Tag: ek Politics

In a stunning race to the bottom, recent popular policies like spying an all Americans, proposing cuts to earned benefits, and prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists instead of fraudulent Bansters have sent Obama approval ratings soaring to heights not seen since the very same period in the mega awesome presidency of George W. Bush.

Poll: Obama’s job approval plunges; Congress, especially GOP, still unpopular

By David Lightman, McClatchy

Monday, July 22, 2013

Stung by Americans’ persistent worries about the economy and a capital gripped by controversy and gridlock, President Barack Obama is suffering his lowest job approval numbers in nearly two years, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The plummeting numbers – still higher than those of Congress – come after weeks of rising gasoline prices, revelations about domestic spying and turmoil in the Middle East.

…

“Clearly six months into his second term there’s been falloff across the board. It’s not like one group bailed on him,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York, which conducted the poll.

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The president has been weathering a succession of spring and summer political storms. In May, news broke that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted for special scrutiny tea party groups seeking tax exemptions. In June, the administration was rocked by revelations about secret government programs that collect data from U.S. phone records and the Internet.

Foreign policy is also taking a political toll. This month, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was ousted, and Syria remained a bloody battleground. By a 48-41 percent margin, people disapproved of how the president is handling foreign policy. In April, approvals slightly outnumbered disapprovals.

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And though the nation has technically been in an economic recovery for four years, most Americans aren’t feeling it. Fifty-four percent said they thought the U.S. remains in a recession, and 60 percent saw the country going in the wrong direction.

Poll: President Obama nears all-time low

By TAL KOPAN, Politico

7/24/13 6:47 AM EDT

Just 45 percent of those surveyed in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll said they approved of the job the president was doing, a drop of 3 points from June. Fifty percent said they disapproved.

That’s close to the lowest numbers registered for Obama in the poll, a 44 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval rating registered in November 2011.

The poll’s numbers reflect Americans’ assessment of how Obama is handling the economy: Forty-four percent said they approved and 51 percent said they disapproved.

Pollsters also pointed to a drop in support among African-Americans as a possible explanation for Obama’s falling numbers, as 78 percent approve of Obama’s work, a 10 point drop since June and 15 point drop since April.

Obama’s approval rating is the same as George W. Bush’s was at this point in his second term, while Bill Clinton’s approval rating was significantly higher, at 56 percent, during this point in his second term, The Journal said.

About the only bright spot is Congress is doing worse-

When asked if they would vote for a ballot measure that would replace every member of Congress, 57 percent of adults polled said they would.

Let’s hear it for electoral victory!

First Time in Over a Year Democrats and Republicans Are Tied in the Generic Ballot

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 24, 2013 11:16 am

The latest NBC/WSJ poll has some good news for Republicans. They are tied with Democrats in the Congressional generic ballot with each party currently at 44 percent. An equal number of Americans want the next election to result in a Republican controlled Congress as want it to result in a Democrat controlled one.

This is the first time in almost two years Republicans have finally closed the polling gap. Democrats have held at least a small lead over Republicans in NBC/WSJ polling since October of 2011.

This is especially good news for Republicans because they don’t even need to win more votes than the Democrats to make real gains in Congress next year.

Yes, Neoliberal policies are poised to deliver the same kind of resounding success they did in 2010.  Heck of a job, congratulations.

I just love these last minute votes.  I’m convinced they hold them this way so we don’t have time to organize.

Yay democracy.

GOP insurrection heats up over surveillance

By David Sirota, Salon

Monday, Jul 22, 2013 2:56 PM UTC

In an attempt to prevent Washington lawmakers from having to publicly declare their position on the National Security Administration’s mass surveillance, will congressional leaders formally snuff out one of the last embers of democracy in the U.S. House? This is one of the big questions this week in Washington, as the Republicans who control the House are resorting to brass knuckled tactics in an effort to thwart one of their own.

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As I learned from four-plus years working in the Capitol’s lower chamber during President Bush’s first term, the U.S. House of Representatives runs like a politburo did in a typical Soviet satellite state. Decisions about what even gets voted on – much less passed – usually happen behind closed doors, with a handful of party leaders handing down orders to the rest of the body’s loyal apparatchiks. That means most legislative drama can’t be seen by voters, and it means congresspeople rarely have to cast public votes on anything the House Speaker doesn’t want them to vote on. By design, this system (which differs from the Senate, where all members can force votes on almost anything) deliberately protects majority party House members from having to cast embarrassing campaign-ad-worthy public votes against the minority party’s proposals.

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Assuming Amash and the bipartisan coalition around his amendment doesn’t back down, there should be little doubt that Permanent Washington and supporters of mass surveillance will soon pivot to the “support our troops” frame. As they always do, they will insist that any delay of any bill relating to the military – in this case the Defense Appropriations Bill – is akin to not supporting the troops. Appealing to the most cartoonish mantras of militarism to try to force the bipartisan coalition to back down, the assertion will be that Amash’s amendment is unpatriotic and treasonous because it might delay the passage of the bill, which would supposedly then leave American troops naked and unarmed on various battlefields across the world.

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Amash’s amendment says the opposite – that Congress needs to have an open debate over that program. In the process, he and his bipartisan coalition have engineered a big moment in the fight over liberties and rights – and that includes Americans’ basic right to know where their own elected officials stand on issues as fundamental as privacy and mass surveillance.

Should lawmakers respond to such a critical moment by blocking a vote on the amendment and then passing a defense bill funding more surveillance, the harrowing message should be clear: Congress will be saying that We the People shouldn’t be permitted to see where our government officials stand on key public policy questions, but government officials should be allowed to continue surveilling, collecting and datamining the most intimate details of all of our lives.

Yet despite their best efforts there will be a vote- probably tomorrow.

Amash (R-MI) & Conyers (D-MI) offer amendment to curtail NSA, NSA against it, vote soon

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

7/24/2013 10:00am

If you want to make a difference, lobby your member. House member phone numbers are at the link. Please use it. And if there’s an extra phone call in your future, you might check out the names in this list. They’re lobby-able as well. So far we’re on the upswing and the tide is with us. Might as well use it.

Me, I’m scoring this vote, and I’ll publish the list of heroes and villains as soon as I have it.

You, please do lobby. I’ll tell you why tomorrow, but for now, just know it’s not useless to act. You won’t always win, but please, do act. Rush Holt’s bill repealing the Patriot Act is also coming; you can join those who are causing a scene, and feel very good about it at the same time. After all, the NSA already knows what you think about them, so there’s nothing to lose, is there.

Snowden’s Whistleblowing Creates Climate for Critical House Vote on NSA Surveillance

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday July 24, 2013 9:24 am

Introduced by Republican Representative Justin Amash and Democratic Representative John Conyers (both from the state of Michigan), it would restrict the “federal government’s ability under the Patriot Act to collect information on Americans who are not connected to an ongoing investigation. The bill also requires that secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court opinions be made available to Congress and summaries of the opinions be made available to the public,” according to the amendment’s sponsors.

A press release indicating at least thirty members of the House support the amendment contends the Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act (LIBERT-E Act) imposes reasonable limits on the federal government’s surveillance.” It “puts some teeth into the FISA court’s determination of whether records the government wants are actually relevant to an investigation, and “it also makes sure that innocent Americans’ information isn’t needlessly swept up into a government database” by attempting to prohibit the “type of government dragnet that the leaked Verizon order revealed.”

President Barack Obama, however, opposes this effort to curtail the power of the NSA. White House spokesperson Jay Carney said, “We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counter-terrorism tools.” And, “His blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.” (Notice the White House does not mention the name of the Democratic Representative who also introduced the amendment, misrepresenting the bipartisan support for this amendment.)

NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander also spent yesterday holding emergency "top secret" meetings with Republicans and Democrats to convince them not to restrict the power of the NSA to conduct surveillance that would broadly sweep up Americans’ communications.

The Liars Are "Very Concerned" Program They Lied About Will Be Defunded

By: emptywheel

Tuesday July 23, 2013 10:11 pm

Buried at the bottom of a broader story on opposition to the Amash-Conyers amendment, CNN offers a very solicitous account of the White House statement opposing it, making no note of how absurd the entire premise is.

…

CNN does, however, provide James Clapper and Keith Alexander an opportunity to give their readout of the TS/SCI briefings they gave Congress.

In spite of reporting describing it as a lobbying session, these noted prevaricators claim their job wasn’t to persuade, it was just to answer questions.

…

Sort of gives you the impression they failed to persuade, huh?

But if their mission was really to “provide information” and “get the facts on the table,” then what have all the unclassified briefings been about? Is this claim they were only now “providing information” yet another indication that they were, perhaps, misinforming before? Again?

That, to me, is a big part of this story: that two men who have lied repeatedly about these programs felt the need to conduct Top Secret briefings to provide information that hadn’t been provided in the past.

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This program is problematic for several reasons: it is overkill to achieve its stated purpose and it violates the intent of the Fourth Amendment.

But add to that the trust those overseeing the program chose to piss away by lying about this collection repeatedly in the past.

If Amash-Conyers does pass (and it’s still a long-shot unless each and every one of you manages to convince your Rep to support it), it will be in significant part because Clapper and Alexander abused the trust placed in them.

Update:

Amash-Conyers Fails 205-217

By: emptywheel

Wednesday July 24, 2013 7:00 pm

In one of the closest votes in a long time for civil liberties, the Amash-Conyers amendment just failed, but only barely, by a vote of 205-217.

The debate was lively, with Mike Rogers, Michele Bachmann, and Iraq verteran Tom Cotton spoke against the amendment; Amash closely managed time to include a broad mix of Democrats and Republicans.

The amendment outlawed U.S. assistance to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government, while allowing assistance for other purposes.

Beyond restricting overt U.S. support of the Contras, the most significant effect of the Boland Amendment was the Iran-Contra Affair, during which the Reagan Administration circumvented the Amendment in order to continue supplying arms to the Contras, behind the back of Congress.

House forces vote on amendment that would limit NSA bulk surveillance

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 23 July 2013 15.26 EDT

Republican congressman Justin Amash prevailed in securing a vote for his amendment to a crucial funding bill for the Department of Defense that “ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act.”

“The people have spoken through their representatives,” Amash told the Guardian on Tuesday. “This is an opportunity to vote on something that will substantially limit the ability of the NSA to collect their phone records without suspicion.”

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In a sign of how crucial the NSA considers its bulk phone records collection, which a secret surveillance court reapproved on Friday, its director, General Keith Alexander, held a four-hour classified briefing with members of Congress. Alexander’s meeting was listed as “top-secret” and divided into two two-hour sessions, the first for Republicans and the second for Democrats. Staffers for the legislators were not permitted to attend.

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Amash’s amendment, supported by a Michigan Democrat, John Conyers, unexpectedly made it through the House rules committee late on Monday night, a feat for which the second-term legislator credited House speaker John Boehner.

The amendment would prevent the NSA, the FBI and other agencies from relying on Section 215 of the Patriot Act “to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

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(Oregon Senator Ron) Wyden, in a wide-ranging speech, reiterated a warning that the authorities government officials believe themselves to have under Section 215 of the Patriot Act might also allow the NSA or FBI to retain bulk medical records, gun purchase records, financial transactions, credit card data and more. “Intelligence officials have told the press that they currently have the legal authority to collect Americans’ location information in bulk,” he noted

Wyden assailed administration and intelligence officials for describing their surveillance as limited in public remarks while secretly briefing legislators about their broad scope.

“The public was not just kept in the dark about the Patriot Act and other secret authorities,” Wyden said. “The public was actively misled.”

On July 2, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, apologized to Wyden for erroneously saying the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans. While not naming names, Wyden alluded to a comment made by Alexander last year in which the director of the NSA said publicly: “We don’t hold data on US citizens.”

“When did it become all right for government officials’ public statements and private statements to differ so fundamentally?” Wyden said in his speech.

“The answer is that it is not all right, and it is indicative of a much larger culture of misinformation that goes beyond the congressional hearing room and into the public conversation writ large.”

That culture faces one of its first major legislative challenges as early as Wednesday with the vote on Amash’s amendment. There are others: a Senate bill introduced in June and co-signed by Wyden would compel declassification of the rulings of the secret Fisa court that sets broad rules for the NSA and FBI’s collection and analysis of phone records and online communications.

Additionally, the NSA itself has indicated its willingness to consider abandoning the phone-records collection provided the telecommunications companies it partners with retains the data. And a former judge on the Fisa court wrote an op-ed for the New York Times advocating the secret surveillance court adopt an adversarial process, with a lawyer appointed to “to challenge the government when an application for a FISA order raises new legal issues.”

Why is it that D.C. is six weeks behind the rest of the country?  Is it something in the water?

What I expect is a great flurry of inaction and word salad hoping that the issue will just quietly slink away with any actual change simply making things worse.

People need to be FIRED!  They need to be LOCKED UP!  They need to be so shamed and punished that they never again hold a position of responsibility in the government!

Mood shifting, Congress may move to limit NSA spying

By David Lightman, Kate Irby and Ben Kamisar, McClatchy

Friday, July 19, 2013

Skepticism has been slowly building since last month’s disclosures that the super-secret NSA conducted programs that collected Americans’ telephone data. Dozens of lawmakers are introducing measures to make those programs less secret, and there’s talk of denying funding and refusing to continue authority for the snooping.

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Late Friday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reauthorized collection of telephone and online data by the federal government, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper revealed. He said the administration was “undertaking a careful and thorough review of whether and to what extent additional information or documents pertaining to this program may be declassified, consistent with the protection of national security.”

“It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to have a full and frank discussion about this balance when the public is unable to review and analyze what the executive branch and the courts believe the law means,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who has asked the administration to make the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court public.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is leading an effort along with Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to have the court’s judges nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Currently, the Supreme Court’s chief justice selects judges from those holding other federal district court judgeships.

Schiff also is pushing a measure, along with Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., to require the attorney general to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act opinions, and got a boost Friday from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

…

The concerns fall into two general categories: What exactly is the NSA doing, and how can its work be more open?

“They need to provide as much clarity as they possibly can so people know and have a familiarity with what’s happening, why that happens,” said James Lankford, R-Okla., chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He wanted “another round of information again and to be able to process that.”

The desire to know more sparked a sometimes fiery House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week with top administration officials.

Conyers, the committee’s top Democrat, noted that the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure. “You’ve already violated the law as far as I am concerned,” Conyers said.

The ire came from both parties. “The Star Chamber . . . in England started out . . . as very popular with the people. It allowed people to get justice that otherwise would not,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., referring to a court that was abolished by Parliament in 1641 over its abuses of power. “But it evolved over time into a powerful weapon for political retribution by the king.”

…

“There’s no legitimate reason to keep this legal analysis from public interest any longer,” said Conyers. Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., was sympathetic, saying, “I share his concern about some classified information that does not need to be classified.”

Panama arrests ex-CIA station chief sought by Italy in rendition case

By Tim Johnson, McClatchy

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Robert Seldon Lady was the CIA station chief in Milan when Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was pulled from the streets of that city as part of an operation that Italian prosecutors later said involved 22 American agents, all of whom fled Italy shortly afterward.

Italy’s main news agency, ANSA, reported that Lady was detained in Panama and that Italian Justice Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri would have two months to formally request his extradition.

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Italy’s top court of appeals in September confirmed a nine-year jail term for Lady in the extraordinary case, the first attempt by a foreign judiciary to prosecute U.S. officials for the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition – the practice of sending a person detained in one country to another country for questioning without requesting the approval of a court.

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Nasr was snatched from Milan’s Via Guerzoni before noon Feb. 17, 2003, by two men who sprayed chemicals in his face and forced him into a white van. He turned up in an Egyptian prison, where he spent four years before his release. U.S. officials suspected him of recruiting radical Muslims in Italy for jihad in the Middle East, but he was never charged with a crime in Italy or Egypt.

Italian prosecutors said they proved that the van was part of a CIA scheme to round up Nasr, move him to an air base north of Venice and on to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, before delivering him to Egyptian interrogators.

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If Lady now faces the threat of being returned to Italy, Nasr has fared little better. During his four years in an Egyptian jail, Nasr tried to commit suicide three times, his attorney told Knight-Ridder newspapers, which was later bought by The McClatchy Co., in 2006.

“He’s been exposed to torture ever since he was kidnapped in Italy,” attorney Montasser Zayat said then. “He said he was beaten even on the plane that took him to Germany before he was handed to Egypt.”

Lady has since been released and has flown back to the United States.  An INTERPOL Warrant for his arrest remains in force.

Germany backs away from claims NSA program thwarted five attacks

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy

Thursday, July 18, 2013

(German Interior Minister Hans-Peter) Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.” And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs.

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(O)pposition politicians and commentators now are talking about the arrogance of the U.S. application of “winner’s power” (a reference to the political authority the United States had here during the Cold War, when Germany was divided between east and west, and West Germany leaned heavily on America for support), and how traditionally strong relations between the two countries have been harmed by the scandal.

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Perhaps most troubling was how quickly the government backed down on the claims that the surveillance helped foil terror plots. Gisela Piltz, a Liberal Party member of the Bundestag intelligence committee, said she could not give exact details of what took place in the secret hearing but noted: “There was a clear discrepancy between the previously reported number of foiled terror attacks and the number we talked about.”

…

Piltz said that while terrorism is a real threat, the U.S. monitoring programs have done little to prevent it.

“Germans are not safer because of U.S. espionage,” Piltz said. “It is true Germany has been lucky not to have suffered a terror attack, but there has to be a balance. We cannot sacrifice freedom for security, and when in doubt I would always opt for freedom.”

Republicans, White House in Talks Toward Big Fiscal Deal

By Chris Frates, National Journal

July 17, 2013 6:42 p.m.

This fall, the country will hit its debt limit and be unable to pay its bills unless Congress authorizes additional borrowing. Republicans plan to use the debate over raising the debt limit to force Democrats to cut spending-a negotiation Obama has said he won’t engage in. But these meetings demonstrate that the president is in fact engaging Republicans in a broader discussion about debt and spending.

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An administration official said White House aides have made clear to Republicans that the president’s offer from December-including $600 billion in new tax revenue for $400 billion in Medicare and other health care cuts-still stands.

Republicans are open to $600 billion in revenue, Burr said, but want to see it come from a mix of entitlement and tax reform. And the GOP opposes Obama’s $400 billion in Medicare cuts, arguing they want more structural reforms.

Repeat after me-

There is no budget deficit.  Austerity does.  not.  work.  You can’t cut your way to growth.

(h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Chase, Once Considered "The Good Bank," Is About to Pay Another Massive Settlement

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

July 18, 12:20 PM ET

In the three-year period between 2009-2012, Chase paid out over $16 billion in litigation costs. Noted financial analyst Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher slammed Chase in a report earlier this year, pointing out that these settlements and legal costs represented a staggering 12% of Chase’s net revenue during this time. There couldn’t possibly be a clearer demonstration of the modern banking model, in which companies break rules/laws as a matter of course, and simply pay fines as a cost – a significant cost – of doing business.

For sheer curiosity’s sake, I thought I’d list, in capsule form, some of the capers Chase has been caught up in in recent years:

• They were fined $153 million for the infamous “Magnetar” fund case, another scam in which a bank allowed a hedge fund to create a “born-to-lose” mortgage portfolio to bet against. Very similar to the Abacus case that’s at the heart of the ongoing “Fabulous Fab” trial;
• Chase paid $228 million for its role in the egregious municipal bond bid-rigging case we wrote about in Rolling Stone in 2011;
• Chase paid $297 million to the SEC last November for fraud involving mortgage-backed securities;
• Chase paid $75 million in cash and generously agreed to forego $647 million in fines in the Jefferson County, Alabama mess, in which a small-town pol was bribed into green-lighting a series of deadly swap deals;
• In two separate orders this spring, Chase was reprimanded by the OCC and the Fed for money-laundering behaviors similar to the infamous HSBC case, and also for regulatory failures and fraud in the London Whale episode. There was a separate FBI investigation into the London Whale probe in which they allegedly lied to customers and investors about the loss;
• They’re under investigation for allegedly failing to disclose Bernie Madoff’s trading activities to authorities;
• They were one of 13 banks asked to pay up in this year’s $9.3 billion robosigning settlement;
• They were one of four banks last year to settle for a total of $394 million with the OCC for improper mortgage servicing practices;
• They were ordered by the CFTC to pay $20 million last year for improper segregation of customer funds (this was part of the Lehman investigation). The CFTC also fined Chase $600,000 last year for violating position limits in the cotton markets;
• Last year, Chase paid a $45 million settlement to the federal government for improperly racking up fees for veterans in mortgage refinancings. Hey, if you’re going to steal from everyone, you can’t leave out those veterans overseas!
• In 2010, Chase paid $25 million to the state of Florida for selling unregistered bonds to a state-run municipal money-market fund;
• The bank last year was convicted in Europe along with several other banks for fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan. A total of about $120 million was seized from Chase and three other banks.

…

There are some other civil actions left out, too, like the $110 million class-action settlement for improper charging of overdraft fees, or their part in the gigantic $6 billion settlement completed last year involving Visa, MasterCard and other credit card providers for manipulating card service rates. And states like California have only just begun crawling up Chase’s backside for its role in the lunatic filing of erroneous credit card collection lawsuits, a scam outed by whistleblower Linda Almonte.

Chase is turning into the Zelig of the corruption era.

Speaking of Credit Cards-

Chase Made Errors in Nine Percent of Credit-Card Collection Lawsuits, Internal Survey Finds

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

July 11, 12:05 PM ET

Thirteen states, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a primary banking regulator, are investigating Chase’s insanely sloppy practices in the area of credit-card collections. I’ve been following this for years thanks to an acquaintance with former Chase VP and whistleblower Linda Almonte, who saw horrific abuses firsthand (I have a chapter on Linda’s crazy experiences coming out in my next book).

…

I’m glad that the states are finally listening to Linda and that this news is starting to come out. The story is actually far worse than is being described in the papers. It involves allegations of a rather complicated scam tied to secondary sales of credit-card debt – it’s easier to sell credit card debt when a judgment has already been obtained, so it seems companies like Chase will go to great lengths, including mass robosigning and other abuses, to obtain judgments.

Chase is the headline target of these new investigations, but most analysts believe the same exact things go on at other banks and credit companies. Once the bigger state lawsuits gain momentum, we’re likely to find out, as we did in the foreclosure scandals, that faulty paperwork and perjured/robosigned affidavits pervade the entire consumer debt industry.

Millions of US license plates tracked and stored, new ACLU report finds

Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Wednesday 17 July 2013 10.07 EDT

Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.

A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.

“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”

…

Many police authorities have few or no regulations over use of the scanners other than that they should not be deployed to track people of personal interest such as spouses or friends. Pittsburg police department in California stated on the documents submitted to ACLU that the scanners can be used for “any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation – reasonable suspicion or probably cause is not required”. The police department in Scarsdale New York was glowing about the potential of the technology, saying the scanners had potential that “is only limited by the officer’s imagination”.

Boston Strangler: DNA testing of suspect’s corpse may lay identity to rest

Associated Press

Friday 12 July 2013 03.09 EDT

Investigators helped by advances in DNA technology finally have forensic evidence linking longtime suspect Albert DeSalvo to the last of the 1960s killings attributed to the Boston Strangler, leading many involved in the case to hope it can finally be put to rest.

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DeSalvo’s family was outraged police secretly followed his nephew to collect DNA for new tests. Attorney Elaine Sharp said the family also believes there is still reasonable doubt he killed the Strangler’s last supposed victim.

NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 17 July 2013 15.19 EDT

The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

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A document published last month by the Guardian detailing the history of the NSA’s post-9/11 bulk surveillance on telephone and internet data refer to one- or two-hop analysis performed by NSA. The document, provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, does not explicitly mention three-hop analysis, nor does it clearly suggest that such analysis occurs.

Wednesday’s hearing was the second major public congressional hearing about the NSA’s surveillance activities since the Guardian and the Washington Post disclosed some of them in early June. Unlike the previous hearing on June 18 before the House intelligence committee, members of the House judiciary committee aggressively questioned senior officials from the NSA, FBI, Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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One senior member of the panel, congressman James Sensenbrenner, the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, warned the officials that unless they rein in the scope of their surveillance on Americans’ phone records, “There are not the votes in the House of Representatives” to renew the provision after its 2015 expiration.

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(S)everal members of the committee, of both parties, said they were concerned not merely about the analysis of the phone records but about NSA’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone data in the first place, without an individual suspicion of connections to terrorism.

“The statute says ‘collection’,” congressman Jerrold Nadler told Cole. “You’re trying to confuse us by talking use.”

Congressman Ted Poe, a judge, said: “I hope as we move forward as a Congress we rein in the idea that it’s OK to bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security.”

…

Congressman Spencer Bachus said he “was not aware at all” of the extent of the surveillance, since the NSA programs were primarily briefed to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren revealed that an annual report provided to Congress by the government about the phone-records collection, something cited by intelligence officials as an example of their disclosures to Congress, is “less than a single page and not more than eight sentences”.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, challenged Litt’s contention that the Fisa court was “not a rubber stamp” by way of a baseball analogy. Jeffries noted that some of the greatest hitters in baseball history – the Cardinals’ Stan Musial, the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, the Tigers’ Ty Cobb and the Yankees’ Babe Ruth – did not hit more than four balls safely per 10 times at bat, for career batting averages ranging from Musial’s .331 to Cobb’s .366.

He then noted that the Fisa court approves over 99% of government requests for surveillance – which would give the government a lifetime batting average of .999 – saying: “But you’ve taken the position that the Fisa court is an independent check.”

Snowden’s surveillance leaks open way for challenges to programs’ constitutionality

By Jerry Markon, Washington Post

Published: July 15

(T)he legal landscape may be shifting, lawyers say, because the revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and the principal source of the leaks, forced the government to acknowledge the programs and discuss them. That, they say, could help plaintiffs overcome government arguments that they lack the legal standing to sue or that cases should be thrown out because the programs are state secrets. A federal judge in California last week rejected the government’s argument that an earlier lawsuit over NSA surveillance should be dismissed on secrecy grounds.

“There is one critical difference from the Bush era. We now have indisputable physical evidence that the conduct being challenged is actually taking place,” said Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security law at American University law school. He said Snowden’s disclosures make it “more likely” that cases will at least be allowed to go forward in court, leading to a years-long legal battle over surveillance and privacy.

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Steven G. Bradbury, a Washington lawyer and senior Justice Department official in that administration, expressed skepticism that the new lawsuits would turn out better than previous ones.

He said the plaintiffs would have difficulty showing that they specifically were harmed by the programs, because the data collection was so vast, and that judges could rule that government officials are immune from such suits. And even though Obama administration officials have discussed the programs, Bradbury said the government could still get cases thrown out under what is known as the state secrets privilege.

Created in the 1950s and rarely used until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it allows officials to urge courts to dismiss cases on the grounds of potential damage to national security or foreign policy. “The further details of these programs are still state secrets,” Bradbury said.

Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the state secrets argument doesn’t apply in cases involving electronic surveillance. She pointed to last week’s decision by a federal judge in California that rejected the government’s efforts to throw out on state secret grounds a 2008 lawsuit, brought by EFF, that includes earlier incarnations of the NSA’s surveillance programs, as well as current ones. The lawsuit is now proceeding.

Although other courts are not bound by the decision, Cohn said it could be a “tremendous boon” to plaintiffs in cases filed in the past month. “It’s tremendous, because anything that allows these cases to proceed is important,” she said.

She added that her organization plans to file a lawsuit this week stemming from Snowden’s recent revelations and that she has heard about at least two additional suits in the pipeline. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also has vowed to bring legal action against the government over its broad surveillance efforts; a spokeswoman for Paul said he is evaluating his options.

And lo it came to pass.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Sues NSA Over Surveillance

By Karen Gullo, Bloomberg News

Jul 16, 2013 1:58 PM ET

The lawsuit, filed today in federal court in San Francisco, focuses on warrantless collection of U.S. communications under an intelligence program partly disclosed by ex-government security contractor Edward Snowden and later acknowledged by the administration. The EFF sued on behalf of groups including Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace and Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Any judicial, executive or executive authorization” of the “Associational Tracking Program or the acquisition and retention of the communications information of plaintiffs, their members, and their staffs is unlawful and invalid,” EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said in the complaint.

Pavlik, was a Soviet youth praised by the Soviet press as a martyr. His story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family. His story was a subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies. The cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children.

Experts: Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work

By Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor, McClatchy

Posted on Tuesday, July 9, 2013

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

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Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

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But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

“There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on detecting terrorists.

“Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy.

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When asked about the ineffectiveness of behavior profiling, (Gene) Barlow (a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive) said the policy “does not mandate” that employees report behavior indicators.

“It simply educates employees about basic activities or behavior that might suggest a person is up to improper activity,” he said.

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But research and other programs that rely on profiling show it remains unproven, could make employees more resistant to reporting violations and might lead to spurious allegations.

The Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have spent tens of millions of dollars on an array of research projects. Yet after several decades, they still haven’t developed a list of behaviors they can use to definitively identify the tiny fraction of workers who might some day violate national security laws.

“We are back to the needle-in-a-haystack problem,” said Fienberg, the Carnegie Mellon professor.

“We have not found any silver bullets,” said Deanna Caputo, principal behavioral psychologist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat efforts for U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”

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But some current and former U.S. officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because security officials are granted access to information outside their usual purview.

These current and former U.S. officials and experts also ridiculed as overly zealous and simplistic the idea of using reports of suspicious behavior to predict potential insider threats. It takes years for professional spy-hunters to learn their craft, and relying on the observations of inexperienced people could lead to baseless and discriminatory investigations, they said.

“Anyone is an amateur looking at behavior here,” said Thomas Fingar, a former State Department intelligence chief who chaired the National Intelligence Council, which prepares top-secret intelligence analyses for the president, from 2005 to 2008.

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Eric Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.”

“The answer to it is not to have a Stasi-like response,” said Feldman, referring to the feared secret police of communist East Germany. “You’ve removed that firewall between employees seeking help and the threat that any employee who seeks help could be immediately retaliated against by this insider threat office.”