Month: March 2014

We Now Get the Chance to See How Much Corruption Barack Obama will Tolerate in the State Security Apparatus

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We have know that the President tolerated it when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper blatantly and unashamedly lied to Congress, but this is a much bigger deal.

Dianne Feinstein* just took to the floor of the Senate and accused the CIA of obstructing a senate investigation and attempting to intimidate the Senate Intelligence Committee Staff:

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.

 In a bombshell statement on the floor of the US Senate, Feinstein, normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the US constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the crisis as a “defining moment” for political oversight of the US intelligence service.

 Her unprecedented public assault on the CIA represented an intensification of the row between the committee and the agency over a still-secret report on the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11.

 Feinstein, who said she was making her statement “reluctantly”, confirmed recent reports that CIA officials had been accused of monitoring computer networks used by Senate staff investigators. Going further than previously, she referred openly to recent attempts by the CIA to remove documents from the network detailing evidence of torture that would incriminate intelligence officers.

 She also alleged that anonymous CIA officials were effectively conducting a smear campaign in the media to discredit and “intimidate” Senate staff by suggesting they had hacked into the agency’s computers to obtain a separate, critical internal report on the detention and interrogation programme.

While it is tempting to focus on the obvious irony of Feinstein’s outrage in the face of her previous full throated support of intellligence excesses, as Edward Snowden does, this is a much bigger issue.

If what Feinstein alleges is true, and I am inclined to believe it because it is a statement against her normal interests, which is as a CIA fanboi, it lends credibility.

Going over her speech, here is what she presents:

  • The Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that all relevant documents be turned over to them so that they might be able to investigate the CIA’s torture program.
  • The CIA balked, and so the committee and then CIA Director Leon Panetta negotiated an arrangement whereby the staff would access these documents at a CIA secured facility.  Here is the relevant quote:

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

  • Unsurprisingly, the CIA provided the documents without any sort of index or any search facility, though one was later added at Senate requests
  • It was this computer system that the CIA searched, in contravention of their agreement.
  • The CIA also insisted on additional multiple level levels of review that were not a part of the agreement.
  • When the staff found something relevant, they would save it to disk at the securely located computer, or print it out.
  • The staff found that documents that they had flagged as important were disappearing.
  • The CIA denied this, then blamed the IT staffers, and finally claimed that this was ordered by the White House, who denied this, and ordered the CIA to cooperate, “The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.“
  • In 2010, the staff found a draft of the “Internal Panetta Review,” an internal review that Panetta commissioned by on torture that demolished the official CIA response to the (as yet unreleased) Senate report.  It specifically contradicted the official report in a number of ways, most notably:
    • The practices were far more brutal that officially revealed.
    • There was no meaningful intelligence derived from torture
  • Because of the importance of the document, it mirrored the Senate Committee conclusions, the staff printed it out for safe keeping, and placed it in the secure safe in the Senate Intelligence Committee Offices.  This was done in accordance with the document handling procedures agreed between the CIA and Intel Committee.
  • The CIA then disappeared the Panetta report from the Senate staffers computers.
  • The CIA has still refused to supply the Panetta Review to the Senate.
  • On January 15, 2014, “CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.”
    • Note that even if this does not qualify as obstructing a Congressional investigation (I think that it does), it is a violation of the law for the CIA to conduct surveillance in the US   If they needed to search the computers (assuming that Congressional immunity does not apply) they would have to go the the FBI. (Which they must have hated)
  • The CIA has refused to provide additional details on the scope of the search, which, “May also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”
  • The CIA’s Inspector General looked at the searches done by the CIA, and concluded that they needed to be investigated criminally, and made a referral to the DoJ.
  • In response, the acting general counsel of the CIA made a criminal referral of the Senate staffers to the DOJ.

Here is the money quote:

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

(emphasis mine)

While Feinstein does not mention the counsel’s name, it is public knowledge that the CIA’s acting general counsel is Robert Eatinger, who among other things, Authorized the Destruction of the CIA Torture Tapes Against the Instructions of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence.

The White House response is a a statement of, “Great Confidence,” in CIA director John Brennan.  So Obama wants to keep this guy.

As I have said before, the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I expect further stonewalling on the part of both the CIA and the Obama administration.

What should happen is that Eatinger should be placed on leave, and his security clearance should be suspended, but I imagine that he will continue to do damage to the Constitution of the United States, and then he will retire with a full pension.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.

Full speech follows:

Statement on Intel Committee’s CIA Detention, Interrogation Report

Washington—Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the committee’s study on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program:

“Over the past week, there have been numerous press articles written about the Intelligence Committee’s oversight review of the Detention and Interrogation Program of the CIA, specifically press attention has focused on the CIA’s intrusion and search of the Senate Select Committee’s computers as well as the committee’s acquisition of a certain internal CIA document known as the Panetta Review.

I rise today to set the record straight and to provide a full accounting of the facts and history.

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate Floor reluctantly. Since January 15, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA’s search of this committee’s network, I have been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter. However, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

The origin of this study: The CIA’s detention and interrogation program began operations in 2002, though it was not until September 2006, that Members of the Intelligence Committee, other than the Chairman and Vice Chairman, were briefed. In fact, we were briefed by then-CIA Director Hayden only hours before President Bush disclosed the program to the public.

A little more than a year later, on December 6, 2007, a New York Times article revealed the troubling fact that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of some of the CIA’s first interrogations using so-called “enhanced techniques.” We learned that this destruction was over the objections of President Bush’s White House Counsel and the Director of National Intelligence.

After we read about the tapes’ destruction in the newspapers, Director Hayden briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee. He assured us that this was not destruction of evidence, as detailed records of the interrogations existed on paper in the form of CIA operational cables describing the detention conditions and the day-to-day CIA interrogations.

The CIA director stated that these cables were “a more than adequate representation” of what would have been on the destroyed tapes. Director Hayden offered at that time, during Senator Jay Rockefeller’s chairmanship of the committee, to allow Members or staff to review these sensitive CIA operational cables given that the videotapes had been destroyed.

Chairman Rockefeller sent two of his committee staffers out to the CIA on nights and weekends to review thousands of these cables, which took many months. By the time the two staffers completed their review into the CIA’s early interrogations in early 2009, I had become chairman of the committee and President Obama had been sworn into office.

The resulting staff report was chilling. The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us. As result of the staff’s initial report, I proposed, and then-Vice Chairman Bond agreed, and the committee overwhelmingly approved, that the committee conduct an expansive and full review of CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

On March 5, 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to initiate a comprehensive review of the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program. Immediately, we sent a request for documents to all relevant executive branch agencies, chiefly among them the CIA.

The committee’s preference was for the CIA to turn over all responsive documents to the committee’s office, as had been done in previous committee investigations.

Director Panetta proposed an alternative arrangement: to provide literally millions of pages of operational cables, internal emails, memos, and other documents pursuant to the committee’s document requests at a secure location in Northern Virginia. We agreed, but insisted on several conditions and protections to ensure the integrity of this congressional investigation.

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

It was this computer network that, notwithstanding our agreement with Director Panetta, was searched by the CIA this past January, and once before which I will later describe.

In addition to demanding that the documents produced for the committee be reviewed at a CIA facility, the CIA also insisted on conducting a multi-layered review of every responsive document before providing the document to the committee. This was to ensure the CIA did not mistakenly provide documents unrelated to the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program or provide documents that the president could potentially claim to be covered by executive privilege.

While we viewed this as unnecessary and raised concerns that it would delay our investigation, the CIA hired a team of outside contractors—who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents—to read, multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced, before providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the committee’s oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process.

The CIA started making documents available electronically to the committee staff at the CIA leased facility in mid-2009. The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true “document dump” that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.

In order to piece together the story of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the committee staff did two things that will be important as I go on:

First, they asked the CIA to provide an electronic search tool so they could locate specific relevant documents for their search among the CIA-produced documents—just like you would use a search tool on the Internet to locate information.

Second, when the staff found a document that was particularly important or that might be referenced in our final report, they would often print it or make a copy of the file on their computer so they could easily find it again. There are thousands of such documents in the committee’s secure spaces at the CIA facility.

Now, prior removal of documents by CIA. In early 2010, the CIA was continuing to provide documents, and the committee staff was gaining familiarity with the information it had already received.

In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that [certain] documents that had been provided for the committee’s review were no longer accessible. Staff approached the CIA personnel at the offsite location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority. And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.

After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.

This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff, and in violation of our written agreements. Further, this type of behavior would not have been possible had the CIA allowed the committee to conduct the review of documents here in the Senate. In short, this was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset.

I went up to the White House to raise this issue with the then-White House Counsel, in May 2010. He recognized the severity of the situation, and the grave implications of Executive Branch personnel interfering with an official congressional investigation. The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.

On May 17, 2010, the CIA’s then-director of congressional affairs apologized on behalf of the CIA for removing the documents. And that, as far as I was concerned, put the incident aside.

This event was separate from the documents provided that were part of the “Internal Panetta Review,” which occurred later and which I will describe next.

At some point in 2010, committee staff searching the documents that had been made available found draft versions of what is now called the “Internal Panetta Review.”

We believe these documents were written by CIA personnel to summarize and analyze the materials that had been provided to the committee for its review. The Panetta review documents were no more highly classified than other information we had received for our investigation—in fact, the documents appeared to be based on the same information already provided to the committee.

What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing.

To be clear, the committee staff did not “hack” into CIA computers to obtain these documents as has been suggested in the press. The documents were identified using the search tool provided by the CIA to search the documents provided to the committee.

We have no way to determine who made the Internal Panetta Review documents available to the committee. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower.

In fact, we know that over the years—on multiple occasions—the staff have asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times, the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee. And while this is alarming, it is also important to note that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.

As I described earlier, as part of its standard process for reviewing records, the committee staff printed copies of the Internal Panetta Review and made electronic copies of the committee’s computers at the facility.

The staff did not rely on these Internal Panetta Review documents when drafting the final 6,300-page committee study. But it was significant that the Internal Panetta Review had documented at least some of the very same troubling matters already uncovered by the committee staff – which is not surprising, in that they were looking at the same information.

There is a claim in the press and elsewhere that the markings on these documents should have caused the staff to stop reading them and turn them over to the CIA. I reject that claim completely.

As with many other documents provided to the committee at the CIA facility, some of the Internal Panetta Review documents—some—contained markings indicating that they were “deliberative” and/or “privileged.” This was not especially noteworthy to staff. In fact, CIA has provided thousands of internal documents, to include CIA legal guidance and talking points prepared for the CIA director, some of which were marked as being deliberative or privileged.

Moreover, the CIA has officially provided such documents to the committee here in the Senate. In fact, the CIA’s official June 27, 2013, response to the committee study, which Director Brennan delivered to me personally, is labeled “Deliberative Process Privileged Document.”

We have discussed this with the Senate Legal Counsel who has confirmed that Congress does not recognize these claims of privilege when it comes to documents provided to Congress for our oversight duties.

These were documents provided by the executive branch pursuant to an authorized congressional oversight investigation. So we believe we had every right to review and keep the documents.

There are also claims in the press that the Internal Panetta Review documents, having been created in 2009 and 2010, were outside the date range of the committee’s document request or the terms of the committee study. This too is inaccurate.

The committee’s document requests were not limited in time. In fact, as I have previously announced, the committee study includes significant information on the May 2011 Osama bin Laden operation, which obviously postdated the detention and interrogation program.

At some time after the committee staff identified and reviewed the Internal Panetta Review documents, access to the vast majority of them was removed by the CIA. We believe this happened in 2010 but we have no way of knowing the specifics. Nor do we know why the documents were removed. The staff was focused on reviewing the tens of thousands of new documents that continued to arrive on a regular basis.

Our work continued until December 2012, when the Intelligence Committee approved a 6,300-page committee study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and sent the report to the executive branch for comment. The CIA provided its response to the study on June 27, 2013.

As CIA Director Brennan has stated, the CIA officially agrees with some of our study. But, as has been reported, the CIA disagrees and disputes important parts of it. And this is important: Some of these important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA’s own Internal Panetta Review.

To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA’s official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?

Now, after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee’s secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate Office Building.

And let me be clear about this: I mentioned earlier the exchange of letters that Senator Bond and I had with Director Panetta in 2009 over the handling of information for this review. The letters set out a process whereby the committee would provide specific CIA documents to CIA reviewers before bringing them back to our secure offices here on Capitol Hill.

The CIA review was designed specifically to make sure that committee documents available to all staff and members did not include certain kinds of information, most importantly the true names of non-supervisory CIA personnel and the names of specific countries in which the CIA operated detention sites.

We had agreed up front that our report didn’t need to include this information, and so we agreed to redact it from materials leaving the CIA’s facility.

Keeping with the spirit of the agreements, the portion of the Internal Panetta Review at the Hart Building in our safe has been redacted. It does not contain names of non-supervisory CIA personnel or information identifying detention site locations. In other words, our staff did just what the CIA personnel would have done had they reviewed the document.

There are several reasons why the draft summary of the Panetta Review was brought to our secure spaces at the Hart Building.

Let me list them:

The significance of the Internal Review given disparities between it and the June 2013 CIA response to the committee study. The Internal Panetta Review summary now at the secure committee office in the Hart Building is an especially significant document as it corroborates critical information in the committee’s 6,300-page Study that the CIA’s official response either objects to, denies, minimizes, or ignores.

Unlike the official response, these Panetta Review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings. That’s what makes them so significant and important to protect.

When the Internal Panetta Review documents disappeared from the committee’s computer system, this suggested once again that the CIA had removed documents already provided to the committee, in violation of CIA agreements and White House assurances that the CIA would cease such activities.

As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed information about its Detention and Interrogation Program, including its decision in 2005 to destroy interrogation videotapes over the objections of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence. Based on the information described above, there was a need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the committee’s own secure spaces.

Now, the Relocation of the Internal Panetta Review was lawful and handled in a manner consistent with its classification. No law prevents the relocation of a document in the committee’s possession from a CIA facility to secure committee offices on Capitol Hill. As I mentioned before, the document was handled and transported in a manner consistent with its classification, redacted appropriately, and it remains secured—with restricted access—in committee spaces.

In late 2013, I requested in writing that the CIA provide a final and complete version of the Internal Panetta Review to the committee, as opposed to the partial document the committee currently possesses.

In December, during an open committee hearing, Senator Mark Udall echoed this request. In early January 2014, the CIA informed the committee it would not provide the Internal Panetta Review to the committee, citing the deliberative nature of the document.

Shortly thereafter, on January 15, 2014, CIA Director Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.

According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the Internal Panetta Review. The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the Internal Review, or how we obtained it.

Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee’s computers. The CIA has still not asked the committee any questions about how the committee acquired the Panetta Review. In place of asking any questions, the CIA’s unauthorized search of the committee computers was followed by an allegation—which we have now seen repeated anonymously in the press—that the committee staff had somehow obtained the document through unauthorized or criminal means, perhaps to include hacking into the CIA’s computer network.

As I have described, this is not true. The document was made available to the staff at the offsite facility, and it was located using a CIA-provided search tool running a query of the information provided to the committee pursuant to its investigation.

Director Brennan stated that the CIA’s search had determined that the committee staff had copies of the Internal Panetta Review on the committee’s “staff shared drive” and had accessed them numerous times. He indicated at the meeting that he was going to order further “forensic” investigation of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.

Two days after the meeting, on January 17, I wrote a letter to Director Brennan objecting to any further CIA investigation due to the separation of powers constitutional issues that the search raised. I followed this with a second letter on January 23 to the director, asking 12 specific questions about the CIA’s actions—questions that the CIA has refused to answer.

Some of the questions in my letter related to the full scope of the CIA’s search of our computer network. Other questions related to who had authorized and conducted the search, and what legal basis the CIA claimed gave it authority to conduct the search. Again, the CIA has not provided answers to any of my questions.

My letter also laid out my concern about the legal and constitutional implications of the CIA’s actions. Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.

I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.

Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

Days after the meeting with Director Brennan, the CIA inspector general, David Buckley, learned of the CIA search and began an investigation into CIA’s activities. I have been informed that Mr. Buckley has referred the matter to the Department of Justice given the possibility of a criminal violation by CIA personnel.

Let me note: because the CIA has refused to answer the questions in my January 23 letter, and the CIA inspector general review is ongoing, I have limited information about exactly what the CIA did in conducting its search.

Weeks later, I was also told that after the inspector general referred the CIA’s activities to the Department of Justice, the acting general counsel of the CIA filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice concerning the committee staff’s actions. I have not been provided the specifics of these allegations or been told whether the department has initiated a criminal investigation based on the allegations of the CIA’s acting general counsel.

As I mentioned before, our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself. As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

Mr. President, let me say this. All Senators rely on their staff to be their eyes and ears and to carry out our duties. The staff members of the Intelligence Committee are dedicated professionals who are motivated to do what is best for our nation.

The staff members who have been working on this study and this report have devoted years of their lives to it—wading through the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed. They have worked long hours and produced a report unprecedented in its comprehensive attention to detail in the history of the Senate.

They are now being threatened with legal jeopardy, just as the final revisions to the report are being made so that parts of it can be declassified and released to the American people.

Mr. President, I felt that I needed to come to the floor today, to correct the public record and to give the American people the facts about what the dedicated committee staff have been working so hard for the last several years as part of the committee’s investigation.

I also want to reiterate to my colleagues my desire to have all updates to the committee report completed this month and approved for declassification. We’re not going to stop. I intend to move to have the findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report sent to the president for declassification and release to the American people. The White House has indicated publicly and to me personally that it supports declassification and release.

If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.

But Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Community. How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.

I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.”

Why We Should Ban Antibiotics in Animal Feed

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Here is something that I missed.

I knew that antibiotics served to make animals to gain weight faster, but it never occurred to me that antibiotic residues are making the American public fat as well.

It makes sense antibiotics make cows, chickens, and pigs gain weight faster, so why shouldn’t it have the same effect on humans?

This is particularly significant with pigs, because as opportunistic omnivores, they are metabolically quite similar to us:

If you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.

As an aside here, we know that this produces cheaper meat, and thanks to the Danes experiences with their antibiotic ban over the past 15 years, we know about how much money it saves, and it is less than 10¢ a pound.

It is basically negligible.

But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.

 ………

 In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.

I think that it’s clear that the major issue here is sources of chronic antibiotic exposure, with meat and poultry being the primary contributors, though the article downplays this:

Of course, while farm animals often eat a significant dose of antibiotics in food, the situation is different for human beings. By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat. American kids are prescribed on average about one course of antibiotics every year, often for ear and chest infections. Could these intermittent high doses affect our metabolism?

This statement is at best an inaccurate generalization.

There are numerous reports about issues involving antibiotic residues in meat, and it is one of the reasons that the FDA is proposing tighter restrictions on antibiotic use on livestock.

Going after Induhviduals?* Be Still My Beating Heart!

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Benjamin Lawskey, head of New York’s Department of Financial Services is now saying that he will be looking at criminal filings against individuals:

Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s aggressive banking regulator who is campaigning to clean up Wall Street, is turning his sights on the individuals as well as the institutions who squeeze struggling homeowners or help banks violate US sanctions.

“Corporations are a legal fiction. You have to deter bad individual conduct within corporations,” said Mr Lawsky, superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, in an interview with the Financial Times. “People who did the conduct are going to be held accountable.”

Mr Lawsky’s name-and-shame strategy taps into a wave of popular discontent in the US and Europe over the fact that few individual bankers have been personally sanctioned for the bad decisions that led to the global financial crisis. Taxpayers have been forced to stump up hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue banks brought low by reckless behaviour.

Mr Lawsky, who has ruffled the feathers of other US regulators by jumping ahead of them to accuse Standard Chartered of breaking sanctions on Iran, has already begun to take a tougher approach to individual behaviour.

As part of Royal Bank of Scotland’s settlement in December over sanctions violations, the bank was asked to let go of four RBS employees, including the head of Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the global banking unit, and claw back the bonuses of eight other employees. Mr Lawsky’s office is now investigating the rapid growth of non-bank mortgage servicing companies Ocwen and Nationstar. He is also looking into possible sanctions violations by several banks and the consultants that advise them. He recently requested information from a dozen banks over potential currency manipulation.

As the DFS does not have criminal authority all actions against individuals will have to be pursued through civil remedies such as fines.

“We think about it most in the area where there has been some sort of intentional misconduct as opposed to a systemic industry wide problem,” Mr Lawsky said. In addition to suspensions, industry bans and clawbacks, Mr Lawsky said he is also considering laying out the allegations in more detail to expose bad actors, which he hopes will deter people from getting into trouble.

The Department of Justice and other regulators have been criticised for not bringing charges against individuals and instead extracting large fines from banks to resolve allegations of misconduct.

Here’s hoping that this will eventually result in senior people (and I don’t just mean the usual non-white suspects like Raj Rajaratnam) ending up behind bars.

When former Senator and Goldman “Vampire Squid” Sachs CEO Jon Corzine and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin are sentenced to a few years in the hoosegow, I’ll throw a f%$#ing party.

*It’s the DNRC, man.

This Takedown is Worthy of Matt Taibbi

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On The Baffler Alex Pareene systematically demolishes New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin’s dealings, and double dealings with, the finance industry:

The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.

 How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.

 Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCormicks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.

 Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.

 ………

 In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture:

DealBook caters to a high-level audience of C-Suite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.

The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible:

Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.

So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.

And then there is this delicious bit:

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

This is really a thing of beauty.

Read the whole thing.

I am adding Alex Pareene to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”

This Would Not Have Happened Without Snowden Leaks

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The FISA Court just rejected the NSA’s request to hold onto to phone metadata forever:

A federal surveillance court has rejected the Obama administration’s bid to hold onto millions of phone records beyond the current five-year limit.

The ruling is a rare rebuke for the government from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court has rejected less than 1 percent of government spying requests over the past 30 years.

But Judge Reggie Walton said he found the Justice Department’s argument for extending the retention of phone records “simply unpersuasive.”

Government lawyers had argued that they needed to retain the data as evidence for the slew of privacy lawsuits filed in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are suing to shut the program down, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.

………

But the federal judge noted that none of the privacy groups have tried to force the NSA to hold onto the data for their lawsuits. He wrote that the groups are seeking “the destruction of the [telephone] metadata, not its retention.”

Walton concluded that there is no legal requirement for the NSA to retain the data, and that any motivation for retaining the records is outweighed by the privacy harm.

Without Snowden, there would never have been the lawsuits, and even if there had been the suits, without the focus on the rubber stamp nature of the FISA court, the request would simply have been quietly granted.

Thank you Edward Joseph Snowden.

Well, I Guess That It’s Better than Being Hit By a Bus (Or Not)

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Charlie Pierce listened to Sarah Palin’s closing speech at CPAC:

By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country’s politics. If you think she’s a legitimate political leader, you’re an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.

Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.

………

A friend bailed on the speech, making the very plausible case that Palin is simply another political celebrity freakshow, like Donald Trump. I can see the point there but, with Palin, and watching the hysterical reception her puerile screed received, there is something more serious going on. She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country’s reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

Actually, no.

Last year, my car got totaled by a tour bus while CPAC was going on, and it’s clear that Mr. Pierce had a WAY worse time this year at CPAC than I did last year getting hit by a bus.

Sarah Palin riffed on Green Eggs and Ham.

Read the whole thing, and shudder.

I Just Got F%$#ing Pwned (Owned) by a Man Who Has Been Dead for 224 Years

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I am referring, of course to Ben Franklin.

Andy Kaufman has nothing on post-death humor.

Specifically, when I blamed Ben Franklin for creating Daylight Saving Time, I neglected to do my research.

It turns out that Ben Franklin’s suggestion was satire:

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin’s day.

I must remember: Google before shooting off my mouth.

It appears that I am not a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is.

The Intercept, Pierre Omidyar, and His Connections to CIA Operations in the Ukraine

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There has a bit of a pissing contest between Mark Ames and Glenn Greenwald over the connections between the First Media news organization, and its subsidiary The Intercept magazine which employs Greenwald.

Part of this is that Greenwald and Ames have been involved in a long running pissing contest, which explains why Ames original article mentioned Greenwald prominently, even though his remit is surveillance, and not covert organic operations or the destabilization of disfavored governments by our state security apparatus.

Still, it raises some very valid points, and Greenwald’s response addressed none of the underlying facts.

It’s basically, Greenwald telling Ames that he’s ugly and that his mom dresses him funny, and that the publisher doesn’t matter.

This is not true generally, nor which is not true in this case, as Omidyar has a long history of intimate involvement with his media ventures, with The Intercept writer Jeremy Scahill saying that he is intimately involved with their messaging:

Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. This guy has a vision.

 With those two remarks, Scahill obliterates Greenwald’s claims of independence from his boss, publisher and sole quarter-of-a-billion-dollar backer.

 There is no universe, current or imagined, in which Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen or any other venture capitalist would be allowed within a billion miles of Pando’s internal messaging system. And there is no planet within that universe on which Thiel, Andreessen or any of our dozen or so venture backers would be given any privileged line to our reporters (if they have something to say they can send us a letter to the editor, like everyone else). I would hope all of the other “billionaire-backed” media organizations Greenwald cites in his post would say the same.

(emphasis original)

So this is not one of the Glennster’s greatest moments.

Of more significance is the fact that Marcy Wheeler (aka Emptywheel) who is covering the developments in the Ukraine for The Intercept, asked sometime before this article came out about information on intelligence ops masquerading as “civil society.  Quoting from Ames’ article:

Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:

“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”

These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.

And now Wheeler is saying that there is no “there” there. This is the bit I find most interesting:

B) The Kyiv Post reported that in 2012 (the year after New Citizen received this grant, and therefore presumably the year it got spent), Omidyar Network funded 36% of New Citizen’s budget, Pact, a non-profit funded in part by USAID funded 54% of it, and other funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy.

USAID is, of course, a US Government agency, and while it is nominally independent, it is largely directed by the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, thought technically a non governmental not-for-profit is funded entirely by a line item in the budget of ……… wait for it ……… USAID.

Or as the best-named-blog ever, Cats not War, observes:

Now, I say Wheeler knows more than she lets on because she apparently understands enough to link to the excellent Moon of Alabama blog, dedicated to chronicling the less visible manifestations of imperial power, when comparing the Ukrainian and Syrian cases. And be reminded that Ames dug this information up about Omidyar at Wheeler’s curiosity–viewing the Ukrainian fray, she clearly knew dirty tricks by their effects and felt compelled to ask about them in public. When Ames revealed that one such meddler was her boss, she employed a new skepticism about the existence of imperial meddling in Ukraine, writing, ‘I don’t see any evidence that [Omidyar’s] donations were explicitly intended to pay for regime change… unless you presume transparency and better governance equates to regime change.’ Soon down the text, Wheeler belittles Ames’ suggestions about Omidyar’s business operations by cueing ‘Hollywood villain music’ and asking what is wrong about Pact, Omidyar-funded NGO, promoting ‘women in leadership,’ a goal Pact offers up on its about page (clearly the only place to go when seeking to understand an institution’s true workings). The insinuation of conspiracism mimics Greenwald’s own, when he reduces Ames charges to the ‘laughable hyperbole that Omidyar is now the mastermind who has secretly engineered the Ukrainian uprising.’ To Greenwald I’d like to ask, But what if, like, the suggestion is not that Omidyar did anything alone, but that he belongs to a larger oligarchical-state network whose global investments make up that thing called imperialism? And to Wheeler I’d like to ask, But what if, like, an NGO doesn’t outright come out with goals of regime change because they are manifestations of soft imperialism, crucial supplements to the harder stuff that use a language of liberal abstractions to work towards goals more nefarious?

Which brings us to my explanation of imperialism. There are two primary parts of which to keep track. The first is its role in capitalism–an odd concept to propose because imperialism is capitalism insofar as capitalism could not persist without it. Here, we are talking about capital and, more specifically, finance. The second is its expansion, which happens through hard imperialism (military operations of varying types–bombings, drones, invasions, covert ops, and so on) and soft imperialism (NGOs and PsyOps), because sometimes the mid-sized and small states fail to cooperate. When describing these activities, I will move from country to country with examples, fully aware that imperial tactics are employed differently in accordance with the needs of given contexts, but hoping still to establish that imperialism has a reliable repertoire, that it is global in scale, and that there can be no doubt about its purpose where it is to be found.

Read the entire Cats, Not War post.  I cannot do if full justice.

Run, Bernie, Run!!!!!!!

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If Bernie Sanders runs for President, he has my vote:

Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama and entertaining the process questions that this most issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided.

In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell him America is ready for a “political revolution.”

I want to see someone who does more than pay lip service to liberal policies, and Bernie would do that.

I’m not sure how serious he is.

At this point, he does not even have an Act Blue page set up for the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Aviation Week Comes to the Right Decision While Ignoring the Obvious

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They have an editorial where they argue (Correctly IMNSHO) that the 50 year old U-2 is a superior reconnaissance platform to the Block 3 Global Hawk UAV:

With the presentation of the Obama administration’s fiscal 2015 budget request last week, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his decision in a battle that had been brewing for some time: U-2 (below) versus Global Hawk. With money as tight as it is, everyone knew it was becoming too expensive to have both options for high-altitude intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) missions.

It would be easy to portray this as a contest between modernity and nostalgia, pitting a cutting-edge unmanned system against a piloted Cold War relic—Hal the computer versus an aging jet jockey with a silk scarf. Indeed, when Hagel announced his decision, he said he is opting to phase out the “50-year-old U-2 in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk” beginning in 2016 (see page 30). But that comparison is not just an oversimplification, it is the wrong way to approach the question.

 Hagel was more forthright when he acknowledged this was “a close call.” It surely is. The operating costs of the two fleets, for example, have been about the same.

They note that the U-2 is cheaper to buy, more flexible in its operations, flies higher, and has a sophisticated ECM suite.

But their editorial ignores the elephant in the room.

The reason that the Air Force, and the Congress, are supporting the very expensive ($200 million a copy) and inferior solution is because of pork and post-retirement employment opportunities for retired officers at defense contractors.

We really need to move to something like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), to take the uniformed military out of the procurement equation.

Additionally, such an agency should have as its remit the analysis of subcontracting, to ensure that work is allocated on the basis of efficiency, and not in an attempt to spread work to politically significant Congressional districts.

Gee, You Think?

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In the Armed Forced Journal, Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis calls for the forced retirement of most of the US general officer corps:

The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.

 ………

 Events have granted us a short window of time in which we might address the problem. America is drawing down after two intense wars, while the potential threats of the future are not quite upon us. Seven decades ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall surveyed an officer corps similarly ill-suited for the tasks to come. He forced into retirement scores of generals, clearing the way for the ones who would help win World War II.

 Today’s times, like Marshall’s, call for a reformation of the general officer corps.

 ………

 After each of these failures, one might expect the Army and program leaders to have suffered censure. Instead, the opposite seems generally to have been the case. The leaders of failed programs and other efforts received prestigious medals, promotion to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort.

 ………

 Shrink the general officer corps. In 1945, about 2,000 general and flag officers led a total of about 12 million citizens in uniform. Today, we have about 900 generals and admirals and 1.4 million troops, and the ratio of leader-to-led has accelerated upward in the two decades since the end of the Cold War. In an age of unprecedented communications technology and with the education and training opportunities for today’s soldiers, this is indefensible. Many general officer billets are redundant and should be eliminated; others can effectively be filled by colonels or even lieutenant colonels.

I highly remommend this as a read, though I would argue that the “Up or Out” officer promotion and retention policies have also contributed to these problems.

It makes the consequences to challenging the Pentagon’s group think to be the end of a career.

Books to Read: Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

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I’ve got to read this book. Professor Robert Farley, an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky has written a book calling for the abolition of the US Air Force as an independent branch of the service:

The United States needs airpower, but does it need an air force? In Grounded, Robert M. Farley persuasively argues that America should end the independence of the United States Air Force (USAF) and divide its assets and missions between the United States Army and the United States Navy.

In the wake of World War I, advocates of the Air Force argued that an organizationally independent air force would render other military branches obsolete. These boosters promised clean, easy wars: airpower would destroy cities beyond the reach of the armies and would sink navies before they could reach the coast. However, as Farley demonstrates, independent air forces failed to deliver on these promises in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, and the War on Terror. They have also had perverse effects on foreign and security policy, as politicians have been tempted by the vision of devastating airpower to initiate otherwise ill-considered conflicts. The existence of the USAF also produces turf wars with the Navy and the Army, leading to redundant expenditures, nonsensical restrictions on equipment use, and bad tactical decisions.

I certainly agree with this idea.  The raison d’être for an independent air force is Douhet’s theory about how strategic bombing could win wars.

History has shown this to be completely false.  Strategic bombing with the possible exception of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, have never won wars, nor do they appear to have shortened wars.

H/t War is Boring.

Yes, the Consumer Financial Protection Board is Doing Things: For Profit Colllege Edition

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The CFPB has filed suit against ITT Technical alleging that it behaves more like a payday lender than an institute of learning.

It’s not just the CFPB, 32 state Attorneys General have filed suit as well, but the CFPB’s involvement makes it far less likely that other federal agencies, most notably the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, will attempt to preempt the investigation:

Honest, well-run for-profit colleges can be helpful to students who do not qualify for traditional schools. But the robber barons in the for-profit sector represent a menace that requires more federal oversight. They saddle students with crushing debt while furnishing them useless degrees – or no degrees at all. These schools have been known to push students who are eligible for low-cost, federal loans into ruinously priced private loans that have fewer consumer protections and that give borrowers who get in trouble little choice but to default. That in turn makes it difficult for them to find jobs, get credit or rent apartments. And because private student loans are difficult to escape through bankruptcy, the stricken borrower might never recover.

Attorneys general in 32 states are actively pursuing this problem . This week the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally got into the act. On Wednesday it filed suit against an Indiana-based for-profit chain, ITT Educational Services, Inc., which has tens of thousands of students enrolled online or at one of roughly 150 institutions in nearly 40 states. The bureau, which paints a damning portrait of the company’s policies, accuses the chain of practicing “predatory student lending.”

………

The suit makes the company look very much like a storefront payday lender that ropes borrowers into loans that they cannot repay, then hammers them with fees and interest. In this case, the bureau asserts that the company rushed students through the application process without giving them a chance to understand what was happening. In some cases “ students did not even know they had a private student loan until they started getting collection calls.” Moreover, it says: “ITT knew that most of its students would ultimately default on their private student loans; it projected a default rate for its students of 64 percent.”

I really hope that this results in meaningful change.

The for profit college industry is full of parasites and predators who make their money off of federally guaranteed loans.

Full CFPB release after break:

CFPB Sues For-Profit College Chain ITT For Predatory Lending

ITT Pushed Consumers into High-Cost Student Loans Likely to Fail

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed a lawsuit against ITT Educational Services, Inc., accusing the for-profit college chain of predatory student lending. The CFPB alleges that ITT exploited its students and pushed them into high-cost private student loans that were very likely to end in default. The CFPB is seeking restitution for victims, a civil fine, and an injunction against the company.

“ITT marketed itself as improving consumers’ lives but it was really just improving its bottom line,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We believe ITT used high-pressure tactics to push many consumers into expensive loans destined to default. Today’s action should serve as a warning to the for-profit college industry that we will be vigilant about protecting students against predatory lending tactics.”

Like the mortgage market in the lead-up to the financial crisis, the for-profit college industry may be experiencing misaligned incentives. These colleges benefit when students take out large amounts of loans, regardless of the students’ long-term success. The CFPB is concerned that some of these corporations may be employing practices to coax consumers into taking out more federal and private student loans. Today’s announcement is the Bureau’s first public enforcement action against a company in the for-profit college industry.

ITT Educational Services, Inc. is an Indiana-based for-profit provider of post-secondary technical education. Tens of thousands of students are enrolled online or at one of ITT’s roughly 150 institutions in nearly 40 states. ITT’s tuition costs are among the highest in the country in the for-profit industry. Earning an associate’s degree at ITT can cost more than $44,000. Bachelor’s degree programs can cost $88,000. That is significantly higher than the cost of similar degrees at a community college or a public four-year institution.

Most of ITT’s students borrow large sums to pay the high tuition costs and the majority of this money is borrowed from federal student loan programs. But private student loans also provide critical revenue for ITT. Because most ITT students’ federal aid does not cover the full cost of an ITT program, most students face a “tuition gap” requiring them to find other sources of funding.

The CFPB’s lawsuit alleges that ITT encouraged new students to enroll at ITT by providing them funding for this tuition gap with a zero-interest loan called “Temporary Credit.” This loan typically had to be paid in full at the end of the student’s first academic year. But ITT knew from the outset that many students would not be able to repay their Temporary Credit balances or fund their next year’s tuition gap.

The CFPB lawsuit alleges that between July 2011 and December 2011, ITT pushed its students into repaying their Temporary Credit and funding their second-year tuition gaps through high-cost private student loan programs. Students were left in the dark about the fact that taking out these high-cost loans would be required to continue their studies. However, ITT’s CEO revealed in investor calls that converting the temporary loans to long-term loans was the company’s “plan all along.”

Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the CFPB has the authority to take action against institutions engaging in unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. Specifically, in today’s lawsuit, the Bureau alleges the following conduct by ITT:

  • Pressured into predatory loans: ITT used its financial aid staff to rush students through an automated application process without affording them a fair opportunity to understand the loan obligations involved. In some cases, students did not even know they had a private student loan until they started getting collection calls. The loans were high-cost. For borrowers with credit scores under 600, for example, the costs of the private student loans included 10 percent origination fees and interest rates as high as 16.25 percent.
  • Credits not transferable: ITT was accredited by a national organization that accredits many for-profit schools, but the credits that students earned typically did not transfer to local community colleges or other nonprofit schools such as public or private colleges. ITT used the prospect of expulsion and the loss of the money already spent during the student’s first year to coerce students into taking out the private loans.
  • Misleading future job prospects: The Bureau believes that ITT’s representations led students to think that when they graduated they were likely to land good jobs and enough salary to repay their private student loans. In this way, ITT exploited student expectations while it knew that a majority of students would default.
  • Loans likely to fail: ITT knew that most of its students would ultimately default on their private student loans; it projected a default rate for its students of 64 percent. Defaulting on private student loans can have grave consequences for consumers. It can make it difficult to get any kind of loan for years and even affect a borrower’s job prospects. And, because private student loans are difficult to discharge in bankruptcy, the debt can be very difficult to recover from.

The complaint against ITT can be found at: http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201402_cfpb_complaint_ITT.pdf

The Bureau’s complaint is not a finding or ruling that the defendant has actually violated the law.
To assist student loan borrowers who may be in delinquency or default, the CFPB recently launched an updated version of the Repay Student Debt interactive tool.

The CFPB also recently finalized a rule allowing it to supervise certain nonbank servicers of federal and private student loans. The rule takes effect on March 1.

CFPB takes complaints about student loans. To submit a complaint, consumers can:

  • Go online at consumerfinance.gov/complaint
  • Call the toll-free phone number at 1-855-411-CFPB (2372) or TTY/TDD phone number at 1-855-729-CFPB (2372)
  • Fax the CFPB at 1-855-237-2392
  • Mail a letter to: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, P.O. Box 4503, Iowa City, Iowa 52244

###
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. For more information, visit consumerfinance.gov.

Turns out that Snowden Did Take it to His Superiors

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Yet another lie about Edward Snowden is disproved:

Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists.

 Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far.

 An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said its internal investigation, including interviews with co-workers, found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone.

 But in his written testimony, Mr. Snowden insisted that he had, adding that his efforts had elicited two types of responses. Some people, he said, responded with “well-meaning but hushed warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ ” for fear of retaliation like being investigated by the F.B.I. as a suspected leaker.

“Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations,” he wrote.

Other people, he said, told him to “let the issue be someone else’s problem.”

“Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns,” he continued, “no one at N.S.A. could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.”

Yes, “No evidence,” from the folks have been caught lying time and time again by Snowden’s revelations.

And the Snoden’s testimony about how an official complaint has never resulted in reforms rings quite true.

The entire history of the US government state security apparatus has been one of excess reigned in from outside sources.

This is the Best News Ever!!!!!!

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I’m an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides.

So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations:

A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.

That’s why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks.

“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”

In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.

“We all feel inundated by PowerPoint,” Askew says. “With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand.”

If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.

Bitcoin Has Had a Disasterous Week

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We’ve just had 3rd Bitcoin exchange robbery in a week, the suspicious death of the CEO of another exchange, the discovery the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is actually a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, and Japan has decided not to regulate it as currency.

I know what you are wondering why is Japan deciding not to regulate Bitcoin a bad thing?

Well, because if it is not currency, then it is subject to the VAT (sales tax) and the capital gains tax:

The Japanese government officially said Friday that it doesn’t consider bitcoin to be a currency and has no plans at present to regulate it as a financial product.

As it tries to cope with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, the government said that the crypto-currency would be treated like other goods and services, with commercial sales of bitcoin itself and bitcoin-based transactions subject to sales tax. In addition, any gains on exchange rates will be taxed as well.

“Any bitcoin transactions are taxable when they fulfill requisitions stated by laws on income tax, corporate tax and consumption tax,” the government said in its statement, which came in response to questions over how bitcoins will be regulated.

At the same time, the statement ruled out treatment of bitcoin as a currency or a financial instrument.

“Bitcoin are neither Japanese nor foreign currencies and its trading is different from deals stated by Japan’s bank act as well as financial instruments and exchange act,” according to a document released by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t know if Bitcoin is done, but I think that a stake has been driven though the heart of the Randroid libertarian dream of completely unregulated and untraceable crypto currency.

Heh.

This is More than a Russian-Ukrainian Thing

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At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron:

At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.

Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”

On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.

It’s kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.

The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.

Gee, Screwed By Your Cell Phone Provider. Why is this News?

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OK, THIS time it’s the Feds that they overcharged:

The President Barack Obama administration accused Sprint today of overcharging the government more than $21 million in wiretapping expenses.

Sprint, like all the nation’s carriers, must comply with the Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires telcos to be capable of providing government-ordered wiretapping services. The act also allows carriers to recoup “reasonable expenses” associated with those services.

Sprint, of Overland Park, Kansas, inflated charges approximately 58 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to a lawsuit (.pdf) the administration brought against the carrier today.

“As alleged, Sprint over billed law enforcement agencies for carrying out court-ordered intercepts, causing a significant loss to the government’s limited resources,” said San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag.

The authorities said the suit, filed in San Francisco federal court, was a result of an investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

It’s kind of like having your Mother-In-Law drive your brand new Mercedes over a cliff.