Year: 2013

The Word for This is Desperation………

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Yes, the NSA is now saying that it will provide information about how it’s rapacious thirst for our personal data stopped some terrorists at some point:

The National Security Agency (NSA) plans to release details of terrorist attacks thwarted by its controversial bulk surveillance of Americans’ communications data, a senior US senator said on Thursday.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, would provide “the cases where this [surveillance] has stopped a terrorist attack, both here and in other places” as early as Monday.

Here is the important quote:

But the FBI director, Robert Mueller, forcefully defended the programs on Thursday to the House judiciary committee by saying the broad surveillance could have foiled the 9/11 attacks and averted “another Boston”.

But this program has been going on for years, and Boston happened.  Why didn’t it do it then?

They are trying to blow smoke up our ass.

SCOTUS Strikes Down Human Gene Patents

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In yet another smack down to the increasingly patent crazy United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Patent Court), the Supreme Court has ruled that the contents of the human genome are a discovery, not an invention, and so they cannot be patented:

Pronouncing what may seem like a patent truism, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that biotech researchers have to create something to get monopoly protection to study and apply the phenomenon. Because Myriad Genetics, Inc., “did not create anything,” the Court struck down its patent on isolating human genes from the bloodstream, unchanged from their natural form. Because Myriad did create a synthetic form of the genes, however, that could be eligible for a patent, the Court concluded.

The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer. But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.

………

The scientific and legal key to the Court’s denial of patent protection to isolated, natural forms of DNA were these sentences: “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA.”

While that was not disputed, because the legal controversy focused rather on what Myriad claimed it did to locate and then isolate the forms of genetic DNA, those agreed-upon factors were enough to convince the Court that “Myriad did not create anything.” As Justice Thomas commented further: “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention. Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the [patent law] inquiry.”

I think that one of the reasons that this was a unanimous ruling was that it was a very narrow ruling, hence the caveats about their explicitly saying nothing about synthesized genetic material.

Still, it is a good ruling, and yet another much needed bitch slap to the Patent Court.

I F%$#ed Up At Work Today

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Click for full size

I used my phone to take some pictures at work yesterday afternoon.

I needed to share the packing arrangement for a kit with the rest of my team.

So I downloaded the pix from my phone, and sent them around.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that after I took those pictures, I took some pictures of our cats having a cute-gasm.

When I sent the photos around, I inadvertently sent the cat photos as well.

D’oh!!!!!

Our IP Regulatory Regime Does Not Work

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Case in point, Internet music streaming service Pandora has bought an FM radio station in South Dakota to reduce its royalty payments:

Pandora is angry about the royalties it’s paying to music publishers, so the company is making a bold move: It’s buying a terrestrial radio station in South Dakota mainly to score lower rates.

The radio station buy is the latest salvo in Pandora’s ongoing legal fight with the performance-rights group American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Pandora says ASCAP discriminates against the company by charging it higher royalty rates, as well as letting publishers pull their song catalogs from Pandora while keeping them available for competitors.

“Certain powerful music incumbents see Internet radio as a threat to the status quo,” Christopher Harrison, Pandora’s assistant general counsel, wrote in a blog post published on The Hill.

To combat that alleged discrimination, Pandora bought the Rapid City, South Dakota, station KXMZ-FM for an undisclosed amount.

Terrestrial radio stations and the Internet properties that own them “were given preferential treatment” through an ASCAP agreement with the Radio Licensing Marketing Committee (RMLC) last year, according Harrison’s blog post.

Pandora says the KXMZ acquisition will let the company qualify for the lower-fee RMLC license. According to Pandora, ClearChannel-owned rival iHeartRadio has such a license because it also owns a terrestrial station.

I’m on Pandora’s side in all this.

Our current IP regime encourages this sort of regulatory arbitrage, and this does little to encourage the production or more music.

All it does is keep record company executives’ brothers-in-law in cocaine.

And While We Are On the Subject of Obama and Subverting Regulation………

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Gary Gensler surprised everyone when, as head of the CFTC, he actually enforced sensible rules.

So it it comes no surprise that Obama is firing him and replacing him with a corporate drone from the Vampire Squid:

Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.

 The president is effectively dismissing Gary Gensler, the ex-Goldman partner who headed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Gensler used his post at a secondary financial regulator to push for reforms. It was his office that blew the Libor scandal wide open by taking referrals from British regulators seriously (by contrast, Geithner, who heard about widespread, deliberate mismarking in 2008, passed the buck to the Bank of England). Gensler has also been making himself unpopular by taking the view that swap dealers, which includes foreign branches of US banks and parties that conduct business with US parties, must comply with Dodd Frank. ………

 Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post describes how Gensler is being ousted for his position on swaps regulation, which was coming to a head in international meetings starting June 20, with a July 12 deadline looming. The industry was pushing for the usual “race to the bottom” approach, since the Dodd Frank provisions are more stringent than overseas requirments (the spin, of course, was that Gensler was acting unilaterally, as opposed to implementing what Congress mandated). Gensler faces varying degrees of resistance from three of his four fellow commissioners. International regulators were apparently also unhappy with Gensler’s tough stand, to the point where they were complaining to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

 Even if Obama fails in fast-tracking his chosen replacement, Amanda Renteria, Gensler’s lame-duck status will considerably weaken his ability to arm-twist the fence-sitters among his colleagues.

 And Renteria is a simply pathetic choice. Oh, she’s got a very appealing personal story, having worked her way up from a very disadvantaged background, a child of migrant workers who made her way to Stanford and later Harvard Business School. But there’s nothing in her background that qualifies her to act either as a senior regulator or as the head of a large operation (the CFTC has over 400 employees). This leap in responsibilities is tantamount to taking a promising law firm associate and making them the head of a large law practice. You’d never do that if you cared about the health of the firm. A move like this looks an awful lot like an effort not just to sideline Gensler’s push on swaps regulation, but to render the CFTC incompetent over time.

 Renteria’s knowledge of finance appears to consist of having worked right after college for a few years at Goldman. ………

And to this we add the bonus story that Barack Obama has nominated Walmart’s biggest fan to head his council of economic advisors:

On June 10, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jason Furman to become the next chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This is a big-time, highly influential post. So what kind of economist is Furman?

One who thinks Walmart is the best thing since sliced bread.

For Furman, Walmart is nothing short of a miracle for America’s poor and working-class folks. For him, progressives should be cheering the firm: he even wrote a 16-page paper titled, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” which was posted on the Center for American Progress website. ………

In Furman’s view, “the US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.”

For the man who will have President Obama’s ear on vital matters like jobs, the evidence of whether Walmart’s wages and benefits are substandard is “murky.” And he doesn’t much care for those who question Walmart’s approach: In the 2006 dialogue with Ehrenreich on Slate, he upbraided activists who had pushed the firm to increase wages and offer better benefits:………

To complete the finger in the eye, the American Enterprise Institute has issued effusive praise on the choice.

I’m not surprised.  I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

Obama loves hippie punching.

What a Surprise ……… No MBAs Equals Business Success

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Costco does not hire MBAs:

Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

………

Jelinek earned $650,000 in 2012, plus a $200,000 bonus and stock options worth about $4 million, based on the company’s performance. That’s more than Sinegal, who made $325,000 a year. By contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s 2012 base salary was $1.3 million; he was also awarded a $4.4 million cash bonus and $13.6 million in stock grants.

These are some of the reasons why Costco is successful, but I think that the most important bit is this:

It will have to look inside, since Costco does not hire business school graduates—thanks to another idiosyncrasy meant to preserve its distinct company culture. It cultivates employees who work the floor in its warehouses and sponsors them through graduate school. Seventy percent of its warehouse managers started at the company by pushing carts and ringing cash registers. Employees rarely leave: The company turnover rate is 5 percent among employees who have been there over a year, and less than 1 percent among the executive ranks. That’s impressive, but it also suggests the company does not have a regular influx of outside views. Even John Matthews, vice president in charge of human resources, calls the company “awfully inbred.”

I believe that much of their success is from the fact that they do not hire pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business.

“Business school graduate,” and, “Pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business,” are pretty much synonymous, and the fact that they have gained much in the way of currency in contemporary American business, is one of the reason that we are so completely f%$#ed.

H/t  Washington Monthly

Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

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The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

………

The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That’s why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

………

Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.

Yes, James Clapper Perjured Himself Before Congress, and Should Be Both Fired and Prosecuted

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Fred Kaplan, who tends to be a font of conventional wisdom, is calling for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be fired:

If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

 Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

 We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Let’s parse this passage. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the top-secret-plus programs that we now all know about. That is, he knew that he was putting Clapper in a box; He knew that the true answer to his question was “Yes,” but he also knew that Clapper would have a hard time saying so without making headlines.

There were actually some non-answer answers he could have given that didn’t rise to the level of lying to Congress, saying something like, “No one is perfect, but we do our best not to infringe on the privacy of the American public,” but he just perjured himself, and he did so because he simply did not did not care about telling the truth under oath.

FWIW, is obliquely saying the Clapper lied through his teeth as well:

Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, revealed that he had given Clapper, the director of national intelligence, a day’s advance notice of a question about the extent of government surveillance at a congressional hearing in March.

 Clapper said earlier this week that he had misunderstood the question. When asked directly by Wyden in March whether the NSA was collecting any kind of data on “millions” of Americans, Clapper replied “no” and “not wittingly” – a claim undermined by the Guardian’s disclosures about NSA collection of millions of Americans’ phone records. Wyden also disclosed that he had given Clapper an opportunity in private to revise his answer, after the session.

 “One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a Tuesday statement.

(emphasis mine)

Note that this makes this even worse, because Clapper did not just lie off the cuff. He was given 24 hours to come up with an appropriate answer, and then he was given the opportunity to revise his answer, and he just lied, because he knew that there would be absolutely no consequences for this.

With Barack Obama in the White House, and Eric Holder as Attorney General, he is probably right, but the statute of limitations is 5 years, so a new AG could file charges between January 2017 and May of 2018.

It won’t happen, but I can dream.

And in the Further Adventures of Epic Fails: NSA Edition

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Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, talking about the NSA telephone drift net says that the US is behaving like China:

Even though we know governments do all kinds of things I was shocked by the information about the US surveillance operation, Prism. To me, it’s abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals’ privacy. This is an important moment for international society to reconsider and protect individual rights.

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

Read the rest.

Paul Ryan Calls the NSA Surveillance “Creepy”, and He is Right

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Look at those dead eyes, he knows creepy

Seriously, makeing Paul f%$3ing Ryan right on ANYTHING is the epitome of fail:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) expressed misgivings with the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs, suggesting on Monday that the activities “go way beyond the scope” of what the federal government has been authorized to do by laws like the Patriot Act.

 “It comes across as creepy,” the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said in an interview with the Wisconsin radio station WJRN. “I understand FISA court orders to go after some known person, and their phone records and whoever they’re communicating with. But to do a blanket dragnet nationwide, that seems to go way beyond the scope of the law that I’m familiar with called the Patriot Act.”

The fail is strong with the Obama administration.

More than any sitting president I have ever seen, Obama seems to obsess over his legacy.

Well, this is your legacy.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Hurray for the ACLU

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They have filed suit to get access to the FISA court orders authorizing the NSA drift netting of Americans’ communications data:

The ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion today with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking the release of secret court opinions that permit the government to acquire Americans’ phone records en masse. The public has a right to know the legal justification for the government’s sweeping surveillance—but, until now, those judicial opinions have remained a heavily guarded secret.

 The ACLU filed its motion on the heels of last week’s disclosure of an order, issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call details for every domestic and international phone call placed on its network during a three-month period. Since then, media reports and statements by members of the congressional intelligence committees have made clear that this order belongs to a much larger surveillance program—covering all the major telephone companies—that has been in existence for the past seven years. When pressed about the program, members of Congress as well as executive officials have emphasized that this mass acquisition of Americans’ phone records was reviewed and approved by judges on the FISC.

 ………

 The release of these FISC opinions is the first step to an informed public discussion of the surveillance powers asserted by the government. It should not be able to shield such a radical and unprecedented intrusion on Americans’ privacy behind a secret court issuing secret legal interpretations of our laws.

I have a sense that they are going to have to fight like hell to get access to the legal opinions, because the filings will almost certainly reveal the low bar presented by the administration, and the low bar accepted by the judiciary, will make a travesty of their protestations of due process.

As Juan Cole pithily notes, “We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It.

The idea that you take a blatantly lawless program of nearly unlimited surveillance powers (Bush/Yoo unitary executive), and slap on some due process and retain the same nearly unlimited power, and it’s OK, because the Obama administration is a bunch of good people*, normal checks and balances do not need to apply.

It can all be done in secret, with the approval of a secret court that you have to keep away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything, and the public will never know, and it’s all good.

It’s why I call him, “the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™.”

*Now that Rahm Emanuel is afflicting the people of Chicago, anyway.

I Think that We May Have Identified Why College is So Expensive

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And the truth from the most unlikely of sources, the New York Post:

City College President Lisa Coico’s Upper West Side home is just four subway stops from the Manhattanville campus, but Coico is chauffeured the two miles to work and back every day in a state-issued Buick.

Coico, whose salary is $300,000, is among nearly 70 SUNY and CUNY officials who enjoy the use of taxpayer-funded wheels and sometimes a driver. In Coico’s case the driver is a college public-safety officer.

In 2009, after The Post exposed the number of commissioners chauffeured to their jobs, the state cracked down on the practice, as well as the personal use of vehicles by agency heads. But the university systems set their own policies.

Both the SUNY and CUNY chancellors have cars and drivers. CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein valued the personal use of his car last year at $14,985, the highest in the state.

College presidents are entitled to cars, as well.

The Ivory Tower execs are joyriding while students are struggling to meet soaring tuition, after trustees in 2011 approved $300-per-student increases for five years for the state and city college systems. CUNY students now pay more than $5,000 per year.

This is kind of a classic result of anti-competitive cartels.

The top universities in the nation have been colluding on tuition, fees, and financial aid for decades, they started in the 1960s, when the alternative to college was the Vietnam war, and once they stopped competing on price, they bid for professors, they build gold plated housing, and they overpaid administrators.

This is what happens with a cartel. They continue to compete, they just no longer compete on price, which leads to more spending on non core “bling”, which increases costs, which increases tuition.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

It doesn’t help that the US government is playing banker for all this, and refuses to institute meaningful cost controls.

H/t Atrios.

I Guess the Obama Administration Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

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In the middle of a rather busy past few days for news, the Obama administration has quietly dropped restricting women’s access to birth control:

The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama.

Women’s reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.

They should worry about how it is put in practice.  Barack Obama has a long history of tepid (at best) support for reproductive rights, and his comment that he supported the blatantly political and craven restriction, because, “as the father of two daughters, the government should apply some common sense,” shows that he does not get women as independent people in control of their bodies.

Thankfully though, he does realize that further appeals will be a political loser, so he’s throwing in the towel.

Why NSA Spying Matters

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John Judis was a relatively low level political activist, primarily concerned with the Vietnam war, in the 1960s

Well, he relates the systematic program of surveillance and harassment against him:

President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said, represent “modest encroachments on privacy” that are “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorists. Count me among those who are not reassured by Obama’s statement. I know better—from my schoolboy knowledge of the Constitution and from my own experience during the ’60s with unwarranted government surveillance.

I don’t usually like to base moral judgments on what the Constitution does or does not allow, but in this case, it makes sense to do so. The Constitution had two very different purposes: One was to create a functioning government; the other, forged in the wake of the American revolution, was to establish constraints that would prevent the abuse of state power. The First Amendment was designed to do the latter; and so was the Fourth, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The administration’s obsessive pursuit of press leaks threatens the First Amendment’s freedom of the press; and the NSA’s surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on general warrants—on indiscriminate searches without probable cause.

………

 I had my own vague vision of what a socialist America would look like, but almost everything that I did was directed at immediate issues like ending the Vietnam War or later impeaching Richard Nixon. I was not a bomb thrower. I advocated running candidates in elections. I taught classes on Marx’s Capital and American history at a school we organized in Oakland. But during this period, I was under almost constant surveillance by the FBI and by other intelligence or police agencies. I received regular visits from the FBI (I told them I wouldn’t talk to them), and they also visited my parents and friends.

As my FBI file, which I later obtained, attested, my movements were being monitored even when I didn’t know it. (Most of it is, unfortunately, blacked out.) In organizing demonstrations, I encountered people who turned out to be government agents. I was pulled over by the police with guns drawn for no apparent reason. And I also received inquiries about my tax returns from the IRS even though I was living on about $3000 a year during much of this period. These inquiries, which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS—whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.

 ………

 Obama says that the debate over the NSA’s activities is “healthy for our democracy” and a “sign of maturity.” But I think it’s a sign of forgetfulness—of Constitutional amnesia—on the part of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the administration’s vaunted intelligence chiefs who want to divert attention from the subject of the leaks, which is their own behavior, onto the leaker. I am hoping Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress remind the administration what the Constitution was designed to do and what the original FISA legislation was meant to do, but judging from the performance of most congressional leaders so far, I am not holding my breath.

When people (like the contemptible Lawrence O’Donnell* this evening) say that they “feel safer” because they are much less likely to be observed in the vast morass of data, they do no not get it.

The question is what happens with all that information when someone in power, whether it be the President of the United States, or minor data entry clerk like Edward Snowden, or a law enforcement official like J. Edgar Hoover decides to make you their business.

You do not get lost in the haystack when they decide to come for you.

That’s why we have a 4th amendment.

*Seriously, he is so in the tank for Obama that he would endorse an order from Obama for O’Donnell’s own execution.

We Have a Name for the Hero

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The NSA leaker is Edward Snowden, who is now in hiding in Hong Kong:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

 The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

 Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA.

 In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

 ………

 He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

 ………

 Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. “I am not afraid,” he said calmly, “because this is the choice I’ve made.”

 He predicts the government will launch an investigation and “say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become”.

 ………

 He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in”, and as a result, “I got hardened.”

 The primary lesson from this experience was that “you can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.”

They are going to try to destroy him, of course.

Note also that he wasn’t working for the NSA, he was a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton. That means that information about this program was spread among dozens of entities (Booz Allen Hamilton was almost certainly one of many contractors), which means that any decent intelligence gathering operation, whether it be Russia, China, or a dude with Google and Lexis-Nexis would know about this.

It’s clear that this secrecy was not about concealing this from potential rivals or adversaries, but rather its goal was to conceal this from the American public.

Click for full size


Clapper Said No US Surveillance, but the US Ain’t Green

BTW, the Guardian has also revealed information about the global data mining operation, called Boundless Informant:

The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

 The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

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 At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

 “No sir,” replied Clapper.

 Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: “NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case.”

The US ain’t green, the lowest level of surveillance, and James Clapper perjured himself before Congress, but there will be no consequences for this.

Meanwhile Congressman Peter King is calling for Snowden’s extradition:

There was no immediate reaction from the White House but Peter King, the chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee, called for Snowden’s extradition from Hong Kong. Snowden flew there 10 days ago to disclose top-secret documents and to give interviews to the Guardian.

 “If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date,” King, a New York Republican, said in a written statement. “The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence.”

It should be noted that Peter King openly and aggressively supported the IRA when it was a terrorist organization, and actually planting bombs.

By comparison, Snowden revealed the administration, and government, lies to, and spying on its own citizens.

If Snowden was seeing a psychiatrist, like Daniel Ellsburg, I fully expect Obama to pull out the Nixon playbook and stage a bag operation to steal his records.

Interesting Idea

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Green Eagle observes on the web, you can judge a book by its cover:

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 As a motion picture art director, I work a lot with graphic artists constructing imitation documents of one kind and another. Perhaps because that is part of my job, I like to look for stylistic cues that give away the nature of a document, without reference to its content. This is an area (at least as it relates to politics) that has not received much attention, although institutions like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore have fine collections of this material, much of it produced by people who are mentally ill.

 In particular, very little has been said about this phenomenon on the internet. This is probably understandable; websites are a relatively recent thing, and some of the relatively well known visual characteristics of the work of the mentally disturbed are eliminated by the template-driven layout of the vast majority of websites. For example, the chaotic writing of the Miz Thang example, or the handwritten political specimen shown below are not really possible on the internet. Well, enough preface, let me dive in with some examples:

He draws comparisons between whack job websites and works of art from the mentally ill.

I won’t post his examples. The picture that I am posting is the home page of the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which shows most of the characteristics he describes.

The tinfoil hat folks wear is reflected in their web designs.

What Matt Taibbi Says

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He observes that the press covering the Bradley Manning trial are missing the big point:

Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.

In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait.

………

All of this sh%$ [Stories focused on the security issues] is disgraceful. It’s Chumpbait.

If I was working for the Pentagon’s PR department as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the nearly five billion dollars the armed services spends annually on advertising and public relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and over again with the same angle.
I would beat it into the head of every hack on this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to decide is exactly the question in these headlines.

Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn’t keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely?

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game’s over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

He’s right.

Read the rest.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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The leader of the Anonymous group that acquired (pinched) much of the data used to prosecute the Steubenville football player rapists, has been raided by the FBI:

In April, the FBI quietly [His description is, “12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to “Get The F%$# Down” with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed safety off, pointed directly at my head.” This is a definition of “quietly” I was previously unaware of] raided the home of the hacker known as KYAnonymous in connection with his role in the Steubenville rape case. Today he spoke out for the first time about the raid, his true identity, and his motivations for pursuing the Steubenville rapists, in an extensive interview with Mother Jones.

 “The goal of the media interviews is to get the entire nation to say ‘fuck you’ to these guys,” said KYAnonymous, whose real name is Deric Lostutter. He was referring to the federal agents who raided his home in Winchester, Kentucky, and carted off his computers and XBox.

 Lostutter may deserve more credit than anyone for turning Steubenville into a national outrage. After a 16-year-old girl was raped by two members of the Steubenville High football team last year, he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man behind the mask in a video posted by another hacker on the team’s fan page, RollRedRoll.com, where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized to the girl. (The rapists were convicted in March.)

He is facing more jail time than the rapists.

This is nuts, between the SWAT style raid, and the excessive nature of the possible sentences.

This lack of proportionality is a feature, and not a bug. Hyper-aggressive policing and sentencing has intimidation (and guilty pleas) as a goal.