SandBoxBlogs: Aspen Daily News "We can’t hide from the national security agency"

Once DEA Special Agent Jim Schrant and crew, slipped into Pitkin County in the dead of night, and then slipped right back out again with an entire cocaine trafficking ring in tow while Pitkin County officials and law enforcement slept peacefully in their beds...................the entire Roaring Fork Valley has been a little on edge.

Thinking (after a few months had passed by) that it was all just one of those very rare times when reality hit Aspen; the folks started to settle back down and return to life as they have known it for roughly '40 years' now.

With the occasional startled reflex jumping at sounds in the night for those that prowl the wee hours in places they should not be.

Until...the trusty 'ZG' crew broke the story of certain investigations in the area that included...SAC Schrant and his new partners, the FBI.

There is a new sense of reality in the Roaring Fork Valley now.    Lots of predictions (see related story here) and a heightened view of what might be lurking in our own backyards reported in the news:

Nat Hentoff: 
"How many Americans know that as of September 2013, all of us engaged in any form of communication will be subject — with the approval of President Barack Obama and the silence of Congress — to continuous tracking and databasing by the National Security Agency?

As I reported here last week, the NSA’s massive new center in Bluffdale, Utah — more than five times larger than the U.S. Capitol — will be storing and analyzing:

“All forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases ...” (“The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” James Bamford, wired.com, March 15)....."  (Read more?  Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBox Comments: Aspen Daily News/Nat Hentoff "A reporter lighting up the world’s hells"

Nat Hentoff:
"Urgent global attention is being paid to Syria’s monstrous president Bashar al-Assad as he commits genocide on his people. But another mass murderer remains mostly out of the American press. Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues his decades-long reign of terror on his people despite two warrants for his arrest by the International Criminal Court for, among other vile atrocities, war crimes, crimes against humanity — and yes, genocide.
 
For years, I have reported on his massacres in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan, a place I’ve never been. But Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has slipped into the infamous region more than 10 times to keep the world informed of Bashir’s endless killings.
 
Kristof does this at considerable personal danger, as he also reports from other devastatingly ruthless regimes. On receiving one of his Pulitzer Prizes, he was accurately described as “giving voice to the voiceless.”...."  (Read more?  Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."