include the content of the calls, but it does collect the "originating and terminating telephone numbers" time and duration of the call, referred to as "metadata."

The order bans Verizon from telling any of its employees about it unless it is necessary to help them comply with the order.

The four-page order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is dated April 25. Because the NSA is collecting metadata and not communications information, no warrant is required.

"This confirms what we had long suspected," wrote Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "We've been suing over this since 2006."

Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman, declined to comment on the matter. It is unclear whether other cell phone providers were also issued a similar order.

The order should expire on July 19 unless it is renewed. Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to collect a variety of information without a warrant in the interest of national security, including expense reports and telephone records.

The EFF has long said the government hides behind Section 215 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to violate privacy.

"It's time to start the national dialogue about our rights in the digital age," said the EFF website. "It's time to end the NSA's unconstitutional domestic surveillance program."

Cohn said the Verizon order affects "millions and millions of innocent people. There's no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation."

She added: "I don't think the government's been getting away with this because everybody thinks they're right." Instead it is because "they've kept the details sufficiently secret" to avoid public dissent.

Sources: The Guardian, Washington Post

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Un-rigging the Rate-Shock Debate The truth about what those healthy 25-year-olds will pay

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113392/obamacare-rate-shock-debate-subsidies-make-huge-difference?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371

Many of us have been wondering whether it's possible to have an honest, reasonable debate about Obamacare. To my pleasant surprise, one may finally be starting.

It's about the same subject that got me all worked up early this week: Whether Obamacare will cause "rate shock" among people buying insurance coverage on their own, through the new insurance exchanges. And if you pay attention to the right people, you'll discern a basic consensus about the facts.

The consensus goes like this: Some people buying coverage on the exchanges will pay more for insurance than they do today. Some people will pay less. The benefits will be better and the policies will be more widely available, but those changes require their own trade-offs, like forcing some people to get more coverage than they want. The insurance offerings from California—the announcement that set off this debate—were better than most of us were expecting. But the numbers in other states could look a lot worse.

Among these writers, who span left and right, plenty of disagreement remains.¹ Is it fair to ask some young and healthy people to pay more for their insurance? How will the people who see higher premiums react? What will that reaction do to the system as a whole? But, as The Daily Beast's Megan McArdle put it, these questions are in many ways more "theological" than "technical." They come down to values and to predictions that, at this early date, are simply impossible to confirm.

Still, I think many Obamacare critics and quite possibly some of its supporters don't fully grasp the significance of one key factor: the subsidies.

To review: Obamacare reorganizes the market for people buying coverage on their own, so that they are no longer at the mercy of insurers who pick and choose the healthiest customers. This "non-group" market is pretty small, in relative terms: The vast majority of Americans will continue to get insurance from employers, Medicare, or Medicaid. But for insurers who sell non-group coverages, the rules for conducting business are changing dramaticaly. Under Obamacare, these insurers must provide all beneficiaries with a core set of benefits, for example, and they can't deny coverage to people who have pre-existing conditions. Insurers are reacting to this by raising premiums. They really don't have a choice, since they can no longer skimp on benefits or avoid taking on sick people.

If you want to make Obamacare look really bad, you stop telling the story right there

rest http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113392/obamacare-rate-shock-debate-subsidies-make-huge-difference?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371

Amish Are Getting Fracked Their religion prohibits lawsuits—and the energy companies know it

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113354/energy-companies-take-advantage-amish-prohibition-lawsuits?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371

It was late 2010 when a chipper agent for Kenoil, Inc., a drilling company in Eastern Ohio, drove to the nearby hamlet of Millersburg to visit Lloyd Miller. His car slithered down the hill overlooking the Millers's home and white farm buildings, past a set of pine green drums, pipes, and gauges—a shallow oil well that Kenoil had drilled on the Millers's property many years ago—and stopped in front of the aluminum barn where the family, who are Amish dairy farmers, lodges its horses and buggy. The agent had an unexpected business proposition for Lloyd and his wife, Edna: Kenoil wanted to lease the right to drill on the Millers's land for shale gas. And for a lease of five years, he could offer them $10 an acre that same day.

The timing felt providential. The couple, who have several young children, were still paying off a 2006 loan they'd used to buy a small farm adjoining theirs. Gazing in the direction of his 158 acres, as he talked with me at his kitchen table in March, Miller said, "We thought, 'Hey, that's $1,500 we didn't have.'" Still, he asked the agent about rumors of farmers who'd been given much larger signing bonuses in similar deals. He remembered the agent grinning dismissively as he said farms in the area were not leasing for more than what was offered. Miller, 46, considered the Kenoil well on the hill, and the years of good relations he had enjoyed with the company. "I just trusted him," he said. The Millers signed the lease.

It was maybe two weeks, Miller figured, before they realized the enormity of what they'd done. First, their local paper, The Bargain Hunter, carried a front-page story advising farmers their land could be worth hundreds per acre to oil and gas companies. He compared notes with landowners nearby while on trips to the sale barns where farmers trade livestock, and when other farmers delivered hay for his cows. Miller is physically imposing—stout and broad-shouldered—but also painfully timid. When pressed on what his neighbors had earned, he gazed for a long time at Edna, who, with one of their daughters, was chalking the outline of a man's pantleg onto a bolt of wool rolled out on the table. "My wife and I took turns kicking each other in the butt." He paused for a long while. "Our ten dollars an acre compared to $1,000."

Indeed, many area farms had leased for thousands. Even by a conservative calculation, the couple said they had missed out on a $79,000 signing bonus. (Kenoil declined to comment). Several times, they have felt the sting of their mistake, as during last year's drought, when a decimated corn crop forced them to buy extra feed for the milking cows, costing thousands of dollars. The Millers have also tried to undo their misstep. Around the beginning of 2011, Lloyd presented his lease and his story to a lawyer, who said that by telling the Millers that $10 an acre represented the best deal available to them, the agent had committed fraud.

rest http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113354/energy-companies-take-advantage-amish-prohibition-lawsuits?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371

Verizon handed over data to the NSA. Why don't Google or Facebook?

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113399/nsa-collecting-verizon-records-why-internet-companies-fight-back?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371

Verizon may not have been able to fight a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, revealed last night by Guardian, to hand over subscribers' call data to the National Security Administration. But over the past decade, the phone company—and its competitors—haven't tried very hard to resist such government surveillance.

As USA Today reported in 2006, the telecom industry started working with the NSA in 2001 to assemble call records of "tens of millions" of Americans. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal detailed how the program had expanded to emails, Internet searches, and bank and credit-card transactions, allegedly including copies of all data going in and out of an AT&T server in San Francisco. Only Qwest, with its tiny market share and a chairman soon afterward convicted of insider trading, declined to participate.

Phone calls, though, aren't the way everyone communicates anymore. A terrorist could just as easily conduct business over Google Voice or Skype, which is encrypted. And troves of information are stored in cloud-based services, on social networks, and on e-commerce websites.

Luckily for consumers, Internet companies tend to be much less willing to share your data with Big Brother. Many companies,¹ for example, demand that law enforcement get a warrant if it wants your email, even though the law doesn't explicitly require one for older messages. Twitter, Google, and Microsoft publish transparency reports that show how many times the government requested data, and how often their requests were granted. All of those companies have joined with public interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to form the Digital Due Process coalition, which is advocating for updates to privacy law for the Internet age. Google even challenged a national security letter this year. And with the notable exception of Yahoo! and Amazon, these companies do a whole lot better than the telecom ones on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy scorecard—where Verizon rates the worst.

So why is Silicon Valley so much better about safeguarding your stuff? Here are a few possible reasons.

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NSA Secretly Collecting Phone Records Of All U.S. Verizon Calls

The National Security Administration is secretly collecting phone record information for all U.S. calls on the Verizon network. "Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls," reports The Guardian, which broke the story of the top-secret project after it obtained record of a court order mandating Verizon hand over the information.

The contents of the call are not recorded and it is also not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone carrier complying with the massive spying project. The court order concerns all calls to, from, and within the United States.

With this so-called "metadata," the government knows "the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication," explains the Guardian.

The Senate's tech-savviest member, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has been discretely warning citizens of these kinds of secretive government projects. "There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows," wrote Wyden and Senator Mark Udall to embattled Attorney Eric Holder.

The order apparently draws from a 2001 Bush-era provision in the Patriot Act (50 USC section 1861). The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.

Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.

Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it's justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

Either way, this is a massive PR disaster for Verizon


rest http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/report-nsa-secretly-collecting-phone-records-of-all-verizon-calls/?ncid=tcdaily

James O'Keefe to pay $100k to ACORN employee @foxnews @hanity @gop

from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/04/1213777/-James-O-Keefe-to-pay-100k-to-ACORN-employee#

It seems that the master of the cleverly edited—if highly deceptive—video reel is now being required to pay the sum of $100,000 to Juan Carlos Vera, a one time California employee of ACORN. Mr. Vera had been portrayed by O'Keefe as being a willing participant when O'Keefe and his accomplice, Hanna Giles, proposed smuggling young women into the United States to work as prostitutes.

Forbes (yes, the financial magazine)

On the day when the House GOP re-de-funds ACORN, said original de-funding being  based on this heavily edited dishonest sleazy video produced by this convicted felon, it is worth noting that ACORN was innocent and O'Keefe was guilty of crimes.

Let's hope that other ACORN employees follow suit.

Sign here to support Senator Harkin's bill to strengthen Social Security: http://j.mp/10XlSdI

http://j.mp/10XlSdI

from https://www.facebook.com/moveon

Federal Appeals Court Judge Said Blacks, Hispanics ‘Predisposed To Crime,’ Lawsuit Alleges

from http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/05/2106061/federal-appeals-court-judge-said-blacks-hispanics-predisposed-to-crime-lawsuit-alleges/

A federal judge who, until recently, led what is arguably the nation's most conservative federal appeals court said blacks and Hispanics are more prone to commit crimes, according to a lawsuit filed this week. Although the remarks by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones were not recorded, five students and one attorney who attended a February event at the University of Pennsylvania law school signed affidavits attesting to what she said that day, the Associated Press reports.

Among her comments were that "racial groups like African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime," are "prone to commit acts of violence," and more likely than people of other ethnicities to be involved in "heinous" acts. She also said the death penalty provides a public service by allowing an inmate to "make peace with God," citing an article called "Hanging Concentrates the Mind," according to the Austin Chronicle. She said claims that the death penalty is discriminatory, imposed arbitrarily, and violate international law are just "red herrings" used by those who oppose the death penalty; that claims of "mental retardation" disgust her; and that Mexicans would prefer to be on death row in the United States than serving prison terms in other countries.

Jones, a Reagan appointee who was chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit until last October, is known for her hostile and discriminatory comments. She erupted at one of her fellow judges during oral argument in 2011, and told him to "shut up" while asking him to leave the courtroom. And she wrote a dissenting opinion claiming that a woman who "was repeatedly propositioned, was groped and grabbed, [had] pornography [] placed in her locker, and [had] other employees broadcast[] obscene comments about her over the company's public address system" did not experience sexual harassment. Jones is also one of the most frequent attendees of junkets for judges, corporate-sponsored legal education getaways.

The lawsuit by several civil rights organizations alleges Jones' comments amount to judicial misconduct, and is signed by nationally known legal ethicists. Ethicist James McCormack wrote in an affidavit accompanying the complaint:

I view this episode as a very sad and unfortunate chapter in the history of our federal judiciary. Most federal judges strive mightily to act fairly and impartially and to strengthen, rather than erode, public confidence in our system of justice. … Judge Jones's conduct militates in the opposite direction. In my opinion, unless an appropriate disciplinary authority strongly disapproves of … Jones's statements and properly addresses her flagrant misconduct, our judicial system – and our federal appellate courts in particular – will suffer the consequences of diminished public respect and confidence.

Jones' alleged comments dismissing racism and the death penalty come while at least one death penalty case pending before her alleges that racially biased statements tainted the case. In fact, the complaint alleges that Jones made comments on several death penalty cases now pending before the court, in violation of legal ethics rules.

nra blames movies for gun violence but made list of coolest gun movies ever

from http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2013/05/21/the-nras-amazing-hypocrisy-about-hollywood-gun-violence/

The NRA's Amazing Hypocrisy About Hollywood Gun Violence

One of the NRA's coolest gun-violence movies ever.

In his press conference after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, last December, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association blamed mass murders on everyone from legislators who pass gun control laws to the makers of videogames–everyone except gun manufacturers and sellers, as I wrote at the time.

He was especially hard on Hollywood. "Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?," he said. "In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society."

The NRA is singing a very different tune today. Its publication American Rifleman just came out with its list of the 10 "coolest gun movies" ever. They include The Terminator, admired for how "Arnold Schwarzenegger played an advanced killing machine that is almost completely unstoppable," and The Godfather, which "affected millions in many different ways with its cinematography, plot and underlying themes, such as how with determination anyone can become powerful, even if that power is of the criminal nature."

Zombieland makes the list because it not only "has introduced a new group of people to preparedness and firearms" but "has also provided some awesome targets and produced a new type of training that is fun and useful in a world-gone-crazy situation. Besides, the final fight scene is just awesome." The Matrix is cited for

a controversial scene that portrayed a shootout in an almost dancelike way, paired with the high-pace song Spybreak by the Propellerheads. This followed a scene containing a line that could easily be the catchphrase of many gun owners when asked what they need: "Guns. Lots of guns."

The full list of all-time cool gun movies is:

1. Red Dawn
2. The Terminator
3. The Alamo
4. Die Hard
5. The Godfather
6. Zombieland
7. The Matrix
8. The Delta Force
9. The Road Warrior
10. Tremors

So now the NRA is praising, among other things, a movie hero who's an "almost unstoppable" "killing machine," a career in criminality, and making a shootout a dance with great music. Talking Points Memo's Hunter Walker writes that "TPM called the NRA to ask how celebrating gun movies fit with the group's past comments criticizing Hollywood. No one from the organization responded."

See the NRA's full slideshow of the coolest-ever gun movies here.

rest at http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2013/05/21/the-nras-amazing-hypocrisy-about-hollywood-gun-violence/

some US senators killed background check bill but are saying they voted for it

Like  Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) touted his co-sponsorship of an NRA-backed bill and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) put out a misleading pro-gun ad.

How the NRA Ends: A bigger, richer, meaner gun control movement has arrived.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113292/nras-end-real-gun-control-movement-has-arrived#

On April 17, the bill to expand background checks on gun buyers failed in the Senate, and the fatalistic shrugs in Washington were so numerous they were nearly audible. The legislation had been a modest bipartisan compromise, supported by 90 percent of the public and lobbied for hard by the president. A group backed by Michael Bloomberg had spent $12 million on ads pressuring senators to vote "yes." When the bill fell short—by just five votes—it seemed to confirm a Beltway article of faith: There's no point messing with the National Rifle Association (NRA). And that, many assumed, was the last we'd be hearing about gun reform.

But then something unexpected happened. Some of the senators who'd voted "no" faced furious voters back home. Even before Erica Lafferty, the daughter of murdered Sandy Hook Elementary principal Dawn Hochsprung, confronted New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte at a particularly tense town hall, Ayotte's disapproval rating in the state had jumped from 35 to 46 percent—half the respondents said her "no" vote made them less likely to support her.¹ In Pennsylvania, which has the second-highest concentration of NRA members in the country, the bill's Republican co-sponsor, Pat Toomey, saw his approval reach a record high. One of the country's best-known gun-rights advocates, Robert Levy, said the NRA's "stonewalling of the background-check proposal was a mistake, both politically and substantively."²

In the Senate, the backlash had an effect. Some Republicans who had opposed the bill, such as Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Jeff Flake of Arizona, signaled they might be open to changing their minds. Majority Leader Harry Reid, once a dependable NRA ally, spoke about taking the rare step of bringing the bill back for another vote. Senator Joe Manchin, the bill's Democratic co-sponsor, is still actively courting support from his colleagues. "It's not going away," he told me.

Why did these developments take so many elected officials and pundits by surprise? As New York Times columnist Tom Edsall has pointed out, political science research shows that politicians consistently overestimate the conservatism of their constituents. But in this case, there was something more debilitating at work. The political class often lets old assumptions blind it to shifting realities.³ And the absolute power of the NRA is one of the oldest and least-tested assumptions in Washington.

Getty Images

AN UNLIKELY CHAMPION

Senator Joe Manchin says his gun reform bill is "not going away."

The NRA, of course, has real clout. Like many other groups, it lobbies in Washington and state capitals, buys ads and deploys activists during elections, and maintains a ratings system that grades elected officials and candidates on their support for its goals. What sets the NRA apart is its relentless invocation of the Second Amendment, the single-mindedness of its supporters, and the inchoate nature of its hold on politicians. Its approval has come to signify not merely support for gun ownership, but American authenticity. For many in Congress, it's "a cultural thing," says one veteran Senate staffer. "You have to pass a cultural test for [constituents] to listen to you on the other stuff."

And yet for some time now, the NRA's power has been more a matter of entrenched wisdom than actual fact. Gun ownership is declining—from half of households in the 1970s to a third today. A slew of senators and governors have won campaigns in red or purple states despite NRA F ratings, including Tim Kaine (Virginia), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bill Nelson (Florida), who has campaigned on gun control but has won majorities even in deeply conservative Panhandle counties. Senator Chris Murphy, a rookie Connecticut Democrat who has taken a lead on the issue since the Newtown massacre, points out that, of the 16 Senate races the NRA participated in last year, 13 of its candidates lost. "The NRA is just all mythology," he says. "The NRA does not win elections anymore."

The reason for the gap between perception and reality is that, for many years, the NRA has had no real opposition. This has given the debate a strange quality: For gun-control advocates, the recent challenge has been less about persuading politicians on policy grounds and more about trying to convince them that the conventional wisdom about gun politics is wrong.

rest at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113292/nras-end-real-gun-control-movement-has-arrived#

writer attends a "build party" where anyone can make an AK-47 with untraceable parts - all legal

from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/ak-47-semi-automatic-rifle-building-party

The wooden and steel parts I need to build my untraceable AK-47 fit within a slender, 15-by-12-inch cardboard box. I first lay eyes on them one Saturday morning in the garage of an eggshell-white industrial complex near Los Angeles. Foldout tables ring the edges of the room, surrounding two orange shop presses. The walls, dusty and stained, are lined with shelves of tools. I'm with a dozen other guys, some sipping coffee, others making introductions over the buzz of an air compressor. Most of us are strangers, but we share a common bond: We are just eight hours away from having our very own AK-47—one the government will never know about.

The AK-47, perhaps the world's best-known gun, is so easy to make and so hard to break that the Soviet-designed original has spawned countless variants, updated and modified versions churned out by factories all over the globe. Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun's key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we're assembling the guns for our own "personal use," whatever that may entail, we're not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California's stringent assault weapons ban, that's perfectly within the law.

Among those ready to get going at this "build party" (none of whom wanted their names used) are a father-son duo getting in some bonding time and a well-bellied sixtysomething with a white Fu Manchu who "loves" the click-ack! sound of a round being chambered. Assembling a Romanian variant is a builder wearing a camo jacket and a hat embroidered with an AR-15 rifle above the legend "Come and take it." His knuckle tattoos read "PRAY HARD."

We crowd in as our three hosts, all expert gun assemblers, hand out waivers with a list of questions: Are you a convicted felon? Ever been dishonorably discharged from the military? Addicted to drugs? Mentally unstable? The guy in camo looks up and, to much laughter, says, "So it's all 'No,' right?"

The hosts collect our paperwork without checking IDs. We don eye protection and gloves, and soon the garage is abuzz with the whir of grinders, cutters, and drills. Sales of receivers—which house the mechanical parts, making a gun a gun—are tightly regulated, so my kit comes with a pre-drilled flat steel platform. Legally, it's just an American-made hunk of metal, but one bend in a vise later and, voilà, it's a receiver, ready for trigger guards to be riveted on. Sparks fly as receiver rails to guide the bolt mechanism are cut, welded into place, and heat-treated. The front and rear trunnions, which will hold the barrel and stock, are attached to the receivers.

Building an AK from parts requires no background checks or serial numbers. Bryan Schatz

Now I need a hand. A stout guy with caramel skin, tired eyes, jet-black hair, and a penchant for peppering his sentences with F-bombs assists me. He starts hammering the barrel into the front trunnion. "If this were an [AR-15] and we did this, we'd be crying doing so much damage," he says. "But an AK, you can drop this thing in shit, drag it through the mud, smash it against the ground, pick it up, pull the charging handle, and keep shooting. That's why they're so popular."

Durability and simplicity are why AKs have become the most widely distributed guns on the planet since their 1947 debut. They began proliferating in the late '50s, when the Soviets permitted "fraternal countries" to manufacture Kalashnikovs at will. Soon they spread from one hot spot to another, their reputation for ruggedness and reliability growing along the way. Now there are as many as 70 million in circulation. Colombian drug lord Pedro Guerrero and Saddam Hussein's son Uday had them plated in gold. Both Hezbollah and Mozambique display them on their flags.

rest at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/ak-47-semi-automatic-rifle-building-party

petition drive to overturn Maryland's new, tough gun laws has failed

from http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/petition-drive-to-overturn-maryland-gun-control-law-fails-official-says/2013/06/01/80044350-cad9-11e2-9245-773c0123c027_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend

A petition drive that sought to derail Maryland's new gun-control law has failed, a state official said Saturday.

Opponents of the law did not turn in an initial batch of signatures by the deadline at midnight on Friday, meaning the law championed by Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) will stand, said Steve Ackerman, a spokesman for the Maryland Secretary of State's Office.

Ackerman also confirmed that his office had not received any petitions from a separate group seeking to halt Maryland's law repealing the death penalty, another O'Malley initiative.

In both cases, opponents were seeking enough signatures to force statewide votes on the new laws in November 2014.

To comply with a constitutional requirement, petition-gatherers had to present the first third of a required 55,736 signatures to the state on Friday. If that threshold were crossed, the remainder would be due a month later.

Leaders of Free State Petitions, the group coordinating the gun-control petition, said little about their progress on Friday.

MDPetitions.com, the group spearheading the petition drive on the death penalty repeal, acknowledged at a news conference Friday that they had fallen short of the 18,579 signatures required for the drive to continue.

The new gun-control law signed by O'Malley bans assault weapons and limits magazines to no more than 10 bullets. Residents buying a gun are required to give fingerprints and obtain a photo ID similar to a driver's license. They also have to spend eight hours in a gun-safety training class.

Some pro-gun groups decided not to participate in the petition drive, arguing that legal action is a better course for overturning the law.

MDPetitions.com, which helped put three measures on the ballot last year, including one on same-sex marriage, also sat out the gun-control fight.

Vincent DeMarco, president of Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence, which lobbied for passage of O'Malley's bill, said he was happy to avoid a long referendum fight.

"We are thrilled that the new law will take effect as planned, and we look forward to making it a model for the nation on how to prevent gun violence," DeMarco said.

gun nut sent letters that contained poisonous ricin to Mayor Bloomberg & President Obama

from http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Mayor-Mike-Bloomberg-Ricin-Letter-Guns--209504641.html

UPDATE: Texas Man Being Questioned in Mail Threats to Obama, Bloomberg

A threatening letter was mailed to President Obama that is similar to two letters containing poisonous ricin sent to Mayor Bloomberg and his anti-gun group, officials confirmed Thursday. 

The letter, first reported by NBC 4 New York, is being tested for ricin. It was received Wednesday at an off-site facility, and did not reach the White House, according to the Secret Service.

"This letter has been turned over to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force for testing and investigation," said Brian Leary, a Secret Service spokesman.

The text of that mailing was identical to the letters sent to the mayor and his gun group, which threatened: "what's in this letter is nothing compared to what I've got planned for you," police and law enforcement sources said. 

One letter was discovered at City Hall's mail sorting facility at 100 Gold St. on Friday, a law enforcement source told NBC 4 New York. It appeared to contain a pink, oily substance when a mail worker came across it and was immediately flagged as suspicious.

An initial field test didn't bring up any sign of ricin, a source said. But more preliminary testing Wednesday showed the letter tested positive for ricin.

An identical letter containing ricin was sent to the Mayors Against Illegal Guns headquarters in Washington, D.C. and was opened on Monday, police said.

The mailings put New York City officials on edge; Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said other suspicious letters were investigated at downtown locations, including two at the office of the city's public advocate, who is a Democratic mayoral candidate, and another near City Hall. Those were said to be unrelated to the ricin scare.

According to law enforcement sources, the three similar threatening letters were postmarked May 20 in Shreveport, La. and sent without a return address or signature. Sources said the NYPD tried to pull fingerprints off the letter discovered at the city's mail sorting site, but nothing usable was found. Authorities also plan to check for any possible DNA.

It wasn't known if any viable forensic evidence was discovered on the letters sent to Washington or the White House. All three mailings read in part: "You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional God given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die."

Bloomberg is the founder of the anti-gun group and has emerged as one of the country's most potent gun-control advocates, able to press his case with both his public position and his private money.

On Wednesday, the mayor said he didn't know what pushed whoever sent the ricin-laced letters to do so, but that his anti-gun efforts would not be deterred, despite the threats in the letter addressed to him.

"There's 12,000 people that are going to get killed this year with guns and 19,000 that are going to commit suicide with guns, and we're not going to walk away from those efforts," said Bloomberg, adding that he didn't "feel threatened."

Civilian workers who came into contact with the letters have not shown symptoms of being poisoned by the ricin, police said. Some members of NYPD's emergency service unit who did come into contact with the opened letter in New York initially showed some minor symptoms of ricin exposure, but the symptoms have since abated.

Bloomberg visited mailroom employees Thursday and thanked them for their service, a spokesman said. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control, ricin is a poison found naturally in castor beans. Symptoms can include difficulty breathing, vomiting and redness on the skin depending on how the affected person comes into contact with the poison.

Police said the letter sent to the anti-gun group was opened by Mark Glaze, the director. He was working out of the offices of The Raben Group, a Washington lobbying firm where he keeps an office. 

Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which now counts more than 700 mayors nationwide as members. It lobbies federal and state lawmakers, and it aired a spate of television ads this year urging Congress to expand background checks and pass other gun-control measures after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The background check proposal failed in a Senate vote in April, and other measures gun-control advocates wanted — including a ban on sales of military-style assault weapons — went by the wayside.

 

Separately, Bloomberg also has made political donations to candidates who share his desire for tougher gun restrictions. His super PAC, Independence USA, put $2.2 million into a Democratic primary this winter for a congressional seat in Illinois, for example. Bloomberg's choice, former state lawmaker Robin Kelly, won the primary and the seat.

Copyright Associated Press / NBC New York