Month: June 2013

Your privacy is protected — unless they think they’ve found evidence of a crime.

by digby

It appears that most people have decided that the PRISM program is no big deal, just a necessary type of intelligence work that doesn’t focus on American citizens (the standard for collection is based upon the analyst’s 51% certainty that the person isn’t American) and if it happens to catch one in the dragnet, it throws him back. The “minimization” process is supposed to safeguard the information being used for anything except its designated purpose.

So, here’s the Washington Post‘s summary of the PRISM program. It’s very clear and concise and pretty much explains that the NSA has outsourced its direct dealings with the Telcoms to the FBI, which I guess is supposed to make it all ok. The FBI gathers the data and ships it to the NSA.

But aside from the larger constitutional and philosophical issue with all that, here’s the practical concern that makes me wonder:

If a target turns out to be an American or a person located in the United States, the NSA calls the collection “inadvertent” and usually destroys the results. If the target is foreign but the search results include U.S. communications, the NSA calls this “incidental” collection and generally keeps the U.S. content for five years. There are “minimization” rules to limit the use and distribution of the communications of identifiable U.S. citizens or residents. The NSA discloses the identities to other agencies if it believes there is evidence of a crime or that the identities are essential to understanding an intelligence report.

It’s that last that strikes me as peculiar. What is to stop the NSA from “inadvertantly” or “incidentally” doing fishing expeditions on American citizens in search of evidence for crimes that have no relationship to terrorism? I can’t see what could stop it.

You don’t know what sort of crimes they might be interested in, but there is a whole lot of overlap these days between the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism. And what one person considers a potential “crime” could be easily seen as civil disobedience by someone else. The risk of political spying is pretty high.

It’s true that if the FBI wants to monitor you, it can probably find some judge somewhere to agree to a warrant and they can likely get this information legitimately. So maybe it’s silly to worry about such a thing. But I can’t help but remember that someone did this back in 2009:

The New York Times reports today that members of Congress are increasingly concerned about the extent of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, particularly the overcollection of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans. An anonymous former intelligence analyst tells reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that during much of the Bush years, the NSA “tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants.” Reportedly, one of the accessed domestic e-mail accounts belonged to former President Bill Clinton.

That was probably just some dude being nosy. But the ability to “accidentally” sweep someone up in a search, “find” a possible crime and then alert domestic authorities is very disquieting. One could easily see someone in authority doing such a thing under the belief that they are “protecting America” — the mantra of the surveillance state.

This case always struck me as something that could easily have come about because someone with inside information pointed authorities in the right direction. In his case, Spitzer’s primary enemy was Wall Street and the banking system so that’s probably all it took. But you can certainly see the possibilities if members of the government find a good excuse to wade through all that personal information they’re holding.

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Dispatch from Gilead: DeMint the smarmy patriarch

by digby

My God. He really does believe that women don’t know what pregnancy is and are happy to have the state educate them on the subject:

“The more the ultrasounds have become part of the law, where a woman gets the opportunity to see that there’s a real child, it’s beginning to change minds, and I think that’s a good thing,” DeMint said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s time that the 3,000 babies we lose every day have some people speaking up for them.”

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow pointed out that women weren’t given the opportunity to have an ultrasound, they were forced to have a medically unnecessary ultrasound by the state. She added that in many cases women were subjected to trans-vaginal ultrasounds.

“So it’s an invasive vaginal forced procedure that a woman cannot say no to by order of the state government,” Maddow continued. “And that is all right with you. I understand that. You feel that you’ve got an interest strong enough to override a woman’s desire to not have that happen to her that you can insist that it does as a legislator. But most American women I think are going to balk at that.”

DeMint, however, insisted that some women wanted the state to force them to have an ultrasound.

“She’s forgetting about the thousands of women who want an informed choice, who want the opportunity to get a free ultrasound, which they can get not from Planned Parenthood but from a lot of these pregnancy centers.”

This is the most infuriating kind of anti-abortion paternalism — some creep like Jim DeMint thinking that women are too dumb to understand what pregnancy is — or, alternatively, just wanting to punish them with an invasive test and a guilt trip for deciding they aren’t ready to give birth. This is the argument that gives away the underlying sexism.

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[A] national fetish about “border security” – which seems to entail building a massive fence that has “gigantic construction boondoggle” written over it, and a functional militarization of the border with one of our closest trading partners – will do nothing to address the real issues driving the immigration debate, and in fact will only put that secondary cart before the horse. The people who want “border security” will find it an endless mirage until they fix their messed-up immigration system. 

They’re still living out the nativist legacy of the Minutemen. And so it ought to be worthwhile for Americans to remember, or at least be made aware of, just what exactly became of those noble citizen vigilantes. 

The Minuteman movement, in fact, crumpled into a heap after 2009, when a leading Minuteman figure named Shawna Forde committed a horrifying home-invasion robbery at the residence of a small-time pot smuggler in Arivaca, Ariz., and shot and killed the man and his 9-year-old daughter and wounded the man’s wife. Forde and her Minuteman cohort are now on Death Row in Arizona, and her former close associates in the movement all denied any association with her – a line largely swallowed by media reporting on the case. 

But as I lay bare in my book And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border, not only was Forde closely associated with leading Minuteman figures right up to the day of her arrest, she was amply reflective of the kind of people the movement attracted and who rose to leadership positions within it. (This was borne out again by co-founder Chris Simcox’s arrest last week for three counts of molesting children under 10.) Yes, she was psychopathic, but then, this was a movement whose appeals were virtually tailored to attract dysfunctional and disturbed personalities (which it did in large numbers): profoundly unempathetic, predicated around scapegoating an easily identifiable Other, and inclined to anger and paranoia and ultimately violence. 

That is the path down which the Minutemen wanted to lead the country, the well-worn path of nativism, which has a long legacy of misery, suffering and death in this country. When we make a fetish out of “border security” at the expense of rationally fixing our immigration mess, that’s the road down which we’re headed. At some point, we need to get off.

Neiwert’s book is a fascinating and extremely disturbing read. The Minuteman story is ground zero of the border security “movement” that seems to have become a bipartisan fetish even as it’s tempered by the desire among some (not all) to legalize current immigrants. In fact, I wonder if we aren’t looking at this backwards: the conventional wisdom is that the increase in border security is the price we must pay to get a path the citizenship. I think that for many people it’s the other way around: the path to citizenship is the price they will pay to get the lucrative outside contracts and fully militarized border they’ve always desired. There’s an awful lot of money in it — and plenty of support from people who believe that shutting out “the other” will keep America pure.  Folks like those All American girls and boys of The Minutemen.

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A true statesman

by digby

Because “putting their finger in our eye” will not stand:

“They should pay a price, either diplomatic, economic, geopolitical, for doing what they did. They’re always putting their finger in our eye,” said Schumer on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing for repercussions against Russia.

C’mon Chuck. Get serious. We have a nuclear arsenal, why not use it?

I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. Twenty, thirty million tops …

At least the CEOs are getting raises

by David Atkins

I get tired of saying the system is broken. For some, it’s working exactly as intended:

Wh we made our annual foray into the executive pay gold mine in April, chief executives’ earnings for 2012 showed what appeared to be muted growth on the year. The $14 million in median overall compensation received by the top 100 C.E.O.’s was just a 2.8 percent increase over 2011, the figures showed.

Well, what a difference a few months and a larger pool of C.E.O.’s make. According to an updated analysis, the top 200 chief executives at public companies with at least $1 billion in revenue actually got a big raise last year, over all. The research, conducted for Sunday Business by Equilar Inc., the executive compensation analysis firm, found that the median 2012 pay package came in at $15.1 million — a leap of 16 percent from 2011.

So much for the idea that shareholders were finally getting through to corporate boards on the topic of reining in pay.

At least the stock market returns generated by these companies last year exceeded the pay increases awarded to their chiefs. Still, at 19 percent in 2012, that median return was only three percentage points higher than the pay raise.

In other words, it’s still good to be king.

But no need to worry. It’ll start trickling down. Any day now.

Blame it on the boogie: The Secret Disco Revolution

A brush with destiny: The Painting

Word salad o’ the day: the champion

by digby

In response to a question whether she’d consider leaving the Republican Party for something called the “Freedom party”:

“I love the name of that party — the ‘Freedom Party.’ And if the GOP continues to back away from the planks in our platform, from the principles that built this party of Lincoln and Reagan, then yeah, more and more of us are going to start saying, ‘You know, what’s wrong with being independent,’ kind of with that libertarian streak that much of us have. In other words, we want government to back off and not infringe upon our rights. I think there will be a lot of us who start saying ‘GOP, if you abandon us, we have nowhere else to go except to become more independent and not enlisted in a one or the other private majority parties that rule in our nation, either a Democrat or a Republican.’ Remember these are private parties, and you know, no one forces us to be enlisted in either party.”

The funny thing is that I hear a more coherent version of this from liberals fairly frequently lately. And one might think that means we could possibly find some common ground with these folks for a third party.

Unfortunately, while we could possibly work on a few discrete issues, I guarantee you that Sarah Palin’s definition of freedom and rights and my definition of freedom and rights are very different, starting with whether or not I own my own body.

I do have to wonder how old Roger Ailes feels about that. Who knows, maybe he’s for it. After all, as long as the Palin wing controls the GOP, a lot of normal people are going to recoil from being part of it. They won’t join the “freedom party” though. They’ll just sign on with the Democrats. Hell, maybe Ailes will join up too eventually. The way its going, he’ll feel right at home.

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Vindication for William Binney

by digby

I don’t know how closely people are following the ongoing NSA revelations at this point but it seems, not very. We seem to have devolved into a meta discussion of what constitutes journalism (a necessary discussion) and armchair psychoanalysis of the players in the story.

But the fact is that the Guardian is releasing new information every day, much of it really fascinating. This one, discussed over at Business Insider, must be especially satisfying for an earlier “crazy” whistleblower named William Binney:

William Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in National Security Agency (NSA) history — worked for America’s premier covert intelligence gathering organization for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he “could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution.”

Binney claims that the NSA took one of the programs he built, known as ThinThread, and started using the program and members of his team to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen under the code-name Stellar Wind.

Thanks to NSA whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden, documents detailing the top-secret surveillance program have now been published for the first time.

And they corroborate what Binney has said for years.

From Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian:

The collection of email metadata on Americans began in late 2001, under a top-secret NSA program started shortly after 9/11, according to the documents. Known as Stellar Wind, the program initially did not rely on the authority of any court – and initially restricted the NSA from analyzing records of emails between communicants wholly inside the US.

However, the NSA subsequently gained authority to “analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States,” according to a secret Justice Department memo from 2007 that was obtained by the Guardian.

Apparently nobody in the here and now cares much about all that.  But I would guess that Binney does. He’s been shouting into the void for over a decade and everyone dismissed him as delusional.

And having it on the record will at least allow for historians of the future to be able to piece together where our great experiment in self-governance and liberty went wrong. It won’t help us much but maybe some society in the future will be able to avoid the pitfalls of blindly trusting the powerful to guard their rights for them.

Update: More slides revealed today in the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, nothing new on Glenn Greenwald’s student loan history so nobody cares.

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Your Daily Grayson

by digby

You deserve a gladiator:

Contribute Now to Blue America ’14

2014 Is going to be a tough year for Democrats to win back the House, especially with Steve Israel once again running the DCCC. But that doesn’t mean we can’t elect more progressives in both primaries and in the general election. That’s our goal.

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Bigwig leakers

by digby

It’s interesting that we’ve had a leak about an investigation into a General’s alleged leaking. I guess we’re all supposed to breathe a sigh of relief that the government is not just targeting the lower level whistleblowers and journalists but is going after people high up the food chain as well. But that’s a little bit silly in an era in which journalists report high level leaks from all over the government every single day and nobody blinks an eye because it’s government propaganda.

Still, this one is interesting, but mostly because of the fact that someone had earlier dropped a dime on the General over an alleged sex scandal that didn’t turn out to be a sex scandal. (If you want to know the details of it, you can read it at the link. I’m uninterested in that.) But I am interested in this, from 2011:

General Cartwright is emerging as a likely front-runner to replace Adm. Mike Mullen when he retires as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct…General Cartwright, a Marine Corps fighter pilot who is among the Pentagon’s experts on computer-network warfare and missile defense, was described by the journalist Bob Woodward in his book, “Obama’s Wars,” as the president’s favorite general.

But during the contentious review process that led to a new White House strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, senior officers — including Admiral Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus — were reported to have felt that General Cartwright went behind their backs to align himself too closely with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others in the White House against the consensus advice of the military and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Let’s just say that in the Village, whenever a bigwig gets targeted, look for the stab wounds in his back from the other bigwigs. It’s fascinating that this would be the one high level person who’s being investigated for leaks.

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