Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Barack Obama, 2009; “I think that we’ve restored America’s standing in the world…”

Speigel, 2013; America’s NSA intelligence service allegedly targeted the European Union with its spying activities. According to SPIEGEL information, the US placed bugs in the EU representation in Washington and infiltrated its computer network. Cyber attacks were also perpetrated against Brussels in New York and Washington.”
Related – Europeans Wake Up With Severe ‘Hope and Change’ Hangover.
h/t Maz2

CBS;

“There were just signs of unusual happenings for many months, odd behavior like the computers just turning themselves on at night and then turning themselves back off again. I was basically able to verify and obtain information from my sources on the suspicious activity and I reported it to CBS News in January because of course it included CBS equipment and systems.”
Attkisson could not speak about whether the hacking was related to her questions about Benghazi because of “legal counsel,” but she did say her work at that time was primarily on the occurrence.

Related.
Update:

Via

American restoration project continues apace;

Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.
The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging”. […]
The directive’s publication comes as the president plans to confront his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California on Friday over alleged Chinese attacks on western targets.

Document here.

Forward!

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

But wait,there’s more!

The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. […]
The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

Lots more at Drudge, as you might expect.

To no one’s surprise: USA Today affirms NSA also seizing records from AT&T, Bellsouth

LA Times;

The report, which analyzed long-term trends of past recoveries, found that the long-anticipated “Great Recovery” has not yet materialized.
Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. More robust growth will be necessary to bring this recovery in line with previous ones.
“It’s not a recovery,” he wrote. “It’s not even normal growth. It’s bad.”

Related: demand for US gold and silver bullion remains at “unprecedented” high levels almost two months after the historical sell-off.

Find Obama’s new UN Ambassador.

Is being covered by Fox News, and Fox News alone. But you can watch via livestream here.

Thomas Lifson;

The Associated Press has uncovered what may become a vast new scandal for the Obama administration: the possibly widespread use of covert email accounts by political appointees, enabling evasion of sunshine laws designed to protect the public. […]
This looks very bad indeed. Former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has already lost her hob owing to her use of the pseudonym “Richard Windsor” in correspondence with both agency officials and outsiders, including environmental activists. These communications ought to be available through Freedom of Information Act requests, but the use of a covert email account circumvents FOIA search requests.

A practice that extended across multiple branches of government? It’s like it was co-ordinated or something.

“Surprise”?

It appears, however, that Israeli officials were caught by surprise that details of the facility at Tel Shahar, classified so top secret that Israel’s military won’t officially confirm its location between Jerusalem and Ashdod, would be made so public.

After Stuxnet?

NRO;

“Windsor” is the e-mail alias that Lisa Jackson, former head of the EPA and now an environmental adviser to Apple, used to correspond with environmental activists and senior Obama-administration officials, among others.
Windsor, we have learned, was also an employee of significant achievement.
Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.”
The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in the management of e-mail records, cyber-security awareness, and what appears to be a counter-terror initiative that urges federal employees to report suspicious activity.

Has anyone checked to see if he voted?

Q: And she indicated that Washington had requested these specific parts of these specific applications; is that right?
A: Correct.

Good question: “[W]hy didn’t the IG report include this information?”

There’s awkward.

And then, there’s really awkward.

AT NRO: The guy who bugged Mitch McConnell’s office admits that he bugged Mitch McConnell’s office.

McClatchy;

While the developing scandal over the targeting of conservatives by the tax agency has largely focused to date on its scrutiny of groups with words such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, these examples suggest the government was looking at a broader array of conservative groups and perhaps individuals. Their collective experiences at a minimum could spread skepticism about the fairness of a powerful agency that should be above reproach and at worst could point to a secret political vendetta within the government against conservatives.