Mark Jaycox has written a long article on the US Executive Order 12333: “No Oversight, No Limits, No Worries: A Primer on Presidential Spying and Executive Order 12,333“:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3486701

Abstract: Executive Order 12,333 (“EO 12333”) is a 1980s Executive Order signed by President Ronald Reagan that, among other things, establishes an overarching policy framework for the Executive Branch’s spying powers. Although electronic surveillance programs authorized by EO 12333 generally target foreign intelligence from foreign targets, its permissive targeting standards allow for the substantial collection of Americans’ communications containing little to no foreign intelligence value. This fact alone necessitates closer inspection.

This working draft conducts such an inspection by collecting and coalescing the various declassifications, disclosures, legislative investigations, and news reports concerning EO 12333 electronic surveillance programs in order to provide a better understanding of how the Executive Branch implements the order and the surveillance programs it authorizes. The Article pays particular attention to EO 12333’s designation of the National Security Agency as primarily responsible for conducting signals intelligence, which includes the installation of malware, the analysis of internet traffic traversing the telecommunications backbone, the hacking of U.S.-based companies like Yahoo and Google, and the analysis of Americans’ communications, contact lists, text messages, geolocation data, and other information.

After exploring the electronic surveillance programs authorized by EO 12333, this Article proposes reforms to the existing policy framework, including narrowing the aperture of authorized surveillance, increasing privacy standards for the retention of data, and requiring greater transparency and accountability.

Jones • September 28, 2020 8:04 AM

There’s a great New York Times article on the NSA from 1983 that details how the agency was created by executive order and how Congress has never passed any law limiting its power or clarifying its scope:

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/27/magazine/the-silent-power-of-the-nsa.html

There’s another report by the Brennan Center called “What Went Wrong With the FISA Court?” that details the creation of FISA after the Church Committee hearings, and how post-911, FISA has been amended to require the types of activities that FISA was created to prevent:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/what-went-wrong-fisa-court

Both documents are important for understanding what EO 12333 means in practice today.

Cody • September 28, 2020 10:00 AM

Reagan’s EO 12333 replaced Gerald Ford’s EO 11905.
Ford’s 1976 EO was a reluctant response to the shocking revelations of the 1975 Senate ‘Church Committee’, which uncovered widespread illegal domestic spying activity (& illicit forein interventions) by Federal agencies including USArmy, IRS, CIA, NSA. Most of the Church findings were kept classified from the American public.

Church did make public the discovery of “Operation SHAMROCK”, in which the major US telecommunications companies shared all their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s.

This is an unofficial FAQ for the abebooks.com BookSleuth Forum,

This is a collaborative effort. Nobody here is being paid to find books for others, so we would appreciate if you would stick around and try your hand at solving some of them.

METAR Data - raw or decoded

If this is the big pre-debate 'gotcha' that the Democrats and their allies in Big Media had in mind, it’s a bit of a flop. //

The New York Times published an article Sunday evening analyzing several years of tax returns filed by President Donald Trump. This illegal leak of the president’s tax returns revealed nothing we didn’t already know about the Trump business hydra: It is complicated, has a lot of expenses that generate tax deductions, and hires very smart tax advisers to make the whole thing work with as low a legal tax liability as possible. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Democrats also tried this line of attack against Trump in the 2016 debates.

Because most media will breeze over it, it’s important to pause and note the criminal illegality of this story. It is a federal crime for any federal, state, or local government employee to release a tax return without the consent of the taxpayer. Ditto for tax lawyers, CPAs, enrolled agents, and other tax professionals. Interestingly, it’s also illegal to print or publish tax returns or information from them. Section 7213 of the Internal Revenue Code prescribes that each violation here is a felony punishable by $5,000 and/or five years in federal prison, plus the cost of prosecution. Federal employees so convicted are to lose their jobs. //

Turning to the particulars of the tax return, there simply isn’t much here. There’s certainly no smoking gun, nothing that on its face is illegal in some way. The portrait that emerges is one of a very aggressive, wheeler-dealer businessman with a thousand fingers in a thousand pies. Trump allocates money in a wide array of business ventures, generating tax deductions that offset income from these and other enterprises.

Trump himself in the piece describes his approach as “truthful hyperbole,” which is one of those wonderful phrases like “trust but verify,” “non-denial denial,” and “unknown unknowns.” In this case, the phrase tells me, as someone who has had all sorts of tax clients over the years, that the president loves the game. He is always looking for his next business venture and wants to plow all his profits from other lines of work into the next chapter of his life. //

The bottom line is that the Trump business empire is basically a closed circuit — profits from business A are used to prop up business B and acquire business C. That creates a lot of deductions that offset the profit, which in turn means that in some years, very little tax is owed.

Does that make Trump a tax cheat? Not by itself, certainly. The IRS or other tax authorities are of course free to challenge the legality of this capital loss or that consulting expense, but that’s a matter of analyzing facts and circumstances case by case. There’s nothing wrong with taking these deductions in and of themselves. These types of news stories tend to cherry-pick particular tax years and tax deductions that fit the narrative and ignore high tax payment years that do not. //

Here is where the story really falls down. It does not inform the reader about the crucial distinction between tax evasion (illegally misrepresenting income and deductions to fraudulently lessen tax liability) and tax avoidance (legally using available deductions and other tax benefits to legitimately lessen tax liability). This difference is the axle upon which the entire story turns.

Unfortunately for the New York Times, all it has managed to uncover is a very aggressive taxpayer working with a very talented team of tax professionals pushing every legal tax avoidance strategy they can muster. God bless them for it. //

Businesses can and should deduct all ordinary and necessary expenses against business revenue to arrive at business profit — period, end of story. To deny this is to implicitly endorse a gross receipts tax on business income, something tax experts of all persuasions will tell you is the singularly most unfair way to tax businesses.

While the media indulges fantasies about right-wing electoral foul play, the truth reveals numerous left-wing attempts to subvert the electoral process. //

Among Democrats and their media allies, it is an article of faith that Donald Trump is plotting to steal the 2020 election. In August, Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate that Trump was planning to subvert the U.S. Postal Service to prevent ballots from reaching their destinations in time. Amanda Marcotte has a lengthy essay in Salon, detailing all the nefarious means Trump and his supporters will employ to this end.

Vanity Fair recently detailed the planning Democrats are undertaking to thwart Trump’s plots. The Washington Post even ran a news article entitled “Here’s One Way Trump Could Try to Steal the Election, Voting Experts Say.” As with anything the left says about conservatives and Republicans, it’s always useful to bear in mind one important thing: Almost every allegation the left makes against the right is projection.

“Accuse your enemies of what you are doing.” Some variation of this quote has been attributed to leftists from Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Goebbels to Saul Alinsky. The quote’s origin may be unknowable, but the substance is perfectly accurate.

While the media indulges the left’s paranoid fantasies about right-wing electoral subversion, the actual history of 2020 reveals a vast array of attempts by Democrats and left-wing activists to undermine the electoral process. Democrats got the ball rolling in March when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D. Calif., attempted to force her 1,400-page coronavirus bill on the country. Buried beneath all the pork spending were provisions that would have mandated a national system of vote-by-mail — with all the fraud, corruption, and sheer incompetence that would entail.

There is a continued claim that there is no evidence of voter fraud in this country but Project Veritas just discovered one of the biggest schemes and it’s attached to none other than Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the more famous members of “The Squad.”

According to Project Veritas, a ballot harvesting scheme in Minneapolis was uncovered by James O’Keefe and his undercover camera crew. The shocking discovery of hundreds of absentee ballots in his car. What’s more, ballots were taken directly from the elderly, and ballots belonging to young people were traded for cash.

teapartyscientist

I am yawning. I couldn’t care less if Donald Trump exaggerates his wealth. I would have been surprised if he didnt. He just need to keep being a conservative president. Before he was elected these are the kind of things that I didn’t like about him. Now that I have seen him govern, these don’t bother me anymore.

Japan will use fuel to create electricity, Saudi Aramco says
Asian country wants to be a world-leader in hydrogen fuels
The world’s first shipment of blue ammonia is on its way from Saudi Arabia to Japan, where it will be used in power stations to produce electricity without carbon emissions.

Saudi Aramco, which made the announcement Sunday, produced the fuel, which it does by converting hydrocarbons into hydrogen and then ammonia, and capturing the carbon dioxide byproduct. Japan will receive 40 tons of blue ammonia in the first shipment, Aramco said. //

Blue ammonia is a feedstock for blue hydrogen, a version of the fuel made from fossil fuels with a process that captures and stores C02 emissions. Hydrogen from renewable energy that creates no emissions is known as green hydrogen.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, is increasingly trying to counter its reputation for producing dirty energy. In recent months, Aramco has highlighted the low volume of greenhouse gases emitted from pumping Saudi crude, programs to boost gas production and plans to grow carbon-absorbing mangroves.