Month: June 2013

A smaller but annoying Orwellian problem

by David Atkins

With Orwell at the top of many minds lately and sales of 1984 on the rise due to the NSA spying revelations, a smaller but significant Orwellian issue is also being dealt with in the California legislature: disclosure of the real forces behind ads backed by groups with Orwellian names. Consider this, for instance:

As part of what advocates call the “next step” of the Affordable Care Act, California voters will consider an initiative next year that will empower regulators and consumer advocates to challenge health insurance premium rate hikes.

Though healthcare reform, better known these days as Obamacare, gives the government the ability to shine a spotlight onto insurance rates, it does not in itself enable regulators to block them. That power resides with the states. Currently, about thirty-four states have some laws on the books to give regulators the authority to block unjustified rate hikes; California is not one of them. And while advocates in California are optimistic about the prospects of reform, the health insurance lobby has wasted no time in preparing to defeat the measure.

Californians Against Higher Healthcare Costs, a political group created to defeat the rate review initiative, describes itself as a “coalition of doctors, hospitals, health insurers, and California employers.” Though the group bills itself as a diverse coalition, our review of disclosures with the California secretary of state’s office show that, since last year, the organization has received 99.27 percent of its funds from health insurance companies and health insurance political action committees. Health insurance interests such as UnitedHealth, Anthem Blue Cross, HealthNet and Kaiser Health Plans have raised $1,366,120 to fight the rate review. In addition, the California Hospital Committee on Issues has donated a mere $10,000.

The group has retained a number of consultants to help defeat rate review, including Thomas W. Hiltachk, a Sacramento attorney known for creating deceptive corporate campaigns for oil and tobacco companies. The media company retained by the insurers, Goddard Claussen (now known as Redwood Pacific Public Affairs), gained infamy for helping insurance companies block health insurance reforms in the past, including the advertising campaign known as “Harry and Louise” that many believe helped sink President Clinton’s attempt to overhaul the health care system.

There is no way that a group of health insurance companies should be able to lobby and put on ads while calling themselves “Californians Against Higher Healthcare Costs.” You can’t, of course, prevent people from giving themselves whatever names they want when they organize. It’s a free country, we have a first amendment, and creating some of sort of panel to decide if an organization has taken a valid name would be a cure worse than the disease.

But what we can do is make sure that when fradulent and Orwellian groups like this take out ads, the public can know exactly who and what is actually behind the sweet-sounding name. That’s what California’s Disclose Act, SB52, is designed to do:

SB 52, the California DISCLOSE Act, passed the full Senate yesterday in an overwhelming vote for increased disclosure in political ads as 27 Democrats, led by authors Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), were joined by Republican Senator Anthony Cannella (R-Merced) in voting Yes.

“In recent years there has been an unprecedented increase in election spending, which makes it more important than ever that we strengthen our disclosure laws to help raise voter confidence in the electoral process and shed light on who is funding political advertisements,” said Senator Leno, D-San Francisco. “With more information at their fingertips, voters will be more encouraged to vote and can make better informed decisions at the ballot box.”

Over $475 million was spent last year in California on ballot measures alone, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Most of it was spent by committees hiding their funders behind misleading names.

“This legislation is vital to protecting the integrity of our democratic process and ensuring fair elections in our state,” said Senator Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo. “After seeing billions of dollars flow into elections across our country after the Citizens United decision, we need the DISCLOSE Act now more than ever.”

SB 52, sponsored by the California Clean Money Campaign, requires state and local political ads in California to clearly and prominently list their top three funders. Committees would be required to maintain a website voters can easily access that lists the largest funders.

SB 52 applies to ballot measure ads and ads by outside groups for and against candidates. SB 52 would also extend existing law to require disclosure on sham issue and issue advocacy advertisements that attempt to influence legislative or administrative action.

It was originally sponsored by former Assemblywoman and now my Congresswoman Julia Brownley, and passed the Assembly last year. It should pass again, and should get a signature from Jerry Brown. If it does, it will be at least one blow against an overly Orwellian future.

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Synergy

by digby

I realize that many Americans are busy and want to be able to trust the men and women they voted for to do the right thing and really don’t want to know any more.  But I’ve been more than a little bit surprised at journalists who feel the same way. After all, one would think they, of all people, would value the whistleblowers and the truth-tellers. And one would certainly have thought they’d have a healthy skepticism about government police power.  I had always thought it was in the job description.

On the other hand, there are certain competing incentives aren’t there?

This is a screen-shot of today’s dead tree version of Politico:

I think that spells out the relationship between much of the beltway press and the government quite well don’t you?

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“This is not the first time that we have had this problem”

by digby

I posted this the other day, but if you missed it take a minute to watch it now. Alan Grayson is a lawyer and a good one. And he knows how to make a case to the jury. If you have questions about what is happening or the larger implications, I urge you to watch this. Watch it even if you already know the details and understand the implications. It’s very good:

Transcript available via Daily Kos.

If you like to sign a petition to support the Mind Your own Business Act, you can do it here.

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Don’t worry honey, Big Data will look out for you


by digby

Over the week-end the Washington Post featured an excellent article by Nancy Scola, a journalist and former staffer on the House government oversight committee, about the Obama administration and its relationship to “Big Data” — and not just in the national security realm. I hadn’t thought about it quite this way before an it strikes me a relevant to the discussion we are having. I’ve always had a sense that Obama had a weakness for the whiz kids and suffered from the “best and brightest” syndrome and this is one specific way in which it manifested:

In the political world, the promise of data — whether it’s Nate Silver’s spot-on election predictions or President Obama’s clearinghouse of government information, Data.gov — is that we no longer have to take so much on faith. “What do the data show?” is the new “What do you think?,” the new “Is this a good idea?”

But belief in the clarifying power of data is its own kind of faith, and it is one Obama has embraced, even before winning the presidency. And now, with the revelation that the National Security Agency is processing huge caches of telephone records and Internet data, the American public is being asked to take on faith how data — and how much data — is being gathered and used in Washington.

The “big data” presidency transcends intelligence-gathering and surveillance, encompassing the White House’s approach on matters from health care to reelection. A ­big-data fact sheet the White House put out in March 2012 — upon the launch of its $200 million Big Data Research and Development Initiative — listed more than 85 examples of such efforts across a number of agencies. They include the CyberInfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER), led in part by the National Archives and the National Science Foundation, and NASA’s Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which the fact sheet described as a “collaborative, international effort to share and integrate Earth observation data.” And the Defense Department is putting about $250 million a year into the research and development of such projects — “a big bet on big data,” as the White House called it.

Data is just data. It has no intrinsic moral character one way or the other. But I do get the feeling from a fair number of wonkish leaders in all aspects of public life that it has taken on a sort of well … religious significance. It is beyond any questions, the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is true.  Except, it’s just data … subject to interpretation by those fatally flawed machines known as human beings.

As this article points out, the real question is what to do with it. She quotes Eisenhower’s military industrial complex speech from 1961:

“In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system, ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

More than 50 years later, the task of the modern statesman and stateswoman is to engage the public in the work of integrating the old and the new.

But when the statesmen in charge are in awe of the scientific-technological elite it’s perfectly fair to wonder if they agree with that. It seems to me there’s a blanket belief among our elites that Big Data is an unalloyed good and the degree to which average people must submit to it is of secondary interest at best.  Why wouldn’t we?

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Moyers and Lessig talk about what to do


by digby

With all the sturm und drang of the past couple of weeks over the NSA revelations, we haven’t heard a lot about the possible solutions. Greg Sargent had a well circulated column about possible fixes and David Atkins wrote about it here as well. My personal view is that biggest threat is the gargantuan size and scope of our surveillance bureaucracy and that job one is to scale it back — and not just the NSA, but across our whole security apparatus. The mere existence of such a system is offensive to a free society in my opinion.

This conversation between Bill Moyers and Lawrence Lessig is one of the most sophisticated discussions I’ve seen about the problems we face with the technology and our ability to contain it and use it to protect the citizens from threats outside the government and within it:

Whatever your take on the recent revelations about government spying on our phone calls and Internet activity, there’s no denying that Big Brother is bigger and less brotherly than we thought. What’s the resulting cost to our privacy — and more so, our democracy? Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, discusses the implications of our government’s actions, Edward Snowden’s role in leaking the information, and steps we must take to better protect our privacy.

“Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,” Lessig tells Bill. “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?”

Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists.

“If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.”

“We should recognize in a world of terrorism the government’s going to be out there trying to protect us. But let’s make sure that they’re using tools or technology that also protects the privacy side of what they should be protecting.”

Here’s just one excerpt I wanted to highlight:

BILL MOYERS: You sounded a warning, back in 1998 when you testified before, 15 years ago, when you testified before the House Judiciary Committee. You begin by describing how the Russian people were technologically monitored by their government. Here’s what you said.

LAWRENCE LESSIG testifying:

The Russian people learned to live with this invasion. They learned to put up with the insecurities that technology brought. If they had something private to say, they would go for a walk in a public park. If they didn’t want a call traced, they would make it from a public phone. They learned to live with this intrusion by adjusting their life to it. They found privacy in public spaces, since private spaces had been invaded by a technology.

And who could blame them? They lived in a totalitarian regime. The State was unchallengeable.

[…]

The last 20 years have seen an extraordinary explosion in technologies for invading people’s privacy and for a market that feeds on the product of these technologies.

We are told that our E-mail can be collected and searched by our company or university, and so op-eds advise us not to put private matters into E-mail. Our credit card records become the source for direct marketers, and rather than object, we simply buy with more cash. We have responded to this increasing invasion as the Soviets responded to theirs. 

Bovine, we have accepted the reduction in private space. Passive, we have adjusted our life to these new intrusions. Accepting, we have been told that this is the way we have to live in this newly digitized age. Now I find this quite bizarre. For while this increasing Sovietization of our personal and private life occurs, we live in no Soviet State. While passivity dominates, there is no reason we couldn’t do things differently. We accept these invasions and these restrictions on our freedom, though there is no Soviet army to enforce them on us.

We accept them, these reductions in the space of our privacy, even though we are the architects of the technologies that give effect to this reduction in privacy. And worse than accept them, sometimes we are told we have no choice but to accept them.

Technologies of monitoring and searching erode our privacy, and yet some will argue that the Constitution restricts Congress’ power to respond. Technologies make it possible from a half-a-mile away to peer into one’s home and watch what goes on there, or eavesdroppers to listen to the conversations in our bedroom, but we are told that the free speech clause of the First Amendment bars Congress from doing anything in response.

Congress, our Constitution is no Politburo. The free speech clause does not render us hostage to the invasions of new technologies. It does not disable you, as representatives of the people, from responding to these changes through laws that aim to re-create the privacy that technology has removed. Indeed, other values, themselves as essential to our democracy as free speech, should push you to take steps to protect the privacy and dignity that changing technologies may take away.

That was 15 years ago. And here we are. I don’t know what the difference is between people who simply accept this way of living and those who don’t, but we’re seeing that tension being played out in the current debate over government secrecy and surveillance. If the polls are to be believed, a large majority are fine with these sorts of activities as long as they personally trust the party in charge of the government that’s doing it.

Lessig has some thoughts about what we can do and it’s well worth watching if you have time. It’s going to take a different consciousness among the American people or an outbreak of conscience and courage among our leaders. I honestly don’t know where that leaves us.

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Mortgage servicers stealing tornado recovery funds

by David Atkins

Hullabaloo veteran Dave Dayen writes in The New Republic of the theft of disaster recovery funds by mortgage services. Focusing specifically on the victims of the Moore tornado, he points out an appalling reality:

But residents of Moore may be shocked when they receive their insurance checks in the coming weeks. Like survivors of previous natural disasters, they will encounter a major obstacle to rebuilding their homes and putting the catastrophe behind them: their mortgage servicer. Turns out the same companies that ripped off homeowners during the foreclosure crisis are, after disasters like the Moore tornado, withholding repair money, often to force homeowners to use the proceeds to pay their mortgage.

The key issue concerns the standard practice for large homeowner’s insurance claims. As laid out in the fine print of mortgage and insurance contracts, the insurance company will make out the check jointly to the homeowner and the homeowner’s mortgage servicer. If the homeowner has a second mortgage on the home with a different servicer, the insurer writes a three-party check. This is intended to protect the lender if the house simply cannot be rebuilt, at which point the proceeds from the insurance claim can get used to pay off the loan. But in all other cases, it means that the homeowner must secure the endorsement of the check from the servicer(s) before they can get the money to pay for repairs.

Only the most fastidious of homeowners know this. The rest learn the hard way—like the residents of Bastrop, Texas. The most destructive wildfires in Texas history tore through the town in September 2011 and destroyed 1,691 homes. Most of these were total losses, and the insurance claims should have gone toward rebuilding. But a survey by the nonprofit consumer advocacy group United Policyholders found that over one-third of respondents were told by mortgage servicers that they would only release funds if the homeowner used them to pay off or pay down their mortgage, rather than make repairs. Though United Policyholders executive director Amy Bach hadn’t seen such a scenario in her 21 years of advocacy, “It made me think that the problem is more common than I realized,” she said. “It’s not like Bastrop is the only time lenders ever overreached.”

This is America, a land where doing anything but offering anodyne “thoughts and prayers” in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy is considered gauche, but where demanding that the victims of horrible tragedies not be ripped off by unscrupulous financial services leeches is socialist.

If ever I’m homeless as a result of a natural disaster, please feel free to skip the thoughts and prayers on my behalf. They’re not helpful. Instead, please do call your Congressmember to make sure disaster aid is provided quickly without stupid cuts to other parts of the budget, and that the aid is allowed to go where it’s supposed to rather than getting stolen by the worst sorts of humanity hiding under the mask of capitalism.

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Losing our foothold “in the grim effort to prevent the slide down the slippery slope to war”

by digby

Mark Lynch offers a deeply skeptical and very depressing assessment of the decision to intervene in Syria. It rings true to me, mostly because it sounds like so many other cases where the operative inducement is an understanable desire to “do something” even though there’s really not much to be done.

This is one piece of it:

On its own, the decision will have only a marginal impact on the Syrian war — the real risks lie in what steps might follow when it fails. The significant moves to arm the rebels began last year, with or without open American participation. Assad’s brutal campaign of military repression and savage slaughters and the foreign arming of various rebel groups has long since thoroughly militarized the conflict. The U.S. is modifying its public role in a proxy war in progress, providing more and different forms of support to certain rebel groups, rather than entering into something completely new.

The real problem with Obama’s announcement is that it shatters one of the primary psychological and political footholds in the grim effort to prevent the slide down the slippery slope to war. He may have chosen the arming option in order to block pressure for other, more direct moves, like a no-fly zone or an air campaign. But instead, as the immediate push for “robust intervention” makes obvious, the decision will only embolden the relentless campaign for more and deeper U.S. involvement in the war. The Syrian opposition’s spokesmen and advocates barely paused to say thank you before immediately beginning to push for more and heavier weapons, no-fly zones, air campaigns, and so on. The arming of the rebels may buy a few months, but when it fails to produce either victory or a breakthrough at the negotiating table the pressure to do more will build. Capitulating to the pressure this time will make it that much harder to resist in a few months when the push builds to escalate.

That’s how it usually works. And Lynch avoids the possibility that this may actually make things worse. More guns rarely makes things better.

Everything I read says that President Obama, unlike many in his cabinet (including his former Secretary of State) has been extremely reluctant to engage but finds himself hemmed in by the circumstances. He certainly isn’t the first president to find himself in that situation. America’s military empire has perhaps been the most “exceptional” thing about us in recent decades. I hope he resists the pressures that Lynch illustrates above. But the first step is always the hardest. The next ones will probably be easier which argues for not taking the step in the first place.

Sigh.

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Is happiness a dirty word?

by digby

A friend of mine from Seattle sent me an email the other day to alert me to this controversial High School graduation speech by novelist David Guterson. Apparently, it caused quite a ruckus. My friend wrote:

It almost caused a riot…I tell you, this guy has balls if nothing else. People who were expecting another cotton candy speech about “the world is wonderful and everything is your oyster” got something else entirely.

I’ve never seen an audience so polarized. Also some political overtones – he mentioned global warming, which of course caused the wingnuts in the audience to go off their rockers and start screaming “Obama, Obama” at him as if that were akin to being the devil.

I called a friend who was also there to confirm that they were shouting “Obama!”, and that these were the passages that drove them absolutely nuts:

It is an economy that motors along on your dissatisfaction, that steams ahead only if it can convince you that something is missing in your life. It knows that you are insecure about your appearance, for example, and in advertising it does everything it can to make you feel even worse about it, because if you feel worse about it, you will buy expensive clothing or pay a doctor to change your face. So in our society, not only do you have to be unhappy on that existential level that is just part and parcel of being human, you also have to be unhappy in ways designed for you by others, and if you are a woman or gay or a person of color, your society will make it even harder for you by tilting the playing field so you have to walk uphill, and by confounding your inner life in ways white men don’t have to face. Add to this your natural anxiety about the future—your distress about what it means that we are developing smart drones and melting the polar ice cap—and happiness begins to feel, for a lot of us, impossible. So impossible that the rate of mental illness in America, of depression in particular, is higher that it has ever been.

Can you imagine, mentioning that society discriminates against women, gays and people of color, and then following that up with a mention of global warming?

Wingnut Armageddon! El DIablo Obama!

Anyway, thought you might enjoy the text.

I certainly did. It was gloomy, but thrilling and hopeful as well. And I’d guess that all the 18 year olds who aren’t channeling Tracy Flick will be able to relate to exactly what he’s saying, in both mood and content.

And he gives some extremely good advice for this generation, which is like to get the exact opposite from most graybeards:

Cultivate those states of mind that actually produce happiness and cast out those that don’t. After a while you will find that you care much less about your own hopes and dreams and a lot more about other people.

You will move in the direction of self-less-ness, which is a good thing, because if there is no self, who is it that has to die some day? There will be no one there to die. There will be no self. Die now, so you won’t have to do it later.

Stop thinking about yourself every second of every day, which only produces boredom, dissatisfaction, fear, dread, anxiety, and hopelessness. Put yourself away and begin to find freedom. And you can find this freedom, which we might also call happiness.

Your life can open toward greater happiness and greater freedom, and it is entirely up to you to make that happen. Because in the end you have the power to do it no matter what the universe seems to be like and no matter the challenges of our place and time.

You really are in charge of your own happiness. Which is, I think, both exhilarating and terrifying. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could do it for you? It’s such a daunting and important task, really the central task of life.

But I urge you to work, on your own, or with the right mentors, or preferably, in both ways, as honestly and fiercely as you can on this matter of your own happiness. Don’t settle for the answers all around you that are not really answers. Don’t settle for a life of quiet desperation.

And most of all, don’t settle for unhappiness. I want to tell you that happiness is possible, and that you don’t have to be despairing and afraid. But it’s up to you, to each of you, to seek out the wisdom that happiness requires. Not learning but wisdom, which is something else altogether.

I wish you a long life, the better to find and deepen that wisdom. And I wish you happiness.

I wish them happiness too. It’s the very best thing to wish for any young person.

I really hope at least some of those kids heard what he was saying and were able to dismiss the silly, predictable outbursts from frightened people who truly cannot bear the idea of all people being allowed the freedom to pursue their own happiness.

And the irony is that they consider themselves to be the only Real Americans.

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Is James Risen a “real” journalist or should we be ignoring him too?


by digby

It would appear that New York Times national security reporter James Risen must be a fool who knows nothing about national security because he sounded an awful lot like Glenn Greenwald (and me) this morning when he went on Meet the Press and said the following:

There’s some limited evidence of abuse. It’s been anecdotal and there’s never been a thorough investigation inside the government of that. One of the problems going back to the Bush administration was all of this was kept so secret, even after we began to report about it, that the inspectors general and the internal investigations were kept secret. 

So there’s never been a full public accounting of the level of abuse, the level of– there’s virtually no transparency at all about how much of this really has caught up American citizens. And I think that’s really one of the issues here is you’ve got the creation of a modern surveillance infrastructure with no debate publicly except on a ad hoc basis whenever someone in the press reports about it.
[…]
The only reason we’ve been having these public debates, the only reason these laws have been passed, and that we’re now sitting here talking about this is because of a series of whistleblowers. That the government has never wanted any of this reported, never wanted any of it disclosed.

If it was up to the government over the last ten years, this surveillance infrastructure would have grown enormously with no public debate whatsoever. And so every time we talk about how someone is a traitor for disclosing something, we have to remember the only reason we’re talking about it is because of it.
[…]
I’m sorry. One of the things that really I think concerns people is that you’ve created something that never existed in America history before, and that is a surveillance state. The infrastructure that I’m basically using software technology and data mining and eavesdropping, very sophisticated technology to create an infrastructure that a police state would love.

And that’s what really should concern Americans, is because we haven’t had a full national debate about the creation of a massive surveillance state and surveillance infrastructure, that if we had some radical change in our politics could lead to a police state.
[…]
And I think one of the reasons that’s happened [whistleblowers going to the press] and has repeatedly happened throughout the War on Terror is that the system, the internal system for whistle-blowing, for the watchdog and oversight system is broken. There is no good way for anyone inside the government do go through the chain of command and report about something like this. They all fear retaliation, they fear prosecution.

And so most whistleblowers, the really, the only way they now have is to go to the press or to go to someone, go outside like Snowden did. He chose people in the press to go to. He picked and chose who he wanted. But the problem is people inside the system who try to go through the chain of command get retaliated against, punished, and they eventually learn not to do it anymore.

ANDREA MITCHELL:Jim, I think they can go to Congress, they can go to the Intelligence Committee. They can go to–

RISEN: If you go– if you’re not in the intelligence community, if you’re a low-ranking person in the intelligence community and you go to the Congress, to the Senate, or the House, you’ll– you will be going outside the normal bounds of– going to Congress would be an–unauthorized disclosure

He’s obviously some low-life blogger who is completely unqualified to speak on this topic. Let us pay no further attention to anything he says.

The good news is that David Ignatius was there to tell us that we have already had full debate on all this and that the Supreme Court affirmed these programs [!] so we must follow the law — which in his view is that the government has carte blanche and that’s that. I’m thinking he must be talking about that other dimension he apparently lives in.

Andrea Mitchell piped up to complain about the fact that a lowly GED holder could possibly make more than a mere subsistence wage (what’s become of our caste system anyway?) and to point out that Peggy Noonan observed that people don’t trust government anymore after Banghazi and the IRS scandal. (She really said it, I swear.)

Finally we had Sub-Commandante Michael Hayden just … well, it’s hard to describe. I’ll let him speak for himself. This was in answer to Andrea Mitchell asking about Snowden’s qualifications:

No, no, that’s not the issue. It’s people of this personality type having access to this, whether they’re–a green badge or a blue badge. Contractor or a government employee, all right? So it’s not so much contractors. Contractors don’t grant themselves clearances, all right? The government grants government employees and government contractors clearances. So this is a government issue. Remember I said as people learn about the facts of the case, they’ll …

Snowden’s wrong. He could not possibly have done the things he claimed he was able to do in terms of tapping communications. James, five inspectors general looked at the program I governed and which he wrote about, and a public report said there were no abuses. Controversial program, but no abuses.

DAVID GREGORY: Well, respond to Jim, too. You as head of the C.I.A. or N.S.A., you didn’t want to have a debate.

No, you give up operational capacity the more these programs are known. And I know honest men argue, “Oh, they knew they were doing that all the time.” But they don’t know the details. And actually, what I fear Al Qaeda learns about this program is not what we’re allowed to do, but they learn what we’re not allowed to do. And they learn the limits of the program. [Hide all copies of the Constitution, stat!]

And just one comment, the programs we’re talking about here now, prism and the metadata program were established under the court, under President Bush in 2006 and 2008. And although Candidate Obama had problems with it, President Elect Obama was briefed on it and embraced them as they existed when he came to office.[Zing …]

David, for part of my life when I was running the N.S.A. program, I thought lawful, effective, and appropriate were enough. By the time I got to C.I.A., I discovered I had a fourth requirement, and that’s politically sustainable. And by the time I got to C.I.A., I was of the belief that I would have to probably have to shave points off of operational or effectiveness to inform enough people that we had the political sustainability and the comfort of the American population concerning what it was we were doing. So I think it’s living in this kind of a democracy, we’re going to have to be a little bit less effective in order to be a little bit more transparent to get to do anything to defend the American people.

“I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed ….” 

This man was a General running the CIA before it occurred to him that the people for whom he worked might have some interests at stake beyond “daddy knows best.” And I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of faith that he means it, even now. After all, he’s a proven liar.

For some reason I feel the overwhelming urge to watch Dr Strangelove again. I hope it’s on Netflix.

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Why skepticism of the so-called success stories is called for

by digby

You know, I’d feel a lot more confident in the abject necessity of gathering all of our phone information if the supporters of the programs didn’t keep bringing up these particular example of their necessity:

Saxby Chambliss (on today’s Meet The Press): Well, the tool that the N.S.A. has talked about and they’ve allowed us to talk about are the Zazi case that was generated out of the monitoring of phone calls under 702 initially, where we picked up on a phone call made from Pakistan into the United States. And then 215 was used after that to coordinate the ultimate monitoring and arrest of Zazi who was headed to New York with backpacks loaded with bombs to blow up the New York subway system.

The other incident that we’ve been able to talk about is the David Headley case. Dual citizen, U.S. and Pakistani who lived in Chicago who was involved in the Mumbai bombings. And those two cases did– we did pick up information in those two cases with the use of 702 primarily, though particularly in the Zazi case. Also there was coordinated use of 215.

Actually, in both those cases, there is evidence that the tip came from either Pakistan or British Intelligence in the Zazi case, and British Intelligence in the Headley case. I’m pretty sure it’s not a huge problem to get warrants when someone is legitimately suspected of terrorism, so it’s hard to see why this capability would have been necessary.

And then there’s this:

But a closer examination of the [Headley]case, drawn from extensive reporting by ProPublica, shows that the government surveillance only caught up with Headley after the U.S. had been tipped by British intelligence. And even that victory came after seven years in which U.S. intelligence failed to stop Headley as he roamed the globe on missions for Islamic terror networks and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Supporters of the sweeping U.S. surveillance effort say it’s needed to build a haystack of information in which to find a needle that will stop a terrorist. In Headley’s case, however, it appears the U.S. was handed the needle first — and then deployed surveillance that led to the arrest and prosecution of Headley and other plotters.

As ProPublica has previously documented, Headley’s case shows an alarming litany of breakdowns in the U.S. counterterror system that allowed him to play a central role in the massacre of 166 people in Mumbai, among them six Americans.

That last strikes me as a slightly important detail. This vaunted system didn’t thwart anything in the Headley case. In fact,it was one of the most successful terrorist attacks since 9/11. Why in the world are they using this as an example of how well this program works?

Maybe Saxby Chambliss is too dumb to see the illogic of this but you’d think a journalist or two would have picked it up.

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