Before Occupy Wall Street, I had followed livestream news - you likely did, as well - except it was usually big breaking news on CNN, or MSNBC and a headline would say "Watch live here." Now there are at least as many livestreamers are there are occupy movements in the nation, and since I've been here at Crooksand Liars' OccupyAmerica site, there have been times when I've been keeping my eyes on up to six different streams simultaneously. The livestreamers are worlds apart from our msm's livestreamed news, there are no edits, no scripts, and you always see the truth in their news.

As our own Tina Dupuy writes in a new article at Alternet, "You can sum up livestreamers as those who came to protest and stayed to tell the story. They’re armed with a smart phone, an app and an audience of people at home watching every frame."

Dupuy points out that as Occupy has evolved, that caught in the middle of the debate over peaceful protests vs. diversity of tactics are the livestreamers. What you see on their livestreams are events exactly as they happen. You can't control what everyone is doing while you're filming. If police throw tear gas at protesters, you'll see it live, and by the same token if an occupier throws a bottle or a brick at police that's what you'll see as well. “People are tired of being lied to by the media,” Tim Pool tells Dupuy, and adds, “Transparency is paramount.”

The important moments - and they are countless - of the occupy movement that are captured by the livestreamers are what their new-found profession are all about. The moments that will become part of history, and re-told for generations to come. Events that might not even be believed if it weren't for the citizen journalists.

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[Note from the Editor: Update at the end of this post.]

Still trying to figure out what happened on Thursday night in Oakland? It isn't any wonder if you follow mainly the msm, like the above local ABC affiliate above. Here is the "report" that went along with this video:

A window at President Barack Obama's Oakland campaign office was smashed Friday night as a group of protesters marched through downtown.

A group of 100-200 Occupy Oakland protesters began marching down Telegraph Avenue after being denied a permit to protest near the First Friday event at Art Murmur.

A few Obama campaign volunteers were working inside the office when the window was smashed in with a brick. No one was hurt.

Police made no arrests.

An error in this report states Friday, when it was actually Thursday.

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An exclusive early release just for CrooksandLiars - Occupy America: JENNIE ARNAU’s “Better Luck Next Time” is featured on Occupy This Album scheduled for a 5/15 release through Sony Music with all proceeds from the album going directly to the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Better Luck Next Time” is the follow-up single to Jennie’s 2010 release Chasing Giants (MRI) which was praised by Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy as “her most fully realized set of songs yet. If you care about the struggle for love and happiness - and who among us doesn't? -- This one's for you.”

After being inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and other worldwide protests and upheavals including those in Egypt, Syria, Greece and Italy to name a few, Jennie approached this track with a sense of urgency. “I immersed myself in listening to protest and folk singers of the past and present including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco and Steve Earle and they emboldened me to write ‘Better Luck Next Time’. I was actually nervous as I didn’t want to compare myself to such important names but I think I’ve written a song that is uniquely my own and contemporary”.

“I’m really so proud of this song,” says Jennie “I’ve tried a lyrical style that’s out-of-the box for me and really hope I can make a small difference with the song somewhere around the world”.

The Occupy This Album is available for pre-order now for just $9.99.

By Justin Elliott, ProPublica

In the months following the October 2001, passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.

"A chilling intrusion" declared one op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

But the consternation didn't focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records.

Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.

Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, "He knows what you've been checking out." In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, "FBI checking out Americans' reading habits."

The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act's Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of "any tangible things" from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.

Civil liberties groups and librarians' associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records.

The section even became known as the "library provision."

Yet as the Guardian and others revealed this month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans — a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.

"A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination," says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

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Lee Camp visited the popular RT show The Keiser Report with Max Keiser to talk about the billionaire hoarders and the plutocrats who are destroying the world.

Turkey’s two major unions—which consist of roughly 800,000 workers—went on a one-day strike on Monday to show solidarity with the protesters who were evicted from Gezi Park on Saturday night. Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Guler denounced the strike as “illegal.” Sporadic clashes between police and protesters continued in Istanbul, where police violently removed protesters on Saturday night ahead of a rally in support of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At Sunday’s rally, Erdogan told hundreds of thousands that the two weeks of countrywide protests had been manipulated by “terrorists” and denied that he was behaving like a dictator. Meanwhile, the president of the Turkish medical association told the BBC that five doctors and three nurses had disappeared since treating the protesters.

Al Jazeera:

The Turkish deputy prime minister has said that the army could be deployed to halt protests that have swept the nation over the past two weeks.

Bulent Arinc on Monday said the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) could be pressed into action if the police failed to restore order.

"What is required of us is to stop if there is a protest against the law. Here is the police, if not enough gendarme, if not TSK," he said in a televised interview to the A Haber channel.

The threat came as members of two union federations in Turkey went on a one-day strike over the forced evictions of protesters from Istanbul's Gezi Park a day earlier.

Labour groups representing doctors, engineers and dentists are also said to have joined the strike on Monday. The striking groups represent about 800,000 workers.

The Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Guler said the strike was "illegal" and warned of police action.

The call for the strike came as police and protesters clashed sporadically in Istanbul overnight following a weekend of scuffles in the city.
Riot police, some in plain clothes and carrying batons, backed by a helicopter, fired teargas and chased groups of rock-throwing youths into side streets around the iconic Taksim Square and Gezi Park late on Sunday night, trying to prevent them from regrouping.

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This is absolutely unconscionable.

Via Bloomberg News:

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them -- enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

The Sacred Heart case is unusual because of the troubling nature of some of the allegations, said Ryan Stumphauzer, a former federal health care fraud prosecutor in Miami who reviewed the affidavit. “A typical indictment might allege phantom billing or improper coding,” he said. “This complaint alleges the hospital and doctors were performing unnecessary invasive surgery to justify false billing.”

...

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Edward Snowden is apparently feeling safe enough in Hong Kong to field questions at The Guardian in a live Q&A. In his first answer, Snowden defended his decision to leak information about NSA operations against China and other countries by saying he didn’t reveal any operations against “legitimate military targets,” only civilian infrastructure like universities and businesses. Snowden said that hacking countries we’re not at war with could crash critical systems, affecting “millions of innocent people.” As for why he chose Hong Kong, he said he could have been interdicted on his way to Iceland and that it would take longer for the U.S. to pressure Hong Kong into extraditing him. Snowden also said that more information on exactly what sort of access the NSA has to tech company servers—he said it was “direct,” but companies and the NSA say it’s more targeted.

Of former Vice President Dick Cheney calling him a "traitor" on national television, Snowden commented that "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American..."

From the Q&A, Snowden was asked:

Kimberly Dozier @KimberlyDozier

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond? http://www.guardiannews.com #AskSnowden
10:34 AM - 17 Jun 2013

His response:

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Three former NSA officials who tried to bring the immense data-collecting activities of their agency to light say Edward Snowden did the right thing by making the operation public. In a round-table interview with USA Today (See video above), Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe praised Snowden for exposing information in the public's interest. The trio pushed back on the idea that his actions caused grave harm to the country, saying people including terrorists know the government is monitoring their telecommunications.

The latest embarrassing detail to emerge from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden implicates the United Kingdom in a high-tech covert operation designed to give the country an advantage at the 2009 G20 summit in London. The Guardian reports that the British government monitored the communications of several foreign politicians, going so far as to set up fake Internet cafes to spy on their computer usage. Delegates' BlackBerrys were also targeted, and the NSA passed information on Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, to the Brits, according to the paper. The news comes as the U.K. prepares to host the G8 summit on Monday.

The Guardian:

There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls "ground-breaking intelligence capabilities" to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

This included:

• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates' use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.

More on the "who was phoning who" activity:

The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of GCHQ's operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45 specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.

"For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was talking to who that updated constantly and automatically," according to an internal review.

But top officials said on Saturday that data taken from the NSA's controversial data-gathering programs helped foil terrorist plots not only in the U.S., but also in more than 20 other countries worldwide. However, this doesn't sound even remotely like busting up terror cells, now does it?

This year's G8 summit ought to be a hoot.

Highlights of this day in history: The Watergate scandal begins to unfold; The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution; O.J. Simpson arrested in the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman; Singer Kate Smith dies.

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