This evening's music features from Louisiana, one of the blues piano players that shaped the Chicago blues, Henry Gray.

Immediately After Launching Effort to Scuttle Iran Deal, Senator Tom Cotton to Meet with Defense Contractors

In an open letter organized by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., 47 Senate Republicans today warned the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal reached with President Barack Obama could expire as soon as he leaves office.

Tomorrow, 24 hours later, Cotton will appear at an “Off the Record and strictly Non-Attribution” event with the National Defense Industrial Association, a lobbying and professional group for defense contractors. ...

Cotton strongly advocates higher defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy. As The New Republic’s David Ramsey noted, “Pick a topic — Syria, Iran, Russia, ISIS, drones, NSA snooping — and Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the debate…During his senate campaign, he told a tele-townhall that ISIS and Mexican drug cartels joining forces to attack Arkansas was an ‘urgent problem.'”

This is a really interesting commentary by Cory Doctorow, worth reading in full. Here's a taste:

Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens

Why spy? That’s the several-million pound question, in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Why would the US continue to wiretap its entire population, given that the only “terrorism” they caught with it was a single attempt to send a small amount of money to Al Shabab?

One obvious answer is: because they can. Spying is cheap, and cheaper every day. ... IT has been responsible for a 2-3 order of magnitude productivity gain in surveillance efficiency. The Stasi used an army to surveil a nation; the NSA uses a battalion to surveil a planet.

Spying, especially domestic spying, is an aspect of what the Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles calls guard labour: work that is done to stabilise property relationships, especially the property belonging to the rich.

The amount a state needs to expend on guard labour is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning. ... When coercion gets cheaper, the point at which it makes “economic sense” to allow social mobility moves further along the curve. The evidence for this is in the thing mass surveillance does best, which is not catching terrorists, but disrupting legitimate political opposition, from Occupy to the RCMP’s classification of “anti-petroleum” activists as a threat to national security. ...

Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair. Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution.

Wikipedia to file lawsuit against NSA and US Department of Justice

Wikipedia will take legal action against the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice challenging the government’s mass surveillance programme.

The lawsuit, to be filed on Tuesday, alleges that the NSA’s mass surveillance of internet traffic in the United States – often called “Upstream” surveillance – violates the US constitution’s first amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. ...

“By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,” Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a blog post.

“Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users’ privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people’s ability to create and understand knowledge.“

Exxon Wants $1 Million Fine for 2011 Yellowstone Oil Spill Reduced Again

The challenge by the world's second-most-valuable company reinforces its reputation for protracted legal fights over penalties and court judgments.

More than three and a half years after an ExxonMobil pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, the world's second-most-valuable company is still fighting regulators over being assessed a $1 million fine.

Exxon last month attacked the legal underpinnings of the government's case, which stems from the July 2011 rupture of the Silvertip Pipeline near Laurel, Mont. The oil giant argued that it complied with federal regulations and that pipeline regulators overstepped their authority in interpreting the legal requirements. It also said that all but one of the violations should be dropped and that the government should, at a minimum, "significantly reduce" the penalties. ...

Earlier this year, the Yellowstone River was fouled by another oil pipeline break. This time it was the Poplar Pipeline, which ruptured near Glendive, Mont., and sent more than 30,000 gallons of oil into the river. The cause of the Jan. 17 spill is still under investigation, but the pipeline was found to be uncovered and unprotected at the time of the break—as was Exxon’s Silvertip pipeline.

The current fine of $1.045 million for the Silvertip spill has already been lowered once. The original penalty of $1.7 million was reduced after Exxon appealed the proposed fine and argued its case in a July 2013 closed hearing. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)’s final order, made public in January, removed one of the violations and included the smaller fine.

Of interest:

Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa review – an unrivalled account