This evening's music features blues and r&b saxophone player Noble "Thin Man" Watts.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Court rules warrantless cellphone tracking not illegal search

Investigators do not need search warrants to obtain cellphone tower records in criminal cases, federal court rules

Investigators do not need a search warrant to obtain cellphone tower location records in criminal prosecutions, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a closely watched case involving the rules for changing technology.

The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning a three-judge panel of the same court, concluded that authorities properly got 67 days' worth of records from MetroPCS for Miami robbery suspect Quartavious Davis using a court order with a lower burden of proof.

In its 9-2 decision, the 11th Circuit decided Davis had no expectation of privacy regarding historical records establishing his location near certain cellphone towers. The records were key evidence used to convict Davis of a string of armed robberies, leading to a 162-year prison sentence.

In fact, Circuit Judge Frank M. Hull wrote for the majority, it's clear that cellphone users in today's society understand how companies collect data about calls and that cell towers are a key part of that. ...

Two judges dissented, contending the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause and a search warrant for such records and some judges in the majority agreed in separate opinions that the U.S. Supreme Court should make the ultimate decision. Davis’ attorney David O. Markus said the dissent could provide a "roadmap" for a likely appeal to the high court.

Why the USA Freedom Act Is Both Desperately Important and Laughably Pathetic

The key reform in the USA Freedom Act, Times reporters Peter Baker and David E. Sanger now pointed out, was an idea “suggested to President Obama in 2013 by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the N.S.A. director, who saw the change as a way for the president to respond to criticism without losing programs the N.S.A. deemed more vital.” ...

Tapping data lines that go in and out of the U.S., grabbing personal information without a warrant from major content providers like Facebook and Yahoo — no worries.

Sweeping up all non-U.S. content possible — sometimes an entire country’s phone calls at a time. Breaking encryption. Installing malware. Hacking Sim cards. Tracking cellphones. No problem.

Spying on porn habits. Sharing raw intelligence on Americans with Israel. It happens.

Installing shunts on the fiber optic cables that are the backbone of the Internet. Breaking into cell networks. Tapping private links between data centers. S’alright.

Allowing secret laws developed on the fly by a rubber-stamp secret court that the Intelligence Community still doesn’t level with. Spy chiefs who want to “collect it all.” Cost of doing business.

Extraordinary new abilities — like automated transcription of phone calls — that Congress never anticipated, may not even know about, and certainly never establish rules for. Love it or leave it, baby.

The USA Freedom Act is like a surgeon talking about taking a small tumor off of a much larger one. Would you recommend against such surgery, if that was the only one the surgeon was even willing to contemplate?

That’s the bind some pivotal privacy groups find themselves in. Access, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among those who say yes, it’s better than nothing. Demand Progress and the ACLU say it’s worse.

This is an excellent article, well worth reading in full:

What we can learn from Judith Miller’s rehab tour

Judith Miller’s publicity campaign for her new book (The Story: A Reporter’s Journey) which has taken her from the Wall Street Journal to numerous television interviews, has been an instructive and engaging media spectacle.

She has shown characteristic passion and energy in attempting to defend her journalistic reputation after being pummeled during her final years at The New York Times for, among other things, writing persuasively that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction ...

She has made sporadic efforts before to defend her reporting. But now she’s employing an important element in the modern method of obfuscation and confusion. Waiting several years after the events, she tries to take advantage of fading memories, especially involving detailed and complicated matters.

Time and complexity are the best friends of a determined distorter of events. ...

This has produced some commentary around the question of what a journalist’s obligations are when fed hard-to-verify information by people with an agenda.The issue in her case is, however, much more simple. It doesn’t involve whether she or any reporter could fact-check the claims of her sources. What Miller appeared to do was make a Mephistophelian journalist’s bargain with officials and sources that went like this: Bring your assertions to me first. In exchange for the notoriety I will achieve I will place them in The Times without careful examination or scrutiny.

Police brutality and total impunity Obama style...

DEA Can’t Tell Senate How Detained Student Was Left to Drink Own Urine to Survive

During an obscure Senate hearing on Tuesday morning, lawmakers vented their frustrations with the Drug Enforcement Administration for failing to answer questions about an incident that saw a man almost die of dehydration while in its custody. ...

On April 20, 2012, Chong was detained by DEA agents during a drug raid on a friend’s house in San Diego. The 23-year-old university student cooperated with agents during an interrogation, and was told that he would soon be free to go, only to be handcuffed with his hands behind his back and left in a small holding cell for five days without food or water. When he was finally discovered, Chong was suffering from near-kidney failure and hypothermia and in need of serious medical attention.

A Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation released last June shed additional light on Chong’s maddening de facto sentence — often served in complete darkness. He told investigators he was forced to drink his own urine and at one point attempted suicide. ...

Senator Grassley, who called the findings “shocking,” had last August sent a 19-question letter to DEA administrator Michele Leonhart.

“It’s been now eight months — I still don’t have a response from DEA to these questions,” Sen. Grassley said on Tuesday. He asked DEA Deputy Assistant Administrator of Drug Diversion Joseph Rannazzisi to commit the agency to responding to his inquiry by the end of the month.

Third Year of Korea FTA Data Released, Show Failure of Obama’s Last ‘More Exports, More Jobs’ Trade Pact Promises, Further Burdening Fast Track Prospects

Trade Deficit With Korea Balloons 104 Percent as Exports Fall and Imports Surge Under Korea Pact Used as TPP Template

Today’s release of U.S. government trade data covering the full first three years of the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement (FTA) reveals that the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea has more than doubled. In addition, today’s U.S. Census Bureau data show Korea FTA outcomes that are the opposite of the Obama administration’s “more exports, more jobs” promise for that pact, which it is now repeating with respect to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as it tries to persuade Congress to delegate Fast Track authority for the TPP.

U.S. goods exports to Korea have dropped 6 percent, or $2.7 billion, under the Korea FTA’s first three years, while goods imports from Korea have surged 19 percent, or $11.3 billion (comparing the deal’s third year to the year before implementation). As a result, the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea has swelled 104 percent, or more than $14 billion. The trade deficit increase equates to the loss of more than 93,000 American jobs in the first three years of the Korea FTA, counting both exports and imports, according to the trade-jobs ratio that the Obama administration used to project gains from the deal.

“As if the odds for Fast Track were not already long enough, with most House Democrats and many GOP members stating opposition, today’s unveiling of a job-killing trade deficit surge under the Korea FTA puts a few more nails in Fast Track’s coffin,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Who’s going to buy the argument about Fast Track and the TPP creating ‘more exports and more jobs’ when Obama’s only major trade deal, used as the TPP template, was sold under that very slogan and yet has done the opposite?” ...

The administration has tried to deflect attention from the failure of its Korea FTA by claiming that its poor performance has been caused by economic stagnation in Korea. However, Korea’s economy has grown during each year of the Korea FTA, while U.S. exports to Korea have not.

'Too Big to Exist': Sanders Introduces Bill to Break Up Big Banks

If passed, bill would give Treasury Secretary a year to break up institutions bailed out in financial crisis

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who in April announced his candidacy for president for the 2016 election, on Wednesday will introduce a bill to break up the country's biggest banks—just a day after the Senate passed a Republican budget that takes aim at many progressive issues.

Under the proposal, called the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, regulators on the Financial Stability Oversight Council would compile a list of institutions which say they are so large that their collapse could trigger an economic crisis—otherwise known as "too big to fail."

The Treasury Secretary would then have a year from the bill's passing to break them up.

"If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist," Sanders said Tuesday. "No single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis."

The firms on that list would also be banned from using customer money to make "risky or speculative activities on the financial market," Reuters reports