Month: June 2013

Terrorists aren’t as dumb as people think they are

by digby

James Fallows points out something that should be obvious to anyone who’s been halfway awake for the past decade:

Terrorist or criminal groups would not have to wait for the PRISM revelations to guess that cell phone traffic might give them away. All they would have to do is watch any American movie or TV show produced since about 1985. Half the action in the first few seasons of The Wire involved “burner phones”; think of 24, Breaking Bad, or any other depiction of groups trying to operate outside the authorities’ view. Everything now known about Osama bin Laden’s final off-the-grid years suggests his scrupulous awareness of the perils of leaving an electronic trail.

My point is not that crime drama is a perfect representation of reality, nor to set this reader up as a straw man, since he’s provided a long stream of otherwise-astute observations. Rather I’m using his message to highlight one of the most striking aspects of the PRISM revelations: the unusual risk/reward balance in this latest large-scale leak.

He wonders why, in that case, this is a classified program at all. It’s certainly reasonable to ask how the vaunted “balance” has been achieved when it’s likely that the only “terrorists” it might be able to catch with this dragnet are some loner losers that are little different from an average criminal like the one who shot up Santa Monica College yesterday.

The question is, are we willing to pretty much give up our privacy to the whims of the national security state in order to catch the equivalent of street criminals (and even then, not necessarily all of them?) Why not give up the Bill of Rights completely — we could undoubtedly do away with most crime of all kinds if we lived in a full-blown police state.
We’d feel very safe. From everything but the government.

But for all our talk about freedom and liberty and swinging our great big flag all over the place, there are an awful lot of people in this country who are very, very sure that they can give up their liberty in the abstract and it will never come back to haunt them. They think they can be completely protected from people who want to hurt them.

And that will never be possible no matter how much power we give the authorities. For instance, what about this?

.

From the “trust the professionals” file: “disappear them” edition

by digby

In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit
— Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) June 8, 2013

Nice.

They said this in front of a journalist, by the way. Will they be fired for leaking?

.

It’s perfectly legal to kill someone over $150.00 in Texas

by digby

Well, I’m sure she deserved it:

A Texas man, Ezekiel Gilbert, has been acquitted of murder after shooting and killing a 23 year old escort he found on craigslist because she would not have sex with him even after paying her $150 fee.

Gilbert was acquitted under a Texas law that allows you to use deadly force to protect your property during a nighttime theft. In this case, the property was either the $150 or the use-rights to the body of 23 year old Lenora Ivie Frago. Frago said she couldn’t give back the money because she had to give it to the driver who was waiting for her.

Gilbert’s lawyers conceded that he shot Frago but insisted he was not actually trying to kill her. Frago was initialized paralyzed due to a gunshot wound to the neck and later died due to her injury.

Hey, yes means yes. If a man pays good money to rent a vagina and the owner of that vagina then refuses to deliver the goods, there’s really no question that you have every right to shoot her. It was 150 bucks, fergawdsakes! Sure it may be illegal to rent that vagina in the first place, but hell, a man’s got to draw the line somewhere.

I eagerly await the gun nuts rushing to say that if only the hooker and her pimp had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened …

Remember when the NSA professionals listened in on soldiers’ phone sex with their wives? Good times.

by digby

The president assured us yesterday that the NSA are professionals and said the he totally trusted them not to spy on his personal phone calls once he is out of office.

Uhm, am I the only one who remembers this?

Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
U.S. Officers’ “Phone Sex” Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers

By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER
Oct. 9, 2008—

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and said the committee has begun its own examination.

“We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration,” Rockefeller said Thursday. “The Committee will take whatever action is necessary.”

“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

“Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,” said Faulk.

The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other’s allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.

“There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect,” said President Bush at a news conference this past February.

But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall’s “smoke pit,” but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

“I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me,” he said.

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

“It’s not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it,” Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), “Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people’s lives?”

“No, sir,” General Hayden replied.

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said “all employees of the US government” should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and “information assurance.”

“They certainly didn’t consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game,” said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country’s warrantless surveillance program.

“This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,” Turley said.

NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.

“We knew they were working for these aid organizations,” Kinne told ABC News. “They were identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’ and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them,” she told ABC News.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: “The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers.”

Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans.

“It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information,” Kinne said.

Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.

“IED’s were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time,” Faulk said.

NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh to join the Navy after 9/11.

Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.

“By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody,” she said. “You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.”

Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, “The Shadow Factory,” to be published next week.

“It’s extremely rare,” said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark “Puzzle Palace” which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency.

“Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn’t be done, and that’s what forces whistleblowers.”

A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: “At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face.”

The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.

In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: “We have been entrusted to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously. Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve this country proudly.”

This problem is not a function of bureaucratic rules or proper protocol. It’s a function of human nature. And I don’t think anyone’s “good intentions” are going to change that.

.

A 1 percenter tells the truth about “job creators”

Nick Hanauer, successful entrepreneur and one percenter, gave testimony on income inequality a few days ago before the U.S. Senate. His testimony in full should be posted in every break room in America:

For 30 years, Americans on the right and left have accepted a particular explanation for the origins of
Prosperity in capitalist economies. It is that rich business people like me are “Job Creators. ” That if taxes go up on us or our companies, we will create fewer jobs. And that the lower our taxes are, the more jobs we will create and the more general prosperity we’ ll have.

Many of you in this room are certain that these claims are true. But sometimes the ideas that we know to be true are dead wrong. For thousands of years people were certain, positive, that earth was at the center of the universe. It’s not, and anyone who doesn’t know that would have a very hard time doing astronomy.

My argument today is this: In the same way that it’s a fact that the sun, not earth is the center of the solar system, it’s also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me are the center of America’s economy.

I’ll argue here that prosperity in capitalist economies never trickles down from the top. Prosperity is built from the middle out.As an entrepreneur and investor, I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all would have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That’s why I am so sure that rich business people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and
hiring.That’s why the real job creators in America are middle-class consumers. The more money they have, and the more they can buy, the more people like me have to hire to meet demand.

So when businesspeople like me take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around. Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring
more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do if and only if increasing customer demand requires it.

Further, that the goal of every business—profit– is largely a measure of our relative ability to not create jobs compared to our competitors. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer. Since 1980 the share of income for the richest 1% of Americans has tripled while our effective tax rates have by approximately 50%. If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. If it was true that more profit for corporations or lower tax rates for corporations lead to more job creation, then it could not also be true that both corporate profits and unemployment are at 50 year highs.

There can never be enough super rich Americans like me to power a great economy. I earn 1000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1000 times as much stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, we
go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally. I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.This is why the fast increasing inequality in our society is killing our economy. When
most of the money in the economy ends up in just a few hands, it strangles consumption and creates a death spiral of falling demand.

Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as “job creators”at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator.”

When someone like me calls himself a job creator, it sounds like we are describing how the economy works. What we are actually doing is making a claim on status, power and privileges.The extraordinary differential between the 15-20% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 39% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is just one of those privileges.
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather, jobs are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle- class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit in a virtuous cycle of increasing returns that benefits everyone.

I’d like to finish with a quick story.About 500 years ago, Copernicus and his pal Galileo came along and proved that the earth wasn’t the center of the solar system. A great achievement, but it didn’t go to well for them with the political leaders of the time. Remember that Galileo invented the telescope, so one could see, with one’s own eyes, the fact that he was right. You may recall, however, that the leaders of the time didn’t much care, because if earth wasn’t the center of the universe, then earth was diminished—and if earth was diminished, so were they. And that fact–their status and power–was the only fact they really cared about. So they told Galileo to stick his telescope where the sun didn’t shine and put him in jail for the rest of his life.

And by so doing, put themselves on the wrong side of history forever. 500 years later, we are arguing about what or whom is at the center of the economic universe. A few rich guys like me, or the American Middle class. But as sure as the sun is the center of our solar system, the middle class is the center of our economy. If we care about building a fast growing economy that provides opportunity for every American, then we must enact policies that build it from the middle out, not the top down.

Tax the wealthy and corporations–as we once did in this country—and invest that money in the middle class as we once did in this country. Those polices won’ t just be great for the middle class, they’ll be great for the poor, for businesses large and small, and the rich.

He’s right: except for the very wealthy global plutocrats whose fortune is in no way dependent on the health of the American middle class, most of the merely rich would in fact do better under Keynesian policies also.

But then, we also know that it’s a human (and extremely American) impulse to worsen one’s own circumstances just as long as it means doing better than the guy next to you. That’s what’s the matter with Wall Street just as much as it’s what’s the matter with Kansas.

.

Maybe this will make some people care

by digby

Jane Mayer is out with an interesting piece about metadata. There doesn’t seem to be much concern about it being used against average citizens, usually Muslims, but perhaps the possibility of it being used for some other purposes will start to worry people.

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.

Yes, I know they are professionals and the president says I should trust them, but still …

William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, retired rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.”

As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

The unctuous Ari Fleischer was just on Anderson Cooper telling us that we should all be willing to give up our civil liberties in order to protect ourselves from a handful of potential terrorists. (Well, all liberties except for our god-given constitutional right to shoot first and ask questions later — he couldn’t comment on that one.) He used the example of the TSA, as if taking off your shoes is the same thing as having a bunch of bureaucrats collecting data on every bit of communication in the country. (They are allegedly under obligation to “minimize” any intrusions that aren’t terrorist related, but the government can’t be bothered to tell us what those measures might be or who is responsible for enforcing the rules.)

Ari’s absolutely right that the government’s job would be much easier if we didn’t bother with such niceties as the 4th Amendment. They would undoubtedly have great success at catching criminals if they could ignore all that bill of rights nonsense and were able to burst into every house in town and search it whenever they wanted to. But our country has traditionally held to the principle that even though it may complicate its job, the government can’t do this sort of thing unless there is probable cause to believe that an individual is a suspect. This came about from a healthy mistrust of the people in charge and centuries of experience with autocratic power.

I guess your mileage may vary on all this but it seems to me that we should at least think a little bit about it before we shrug this whole thing off.

Anyway … here’s a little reminder of why one wouldn’t want to work for the NSA:

Pretty much …

.

So let’s consider what may have happened to three probable false positives who had their lives thoroughly investigated in 2009 after being — wrongly, apparently — tied to Najibullah Zazi’s plot to bomb the NYC subway.

We first learned of these three people when they appeared in the detention motion the FBI used to keep him in custody in Brooklyn. As part of the proof offered that Zazi was a real threat, FBI described 3 people in Aurora, CO, who bought large amounts of beauty supplies.

Evidence that “individuals associated with Zazi purchased unusual quantities of hydrogen and acetone products in July, August, and September 2009 from three different beauty supply stores in and around Aurora;” these purchases include:

Person one: a one-gallon container of a product containing 20% hydrogen peroxide and an 8-oz bottle of acetone 

Person two: an acetone product  

Person three: 32-oz bottles of Ion Sensitive Scalp Developer three different times. 

Unlike just about everything else cited in the detention motion, there was no obvious means by which these individuals were identified.

During the debate on PATRIOT Act reauthorization later that fall, Dianne Feinstein used the Zazi investigation to insist that Section 215 retain its broad “relevant to” standard. Given her insistence Section 215 had been important to the investigation, and given that the identification of these beauty supply buying subjects appeared to work backwards from their purchase of beauty supplies, I guessed at the time that the FBI used Section 215 to cross reference all the people who had bought these beauty supplies in Aurora, CO — which are precursors for the TATP explosive Zazi made — with possible associations with Zazi.

Just days later, as part of the debate, Ben Cardin discussed using National Security Letters to track people who buy “cleaning products that could be used to make explosive device.” And John Kyl discussed wanting to “know about Joe Blow buying hydogen peroxide.” Acetone and hydrogen peroxide, the same precursors used to implicate these three people.

In February 2011, Robert Mueller confirmed explicitly that Section 215 had been used to collect “records relating to the purchase of hydrogen peroxide.”

That seems to suggest that the government used Section 215 or NSLs to search on all the people who bought acetone and hydrogen peroxide in Aurora (by all public reporting, Zazi kept to himself the entire time he lived in CO).

But here’s the thing: these three people never appeared again in the legal case against Zazi and his co-conspirators. The only one from CO ever implicated in the plot was Zazi’s father, who had lied to protect his son.

Poof!

They were three known associates buying dangerous explosives precursors one day, and apparently became either cleared innocents or recruited confidential informants the next day.

In other words, they appear to be false positives identified by the Section 215 dragnet celebrated by Obama and DiFi and everyone else implicated in it now as a great way to prevent terrorism (Zazi, remember, was discovered through legal FISA intercepts obtained after we got a tip from Pakistan).

Now, no one, as far as I know, has ever found these three probable false positives to ask them what they went through during the period when they were suspected of being co-conspirators in the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11. But given the likelihood that the association with Zazi went through his mosque (the other likely possibility is another driver from the airport), I imagine that their neighbors and employers got awfully suspicious when the FBI showed up and started asking questions. How badly does being actively — and, apparently, falsely — investigated for being a terrorist ruin your life if you’re an American Muslim? Do you lose job security? Do other kids’ parents refuse to let their kids play with yours? Does your homeowners association try to cause you trouble?

That’s what this debate about efficacy needs to quantify. Data mining is never completely accurate, and given the small number of terrorists and therefore the high degree of guessworks that goes into what counts as an association, you’re going to have false positives, as appears to have happened here.

Lots of apologists are saying they never do anything wrong, and therefore they don’t have to worry. But it appears that doing something as innocent as buying hair bleach can get you sucked into this dragnet.

Links to all the documentation at the link. Marcy asks how one feels when one is falsely accused in these situations. I couldn’t help but think of this fellow:

Offering a rare public apology, the FBI admitted mistakenly linking an American lawyer’s fingerprint to one found near the scene of a terrorist bombing in Spain, a blunder that led to his imprisonment for two weeks.

The apology Monday came hours after a judge dismissed the case against Brandon Mayfield, who had been held as a material witness in the Madrid bombings case, which killed 191 people and injured about 2,000 others.

Mayfield, a 37-year-old convert to Islam, sharply criticized the government, calling his time behind bars “humiliating” and “embarrassing” and saying he was targeted because of his faith. 

“This whole process has been a harrowing ordeal. It shouldn’t happen to anybody,” said Mayfield. “I believe I was singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim.” 

Karin Immergut, the U.S. attorney in Oregon, denied Mayfield had been a target because of his religion and maintained that the FBI had followed all laws in the case.

Court documents released Monday suggested that the mistaken arrest first sprang from an error by the FBI’s supercomputer for matching fingerprints and then was compounded by the FBI’s own analysts.

Right. They never do anything wrong.

Update: Greg Sargent wrote a nice piece on president Obama’s comments earlier and I think his conclusion is correct:

I find it hard to imagine that these NSA programs represent a level of restored balance that Obama would proudly hold up as part of that legacy. But perhaps I’m wrong; after all, he told us today that those programs have the balance right.

More to the point, thanks to his own definition of his commander in chief role, which — as he himself forthrightly tells us — requires him to place national security first, perhaps a full restoration of the proper balance will never be a part of his legacy.

I think it probably has something to do with this.

.

Income inequality in the U.S. is literally off the charts

by David Atkins

Consider this yet another depressing reminder of the depraved immorality of our economic system:

It is well known that the level of income inequality stretches much higher in the United States than in the other developed countries of Europe and North America. Now a report from the International Labour Organization shows that U.S. inequality has literally gone off the chart.

Income inequality in the United States is soaring so high, in fact, that the authors of the ILO’s new 2013 World of Work report couldn’t even place the United States on the same graph with the other 25 developed countries their new study examines.

Here’s the chart:

To get a good grip on income inequality in the United States, you really a video to capture it:

Just as we look back on the savagery of the Mongol hordes in revulsion today, there will come a day when future generations look back on us today and shudder at the horror of it. And they will wonder why we didn’t band together to do something about it sooner.

.

“unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world”

by digby

Greenwald has another scoop this afternoon about a secret presidential directive relating to cyber-warfare:

The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging”.

It says the government will “identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power”.

The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the US, though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency.

I think everyone assumes that the United States has plans in place to defend itself against cyber-attacks. I would also assume it has plans to retaliate against various entities around the world who attack the US cyber-infrastructure. What is surprising about this is that we are evidently drawing up plans to “advance US national objectives around the world” which could mean any number of interesting things, couldn’t it?

The article lays out a few concerns:

Asked about the stepping up of US offensive capabilities outlined in the directive, a senior administration official said: “Once humans develop the capacity to build boats, we build navies. Once you build airplanes, we build air forces.”

The official added: “As a citizen, you expect your government to plan for scenarios. We’re very interested in having a discussion with our international partners about what the appropriate boundaries are.”

The document includes caveats and precautions stating that all US cyber operations should conform to US and international law, and that any operations “reasonably likely to result in significant consequences require specific presidential approval”.

The document says that agencies should consider the consequences of any cyber-action. They include the impact on intelligence-gathering; the risk of retaliation; the impact on the stability and security of the internet itself; the balance of political risks versus gains; and the establishment of unwelcome norms of international behaviour.

Among the possible “significant consequences” are loss of life; responsive actions against the US; damage to property; serious adverse foreign policy or economic impacts.

Yeah, I think we need to have discussions with our international partners about what the appropriate boundaries are. Also too: the American people, particularly if this is being developed to use in the US.

I would also be concerned about whether the US has decided to use these capabilities to “protect”  multi-national business concerns. In fact, the the back and forth between the US and the Chinese alluded to in the article is highly likely to be about intellectual property rights. I just hope that it doesn’t get out of hand and result in a shooting war at some point. I’d hate to think we ever went to war over some pirated Disney movies. (Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened would it?)

I think this should be debated. If the US thinks it can use cyber attacks to “advance its national interest” I think we need to know how they define that. What are the rules of the road here? If the document had said they were planning for contingencies/retaliatory strikes in case of a cyber-war launched by another country (or even an unknown adversary) I’d be less concerned. But this sounds like first strike stuff with the rationale for using it left extremely vague.

It brings to mind the “March of Folly”, where boys and their new toys decide they can test the boundaries without thinking through the ramifications. The results are often very violent. We should be formulating a policy on this in a democratic fashion not just drawing up plans for a cyber-war of aggression that could easily lead to a real one if we aren’t careful.

.

Huzzah for Obamacare

by digby

I’ve been worried about the fact that some people will see their premiums go up under Obamacare and that the inevitable backlash would threaten the positive aspects of the reforms (especially considering our current political deadlock.) I also wondered what would happen to my husband and me, who are middle aged, middle class and in the private insurance market.

I found out today by going to the Covered California website: we are going to get a substantially better plan and save a bit of money. (At least I think so based on the calculator…) Hooray for Obamacare.

This part seems a little bit unwieldy for people who own their own businesses or work on a consulting or freelance basis, however:

Any eligible Californian without insurance can shop through Covered California for coverage, regardless of income. Your income level helps determine your eligibility for Medi-Cal coverage or a government assistance program, such as a tax credit, to help pay your premium. If your income changes over the year, your tax credit will be adjusted accordingly. If your income increases, you will have to pay the difference at tax time. It will be important that you keep on top of any income changes so you have an idea of how much you will owe at tax time.

If you have Medi-Cal coverage and your income increases to more than $15,415 a year for an individual or $31,810 for a family of four, you would no longer qualify for this no-cost government insurance plan. However, through Covered California, you could find affordable coverage and tax credits to help pay the premiums.

People in the private insurance market are subject to big fluctuations in income, so this could be challenging. We’ll have to see how that works out. But overall, I’m very pleased, at least as it concerns my own personal situation in California. If most people are in my position when all this shakes out, this is going to be a success here.

As for the rest of the country I can’t imagine. California is actually trying to make it work and from the looks of things the private health care market is going to be improved. Other states, not so much…

And lest on thinks the conservatives will do everything they can to ensure that it doesn’t work, read this by Ed Kilgore.

Update: Via dday, (who wrote about some of this earlier at Salon) I got this email from Health Access California which shows that it’s not completely sunny in California just yet. While people like me might be better off, if the Governor has his way, a number of poor people may be out of luck — even with the medicaid expansion under the ACA:

GOVERNOR AND LEGISLATURE’S DECISION ON THE BUDGET COULD CUT SAFETY-NET, INCLUDING FOR THE REMAINING UNINSURED: “As the federal Affordable Care Act is ready to expand coverage and increase investments in our health system, this state budget would seek to cut $300 million immediately and $1.3 billion in 2016–over 75% of the funds to serve the remaining uninsured through the county health infrastructure we have built up over years.” said Wright. “California needs a safety-net that survives and thrives, and we should not prematurely reduce the resources already set aside to serve the 3-4 million remaining uninsured.”

“Decisions made in the next few days may very well reduce our safety-net capacity at public hospitals, clinics, and county low-income health programs. It’s shameful if California policymakers, while the Affordable Care Act is expanding access for so many, actually cuts and curtails access to others.” said Wright. “The Governor’s formula to take savings would restrict many counties from providing safety-net care and coverage for many of the remaining uninsured, and the Legislature should not allow that.”

“At the time we need all the capacity we can get, the current budget would go forward with cuts for both public and private health care providers, which would make it harder for both the insured and uninsured to get the care they need when they need it.” said Wright. “The Governor would continue cuts to Medi-Cal dental services to 3 million Californians, and to Medi-Cal provider rates, which prevents many Californians from getting in to see a doctor or specialist when they need it. Cancelling the pending Medi-Cal provider rate cut or restoring dental coverage would bring in one-to-one federal matching dollars for those now in Medi-Cal, but be full federally funded for those newly-eligible under the Affordable Care Act. If California wanted to maxmize the benefits of the law and take a truly leadership position, California should make the investments to get that immediate return for California families, for our health system, for our economy.”

I can’t imagine why they would want to do this since it brings in the 1-1 federal matching funds, but it’s on the table. It affects the poorest of the poor — the homeless and those who have no dependents.What a ridiculous place to “save” money. It’s not as if these people won’t get sick.

Lord this is a complicated piece of legislation. Multiply these issues by 50 and imagine how hard it’s going to be to get it off the ground safely before the Republicans get into power and start chipping away at it.

One can easily understand why single-payer advocates were so exasperated. It would have been a hell of a lot simpler to just put everyone in the same system. And a hell of a lot harder to take them out.

.