People are wondering why Perdue Pharmaceuticals, a company known of hard selling its signature drug OxyContin, is shutting down its marketing to doctors.
It’s pretty simple: They see the lawsuits coming, and the see the real possibility of criminal prosecutions, and they are trying to unwind the whole mess, and then cover it up.
Of course, this is America, so the Sackler family is at no risk of anything beyond a slap on the wrist, because billionaire criminals are above the law here.
One of the central tenets of the PPACA (Obamacare) was that the malefactors of healthcare, insurance companies, big pharma, corrupt medical coding, etc. needed a seat at the table.
The logical extension of this is the admission by Dr. Jay Ken Iinuma, former medical director for Aetna for Southern California, that he rejected claims without ever looking at medical records:
California’s insurance commissioner has launched an investigation into Aetna after learning a former medical director for the insurer admitted under oath he never looked at patients’ records when deciding whether to approve or deny care.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones expressed outrage after CNN showed him a transcript of the testimony and said his office is looking into how widespread the practice is within Aetna.
“If the health insurer is making decisions to deny coverage without a physician actually ever reviewing medical records, that’s of significant concern to me as insurance commissioner in California — and potentially a violation of law,” he said.
………
The California probe centers on a deposition by Dr. Jay Ken Iinuma, who served as medical director for Aetna for Southern California from March 2012 to February 2015, according to the insurer.
During the deposition, the doctor said he was following Aetna’s training, in which nurses reviewed records and made recommendations to him.
Jones said his expectation would be “that physicians would be reviewing treatment authorization requests,” and that it’s troubling that “during the entire course of time he was employed at Aetna, he never once looked at patients’ medical records himself.”
This is what happens when you fetishize the market, and decide that people need “Skin in the Game”.
This is the natural consequence of keeping predators in our healthcare system.
They are unsatisfied with what they are getting from internet advertising, though their statement about this mentions both what their products are paired with online, as well as the fact that the metrics are unreliable.
Though they soft pedal the latter in their statement, I think that this is their real agenda. Otherwise, why mention it all?
That’s my assessment, given that having an ad show up on Logan Paul’s YouTube stream is fleeting and easily corrected, but getting sold silicon snake oil is the sort of thing that gets the acounting types upset:
Unilever has threatened to withdraw its advertising from online platforms such as Facebook and Google if they fail to eradicate content which “create division in society and promote anger and hate”.
Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of the sprawling multinational, whose brands include Dove, Magnum, Persil and Marmite, said that online platforms were sometimes “little better than a swamp”. He told major advertising, media and tech firms gathered at a conference in California: “As one of the largest advertisers in the world, we cannot have an environment where our consumers don’t trust what they see online.”
He added: “We cannot continue to prop up a digital supply chain – one that delivers over a quarter of our advertising to our consumers – which at times is little better than a swamp in terms of its transparency.
“It is in the digital media industry’s interest to listen and act on this. Before viewers stop viewing, advertisers stop advertising and publishers stop publishing.” According to the analysts Pivotal, together Google and Facebook account for nearly three-quarters of all digital advertising in the US. In the UK the two have more than 60% of digital advertising and 90% of all new digital spending.
(emphasis mine)
That thing about swamp and transparency?
That is not about “fake news” or “hate speech”, it is about things like Chinese click farms that generate false click throughs and the like, which costs them money, and delivers no customers.
I’m wondering if this whole thing is a dog whistle to Google and Facebook, and that the whole, “Divisions in society,” thing is a smoke screen.
As always, note that this post should in no way be construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
The Nomenklatura of Silicon have decided that when their children are education, they want a human touch with an absolute minimum of computers:
The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is small, exclusive and packed with the children of Silicon Valley executives who love the role that technology plays in the pupils’ education there. That is, it plays no role whatsoever.
Instead children at the $25,000-a-year elementary school in Los Altos, California, are learning to explore the world through physical experiences and tasks that are designed to nurture their imagination, problem-solving ability and collaborative skills.
Pencils, paper, blackboards and craft materials abound while tablets, smartphones and other personal electronic devices are banned from the classrooms until they are teenagers studying at the middle and high school campus nearby. Even then technology is only introduced slowly and used sparingly.
Alumni and present pupils include the children of Alan Eagle, a director of communications at Google, who helped to write the New York Times bestseller How Google Works, as well as those of a chief technology officer at eBay and senior executives at Apple and Yahoo. Their outlook is in line with some of the most powerful figures in the industry. Last month Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said he did not want his nephew, who is about 12, to use social media. Last year Sean Parker, the billionaire and an early Facebook investor, admitted that he and the other creators of the publishing site had deliberately made it as addictive as possible. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.
………
Ms [Beverly] Amico [Head of outreach at Waldorf Schools] sees no contradiction. “It’s a very attractive option for people in the tech world for their children,” she said. “All employers, tech world or not, are looking for graduates these days that can think independently, take initiative, are capable of collaborating, have curiosity and creativity.”
The approach contrasts starkly with the new classroom orthodoxy in most American schools where children are spending more and more time staring at screens in lessons. There too, however, a grassroots movement is beginning to build against the relentless march of technology, supported by research illuminating the harmful effects of smartphone use on young brains and new shareholder pressure on the IT giants that make them.
These folks know that at best, they are peddling digital crap, and at worst, they are peddling digital crack, and they want their children to have none of it.
Think about that the next time that you hear about your local school district, or charter school, going all “high tech”.
Here’s another thought though:The Treasury Department is part of the IC. Yet it never has to come testify to talk about the World Wide Threats that things like tax havens create. Why is that?
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 12, 2018
(IC=Intelligence Community)
“The fight against global terror is sacrosanct, but the ability of the rich to dodge taxes in offshore accounts is more sacrosanct,” he said paraphrasing Animal Farm.
For the past 24 hours, we have had no water at our house, because an 8 inch water main broke, shutting off water to 20-30 houses in my neighborhood.
Seeing as how we all were beginning to stink, we went to the JCC (Jewish Community Centers) to take showers, as they have a gym, locker room, and showers.
We were discussing the showers, and Sharon* mentioned that there were stalls with curtains in the women’s locker room.
I noted to Charlie that this was not the case in the men’s locker room, where it was an open floor plan. (It turns out that my recollections were wrong. They have added stalls and curtains)
Charlie was upset, as he is not enamored of the concept of taking a shower in front of other people, so he went to get his swim trunks.
So I asked him, “What is your problem with having a Zyklon B layout in the showers?“
He turned to me, and said that this was the worst thing that he had heard me say in his entire life.
I am a truly awful person.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Donald Trump decided not to release the Democratic answer to the Nunes memo:
Donald Trump is blocking the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal to a Republican memo that accused the FBI of a politically biased investigation into the president’s ties to Russia.
Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, released a letter Friday night arguing that disclosure of the Democrats’ memo would “create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests” and claiming that Trump was “inclined to declassify” the document, but could not at this time due to “classified and especially sensitive passages”.
Democrats on the House intelligence committee, which is investigating Russian meddling into the US election, authored the new memo, which they said provided context for a four-page memo authored by Republican Devin Nunes, a close ally of Donald Trump.………
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned the White House’s decision to block the Democratic memo on Friday, saying in a statement: “The President’s double standard when it comes to transparency is appalling. The rationale for releasing the Nunes memo, transparency, vanishes when it could show information that’s harmful to him. Millions of Americans are asking one simple question: what is he hiding?”
Yeah, pretty much, Chuck.
You know that Trump would never release the memo without redacting it into uselessness.
In the old days of the internet, I quickly realized that I could not create a particularly useful web page, so I deliberately created a useless one, dedicated to bad hair.
Because of an incident as he boarded Air Force One, I have updated my Bad Hair Web Page.
It’s my first update since 2001, when I added Jim Trafficant.
This might be the lamest page on the web.
H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
One of the things that seems to be constant in the United States is that when there is a potential conflict between Nazis and counter-protesters, the police will favor the Nazis, see the case of protests in Sacramento, California:
California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.
The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.
Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.
“It is shocking and really angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis,” said Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley teacher and anti-fascist organizer charged with assault and rioting after participating in the June 2016 Sacramento rally, where she said she was stabbed and bludgeoned in the head. “The people who were victimized by the Nazis were then victimized by the police and the district attorneys.”
………
Some California highway patrol (CHP) investigation records, however, raise questions about the police’s investigative tactics and communication with the TWP.
Felarca’s attorneys obtained numerous examples of CHP officers working directly with the TWP, often treating the white nationalist group as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects.
………
In one phone call with Doug McCormack, identified by police as the TWP affiliate who acquired the permit for the Sacramento rally, CHP investigator Donovan Ayres warned him that police might have to release his name in response to a public records requests. The officer said he would try to protect McCormack.
………
The officer’s write-up about an African American anti-fascist activist included a photo of him at the hospital after the rally and noted that he had been stabbed in the abdomen, chest and hand.
Ayres, however, treated the protester like a suspect in the investigation. The police investigator recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.
As evidence, Ayres provided Facebook photos of the man holding up his fist. The officer wrote that the man’s “Black Power salute” and his “support for anti-racist activism” demonstrated his “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the neo-Nazi group. He was ultimately not charged.
(emphasis mine)
Seriously, This is not a case of a few bad apples. The whole damn orchard is rotten.
The rise of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, disproves the most efficient market hypothesis, which is the basis of neoliberal economics and hence the basis of deregulation:
The spectacular increase and recent plunge in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have raised concerns that the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble will cause financial markets to crash. They probably won’t, but the Bitcoin bubble should finally destroy our faith in the efficiency of markets.
Since the 1970s, economic policy has been based on the idea that financial market prices reflect all the information relevant to the value of any asset. If this is true, market prices are the best estimates of the value of any investment and financial markets should be relied on to allocate capital investment.
This idea, referred to in the jargon of economics as the efficient market hypothesis (technically, the strong efficient market hypothesis), implicitly underlay the deregulation of financial markets that started in the 1970s. Although rarely stated now with as much confidence as it was during its heyday in the 1990s, the efficient market hypothesis remains a background assumption of much central-bank and economic policy.
The hypothesis survived the absurdities of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the meltdown in derivative markets that led to the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. Although the hypothesis should have been refuted by those disasters, it lived on, if only in zombie form.
But at least each of those earlier bubbles began with a plausible premise. The rise of the internet has transformed our lives and given rise to some very profitable companies, such as Amazon and Google. Even though it was obvious that most 1990s dot-coms would fail, it was easy to make a case for any of them individually.
As for the derivative assets that gave us the global financial crisis, they were viewed favorably in light of a widely held theory, known as the “great moderation,” that suggested that major economic crises were a thing of the past, thanks to certain systemic changes in the way developed nations ran their economies. The theory was backed by leading economists and central bankers. Asset-backed derivatives were, ultimately, a bet on the great moderation.
The contrast with Bitcoin is stark. The Bitcoin bubble rests on no plausible premise. When Bitcoin was created about a decade ago, the underlying idea was that it would displace existing currencies for transactions of all kinds. But by the time the Bitcoin bubble took off last year, it was obvious that this would not happen. Only a handful of legitimate merchants ever accepted Bitcoin. And as the Bitcoin bubble drove up transactions charges and waiting times, even this handful walked away.
………
But even if the claim is true, the idea that Bitcoin is valuable simply because people value it and because it is scarce should shake any remaining faith in the efficient market hypothesis.
………
Whatever happens to Bitcoin, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental — and more worrisome — development: A financial product with a purely arbitrary value has been successfully introduced in the world’s most sophisticated financial markets.
Bitcoin probably won’t bring financial markets crashing down. But it shows that regulators need to cut those markets down to size.
We need to regulate, and we need to throw the banksters in jail.
Cabinet office: Brexit is punching ourselves hard in the face.
Government spokesman: This account ignores the fact that we will be wearing bespoke gloves.— Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr) January 30, 2018
Yep. That’s pretty much the Tory Brexit plan in a nut shell.
This is in addition their proposal to add a work requirement:
After allowing states to impose work requirements for Medicaid enrollees, the Trump administration is now pondering lifetime limits on adults’ access to coverage.
Capping health care benefits — like federal welfare benefits — would be a first for Medicaid, the joint state-and-federal health plan for low-income and disabled Americans.
If approved, the dramatic policy change would recast government-subsidized health coverage as temporary assistance by placing a limit on the number of months adults have access to Medicaid benefits.
The move would continue the Trump administration’s push to inject conservative policies into the Medicaid program through the use of federal waivers, which allow states more flexibility to create policies designed to promote personal and financial responsibility among enrollees.
However, advocates say capping Medicaid benefits would amount to a massive breach of the nation’s social safety net designed to protect children, the elderly and the impoverished.
In January, the Trump administration approved waiver requests from Kentucky and Indiana to terminate Medicaid coverage for able-bodied enrollees who do not meet new program work requirements. Ten other states have asked to do the same.
These folks really should have drowned at birth.
The US just launched airstrikes against Syrian and allied forces:
The closer the U.S. gets to its original goal in Syria of defeating the Islamic State group, the murkier its end game. New layers of complexity are descending on a shifting battlefield, as demonstrated by a deadly barrage of American air and artillery strikes on a shadowy attacker.
The Pentagon insists it is keeping its focus on defeating IS, but Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday U.S.-backed fighters in eastern Syria faced a “perplexing” overnight assault by about 300 pro-Syrian government fighters whose nationalities, motives and makeup he could not identify. A number of U.S. military advisers were present alongside local allied forces, and the Americans led a punishing response that other officials said killed about 100 of the assailants.
Mattis asserted the episode was an aberration that should not be seen as an expansion of the U.S. war effort. But Trump administration critics disagreed. The Pentagon boss also dismissed any suggestion that Russia, the Syrian government’s most powerful military ally, had any control over the mysterious attacking force.
“I am gravely concerned that the Trump administration is purposefully stumbling into a broader conflict, without a vote of Congress or clear objectives,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, who has challenged the legal grounds on which American troops can operate in Syria for post-IS operations.
Mattis rejected Kaine’s suggestion the U.S. is being drawn into a broader war.
“It was self-defense,” he said. “We’re not getting engaged in the Syrian civil war.”
I’m going to call bullsh%$ on this.
Given that many elements in the US military, diplomatic, and state security apparatuses are determined to promulgate regime change in Syria, the juxtaposition of events that led to these airstrikes seems to me to be AWFULLY contrived.
There have simply been too many Gulf of Tonkin type events for me to believe that they have been unintentional.
Because it was carrying a large number of batteries, it was also supposed to be able to spend an significant amount of time running on battery power in “silent watch mode”, where it would be hard to detect, because it would be operating without running its engine while its sensors took in information about its immediate vicinity and relayed it across the network.
It turned out that a “significant amount of time” ended up to be something less than an hour because of the power consumption of the sensors, computers, and communications systems.
It turns out something very similar is happening with self-driving cars:
For longtime residents of Pittsburgh, seeing self-driving cars built by Uber, Argo AI, and others roam their streets is nothing new. The city’s history with robot cars goes back to the late 1980s, when students at Carnegie Mellon University caught the occasional glimpse of a strange vehicle lumbering across campus. The bright-blue Chevy panel van, chugging along at slower than a walking pace, may not have looked like much. But NavLab 1 was slowly—very slowly—pioneering the age of autonomous driving.
Why did the researchers at CMU’s Robotics Institute use the van instead of, say, a Prius? First, this was a decade before Toyota started making the hybrid. Second, the NavLab (that’s Navigational Laboratory) was one of the first autonomous vehicles to carry its computers with it. They needed space, and lots of it. For the four researchers monitoring computer workstations, with their bulky cathode ray monitors stretched across a workbench. For the on-board supercomputer, camera, giant laser scanner, and air-conditioner. And for the four-cylinder gasoline engine that did nothing but generate electricity to keep the kit running.
Thirty years on, the companies carrying that early research into reality have proven that cars can indeed drive themselves, and now they’re swiveling to sort out the practical bits. Those include regulations, liability, security, business models, and turning prototypes into production vehicles, by miniaturizing the electronics and reducing that massive electricity draw.
Today’s self-drivers don’t need extra engines, but they still use terrific amounts of power to run their onboard sensors and do all the calculations needed to analyze the world and make driving decisions. And it’s becoming a problem.
A production car you can buy today, with just cameras and radar, generates something like 6 gigabytes of data every 30 seconds. It’s even more for a self-driver, with additional sensors like lidar. All the data needs to be combined, sorted, and turned into a robot-friendly picture of the world, with instructions on how to move through it. That takes huge computing power, which means huge electricity demands. Prototypes use around 2,500 watts, enough to light 40 incandescent light bulbs.
“To put such a system into a combustion-engined car doesn’t make any sense, because the fuel consumption will go up tremendously,” says Wilko Stark, Mercedes-Benz’s vice president of strategy. Switch over to electric cars, and that draw translates to reduced range, because power from the battery goes to the computers instead of the motors.
Don’t be depressed. Self driving cars are only 10 years away, and will be just 10 years away for the next few decades, just like fusion and the Iranian nuclear arsenal.
I am, of course, Referring to The Onion:
FBI Warns Of ‘American Dream’ Scam
Noting that millions have already fallen victim to the long-running grift, the FBI warned Monday of the ‘American Dream’ scam. “Reports are coming in all across the country of Americans who were promised great prosperity and success in exchange for a lifetime of hard work, only to find themselves swindled and left with virtually nothing,” said agent Dean Winthrop, who explained that susceptible parties are made to believe that class mobility is possible simply through ability or achievement, despite the fact that innumerable social, economic, and racial barriers prevent the vast majority of U.S. citizens from attaining even marginal amounts of upward movement. ………
Brilliant.
Down 666 points on Friday, and 1175 points on Monday.*
The benefits of the tax cuts are positively amazing:
The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 1,175 points Monday in an exceptionally volatile day for financial markets around the world, stirring concerns about the durability of the long-running stock gains.
In the biggest global sell-off since 2016, financial markets from Asia to Europe to the United States were rocked primarily by concerns about inflation.
The Dow was off a heart-stopping 1,600 points during afternoon trading, the largest intraday point decline in the blue-chip index’s history. But the 4.6 percent loss for the day was not even close to the biggest.
The downdraft raised fresh anxieties among Americans who have seen their retirement savings and household worth march steadily higher without any of the gyrations that are part of a normal market cycle.
It also threatened to deprive President Trump and the GOP of a favorite talking point at the nascent stages of the 2018 midterm campaign.
Although the declines were eye-catching, market observers have been anticipating a correction after a year of big gains in the Dow, the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the tech-heavy Nasdaq.
You know, Trump was right. I’m sick of winning.
*Yes, I know that the stock market, and particularly the Dow, are separate from the real economy.
When you libel James Clapper and John Brennan you libel America. The desperate attack on men who have given over 90 years of dedicated service to our country is clear evidence of a conscientiousness of guilt.— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) February 5, 2018
Dead from the neck up
Well, now I understand how Rob Reiner produced and directed the fiasco that was North.
Rob Reiner seems to think that criticizing a man who lied to Congress about warrantless wiretaps (Clapper), and another who has spent most of his career sucking up to the House of Saud with a detour excusing torture?
The only word that I can think that describes his neo-McCarthyite bullsh%$ is Deplorable.
The final word on this tweet is:
I hated this tweet. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this tweet. Hated it.
You are picking up pennies and dimes in front of the steamroller, and you are eventually going to get steamrolled.
Wall Street will invent anything to provide a casino for people to speculate until it blows up.
—Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of Bleakley Financial Group
Yeah, pretty much.
Ht CZ at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Scott Dworkin aggressively raised funds for his anti-Trump “resistance” group, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, and then he kept most of the money for himself and his friends:
Omar Siddiqui couldn’t make it to an August fundraiser in Beverly Hills for the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. But he ponied up the $2,000 ticket price after the group’s senior adviser, Scott Dworkin, sent him a personal invitation.
Months later, Siddiqui, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), was surprised to discover his money—or three of every four dollars of it—had gone to the coffers of consultants and lawyers the group leaned on to fight a libel suit, rather than pushing back against the president.
When told by The Daily Beast how the group had spent his money, Siddiqui was, charitably speaking, not pleased.
“Being an attorney,” he said, “I intend to investigate this further and look forward to receiving a full explanation about the use of donations.”
The Democratic Coalition, one of the many new progressive-minded organizations to bloom in the age of anti-Trump fervor, brought in nearly half a million dollars last year. Its donors include Siddiqui, a pair of Hollywood television producers, a former Real Housewife of Miami, and a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. The vast majority of its funds, however, have come from people whose names don’t make it into Federal Election Commission disclosures: the small, “unitemized” donors who give $200 or less.
It’s what the group has done with its money—not how much it has brought in—that has raised eyebrows among other operatives.
The Democratic Coalition paid more than half of the money it raised last year to its employees or their consulting firms, according to Federal Election Commission records. Dworkin’s Bulldog Finance Group was the chief beneficiary, drawing more than $130,000 from The Democratic Coalition.
This is what is wrong with the Democratic Party establishment in a nutshell.
The DNC requires candidates that it supports to spend a large proportion of their money on a consultant from their list, and Scott Dworkin is most assuredly on their list, at least until this story came out.
First, we need to end the grifting.
So, now the House Intelligence Committee has approved the release of the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo, so the ball is in Trump’s court now.So, Trump can approve the memo, and look like a complete tool, or he can try to suppress the memo, and look like a complete tool, or he can do nothing for a week, and look like a complete tool.
All in all, I am amused:
#ReleaseTheMemo is set to happen again.
Just days after releasing a memo sowing doubt about the integrity of those investigating ties between President Trump and Russia, the House intelligence committee agreed to declassify a Democratic rebuttal.
The original memo—penned by the staff of chairman Devin Nunes and released after fierce objections from both the Justice Department and the FBI—was immediately championed by Trump as a vindication.
But the top Democratic on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff, claimed after prevailing in a unanimous committee vote on Monday that his document would reveal “many distortions and inaccuracies in the [Republican] memo.”
The vote came hours after Trump taunted Schiff on Twitter. And it was an abrupt reversal for the committee Republicans, all of whom voted against releasing the Democratic document last week—something their Democratic colleagues said was a political stunt to ensure the pro-Trump narrative laid out in the Nunes memo had days to circulate unrebutted. Schiff said Monday night that the Republicans’ transparency rhetoric placed them in an “unsupportable position” to reject the Democratic memo.
Much as with last week’s disclosure of Nunes’ memo, Trump now has five days to object to the release of the Democratic counter-memo. Should he, the full House can vote to override Trump and release it. Asked ahead of the Monday committee vote if the FBI had reservations about the release of the Democratic memo, the bureau declined comment.
This would be perfect, except that we are seeing bunches of alleged civil libertarians defending the surveillance activities of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.