Month: June 2013

Trust the professionals. They’ll strike the right balance


by digby

I just listened to the president blather on about how nobody’s listening to anyone’s phone calls, despite the fact that this has not been alleged by anyone. And he assured us that he has no worries about having his own phone tapped when he’s out of office because the people who are doing all this are professionals and he trusts them. So that’s good.

But here’s what’s been going on:

We don’t know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people — we believe on millions of people — and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug — presumably only with a warrant.

We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime — deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what’s really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.

We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running “fusion centers” to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn’t die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.

We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels — inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers

In today’s press conference he said this:

I will leave this office at some point. And after that i will be a private citizen. And I would expect that on the list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their emails – I’d probably be pretty high on that list. But I know that the people who are involved in these programs… They’re professionals.

In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.

Apparently, the “right balance” includes an unprecedented crusade to punish whistleblowers and intimidate the reporters who revealed what we’ve been able to piece together:

It’s a little bit hard to believe that he “welcomes” a debate about all these programs he’s gone to such great lengths to keep a secret.

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Indiscriminate metadata gathering is a bad way to “protect America”

by David Atkins

Conservadem Senator Dianne Feinstein, trying to explain why the NSA feels it is necessary for the NSA to sift through the metadata for every single person in America:

Feinstein said she could not answer whether other phone companies have had their records sifted through as Verizon has.

“I know that people are trying to get to us,” she said. “This is the reason why the FBI now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. This is the reason for the national counterterrorism center that’s been set up in the time we’ve been active. its to ferret this out before it happens. “It’s called protecting America.”

It’s almost like waking up in the middle of the Bush Administration, isn’t it?

Hyperventilating aside, it’s clear what the feds are trying to do here in theory. Having been caught with their pants down by missing the threat from the Tsarnaevs (as well as several other close calls over the last decade), the NSA wants to vaccuum up every single phone call to see who is making “suspicious” calls outside the country. Now that they have the capacity to process mindboggling amounts of data at one time, the feds are running a dragnet of every single phone call to see what turns up. Unlike the Bush Administration which illegally bypassed the FISA court in order directly wiretap calls, the Obama Administration is apparently (so far as know at this point) staying within the law by going through the FISA court to get not the calls themselves, but metadata on the calls. Casting that wide a net seems to me (and, I suspect, most Americans) to be an egregious violation of the 4th Amendment, nor given the secrecy of the government’s arguments can we reasonably trust that the question of 4th Amendment protections will or even possibly can be adequately determined by any court.

Beyond the Constitutionality of the program, there’s something else that bothers me about it. It seems that Dianne Feinstein believes that we’re supposed to be reassured by this massive overreach on the part of NSA that the feds are doing everything necessary to protect us from a terror attack. But the opposite is true.

What the Boston Bombing tells me on a counterterrorism level is that we clearly weren’t paying enough attention to connections from Chechnya; whatever intelligence we have on the ground in Chechnya and among Chechen immigrants is obviously inadequate; red flags should be going up when discontented young men spend long amounts of time overseas in areas known to foster terrorism; and the government should probably be doing some detailed inquiry and outreach among other communities previously considered 2nd-tier potential for homegrown attacks. It seems that the Tsarnaev problem requires a focused effort involving narrowly targeted inquiry.

Instead, the feds have seen fit to just cast the widest possible net in the hopes that something will turn up if they churn through enough phone numbers. Even if that major and probably unconstitutional intrusion into civilian privacy weren’t being abused at all, it hardly instills confidence that the NSA is doing what it takes to protect America. On the contrary, it seems to be literally throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.

Constitutional issues notwithstanding, if Dianne Feinstein thinks that’s the right way to “protect America”, then perhaps it’s time for her retire and allow someone with more common sense (to say nothing of greater respect for civil liberties) to take on oversight of the Executive Branch’s national security activities.

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“The essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer”

by digby

Do yourself a favor and listen to Bobby Kennedy’s Day of Affirmation speech delivered this day in 1966.

He was shot down two years later on the same date.

It will make you feel better. And make you want to keep up the fight:

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person’s benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech; the right to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of field and forest; the right to recall governments to their duties and obligations; above all, the right to affirm one’s membership and allegiance to the body politic — to society — to the men with whom we share our land, our heritage, and our children’s future.

Hand-in-hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard — to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes men’s lives worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer — not just to the wealthy; not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race; but to all of the people.

And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people: so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, but also no interference with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties on an ordinary citizen by officials high or low; no restriction on the freedom of men to seek education or to seek work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all that he is capable of becoming.

Full transcript at the link up top.

This is what the secrecy is all about …

by digby

This isn’t new, but it will fill in some blanks if you haven’t been following the ins and out of this NSA debate:

Back in October of 2011, the then-Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote a letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) concerning section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

As NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reported earlier today, the senators had expressed concern about a “secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that would stun the American people.”

In the letter, obtained by NPR’s Carrie Johnson, Weich explains in broad terms how the government collects information using section 215 of the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. And he makes two main points: Congress had detailed knowledge of the classified uses of section 215 and despite that reauthorized the statute and two other provisions of the Patriot Act by overwhelming margins in May 2011.

“Against this backdrop, we do not believe the Executive Branch is operating pursuant to ‘secret law’ or ‘secret opinions of the Department of Justice,'” Weich writes. “Rather, the Intelligence Community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the Intelligence Committees of both Houses. There is also extensive oversight by the Executive Branch, including the Department of Justice and relevant agency General Counsels and Inspectors General, as well as annual and semi-annual reports to Congress as required by law.”

I guess the fact that it’s kept secret from the people — and it turns out we’re pretty much all personally involved — doesn’t count as “secrecy.” And furthermore, those irrelevant people should not be upset about the fact that none of this has seen the light of a normal courtroom where the constitutionality of this could be challenged by someone — because it’s been a secret.

That’s what Mark Udall is alluding to I think with his comments today;

Udall said the lack of transparency, not the breadth in information collected, is what concerns him the most.

“That’s why I’ve been fighting for years to amend the Patriot Act,” Udall said.“My concerns are that people need to know how the president interprets his authority under the Patriot Act … He said he was going to submit to transparency in the State of the Union … I expect him to uphold his commitment.”

It comes back to this insight from Emptywheel that I noted earlier:

[O]ur court system is set up to be an antagonistic one, with both sides represented before a judge. The government has managed to avoid such antagonistic scrutiny of its data collection and mining programs — even in the al-Haramain case, where the charity had proof they had been the target of illegal, unwarranted surveillance — by ensuring no one could ever get standing to challenge the program in court. Most recently in Clapper v. Amnesty, SCOTUS held that the plaintiffs were just speculating when they argued they had changed their habits out of the assumption that they had been wiretapped.

This order might just provide someone standing. Any of Verizon’s business customers can now prove that their call data is, as we speak, being collected and turned over to the NSA. (Though I expect lots of bogus language about the difference between “collection” and “analysis.”)

That is what all the secrecy has been about. Undercutting separation of powers to ensure that the constitutionality of this program can never be challenged by American citizens.

 Update: Rob Wyden’s statement:

“The program Senators Feinstein and Chambliss publicly referred to today is one that I have been concerned about for years. I am barred by Senate rules from commenting on some of the details at this time. However, I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information. Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.

The administration has an obligation to give a substantive and timely response to the American people and I hope this story will force a real debate about the government’s domestic surveillance authorities. The American people have a right to know whether their government thinks that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being conducted. Furthermore, they have a right to know whether the program that has been described is actually of value in preventing attacks. Based on several years of oversight, I believe that its value and effectiveness remain unclear.”

That last is important. Have they really managed to thwart terrorist attacks with all this? Who knows? A comment from one of our elected leadership today indicates what they might have in mind:

“We are very much under threat,” [Lindsay]Graham said on “Fox & Friends … Radical Islam is on the rise throughout the region. Homegrown terrorism is one of my biggest concerns. It is happening in our own backyard, and I am glad that NSA is trying to find out what terrorists are up to overseas and inside the country.”

When all the world, including the “homeland”, is a battlefield, we are all potential enemies.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party is hyperventilating over having to fill out some forms…

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The student loan crisis is horrible even from a conservative perspective

by David Atkins

Hullabaloo veteran Dave Dayen has an outstanding new piece at Salon on the subject of student loans. I wrote earlier today about the generational conflict that the student loan crisis is engendering; Dave Dayen points out that it’s leading to a modern form of indentured servitude:

At a time when overall student debt approaches $1 trillion, the facts reveal that student loans aren’t loans, not in the traditional sense. They exhibit none of the qualities of modern consumer financial instruments, and are often sold under false pretenses, with the promise of a lifelong benefit that never materializes. We need to change how these loans work and have a broader conversation about what we should be doing — including bankruptcy and refinancing — to help future generations obtain a quality, affordable education, which is critical to our economic future.

The roughly two-thirds of U.S. students who take out loans to finance their college education can end up in a situation most resembling the historical concept of indenture. In medieval times, peasants would sign deeds to work land, which would then get cut in a jagged line (looking like teeth, or “dentures”). Each party would get half, and rejoining them would prove the authenticity of the contract. Colonial indentures would trade years of labor for the opportunity of transportation to the New World. The indentured could not alter the terms of the contract, no matter their circumstances. One way or another, the debt would get paid.

Dayen goes on to point out the various ways in which these loans can be bad bets: failing to graduate (often not due to poor academic performance but due to the need to make a living simultaneously), going to a rip-off degree mill private “school”, and a general lack of jobs post-graduation in certain fields. More importantly, however, the debt on these loans is increasingly difficult to escape:

Before 1976, student debt was treated the same as any other in the bankruptcy process. Amid rising default rates – yes, even back then – Congress got it in its head that people were ripping off the government for a free education and then shedding the loans (a couple of well-placed stories about doctors declaring bankruptcy after graduating from medical school added to the panic). In an effort to stop this, Congress passed a law permitting students only to discharge loans in bankruptcy five years after origination, unless they demonstrated undue hardship.

In 1990 the five-year rule was extended to seven years, and then in 1998 Congress dropped that requirement altogether, making undue hardship the only way to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. And undue hardship is a very large chore to prove, according to Bob Lawless, law professor at the University of Illinois. “The courts require proof of an inability to get by without a modification,” Lawless told Salon. “They’re reluctant to allow a discharge if someone just has a lower-paying job and can’t afford the payment.” So the bankruptcy law has become harsher at the same time that college tuition has ballooned, increasing demand for student loans. As then-law professor Elizabeth Warren said in 2007, “Why should students who are trying to finance an education be treated more harshly than someone … who racked up tens of thousands of dollars gambling?”

In addition to having no escape from their loans, students must deal with aggressive creditors that can get to virtually any income source to secure payment – paychecks and tax refunds included. The Department of Education uses an “army of private debt collectors,” some of the most notorious financial operators out there, to intimidate and harass student borrowers. These collectors earned $1 billion in commissions from taxpayers in 2011.

This is madness. It’s immoral. It’s also harmful to the economy–whether one sits on the right or left side of the political fence.

Politicians of all stripes like to talk about the need to spur entreneurship in a flattened global economy. That’s mostly a garbage talking point that won’t help most people. But insofar as pushing people to start their own businesses is a good thing, the lack of single-payer healthcare and the burden of student loan debt are the two greatest obstacles, not taxes or regulations. Older Americans can’t leave their jobs for fear of losing their healthcare, while younger Americans with college educations can’t risk saddling themselves with the risk of entrepreneurship while being burdened with major student loan debt.

I know this from personal experience. I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent education at home, and went to UCLA on full-ride academic scholarship while working at my parents’ business 30 hours a week after classes. I started my own business a couple of years after graduation in a field wholly unrelated to my major (there aren’t a lot of jobs out there for Greek and Latin majors), but directly related to my apprenticeship at my parents’ business. I still make my modest living from that small business I started nearly eight years ago. Though I know I provide no more value to society than a teacher or other public sector worker, Republicans would call me one of their dearly beloved “producers”–a fact I often use to tweak them.

But had I been saddled with with the indentured servitude of $50,000 in student loans to attend UCLA, there is no way I would have dared to strike it out on my own. I would barely have started to pay back that level of debt. I would likely have been forced into a horrible, dead-end job somewhere with little expectation or hope or income advancement, and I would have been tempted like so many other Americans to buy into one the great American asset bubbles in order to have a hope of getting ahead.

The student loan crisis isn’t just an abomination from a progressive standpoint for all the obvious reasons. It’s also horrible from a conservative standpoint. If the objective is to make of every American a self-sustaining, freedom-loving capitalist entrepreneur, saddling them with loans they cannot repay at the beginning of working age is the very worst thing one can do.

If Republicans really believe their rhetoric, they’ll do something about it. On the other hand, if their intent is to create a desperate, indentured labor pool struggling just to maintain the facade of a middle class existence while begging for scraps from the corporate table, then doing nothing is a perfect choice.

But I think we already know what they’re going to do, don’t we? So let’s just remember that when conservatives do nothing on this issue, it will be proof that they’re not interested in removing barriers to entrepreneurship and capitalist risk taking. They’re interested in creating a vulnerable, dependent class of desperate grist for the corporate mill.

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GOP Hearts Ladies

by digby

So sweet.  They remind me of my grandpa. And he was born in 1888.

And that’s just from this year so far. After they lost the presidential race decisively in 2012 at least partially because of their throwback views on women. They must really believe this stuff, right?

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Blast from the past

by digby

January 2008:

“My job this morning is to be so persuasive…that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack,” he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers–and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event.

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and “wiretaps without warrants,” he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans’ phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It’s hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.

In our own Technology Voters’ Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: “No.”

A few months later:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.

In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party’s base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists.

In so doing, Obama sought to walk the fine political line between GOP accusations that he is weak on foreign policy — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called passing the legislation a “vital national security matter” — and alienating his base.

“Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program,” Obama said in a statement hours after the House approved the legislation 293-129.

This marks something of a reversal of Obama’s position from an earlier version of the bill, which was approved by the Senate Feb. 12, when Obama was locked in a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the “Potomac Primaries,” but issued a statement that day declaring “I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty.”

The FISA vote was a memorable moment and one that sparked some particularly nasty infighting, even among a few Obama supporters. I was extremely unimpressed, as was Dday, who wrote here in those days. Atrios even anointed Obama “wanker of the day.” But the usual frenzied beat down of all criticism ensued and we were never able to muster the sustained opposition to the president on this issue that might have made him think twice about pursuing these policies. Spilled milk. But there’s a lesson in it: listen closely.

He was very careful with his words in that earlier statement. And his words implied the opposite of what he has ended up doing . (He used similar misdirection about deficit reduction and the Social Security issue on the stump last year.) He’s a politician and a very, very good one. And much of the liberal left has never been able to really hear him.

This was what they loved:

My job this morning is to be so persuasive…that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack

And that’s how it happened for a lot of people — an emotional experience that transcended politics. It’s heady stuff. But it gives an awful lot of power to a leader inclined to protect the bipartisan status quo.

I’m pretty sure that something like that won’t happen again any time soon. Indeed, the next Democratic nominee will likely not get the slightest benefit of the doubt as the pendulum swings hard the other way. And more importantly, Barack Obama is a once in a generation politician who had a very special relationship with the grassroots of the Democratic Party. I meet people all the time in civilian life who adore him. Most presidents don’t have that deep and enduring bond with their voters.

But even if one feels that bond, it’s a good idea to pay close attention to any politician, even the ones you like and admire. They are often saying something that isn’t quite as clear cut as your gut assumes. After all, most of them are lawyers*. They’re trained that way.

*No knock on lawyers. It’s in the job description.

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Don’t worry your pretty little heads about anything

by digby

From Tom Tomorrow a year ago:

Someone should introduce Senator Feinstein to Senators Udall and Wyden because she just went on TV to explain that all of this is well known and that nobody in the government objects.It’s all very above board, legal and by the book.

Oh, and she believes we need a leak investigation right away because we are living in “a culture of leaks” and it must be stopped.

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QOTD: Eric Holder

by digby

“The Department has not prosecuted, and as long as I’m Attorney General, will not prosecute any reporter for doing his or her job.”

But it’s fine to tell a court that a reporter is a suspected “aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” so you can get a warrant. Judges don’t mind a little harmless misdirection for a good cause, right?

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Austerity policies will lead to generational conflict–as intended

by David Atkins

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones points out how the student debt crisis (encapsulated in the chart below) will inevitably lead to generational resentment:

It’s also yet another fault line between young and old that’s not likely to turn out well. My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s 20-somethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago.

What Drum doesn’t mention is that this is a feature, not a bug. There’s a very good reason that Paul Ryan’s “fix” for Medicare involves screwing everyone under the age of 50 or 55. It’s not just because it’s easier politically: it’s also because it’s guaranteed to create another way to divide one part of the 99% from the other.

After all, Republicans are becoming painfully aware that racial resentments won’t guarantee them electoral success anymore. In fact, it’s becoming a liability for them. They’ve been pushing the sexism angle for a while now, but in doing so they’re throwing away 60% of women right off the bat.

So playing one generation off another through horrible austerity policies seems like another way to keep the peasants angry at one another long enough for the nobles to finish looting what’s left.

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