Month: July 2013

Corporations seeking metadata? Yup.

by digby

So you think the government needs to access your communication records if it thinks it needs to do so to protect the country.  But what if it’s a corporation seeking to retaliate against people who won a judgement against them in another country?

On June 25, a federal judge approved a subpoena, to be served by Chevron to Microsoft, granting the oil company private Internet and phone data related to 30 email addresses, including those related to environmental nonprofits, activists, journalists and lawyers.

This information forms part of a larger fishing expedition by Chevron to go after those who won an $18 billion judgment against the company in Ecuador in February 2011 for dumping 18.5 billion gallons of highly toxic waste into the streams and rivers in the rainforests of eastern Ecuador.

In its retaliatory lawsuit, Chevron claims that “this judgment is the product of fraud.” And it is seeking the IP addresses of individuals involved in the suit over a nine-year period.

In particular, the subpoena calls for the production of all documents related to “the identity of the users of the email addresses, including ‘all names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, billing information, date of account creation, account information and all other identifying information.”

Like the NSA, Chevron claims that “the subpoena does not call for contents of emails sent or received by any of the thirty email addresses.” It does however request Microsoft to “produce documents identifying the account holders and their available personal information” and “the IP address connected with every subsequent login to each account over a nine-year period.”

As the subpoena itself states, it would allow Chevron to determine the countries, states, cities and even building addresses from which accounts were used.

Chevron also served subpoenas around September 18, 2012,to Google and Yahoo, demanding IP logs and identifying information for approximately 71 email accounts. Earth Rights International and the Electronic Front Foundation filed a motion to quash these subpoenas on First Amendment grounds in northern California on November 28, 2012.

Yes, it appears to be legal. So what?

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Ted Cruz is smart. But all evidence suggests he’s never thought for himself.

by digby

This story about Ted Cruz’s radical senior thesis is fascinating and should be read in full. But I wanted to highlight one little piece that prefaces his college years and beyond:

RAFAEL EDWARD CRUZ’S CONSERVATIVE baptism came at 13, when his parents enrolled him in an after-school program in Houston that was run by a local nonprofit called the Free Enterprise Education Center. Its founder was a retired natural gas executive (and onetime vaudeville performer) named Rolland Storey, a jovial septuagenarian whom one former student described as “a Santa Claus of Liberty.”

Storey’s foundation was part of a late-Cold War growth spurt in conservative youth outreach. (Around the same time in Michigan, an Amway-backed group called the Free Enterprise Institute formed a traveling puppet show to teach five-year-olds about the evils of income redistribution.) The goal was to groom a new generation of true believers in the glory of the free market.

Storey lavished his students with books by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, political theorist Frédéric Bastiat, and libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard—and hammered home his teachings with a catechism called the Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. (Cruz was a fan of Pillar II: “Everything that government gives to you, it must first take from you.”) Storey’s favorite historian was W. Cleon Skousen, an FBI agent turned Mormon theologian who posited that Anglo-Saxons were descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. Skousen was also a patriarch of the Tenther movement—whose adherents view the 10th Amendment as a firewall against federal encroachment. (By Skousen’s reading, national parks were unconstitutional.)

Cruz was a star pupil. “He was so far head and shoulders above all the other students—frankly, it just wasn’t fair,” says Winston Elliott III, who took over the program after Storey retired. When Storey organized a speech contest on free-market values, Cruz won—four years running. “It was almost as if you wished Ted might be sick one year so that another kid could win.”

Cruz and other promising students were invited to join a traveling troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators. Storey hired a memorization guru from Boston to develop a mnemonic device for the powers specifically granted to Congress in the Constitution. “T-C-C-N-C-C-P-C-C,” for instance, was shorthand for “taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts.” The Corroborators hit the national Rotary Club luncheon circuit, writing selected articles verbatim on easels. They’d close with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.”

FROM HOUSTON, CRUZ MOVED on to Princeton and then Harvard Law School, a period of his life he refers to, with some seriousness, as “missionary work.” He has said of his time in Cambridge: “The communists on the Harvard faculty are generally not malevolent; they generally were raised in privilege, have never worked very hard in their lives.” He was a believer in a land of Philistines.

This is a person who has, apparently, never questioned for a moment what he was taught at age 13. And the radical, right wing political philosophy he adopted at that tender age seems to be the basis for his entire identity. That’s very creepy.

It doesn’t always go down that way. Take for example this equally precocious 13 year old kid:

One of the biggest hits at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference was a homeschooled pundit with the voice of a Muppet and the ideology of Alex P. Keaton. Laugh all you want, but the way things are going, he could soon replace Michael Steele.

Guess what he did?

It’s almost a job requirement for a 13-year-old to do things that will make him cringe as an 18-year-old. Some regret a death-metal phase, others a Bieber haircut. Jonathan Krohn says that his big embarrassment is his stint as a conservative pundit.

In his early teens, Mr. Krohn wrote a book titled “Define Conservatism” and made a speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference that caught fire. He was courted by Fox News, mentored by William Bennett and anointed “the future of conservatism.” A frequent cable-news guest and Tea Party speaker appearing in sweater vests or suits and ties, he was called Alex P. Keaton, Lil’ Limbaugh, the Little Mr. Conservative (in a headline with a 2009 article in these pages), Urkel, a Muppet and Doogie Howser, G.O.P.

But Mr. Krohn, it turned out, was a work in progress, and by this spring his transformation seemed nearly total: from a buttoned-up kid to a shaggy young adult with facial scruff and untucked shirts; from a golfer to a lover of art films; from a home-schooled Christian living in Duluth, Ga., to a secular New York University freshman in the East Village. Most jarring of all, he renounced his earlier political beliefs.

The turnabout made him something of a pariah among conservatives (Mr. Bennett now declines to discuss him) and ruptured his family.

“I started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about what I had said and what I had done,” Mr. Krohn told Politico last summer. He said he came to believe that “it was naïve,” that he was “a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.”

He added that from now on “I want to be Jonathan Krohn, and I’m tired of being an ideology.”

Apparently, Ted Cruz managed to never question anything, never reflect, never wonder if he was just saying “stuff he had heard for a long time.” He stopped thinking at age 13.

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Social mobility map: the Deep South is where the American Dream goes to die

by David Atkins

David Leonhardt has a fantastic piece about social mobility in the United States. It turns out that the American Dream, while getting more and more distant across the board, is still much more possible in some places than in others. What places? Well, surprise surprise:

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

Here it is in map form:

Kevin Drum comments:

There are several regions that are above and below average, but the obvious outlier is the deep South. This is yet another reminder of a lesson from politics: never look solely at nationwide data. Politically, this means that the South votes fundamentally differently from everyone else. Working class whites, for example, aren’t actually a big problem for Democrats. Only Southern working class whites are a big problem. When it comes to mobility, apparently the same thing is true. If you look solely at nationwide trends, you’ll miss the fact that one particular region is way, way different than the others. Poor kids don’t exactly have a great chance in life no matter where they live, but in the South, they have almost no chance at all. If you take a look at the policy preferences of Southern governors and legislatures, that’s apparently exactly the way they like it.

Obviously, race plays a huge part in this. But mobility for poor whites in the South is terrible as well.

Conservative policies are quite literally killing the American Dream.

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Clean air and water is “nice to have” but nonessential


by digby

Here’s what the right is likely to propose in the upcoming budget battles, via Sahil Kapur at TPM:

House Republicans unveiled legislation Monday that dramatically cuts funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and various arts and wildlife programs.

The draft legislation (PDF), which will face committee hearings starting Tuesday, slashes the fiscal 2014 budget for the Interior Department and for the EPA by $5.5 billion from existing levels enacted for 2013 — a 19 percent cut that brings base funding down to $24.3 billion. It’s $4 billion below levels already required by sequestration — automatic spending cuts that both parties say are senseless and onerous.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said the bill “reflects the extraordinarily hard choices needed to maintain critical investments and services for local communities,” while “dramatically scaling back lower-priority, or ‘nice-to-have’ programs.”

The proposal reflects the GOP’s opening salvo in what is shaping up to be an ugly battle to keep the government open when funding expires on September 30. Republicans are demanding a swath of new cuts to domestic programs, in part to protect the military budget from long-term spending reductions that the two sides agreed to in 2011.

The president, meanwhile, has reportedly offered up December deficit cliff offer as an opening bid and is working with the Chained-CPI Gang in the Senate to get an agreement to get that done.

So, here are the options so far:

1. Slashing government programs like the EPA which the Republicans characterize as “nice to have” but nonessential.
2. Slashing the social insurance programs instead (preferably with some phony “tax reform” so Democrats can pretend that they soaked the rich even though they didn’t.)
3. Already scheduled military cuts which President Obama, most Democrats and all Republicans have said they cannot tolerate.

Gosh, I wonder how this is going to go?

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Factoid ‘o the day

by digby

In 1960, the wealthiest metro area in America was Detroit. Today, it's Washington DC. #completelyunrelatedrandomfacts— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 22, 2013

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Parsing the “professionals”

by digby

The president and others have told us that we can trust the professionals to protect us and make sure their surveillance activities are in compliance with the constitution. And yet, so much of what they say doesn’t make sense:

The U.S. Justice Department has told a court in Florida that the government does not secretly track the location of Americans’ cellphones as part of its massive phone surveillance dragnet, but asking experts to believe that assertion has proved to be another matter.

The basic privacy question raised in the recent revelations — has the government been tracking American phone users? — remains muddied by a vaguely worded, top-secret court order and an ensuing series of carefully worded denials.
[…]
The government’s response to Lewis’ request, filed with the court last Wednesday, says the NSA does not have such a capability: The agency didn’t collect location data under the phone surveillance program, so there were no records to turn over, the court filing said.

“The program described in the classified [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court] order cited by the defense did not acquire such data,” the filing stated, adding that “the government has no reason to believe” location data were being held by the government that could be turned over for the criminal case.

Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cole made a similar statement about the limits of the phone metadata program at a U.S. House Intelligence Committee hearing last Tuesday.

“This is just like what you would get in your own phone bill,” Cole testified. “It is the number that was dialed from, the number that was dialed to, the date and the length of time. That’s all we get. … We don’t get any cell site or location information as to where any of these phones were located.”

But surveillance experts still found themselves poking through the officials’ latest statements and looking for trap doors and subtle elisions, checking to see whether the government had camouflaged wide-ranging surveillance capabilities behind a few carefully worded denials.

Much of the uncertainty regarding the government’s latest statements resides in the original FISA court order to Verizon. The top-secret order, issued in April, compelled Verizon to turn over “all call detail records,” including “comprehensive communications routing information.”

Specialists queried by the Los Angeles Times couldn’t say with certainty whether the language used in the order meant that Verizon was clearly compelled to turn over location data to the government, though many assumed location data would normally be included in such a broadly worded request.

“Given that the FISA Court order says that the government can have location data, it’s quite odd to hear the government claim that it doesn’t ‘collect’ that data,” said Susan Landau, a former Sun Microsystems engineer and an expert on digital surveillance.

“They certainly have the technical capacity and assert they have the authority,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group. “Given the history of deceptive and misleading statements from the [national intelligence director], I cannot take the government at its word that, despite its technical capacity and belief in its authority, it simply chooses not to track location.”

h/t to @???

The unfortunate victims of “black skin privilege”

by digby

Following up on David’s post below, Roy Edroso surveys other horrors of the right wing commentariat on the Zimmerman verdict and President Obama’s speech, so you don’t have to:

Rightbloggers … reacted as if it were a black version of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, because it acknowledged something they absolutely refuse to accept: That white people have some advantages over black people in America.

(NB: It should be mentioned up front, to avoid confusion, that all rightbloggers speaking on the case accepted Zimmerman’s story that Martin struck him first as a settled fact, and some even took the theorizing to that effect of witness Rachel Jeantel, whom they had mocked and reviled during the trail, as evidence thereof.)

“President Trayvon Obama – Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste – Divisive Obama Injects Himself To Insure Racial Tensions Explode,” headlined The Conservative Treehouse. “OBAMA CONTINUES RACIAL ZIMMERMAN NARRATIVE WHILE HISPANICS TARGETED” said Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com. “He cheered for emotionalism and for the perspective that insists it is always about race,” said Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post. “The Divider & Narcissist in Chief Barack Obama … Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me (VIDEO & Transcript) … Obama Fans the Flames of Racism,” howled Scared Monkeys. “…Sorry, but Obama is a poor excuse of a president and a poor excuse of a human being. All he can do is attack his own racism and past to Trayvon Martin like a leach.”

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit cried, “Good Grief.. Barack Obama: If You Lock Your Car Doors… You Must Be Racist.” “Martin was the aggressor. Is Obama trying to suggest otherwise?” said Nice Deb. (See, we told you.) “Michael Savage gives a Negro caller a piece of his mind,” cheered Ozzie Saffa. “…And before people go on about him being a Jew, he’s just about the only Jewish person I’ve ever heard who is a Jew realist.”
[…]
Referring to the “I Am Trayvon” slogan some supporters were using, Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag assured readers that “I Am Not Trayvon Martin,” because if he were shot and killed, “lacking the Black Skin Privilege that turns a death into an opportunity for race baiting, I would just be another statistic. There would be no rallies for me and no t-shirts with my name on it. No one would be talking about how they are me or aren’t me.” We can’t understand how white people survive day after day under that kind of oppression. Maybe Greenfield could have his skin darkened so he can enjoy some of that Black Skin Privilege. It worked for John Howard Griffin!

There’s more. Much more. Read it all. You have to know, even though you may not want to.

And once and for all, can we please dispense with the convenient delusion that we are in a “post-racial” society?

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Fantasizing about killing minorities

by David Atkins

My brother Dante Atkins writes at Daily Kos about something we’re all not supposed to talk about: the prevalent fantasy on the part of much of the right wing about murdering members of minority groups:

Rush Limbaugh felt the need to compare Trayvon Martin and Boston Bomber suspect Dzokhar Tzarnaev. The ever-so-moral Pat Robertson declared that Trayvon was basically at fault because he jumped on someone whom he “thought was a quasi-policeman,” as if to imply that the victim had a lack of respect for law enforcement and presumably deserved to die for the offense. But as bad as they are, they are far from alone. Right-wing media figures have conducted a relentless smear campaign against the victim, suggesting with no evidence that he was a “wannabe gangster” and a drug dealer with a history of violence. Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence had absolutely nothing to do with Trayvon Martin’s past, but rather on the singular events that took place that fateful evening. And yet, the right wing continues to feel this twisted compulsion to insult his death by tarnishing his life. Why?

Because as horrific as it is, the fantasy about killing aggressive urban minorities in self-defense is a prevalent, deeply held narrative among certain sections of the American right. It’s not a hidden fantasy, a secret and dark desire that dare not speak its name. No, this strain states its intentions and its desires loudly and proudly. Take, for instance, shock jock Neal Boortz, who had this to say about crime in Atlanta:

This town is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I’ll tell you what it’s gonna take. You people, you are – you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city. And let their — let their mommas — let their mommas say, “He was a good boy. He just fell in with the good crowd.” And then lock her ass up.

This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. On far-right message board Free Republic, there have been threads where posters openly fantasize about killing black people who “invade” their communities subsequent to rioting or social unrest. In the minds of this strain of the American right, best represented by Rush Limbaugh and Ted Nugent, Trayvon Martin must have been violent, must have been a gangster, must have been a drug dealer or drug addict. Because were this not the case—were he simply, as he was, a teenager carrying a can of iced tea and a pack of Skittles minding his own business and on his way home—it would suggest that perhaps the vigilante fantasy that so pervades the conservative camp might be mistaken; that perhaps standing one’s ground for so-called Second Amendment remedies could result in the death of an innocent teenager, rather than justified self-defense against one of Boortz’ so-called “urban thugs.”

Trayvon Martin is dead. But some among the right feel the need to kill his soul as well, all so a disturbing vigilante fantasy can live on without hindrance.

One thing the Zimmerman trial has certainly done is bring to the fore the enormous amount of violent racism that still exists in America. It hasn’t gone away among a certain segment of the population, and it’s not going to for quite some time.

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Corporations are enlisting militias to chase terrorists. Seriously. 


by digby

What does this look like to you?

If you said a terrorist, you are sadly mistaken:

Imagine taking a hike in your local woods and coming upon characters toting semi-automatic weapons, dressed in camo and wearing masks. Then imagine finding out they are militia-movement followers hired by a mining operation to protect against “eco-terrorists.”

That’s what’s been happening to people living in northern Wisconsin lately…

The first of these goons to show up on behalf of the Canadian mining company — Gogebic Taconite, or GTAC — that wants to rip these woods apart were employed by an outfit from Arizona called Bulletproof Securities. Then they quickly vamoosed when it emerged that they were not licensed to operate in the state of Wisconsin.
In short order, a new set of goons appeared as security for GTAC’s President, Bill Williams, in his recent appearances in Wisconsin. And these men were wearing the logos of a Patriot/militia organization called the Watchmen of America — though true to the “leaderless resistance” model of action these “Patriots” espouse, the Watchmen’s organizational leaders are denying any involvement, while in effect conceding that members may be operating in Wisconsin without their approval.
[…]
These denials are not particularly meaningful. After all, the Patriot/militia movement has been characterized by a “leaderless resistance” strategy that encourages individual “lone wolf” and small-cell action in which organizational leaders can plausibly deny responsibility and thus avoid any consequences for the actions of followers and colleagues.

As Mary Catherine O’Connor at Outside reports, this is all taking place in a context where the mining officials are labeling local protesters “eco terrorists” and using the flimsiest of pretexts to bring in militia-style thugs to intimidate the locals.

Let’s hope Americans remember that in Italy and Germany, fascists first gained political traction and moved out of the fringe of politics in the 1920s when they were hired by large landowners and businessmen as thugs to beat up and harass union organizers and land reformers, all under the rubric of calling them “communists”. This is an ominous development indeed.

Oh now, come on. These people are patriots, not terro-commies. We have no need to be concerned. They aren’t even Muslim.

More from Kate Shepard at Mother Jones on this growing phenomenon.

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QOTD: Justice Scalia

by digby

“I accept, for the sake of argument, that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged. Rather, I am questioning the propriety, indeed the sanity, of having a value-laden decision such as that made for the entire society by unelected judges.”

He also claimed the holocaust was caused by judicial activism in Germany. Apparently, he really doesn’t understand that by turning back the clock to 1789 — or even 1973 — he’s the very definition of an activist judge.

Indeed, for all his braying about “the people” in a democratic society being responsible to make its own decisions through the political system, he eagerly ignored two centuries of electoral practice and explicit instructions in the Constitution to award the presidency to his preferred candidate while saying the decision cannot be applied to anyone else. It just doesn’t get more “activist” than that.

True, he didn’t cause a holocaust with that outrageous act, but the people of Iraq could certainly be forgiven for seeing his actions in a similar light.

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