This evening's music features blues and gospel songwriter, guitarist and singer Josh White.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

NSA surveillance needed to prevent Isis attack, claims former intelligence chair

Mass surveillance should be retained because of the prospect of Islamic State attacks within the United States, a key Republican ally of the National Security Agency has claimed.

Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said the NSA needed to preserve its wide powers in case Isis used its bases in Syria and Iraq to unleash atrocities on the US homeland. ...

Rogers gave the warning as negotiators in the House of Representatives wrangled over a revamp of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that aimed to stop the NSA from its daily collection of US phone records in bulk which failed in the Senate in 2014, and is now returning to Congress.

Congress cannot be taken seriously on cybersecurity

Members of Congress - most of whom can’t secure their own websites, and some of whom don’t even use email - are trying to force a dangerous “cybersecurity” bill down the public’s throat. Everyone’s privacy is in the hands of people who, by all indications, have no idea what they’re talking about. ...

Consider the qualifications of the members who are in charge of cybersecurity oversight and who are leading the push for these invasive new laws. The man in charge of the subcommittee on cybersecurity and the NSA in the House, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, has a background in construction and is best known for trying to pass a Ten Commandments law (while only being able to name three of them). His actual expertise in cybersecurity is anyone’s guess, besides having an NSA facility in his district.

It gets worse. The Congressman who oversees the appropriation of billions of dollars in cybersecurity funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Representative John Carter, said this about cybersecurity and encryption recently: “I don’t know anything about this stuff”. Yes, that is an exact quote.

Congress doesn’t have to be completely ignorant about technology issues. They used to have a whole office which would give them all the expert advice they asked for. It was called the Office of Technology Assessment and it gave Congress nonpartisan advice on technical matters. Newt Gingrich killed it when he became speaker of the House of Representatives in the mid-1990s. As Vox’s Timothy Lee explained, when Representative Rush Holt, a member of Congress who knew a thing or two (he was a nuclear physicist), tried to revive it, his plan was voted down almost 2-1.

So there you have it: Congress has intentionally chosen to stay ignorant of technical issues. When they try to reassure you about the bills that are coming up for vote not being about increasing surveillance, just remember: most of them have no idea what they’re talking about.

Oh, such a choice our dark overlords have planned for our next big electoral moment of "change!"

Jeb Bush Praises Obama’s Expansion of NSA Surveillance

Best part of the Obama admin? @JebBush cites enhancement of #NSA @MedvedSHOW

— lesley clark (@lesleyclark) April 21, 2015

One of the most glaring myths propagated by Washington — especially the two parties’ media loyalists — is that bipartisanship is basically impossible, that the two parties agree on so little, that they are constantly at each other’s throats over everything. As is so often the case for Washington partisan propaganda, the reality is exactly the opposite: from trade deals to Wall Street bailouts to a massive National Security and Penal State, the two parties are in full agreement on the bulk of the most significant D.C. policies (which is why the leading candidates of the two parties (from America’s two ruling royal families) will have the same funding base). ...

Consider the comments today of leading GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush:

Medved: If you were to look back at the last seven years, almost, what has been the best part of the Obama administration?

Jeb Bush: I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be his continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs, the NSA being enhanced.

The FBI's 'mass disaster' of false conviction

In July 2013, the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called “hair comparison evidence” – a technique that its agents had used in hundreds of criminal cases nationwide and spread through the training of state-based detectives potentially through tens of thousands of other cases – were scientifically invalid. ...

As the scientific basis of hair analysis has crumbled, the scale of the judicial catastrophe caused by the FBI’s enthusiastic use of it for decades until about 2000 has now begun to emerge more fully. On Monday, the FBI and the US Justice Department, together with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, released the findings of the first stage of a joint investigation into these historic civil rights mistakes.

The results, first reported by the Washington Post, concluded that an astonishing 26 of the 28 FBI agents who had provided testimony as expert witnesses at trial based on microscopic hair analysis had made statements to juries that were known to be false. Their erroneous evidence was found in a full 90% of the trial transcripts the team has studied.

The government has identified almost 3,000 cases in which FBI agents may have given testimony involving the now-discredited technique. So far only about 500 of those cases have been been reviewed.

Some 268 of those involved FBI examiners providing expert evidence in court that pointed to the guilt of the defendant – of which 257, or 96%, included false testimony.

Most shockingly, at least 35 defendants received the death penalty, 33 of which were the subject of false FBI testimony. Nine of the prisoners were executed and five died from other causes on death row.

Obama's political point-scoring Earth Day event turns into a pissing contest with a Rethug governor. See the guy with the disasterous climate record go toe to toe with the guy who banned the use of the term "climate change!"

Quite an impressive show to watch as the planet burns.

Obama in the Everglades to raise alarm on climate change

Barack Obama is expected on Wednesday to visit Everglades national park in southern Florida, where administration officials say concerns about changing temperatures and rising sea levels offer the perfect backdrop for the administration to raise an alarm about climate change on Earth Day 2015. ...

The sense of a building political skirmish was stoked by a pre-emptive attack against the president’s visit by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, himself a climate change skeptic. Scott released a statement on Tuesday criticizing Obama for failing to “live up to his commitment on the Everglades and find a way to fund the $58m in backlog funding Everglades national park hasn’t received from the federal government”.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest sharply objected to Scott’s attack in a conference call with reporters late Tuesday, noting repeatedly that Scott’s office had reportedly banned state employees from using the phrase “climate change” in educational material and other official documents.