Thursday, January 2, 2014

TO DO: Fracking/NY "Thousands Rally..."
Source: Sierra Club

https://www.facebook.com/events/645149358864979/?source=1

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Major energy decisions will be made in 2014 that will dictate the fate of New York's environment and economy for the next 50 years. Governor Cuomo will have to decide whether to advance fracking or to ban it outright. He will have to decide whether we repower the state's crumbling energy infrastructure with more dirty fossil fuels or usher in a clean energy revolution with solar, wind, and high efficiency technologies. He will also have to decide whether to listen to the monied interests of the fossil fuel industry or the millions calling for a clean energy economy. This is where you come in.

On January 8th Governor Cumo will deliver his state of the state address before an audience of some of the states most influential decision makers in the state. Will you join the thousands outside demanding a bold new energy policy?

What: Thousands Rally Against Fracking at Governor Cuomo’s State of the State Address

When: Wednesday, January 8th, 2014

Time: 11:30am – 3pm

Where: New York State Capitol Empire Plaza, Hallways to the Concourse, S Mall Arterial, Albany, NY 12242 (warm and indoors)

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Article: Fracking
Source: RT

http://rt.com/usa/flammable-water-dakota-fracking-023/

Fracking hot: N. Dakota man ‘sets tap water on fire’

Published time: December 31, 2013 14:59
Edited time: January 01, 2014 12:09

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Still from a video uploaded on YouTube by user@Jacob haughney

Tags

Ecology, Fracking, Gas, USA

A video made by a man from North Dakota shows him cautiously holding a lighter up against the stream of water coming out of his tap, prompting large flames to rise up into the faucet. North Dakota has been home to a fracking boom over the past few years.

“First time I did it, it was a huge fireball [that] took up the entire sink – so that's why I'm a little jumpy doing it. I don't want to blow up the bathroom here,” he laughed during the demonstration. A huge flame shot up as the running water appeared to catch alight.

“Really weird, right?” he questioned as he switched the camera off. The video has had over 400,000 views. It was only uploaded within the last three weeks, garnering attention on a global scale. The video prompted one commenter to note sarcastically that there was “nothing like a refreshing glass of fire.”

Jacob Haughney, who made the video, tells the camera that he works in the North Dakota oil fields

His stunt with the tap water seems reminiscent of notorious 2010 documentary film ‘Gasland’ when a Colorado resident conducts a similar feat.

The scene in particular has been thrown into question by investigative journalist, Phelim McAleer, who postulated that residents in the man’s neighborhood had been able to light tap water on fire since around the 1930s because of naturally occurring methane. The filmmaker later said that his findings were irrelevant.

However, Haughney’s video has sparked speculation that the North Dakota fracking boom and nearby oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing is responsible for the apparently flammable tap water.

A Louisiana family noted a similar incident at the beginning of December, and they blamed a gas company for nearby drilling. The fire “blew up and caught the fringe of the curtains,” according to the daughter Sarah Evans, who spoke to local station, KSLA12

The highly controversial process of injecting water, sand and various chemicals into layers of rock in hopes of releasing oil and gas deep underground has drawn harsh criticism from environmentalists.

While supporters say fracking brings jobs and opportunities for energy independence, detractors have pointed to exaggerated employment claims – not to mention the health risks related to chemicals used in the practice.

And experts say the flammable water could be caused by a high concentration of methane in the line, which occasionally occurs naturally.

In October, researchers found high levels of radioactivity, salts, and metals in water and sediment located downstream from a treatment facility which processes fracking wastewater from oil and gas production sites in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale formation.

At the end of November, northern Texas towns experienced some 16 earthquakes over a period of three weeks, while in December, opponents of the practice experienced a rare victory when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that a 2012 law allowing gas companies to drill anywhere in the state unconstitutional.

North Dakota is the second largest oil-producing state in the US, reaping more than 911,000 barrels of shale gas on a daily basis.

TO DO: Snowden/NSA
Source: ACLU

President Obama: Grant Edward Snowden Immunity Now

GOAL: 35,000

29,912

29,912 people support this campaign. Help us get to 35,000!

Edward Snowden is a great American who deserves full immunity for his patriotic acts. And we’re proud to serve as his legal advisors.

When Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA, he single-handedly reignited a global debate about government surveillance and our most fundamental rights as individuals.

And a federal judge just vindicated Snowden’s actions by declaring unconstitutional the NSA’s spying program, labeling it “Orwellian”— adding that James Madison would be “aghast.”

For more than 12 years, the ACLU has been fighting to end government surveillance that invades the rights and lives of millions of Americans with virtually no oversight. But when our years-long case against mass surveillance finally reached the Supreme Court, it was dismissed for lack of evidence of the secret programs. Snowden provided that evidence, at great personal risk.

Right now, Snowden still lives under threat—exiled in Russia far from his home and his family, and the victim of ongoing public attacks by the NSA and their surveillance allies.

And recently, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said that Snowden “ought to swing from a tall oak tree” for exposing the NSA’s illegal programs.

Despite all this, in a recent CBS News interview, a top NSA official opened the door to offering Snowden immunity, under certain conditions (though we firmly believe it should be unconditional).

Now if tens of thousands of us stand together and tell President Obama to grant Snowden immunity, we have a real chance of bringing him home.

President Obama:

Edward Snowden is an American patriot. End the public attacks and grant him full immunity now.

Article: Snowden/NSA
Source: NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: January 1, 2014

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Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

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The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately,found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

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Mr. Snowden is currently charged in a criminal complaintwith two violations of the Espionage Act involving unauthorized communication of classified information, and a charge of theft of government property. Those three charges carry prison sentences of 10 years each, and when the case is presented to a grand jury for indictment, the government is virtually certain to add more charges, probably adding up to a life sentence that Mr. Snowden is understandably trying to avoid.

The president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower.

“If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.

In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:

■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.

■ The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.

■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.

■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)

■ The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.

■ A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.

The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr. Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on January 2, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.