Year: 2014

This is Foreseeable Blow-Back from Our Stupidity in the Banks of the Black Sea

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Russia has just revised its military doctrin, and ……… wait for it nostalgia buffs ……… gone back to declaring NATO to be its primary threat:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed into law a new defense doctrine that identifies NATO as the chief threat to Russian security and claims the right to use nuclear weapons to counter any aggression that “threatens the very existence” of Russia.

The revisions to the 2010 defense mission statement were few but appeared intended to put further pressure on the United States and the Western military alliance to cease courting Ukraine as an economic and strategic ally.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has moved forces closer to Russia’s borders in response to the Kremlin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in March and its dramatically increased challenges of the alliance’s airspace and maritime borders. NATO officials report that the number of aerial and maritime intrusions by Russian fighter jets in the Baltic Sea area has more than tripled this year over last.

The new defense doctrine cites NATO troop deployments and induction of former Soviet-allied states as the top threat to Russian security. It also deems the developing Prompt Global Strike program of the United States as hostile. The precision weapons system is being designed to be able to strike anywhere in the world so swiftly that the target has too little time to respond.

The new doctrine also mentions NATO missile defense plans as destabilizing and for the first time identifies a priority for Russia to protect its natural resource and maritime interests in the Arctic Sea.

The Neocon’s little adventure in the Ukraine is the gift that keeps giving.

The insane interventionist streak that oozed out of the American foreign policy establishment at the end of the Cold War is dangerous and insane, but it remains the consensus within the halls of government.

It’s like our government is being run by a bunch of rabid wolverines.

Merry Christmas from the NSA

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You know how people drop bad news on Friday evenings in Government?

Well, the NSA just dropped some sh%$ so heavy that they waited until Christmas Eve:

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,” is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”.

Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.

Yeah, and the people who did this are still on the job:

For the most part, the reports don’t appear to contain anything especially new, but I was struck by this particular violation:

………The OIG’s Office of Investigation initiated an investigation of an allegation than an NSA analyst had conducted an unauthorized intelligence activity. In an interview conducted by the NSA/CSS Office of Security and Counterintelligence, the analyst reported that, during the past two or three years, she had searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting….Although the investigation is ongoing, the analyst has been advised to cease her activities.

If the NSA gave even half a f%$# about this sort of abuse, this analyst would be fired, and her security clearance would be pulled.

Instead, she was “advised to cease her activities.”

This is why super-secret organizations need real independent oversight, because their first priority is preserving their own prerogatives, using whatever means necessary.

Full report here. (PDF)

Don’t Jump to Conclusions on the Sony Hack

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Bruce Schneier, perhaps the most prominent security pundit in the world, is dubious about the FBI’s claim that the DPRK is behind the Sony Hack, while Kurt Stammberger, the senior VP Norse, a cybersecurity firm, insists that all evidence points to an internal hack:

Cybersecurity experts are questioning the FBI’s claim that North Korea is responsible for the hack that crippled Sony Pictures. Kurt Stammberger, a senior vice president with cybersecurity firm Norse, told CBS News his company has data that doubts some of the FBI’s findings.

“Sony was not just hacked, this is a company that was essentially nuked from the inside,” said Stammberger.

While Norse is not involved in the Sony case, it has done its own investigation.

“We are very confident that this was not an attack master-minded by North Korea and that insiders were key to the implementation of one of the most devastating attacks in history,” said Stammberger.

He says Norse data is pointing towards a woman who calls herself “Lena” and claims to be connected with the so-called “Guardians of Peace” hacking group. Norse believes it’s identified this woman as someone who worked at Sony in Los Angeles for ten years until leaving the company this past May.

I’m inclined not to believe the official story from the FBI.

The sketchy accounts currently given by the FBI seem to indicate that they worked backward, starting with the guilt of North Korea, and then picking and choosing evidence on that basis.

Here is an Interesting Jurisdictional Conundrum

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The Department of Justice has subpoenaed some Microsoft emails, and the Redmond Borg has objected because the emails in question are on a server in Ireland:

The Irish government today supported Microsoft in its ongoing fight against US prosecutors – who appear to want access to server hard drives anywhere in the world.

Microsoft has garnered serious backing from the technology industry in its case against American investigators. The Feds believe they have the right to access emails stored on Microsoft’s servers in Ireland; Uncle Sam thinks it can lawfully tap up any US company for information, regardless of where that info is stored.

The Feds wants the messages to prosecute a drug case, and obtained a simple search warrant served against Microsoft in New York, rather than approaching the Irish government and its courts for help. If the US govt wins the case, which is being played out in the aforementioned state, it will effectively mean that Microsoft’s cloud data stored around the world can be read at will by US g-men.

Now the Irish government has filed an amicus curiae brief [PDF] supporting Microsoft’s position. If the US government wants information on servers overseas, it should go through existing treaties rather than just expecting to snatch the bytes with a US-issued search warrant.

This is not a big deal from a procedural standpoint: It really would not take much longer to make existing treaty mechanism, but it is from a business perspective, because, should the DoJ prevail, it will be yet another reason for foreign customers to flee American cloud providers.

The degree to which the US state security apparatus attempts to eschew treaty based in attempt to be bad-ass borders on the pathological.

Quote of the Day

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If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

—Charlie Pierce

He is taking about how our torturers and our police demand to operate with impunity.

So, The Interview is Going to be Released After All

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And suddenly I have no urge at all to see the film:

A comedy film about North Korea that had its Christmas Day launch cancelled after a major cyber attack and threats against US cinema-goers is now to get a limited theatrical release, Sony says.

The Interview will be shown in some independent US cinemas on Thursday.

Sony Chairman Michael Lynton said he was “excited” that the comedy, about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, would now be seen.

Two cinemas in Atlanta and Austin have already revealed screenings.

Any urge I had to see the movie has vanished, but I am now seriously considering Will Bunch tweeted tongue in cheek conspiracy theory:

Elevator pitch: Slapstick comedy about worst movie ever made becoming box-office smash when it’s hacked by North Korea
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) December 23, 2014

Well, It’s a Start

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South Korea has indicted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:

South Korea has indicted the chief executive officer and local subsidiary of Uber Technologies Inc for violating a law governing public transport, becoming the latest jurisdiction to challenge the U.S. taxi service provider.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office issued the indictment against CEO Travis Kalanick and the firm’s Korean unit for violating a law prohibiting individuals or firms without appropriate licenses from providing or facilitating transportation services, an Uber spokeswoman said.

The prosecutors’ office declined to comment.

“Uber Technologies respects the Korean legal system and will provide its full cooperation,” the company said in a statement without detailing the charges brought against it.

Uber, through its apps, charges fees to play matchmaker for passengers and drivers – some registered as taxi drivers. But a lack of regulation for the relatively new business model has brought Uber to the attention of authorities worldwide.

Taiwan and the Chinese mainland city of Chongqing on Monday separately said they were investigating Uber over concerns it and its drivers were not appropriately licensed.

Seeing as how Uber’s basic business model is lawlessness with a few legal walls to ensure that people like Kalanick will never face any liability for anything, the idea that he has been personally indicted is a good thing.

Here’s hoping that he he actually has to stand trial there.

Hotel Telecommunications F%$#ery

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Marriott specifically, who just got fined for jamming personal Wi-Fi hotspots, and is now attempting to get regulatory forbearance:

Microsoft and Google don’t agree on much, but they’ve presented a united front against the hotel industry, which is trying to convince government regulators to give them the option of blocking guests from using personal Wi-Fi hotspots.

The tech companies recently joined the wireless industry’s lobbying group and a handful of other parties in opposing the hotel industry’s petition, which seeks the Federal Communications Commission’s permission to block personal Wi-Fi networks on their properties.

This summer, the American Hospitality & Lodging Association and Marriott International asked the FCC to declare that a hotel operator can use equipment to manage its network even if it “may result in ‘interference with or cause interference’ to a [wireless device] being used by a guest on the operator’s property.”

 Now that many people have cell phones, and don’t pay the usurious fees for phone calls, Marriott wants to jam personal Wi-Fi hotspots so that they can charge equally usurious fees for that:

The Marriott-owned Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center tech staff was using a monitoring system that de-authenticated guests’ personal Wi-Fi hot spots. Meanwhile, the hotel was charging exhibitors and attendees anywhere from $250 to $1,000 for Wi-Fi service, the FCC said.

In October, Marriott settled an FCC complaint about the practice for $600,000 but argued that it hadn’t broken the law and was using technology to protect guests from “rogue wireless hotspots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber attacks and identity theft.”

A month later, the agency asked for comments on Marriott’s earlier request to find such Wi-Fi blocking legal.

 Like I said, Hotel Telecommunications F%$#ery.

I think that the deadline for comment has passed, but you can read the comments here.

The Tor Anonymity Network Just Got Hacked by Law Enforcement

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Paul Carr at Pando has been writing a lot about potential security issues with TOR, both issues with the ties between the founders and the US state security apparatus, and possible technical issues.

One of the ones that he has mentioned is the compromise of their exit nodes or their directory authorities.

It now appears that a large cluster of exit nodes has been seized by the authorities:

Earlier this week, we reported on an apparent threat by an unnamed agency to disable the Tor anonymity network.

According to founder Roger Dingledine:

The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacitate our network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers in the network called directory authorities.

This is not the current problem though,  it appears that some of the exit nodes have been seized by the authorities:

Today, Thomas White who operates “a large exit node cluster for the Tor network and [a] collection of mirrors,” reports that his servers have apparently been compromised.

Tonight there has been some unusual activity taking place and I have now lost control of all servers under the ISP and my account has been suspended. Having reviewed the last available information of the sensors, the chassis of the servers was opened and an unknown USB device was plugged in only 30-60 seconds before the connection was broken. From experience I know this trend of activity is similar to the protocol of sophisticated law enforcement who carry out a search and seizure of running servers.

White warns “Do NOT use my mirrors/services until I have reviewed the situation,” adding:

At this moment in time I am under no gagging orders or influence from external parties/agencies. If no update is provided within 48 hours you may draw your own conclusions.

Needless to say if you rely on TOR for some sort of crucial secure communications, I would suggest that you find some other method, or go dark, over the short term.

I know a guy with a carrier pigeon.

It Goes Without Saying that Rush Limbaugh is a Blithering Idiot

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As evidenced by his recent racist screed about how Idris Elba cannot play James Bond because the actor is black.

Emails revealed that a senior Sony executive was looking to tap Elba to replace Daniel Craig when the latter is done with the role.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh had a bigotrygasm over all of this.

This begs the question:  Why are sponsors supporting this inveterate racist?

To be clear, I would much rather have Elba playing George Smiley than James Bond:  I’ve always found Bond to be a bit one dimensional.

I will say something here:  If  Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal has mooted casting Elba take the role of Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy movie, I would be upset: It’s a profound waste of his not inconsiderable acting talent.

Then again, playing Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy would be a waste of pretty much anyone’s acting talent.

This is Not Going to End Well………

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The Ukrainian Parliament has voted to abandon their non-aligned status:

In a sign of Ukraine’s hardening attitude toward Russia, Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to remove a legal barrier to joining the NATO defense alliance.

The move provoked an angry response from Russia, even though NATO shows few signs of accepting Ukraine as a member anytime soon. But this year’s bloody conflict in Ukraine’s east has altered the country’s feelings about the Western alliance. A plurality of Ukrainians now favor joining NATO, a stark change from recent years when just a small fraction did.

Ukraine’s decision comes as Russia struggles with a weakened ruble and growing concerns about economic instability.

The vote in Ukraine’s parliament had no immediate practical effect on the country’s relationship with NATO. But it ended Ukraine’s nonaligned status, which was adopted as a way of reassuring Russia that its neighbor would not join NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin cited his fear of Ukraine’s joining NATO as a reason Russia annexed Crimea in March.

This is a very stupid step to take when the cease fire finally appears to be holding in the east of the Ukraine.

It is a deliberate provocation, and I believe that the US government was involved in this move.

We already know that Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, was intimately involved in funding the revolt that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, and the fact that senior positions in the current government, most notably the American born Natalie Jaresko at finance minister, indicates that there had to be at least tacit approval.

In fact, Jaresko, appears to still be in the US payroll, albeit through the back door.

There are a whole bunch of people in the State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence services who are still intent on imposing something like the Morgenthau Plan, which was intended  intended to reduce Germany to a pastoral following WWII on Russia.

Putin is very much aware of these attitudes, it’s hard to miss when folks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have made no bones about supporting this strategy.

Paranoid Putin may be, but it is a justified paranoia, and the recent vote in the Ukraine will only serve to reinforce that attitude, and so escalate the conflict.

It looks like we are into a cycle of doomed imperial hubris on and around the Black Sea.

Another Statement of Obama’s that is “Inoperative”*

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Cliff Stone, who worked with the State Department finding places to send innocent Guantánamo detainees once they were cleared for released, has resigned in the slow pace of releases:

The State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is resigning, dealing another blow to President Obama’s efforts to close a facility that top administration officials say is a blight on the country’s international standing.

The resignation of Cliff Sloan, a close confidant of Secretary of State John Kerry, comes as officials at the State Department and the White House have increasingly expressed frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Sloan denied that he was leaving because he was frustrated by foot-dragging at the Pentagon. He said he had always intended to stay a maximum of 18 months, noting that he was right on schedule.

“Frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners,” my ass.

The military is not a democracy. Barack Obama is commander-in-chief.

If someone is dragging their feet, Obama can fire them.

What’s more, I would argue that he has a moral obligation to fire them.

Guantánamo is more than a moral cancer on America. It is a source of outrage in the Arab world, and is one of the most power recruiting tools that Jihadis have.

*Yes, I am invoking the memory of former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.

Am I a Bad Person to Experience Unalloyed Glee at the Misfortune of Others?

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That’s Gotta Hurt!

Well, let me clarify:

I am talking about one entity specifically………

I’m talking about one entity who was caught trying to deceive regulators specifically………

I’m talking about one entity who was caught trying to deceive regulators and defraud the public specifically………

I’m talking about one entity who was caught trying to deceive regulators and defraud the public specifically whose business model is primarily rent seeking………

OK, spoiler alert, it’s Monsanto, who just had a fraudulent patent revoked:

Patent EP1812575 held by Monsanto has been revoked by the European Patent Office (EPO) after the international coalition No Patents on Seeds! filed an opposition in May 2014.

A further opposition was filed by Nunhems / Bayer CropScience. In November 2014, Monsanto requested that the patent be revoked in its entirety and the EPO complied with this request.
The patent covered conventionally bred tomatoes with a natural resistance to a fungal disease called botrytis, which were claimed as an invention. The original tomatoes used for this patent were accessed via the international gene bank in Gatersleben, Germany, and it was already known that these plants had the desired resistance. Monsanto produced a cleverly worded patent in order to create the impression that genetic engineering had been used to produce the tomatoes and to make it look ‘inventive’.

“Revoking this patent is an important success. It was more or less based on a combination of fraud, abuse of patent law and biopiracy. The patent could have been used to monopolise important genetic resources. Now breeders, growers and consumers have a chance of benefiting from a greater diversity of tomatoes improved by further breeding”, says Christoph Then, a coordinator of No Patents on Seeds!. “The intended resistance is based on complex genetic conditions, which are not known in detail. So genetic engineering is clearly not an option in this case.”

It would be nice if patent law were changed to invalidate gene and species patents, but it’s a start.

Mazel Tov!!

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The new editor of The New Republic has announced that he will try to expand its bullpen beyond its white Ivy League past:

The best way for any new editor of this magazine to respect the spirit of the institution is to first recognize its defining characteristic is a habit of reinvention. The task before us is to ask what The New Republic should be one hundred years after its founding. We set out with many advantages: first, an owner who has committed to investing in quality journalism and who has granted his editorial staff the creative freedom to find a new path. We have an impressive editorial team that has demonstrated exceptional mettle and we will be adding to their ranks. And we have the heritage of sustaining a continuous conversation about America’s promise.

As we revive one proud legacy of The New Republic—the launching of new voices and experts—those new voices and experts will be diverse in race, gender, and background. As we build our editorial staff, we will reach out to talented journalists who might have previously felt unwelcome at The New Republic. If this publication is to be influential, and not merely survive, it can no longer afford to represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites.

You know, I think poaching Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic might be a good start.

He’s a great writer, and has been aggressive critic of The New Republic‘s indifference, and occasional hostility, to the minority community, and it would do a lot to indicate that this is a clean break from the ignominious reign of the contemptible Marty Peretz.

I Finally Have Some Meaningful Thoughts About the Police Shootings in New York this Saturday

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My first thought is that the NRA is a much bigger threat to the safety of police officers than peaceful protesters, civilian review boards, or criticism:

The last year when Ismaaiyl Brinsley—the man who killed two New York City cops on Saturday—should have been able to buy or carry a gun was 2008, when he was convicted of felony shoplifting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to more felonies after he shot a woman’s car with a stolen handgun. Over his life, he had 19 arrests in Ohio and Georgia.

As a felon, Brinsley was barred under federal law from buying a gun. Had he undergone a background check, he would have failed it and authorities could be notified. Yet the National Rifle Association argues that bad guys will get their hands on guns regardless of the law. The lobby points to violence in states with strong gun laws as evidence of gun control’s ineffectiveness.

In fact, it’s weak gun laws that enable felons, domestic abusers, and the mentally ill to arm themselves. Whereas licensed gun sellers must conduct background checks, unlicensed secondary market sellers face no such requirement in more laissez-faire states.

This is a direct result of the gun show loopholes and other similar exceptions foisted upon us by the ammosexual lobby.

The second thought is that the advocates for police in general, and the PBA in New York City in particular, are demanding that criticism and accountability for the police be non-existent:

I covered New York politics for 15 years, and I saw some awfully tense moments between the police and Democratic politicians. But there has never been anything remotely like the war the cops are waging right now against Mayor Bill de Blasio for the thought crime of saying something that was completely unremarkable and so obviously true that in other contexts we don’t even bat an eye when someone says it. And for that, the mayor has blood on his hands, as Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Pat Lynch said Saturday evening after the hideous assassinations of two NYPD officers?

Let’s rewind the tape here. On Dec. 3, in the wake of the Staten Island grand jury’s refusal to indict in the case of the police homicide of Eric Garner, de Blasio gave a press conference at a Staten Island church. He spoke of the need to heal and so on, the usual politician’s rhetoric, and then he uttered these words:

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

Dante de Blasio, as you surely know, is a mixed-race young man of 16 who looks black and sports a large, ’70s-style afro. Does anyone seriously think that his father should not have told him what he did? Come on. We all know the odds (actually, we don’t, more on which later). We hear every prominent black man in America who has a son and who decides to talk about this publicly—football players and actors and others—say exactly the same thing. We’ve heard it hundreds of times. Are these men lying? Are they paranoid weirdos? Of course they aren’t. They are fathers, describing to the rest of us what I thought was a widely acknowledged reality.

I understand that any management-labor dialogue is necessarily fraught, but this is literally a prescription for a police state, and Pat Lynch should be condemned.

What’s more, this attitude is likely to make police officers less safe.

It’s Been 6 Years, and Finally a Regulator Forces a CEO to Resign

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Rather unsurprisingly, the regulator in question, is New York Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky, who has had nothing to do with the Obama administration.

He went after the astonishingly corrupt and incompetent mortgage servicer Ocwen, and uncovered self-dealing by the CEO that forced his resignation.

It would have been nice if William Erbey were breaking rocks somewhere, but it is a start:

Let’s say you run a company whose misdeeds are splashed across the front pages of the business section on an almost weekly basis. You might reasonably expect to be fired without delay. But then let’s also stipulate that you’re in the financial services industry. Recent history suggests you’ll be able to keep your job and your handsome bonus, and that even if law enforcement officials penalize the company for improprieties, somebody else—like your shareholders— will pay those fines, leaving you to continue your charmed life unscathed.

 William Erbey, the billionaire chairman of the mortgage servicing giant Ocwen, probably thought that would be his fate as well, but he didn’t anticipate the determination of New York Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky. On Monday, Lawsky announced Erbey would step down chairman of Ocwen and four related businesses, as part of the settlement of an investigation into the company’s sad enduring legacy of ripping off homeowners.

 It isn’t a prison sentence. But on the spectrum of accountability for financial industry executives, “forced to resign” beats “suffered no consequences while staying in power.”

 Lawsky has been chasing Ocwen for several years. A mortgage servicer handles day-to-day operations on loans, from collecting monthly payments to making decisions after a default. Ocwen has grown almost ten-fold since 2009 by purchasing the rights to service distressed loans from the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Ally Bank. Big banks have engaged in a fire sale of their mortgage servicing rights, because of increased compliance standards for servicing, and because of new bank capital rules that make servicing loans costly. As a non-bank, Ocwen has more wherewithal to handle mortgage servicing, and this has made it the 4th-largest servicer in America. ………

 ………

 The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found similar problems with Ocwen and reached an agreement on a $2.1 billion settlement. But most of the money went toward modifying loans that Ocwen serviced but didn’t own, allowing it to pay the fine with other people’s money.

 More recently, Lawsky uncovered more Ocwen secrets. He discovered that four other public companies chaired by Ocwen chairman William Erbey have close business relationships with the mortgage servicer (Erbey is also the largest individual shareholder for all the companies). One subsidiary hosts nearly all of Ocwen’s online auctions; another handles all Ocwen post-foreclosure real estate transactions. So Ocwen profits by funneling default-related business to closely associated companies, providing an incentive to push borrowers into default.

 Lawsky also found that Ocwen backdated letters to borrowers, making it impossible for them to challenge denials of their mortgage modifications within a specific time frame. He also investigated whether Ocwen stalled short sales, where homes get sold for less than the balance on the mortgage, in order to collect additional fees.

And here is the special sauce:

This time, Lawsky did not spare top executives. Erbey will resign both Ocwen and the four related companies by January 16, and subsequently hold “no directorial, management, oversight, consulting, or any other role at Ocwen or any related party.” Any other Ocwen employees also working for one of the other four companies will have to drop those responsibilities.

 Under the agreement, Ocwen will add two new independent board positions, and an Operations Monitor will work directly with the board on oversight functions, and determine whether other senior management will have to be fired. Ocwen cannot acquire other mortgage servicing rights without the consent of the Operations Monitor.

 Ocwen will also pay $150 million to New York homeowners harmed by the company. Instead of a “soft-dollar” promise of mortgage modifications that Ocwen can pass on to the owners of the loans they service, these are cash penalties—$100 million to the Department of Financial Services for housing counseling and community redevelopment programs, and $50 million to be split by Ocwen foreclosure victims, with $10,000 for each borrower on whom Ocwen completed foreclosure, and the rest handed out to those with active foreclosures in process. Ocwen will also have to re-evaluate borrowers in foreclosure after paying the penalty, “in light of their improved financial condition resulting from such payment.”

Ocwen cannot take a tax deduction on any of these payments, per the agreement. The company also agreed to provide all of its New York borrowers with their complete loan files upon request, along with assurances to detail reasons for any denials of mortgage relief. As the loan files represent evidence in private borrower misconduct litigation, it could expose Ocwen to further legal headaches.

Seriously, if there had been any appetite for even a cursory investigation of the banksters by Obama and His Evil Minions™, we would have seen a lot more of this.

Then again, if we did that, Obama would not be able to get his 6 figure speaking gigs from Wall Street execs when he leaves offices.

One has to have priorities.

You Don’t Need to be an Alcoholic to Work with Richard Nixon, but it Helps

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A while back, NPR had a story about Stephen Hess’s book, The Professor And The President, which detailed how Daniel Patrick Moynihan became one of Richard M. Nixon’s most influential domestic policy advisers.

I’m thinking that it Moynihan’s heavy drinking might have had something to do with is.

If I found myself working as Nixon as a domestic policy adviser, I’d be polishing off a 5th of Bourbon a day.