Homeless in Arizona

Osaka mayor: Wartime sex slaves were necessary

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Osaka mayor: Wartime sex slaves were necessary

Associated Press Mon May 13, 2013 10:11 PM

TOKYO — An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military’s forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to “maintain discipline” in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.

The comments made Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan’s wartime aggression and that have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, also told reporters that there wasn’t clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called “comfort women.”

“To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time,” said Hashimoto. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone.”

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels.

An unidentified South Korean government official told Yonhap news agency it was disappointing that a senior Japanese official “made comments supportive of crimes against humanity and revealed a serious lack of a historical understanding and respect for women’s rights.”

Hashimoto’s comments come amid mounting criticism at the prospect of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative government revising Japan’s past apologies for wartime atrocities. Before he took office in December, Abe had advocated revising a 1993 statement by then-Prime Minister Yohei Kono acknowledging and expressing remorse for the suffering caused to the sexual slaves of Japanese troops.

Abe has acknowledged “comfort women” existed but has denied they were coerced into prostitution, citing a lack of official evidence.

Recently, top officials in Abe’s government have appeared to backpedal on suggestions the government might revise past apologies, apparently to calm tensions with South Korea and China and address U.S. concerns about Abe’s nationalist agenda.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga repeated the previous government position and said that those women went through unbearable pain.

“The stance of the Japanese government on the comfort women issue is well known. They have suffered unspeakably painful experiences. The Abe Cabinet has the same sentiments as past Cabinets.”

Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura said Hashimoto’s remark doesn’t help as Japan has faced criticism from its neighboring countries and the U.S. over its interpretation of history.

“A series of remarks related to our interpretation of (wartime) history have been already misunderstood. In that sense, Mr. Hashimoto’s remark came at a bad time,” Shimomura told reporters. “I wonder if there is any positive meaning to intentionally make such remarks at this particular moment.”

Hashimoto, 43, is co-head of the newly formed Japan Restoration Party with former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who is a strident nationalist.

Sakihito Ozawa, the party’s parliamentary affairs chairman, said he believed Hashimoto’s remarks reflected his personal view but expressed concerns about repercussions.

“We should ask his real intentions and stop this at some point,” he said.

Trust us, we are no longer corrupt!!! Arizona National Guard

Arizona Guard chief unveils discipline, anti-corruption reforms

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 11:22 PM

Arizona’s top National Guard officer on Friday released a package of reforms and training protocols designed to improve discipline and combat corruption documented by a Pentagon agency’s investigation.

At the direction of Gov. Jan Brewer, Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar announced more than two dozen new initiatives that he described as “catalysts for broad, systemic program change.”

The reforms were drafted in response to recommendations made by the National Guard Bureau, a national umbrella agency for state military organizations. Earlier this month, bureau investigators released a 107-page report that said Arizona’s Guard suffers from unethical leadership, lax discipline, rogue conduct and a failure to protect abuse victims.

Those conclusions mirrored findings in an Arizona Republic series last fall that focused on sexual harassment, fraud, fraternization and other wrongdoing.

In a letter to Brewer, Salazar said the Guard remains “prepared, equipped, manned and ready to respond to local, state or federal missions” but is making changes “to remedy the (problem) areas identified in the NGB report.”

“A key priority of effort for the organization targets the serious issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” he added.

The Arizona Army and Air Guard serve under Salazar, who reports to Brewer as commander in chief. The organization has about 8,000 personnel.

Wrongdoing prevailed among the 1,400 soldiers and airmen who work full time. The remainder serve one weekend per month.

Among the new programs and procedures, some of which already have been implemented:

Mandatory reporting of alleged misconduct by leadership personnel.

Revisions of the Arizona Code of Military Justice and court-martial policies to enable appropriate disciplinary actions.

Regular personnel surveys on integrity, leadership and morale issues.

Development of a tracking system for investigations of misconduct.

Enhanced training and response to sexual harassment and abuse.

Creation of a provost marshal to coordinate with civilian law enforcement.

Brewer did not immediately comment on the action plan.

Salazar, who has announced that he will retire as adjutant general later this year, described the reforms as “deliberate steps to demonstrate our commitment to corrective action.”

The Republic began investigating National Guard culture last year at the request of numerous soldiers and airmen who complained of cronyism, fraternization and failed leadership.

Using military records, The Republic documented illicit relations with teenage recruits, paintball attacks on homeless people, fraudulent expenses, sexual harassment, drug dealing, drunken driving and other crimes. Personnel who committed offenses in many instances were not held accountable, while victims and whistle-blowers became targets for reprisal.

National Guard Bureau investigators, led by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams, found that misconduct by command officers, especially sexual fraternization, sabotaged respect and discipline. They said that serious wrongdoing went unpunished and that those who complained of abuse were “victimized twice: once by the perpetrator and once by the leadership that was unable to address their needs.”

Brewer reacted to those findings by declaring that Arizona’s National Guard is “not broken.” She said she would rely on Salazar’s “steady hand and wise counsel” to address shortcomings identified in the report.

Rep. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, on Friday renewed her call for public hearings in the Arizona Legislature and said the action plan fails to address overarching command-ethics issues.

She also complained that it lacks a system whereby Guard personnel can file complaints directly with the Governor’s Office for independent review.

“I think the fundamental problem in the Guard is the lack of leadership at the top,” McCune Davis said. “Who actually will implement this plan, and do they have a reputation for ethical behavior as an example? ... The governor has to be vigilant in selecting somebody with the highest standards.”

Politicians and cops are addicted to Federal pork???

Posted on May 17, 2013 11:27 am

First responders face cutbacks as federal funds dry up

My Turn by SCOTT SOMERS

Once again an American city has been the target of the brutality of terrorism. Our hearts go out to the victims and families affected by the Boston Marathon bombing. [If you ask me the police who flushed the Constitution rights of the people of Boston down the toilet to catch the two Boston bombers were bigger terrorists then the Boston Bombers were.]

Watching the news, we were witness to the value of a unified response by federal, state and local authorities. Videos document Boston firefighters, emergency medical personnel and local hospitals working together to treat the wounded. Pictures show FBI and ATF agents standing with Boston police to investigate the crime and apprehend those responsible.

Homeland security continues to be a highly visible, core responsibility for frontline first responders. [The only good thing about all this "homeland security" is that it make most people realized that America has turned into a police state!!!]

Federal, state and local agencies in the Valley have worked diligently to integrate communications and build regional preparedness capabilities. An example is the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. ACTIC was one of the first fusion centers to go into operation and is able to tie together intelligence agencies statewide. This partnership prepares the region to better respond to natural or human-caused disasters or terrorist events.

But critical programs face cuts amid a decline in federal preparedness efforts. [I disagree with that 100 percent. We don't need these wasteful police state pork programs any more then we need a hole in the head!!!]

Urban Area Security Initiative grants have been used by fire departments to improve capabilities to respond to hazardous-materials incidents. Some of these resources were used recently to respond to a suspicious letter containing an oily substance at the Phoenix office of Sen. Jeff Flake. [Yea, and I don't ever remember the cops using these megabucks of Federal pork to ever respond to any real threats. They usually end up blowing up a bag of dirty clothing that somebody forgot at a bus stop. And then claiming that they protected us from some imaginary terrorists]

Police have used UASI grants to increase explosive-ordinance disposal and SWAT and intelligence-analyzing capabilities. This equipment was on display when officers investigated a backpack left near 44th Street and McDowell Road. [I don't remember that incident, but if it was like all the others the cops probably ended up blowing up the backpack only to find out it wasn't a bomb, but a bag of dirty clothing.]

But Phoenix UASI decreased more than 50 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2012. [Thank God!!! We need a lot less of this wasteful government pork that has turned American into a police state]

The region is in jeopardy of losing its funding altogether as Congress continues to call for reductions in the number of regions receiving UASI grants. The president’s 2014 budget proposed consolidating state and local preparedness grants without adequate stakeholder input. [Yea, and lets hope they lose 100 percent of this wasteful police state pork!!!]

The Metropolitan Medical Response System grant was all but eliminated last year. MMRS helped strengthen medical surge capacity, mass vaccinations and treatment, decontamination capabilities and regional collaboration. [Translation, like the insane unconstitutional war on drugs, it's a jobs program for cops!!!]

In March, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, along with council members Daniel Valenzuela of Phoenix and Sammy Chavira of Glendale and myself, met with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security to express concern about the decline in the region’s grant allocation. The issue is under review by DHS. [So it sounds like the author [Scott Sommers], along with Greg Stanton, Mark Mitchell, Daniel Valenzuela, and Sammy Chavira are part of the problem of this wasteful government spending on police state pork and all need to be booted out of office by the voters]

Homeland Security grants are needed to sustain critical capabilities, training and exercises for our first responders and community partners and to continue such successful programs as Terrorism Liaison Officers and Community Emergency Response Teams. These Phoenix regional programs were identified as “innovative best practices” in a 2009 DHS review. [Of course they were. The DHS wants as much government pork as it can get!!!]

Be assured that Valley first responders remain ever vigilant and prepared to prevent and respond to emergencies. But local responders need a committed federal partner to protect our homeland. [That's 100 percent BS. What we need to do is boot the police state politicians who are responsible for this wasteful government spending out of office!!!]

Scott Somers is a Mesa City Council member.

Emperor Obama knew the IRS was harassing his enemies????

Probe of IRS began last year

By Stephen Ohlemacher Associated Press Sat May 18, 2013 12:15 AM

WASHINGTON -- Senior Treasury officials were made aware in June 2012 that investigators were looking into complaints from “tea party” groups that they were being harassed by the Internal Revenue Service, a Treasury inspector general said Friday, disclosing that Obama administration officials knew there was a probe during the heat of the presidential campaign.

J. Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified alongside ousted IRS head Steven Miller, who did little to subdue Republican outrage during hours of intense congressional questioning.

Both defiant and apologetic, Miller acknowledged agency mistakes in targeting tea-party groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status, but he insisted that agents broke no laws and that there was no effort to cover up their actions.

Miller only stoked the criticism of many Republicans, who are assailing the administration on a sudden spate of other controversies, even as some Democrats are trying to contain the political damage.

“I don’t know that I got any answers from you today,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., told Miller. “I am more concerned today than I was before.”

At one point in the day’s hearing, George said he had told the department’s general counsel about his investigation on June 4, 2012, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.” But, George cautioned, those discussions were “not to inform them of the results of the audit, it was to inform them of the fact that we were conducting the audit.”

After the hearing, inspector-general spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said George “informed Department of Treasury officials that we were looking into the IRS’ handling of applications for tax-exempt status, partly due to allegations raised by conservative organizations.”

Kraushaar said the disclosure was part of a routine briefing about the office’s activities.

The Treasury Department issued a statement on Friday saying officials first became aware of the actual results of the investigation in March, when they were provided a draft of George’s report, a standard practice.

George’s disclosure came before the House Ways and Means Committee in the first of several congressional hearings on the matter. He was joined by Miller, who spoke publicly about the controversy for the first time.

Miller was contrite as he apologized for the actions of agents who singled out conservative political groups for additional, often burdensome scrutiny.

“First and foremost, as acting commissioner, I want to apologize on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service for the mistakes that we made and the poor service we provided,” he told the committee. “The affected organizations and the American public deserve better.”

But the hearing turned prickly when Miller insisted he did not deceive Congress, though he repeatedly failed to reveal the controversy last year when he was asked about it by lawmakers — even after he had been briefed.

“I did not mislead Congress or the American people,” Miller said.

The administration is on the defensive for a trio of issues that are threatening to derail the president’s second-term agenda. In addition to the IRS case, President Barack Obama and other officials are being pressed about last September’s terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and the government’s seizure of Associated Press telephone records as part of a leak investigation.

“Listening to the nightly news, this appears to be just the latest example of a culture of cover-ups and political intimidation in this administration,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Committee Democrats were also critical of the IRS, but several took offense at Camp’s assertion that this matter is part of a wider problem within the administration. They noted that there has been no evidence so far that anyone outside the IRS was involved in targeting conservative groups.

“If this hearing becomes essentially a bootstrap to continue the campaign of 2012 and to prepare for 2014, we will be making a very, very serious mistake,” said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the panel.

Levin said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that makes decisions about tax-exempt groups, “should be relieved of her duties.” Lerner is the IRS official who made the scandal public on May 10 in what Miller said was a planned event at a legal conference.

Obama forced Miller to resign this week, though Miller will remain on the job for a few days until the new acting director takes over. Obama has named Daniel Werfel, a top White House budget officer, to replace him.

Miller is a 25-year IRS employee who was a deputy commissioner when the tea-party groups were being targeted. In that job, Miller was over the division that dealt with tax-exempt organizations.

He became acting head of the agency in November, when IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s five-year term expired. Shulman had been appointed by President George W. Bush, a fact highlighted by several Democrats at Friday’s hearing.

Camp said Miller’s departure wouldn’t be enough.

Two other committees have hearings scheduled for next week, and the Justice Department has launched its own criminal investigation. Miller is also scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee. He will be joined by Shulman and George.

Underscoring the seriousness of his testimony on Friday, Miller was sworn in as a witness, an unusual step for the Ways and Means panel.

He told committee members that before the episode became public, he had no contact with the Treasury Department, the White House or Obama’s re-election campaign about targeting conservative groups.

“Absolutely not,” Miller said.

He surprised committee members when he said “it is absolutely not illegal” for IRS agents to single out conservative groups for additional scrutiny.

“Please don’t get me wrong,” he added. “It should not happen.”

George, the inspector general, backed up Miller’s assertion when he said the yearlong investigation did not uncover illegal activity.

George’s report concluded that an IRS office in Cincinnati, which screened applications for the tax exemptions, improperly singled out tea-party and other conservative groups for tougher treatment. The report says the practice began in March 2010 and lasted in various forms until May 2012.

Agents did not flag similar progressive or liberal labels, though some liberal groups did receive additional scrutiny because their applications were singled out for other reasons, the report said.

The inspector general’s report blamed ineffective management in Washington, D.C., for letting the inappropriate singling out occur for so long.

Miller said he was notified that conservative groups had been singled out for additional scrutiny on May 3, 2012.

But Miller was not forthcoming back then about groups being targeted in at least two letters to members of Congress and in testimony before a Ways and Means subcommittee.

Ron Paul slams Boston police in Marathon bombing

Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston

by Ron Paul

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

The “shelter in place” command imposed by the governor of Massachusetts was lifted before the suspect was caught. Only after this police state move was ended did the owner of the boat go outside to check on his property, and in so doing discover the suspect.

No, the suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public. He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.

As journalist Tim Carney wrote last week:

“Law enforcement in Boston used cameras to ID the bombing suspects, but not police cameras. Instead, authorities asked the public to submit all photos and videos of the finish-line area to the FBI, just in case any of them had relevant images. The surveillance videos the FBI posted online of the suspects came from private businesses that use surveillance to punish and deter crime on their property.”

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

This is unprecedented and is very dangerous. We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

Source

Ron Paul slams Boston police response to blasts

Catalina Camia, USA TODAY 3:47 p.m. EDT April 29, 2013

Former congressman Ron Paul was no fan of the police presence and manhunt tied to the Boston Marathon bombings.

The libertarian-thinking, former GOP presidential candidate slammed what he called the "military-style takeover" of Boston on April 19, the day Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked residents of Boston and its nearby suburbs to "shelter in place."

"The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city," Paul wrote on the website of Lew Rockwell, a libertarian writer. "This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged in connection with the blasts that left three people dead and more than 260 injured. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a firefight with police hours before Dzhokhar was tracked down.

Paul served in Congress for 23 years, before retiring in January. The Texan was well known for criticizing what he believed was big government intrusion, in everything from tax and financial policy to national security. The scenes in Boston of police going door-to-door, closed businesses and public transportation shut down were more appropriate for "a military coup in a far off banana republic," Paul wrote.

Patrick last week defended the "shelter in place" decision. "I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time," he is quoted as saying in The Boston Globe.

Source

Ron Paul criticizes Marathon bombing response

Globe Staff

April 29, 2013

WASHINGTON — Former US representative Ron Paul has a warning for Americans after the Boston Marathon bombings, and it may come as a surprise.

The prominent libertarian says citizens should perhaps be more frightened by the police response to the attack — which killed three and injured scores more — than by the explosions themselves.

In an article called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston,” the former Republican representative and two-time presidential candidate compares the intense April 19 search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”

“Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties,” Paul writes. “That is what happened in Boston.”

During the search, authorities encouraged residents in the Boston area to stay inside their homes.

It created surreal scenes on the Friday after the attack, with eerily quiet streets.

Governor Deval Patrick last week defended the decision to shut down the Boston area.

“I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time,” Patrick said at a news conference Friday.

— MATT VISER

<SNIP>

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor's biotech firm

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor's biotech firm

By David Willman

Reporting from Washington

May 19, 2013

Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.

Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it.

Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

By his own account, Danzig encouraged Human Genome Sciences Inc. to develop the compound, and from 2001 through 2012 he collected more than $1 million in director's fees and other compensation from the company, records show.

The drug, raxibacumab, or raxi, was the first product the company was able to sell, and the U.S. government remains the only customer, at a cost to date of about $5,100 per dose.

A number of senior federal officials whom Danzig advised on the threat of bioterrorism and what to do about it said they were unaware of his role at Human Genome.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a biodefense official in the George W. Bush administration who attended invitation-only seminars on bioterrorism led by Danzig, said he did not know about Danzig's tie to the biotech company until The Times asked him about it.

"Holy smoke—that was a horrible conflict of interest," said Russell, a physician and retired Army major general who helped lead the government's efforts to prepare for biological attacks.

Federal law bars U.S. officials, including consultants, from giving advice on matters in which they or a company on whose board they serve have "a financial interest."

Danzig said in an interview that he believed his position at Human Genome posed no conflict.

He said he had tried to improve policymakers' understanding of biodefense issues, including the threat of antibiotic-resistant anthrax, but never lobbied the government to purchase raxi.

"My view was I'm not going to get involved in selling that," Danzig said. "But at the same time now, should I not say what I think is right in the government circles with regard to this? And my answer was, 'If I have occasion to comment on this, it ought to be in general, as a policy matter, not as a particular procurement.'

"I feel that I've acted very properly with regard to this," he said.

The government's purchases of raxi, which began in 2006 under the Bush administration, buoyed the Rockville, Md., company while it struggled to bring a conventional drug to market. The Obama administration has made additional purchases, more than doubling the government's supply.

Human Genome was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in August for $3.6 billion.

Because raxi loses its potency after three years in storage, the government's supply will expire as of 2015, according to federal documents and people familiar with the matter. Administration officials must decide whether to replenish the expiring inventory of raxi and a similar product made by a Canadian company.

Richard J. Danzig, 68, served as secretary of the Navy under President Clinton. He's since served as a presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

Danzig began warning about antibiotic-resistant anthrax after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the mailings of anthrax-laced letters that fall.

The powdered anthrax in the letters killed five people but was not resistant to common antibiotics. Asked what gave rise to his concern about resistant strains, Danzig cited conversations with "people whose technical skills exceed mine." One of them, Dr. Robert P. Kadlec, a bioterrorism advisor in the Bush White House, said he and others were concerned that terrorists could develop such a weapon.

Danzig has sounded the alarm in published papers and in private briefings and seminars for biodefense and intelligence officials.

In a 2003 report funded by the Pentagon, "Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What Is To Be Done?" he wrote that it would be "quite easy" for terrorists to produce antibiotic-resistant anthrax. He has expanded on that theme over the years, including in a 2009 paper for the Pentagon.

In the 2003 report, published while raxi was in development at Human Genome, Danzig said a drug to combat resistant strains of anthrax should be produced "as soon as possible" and that stockpiling such a treatment, "even if expensive and in limited supply," would deter an attack.

John Vitko Jr., a top Homeland Security official during the Bush and Obama administrations, said he turned frequently to Danzig for advice on biodefense matters — and read and "paid attention to" his "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" report.

The two have served for the last seven years on a government panel that provides confidential assessments of the nation's biodefense needs to the Homeland Security secretary, the National Security Council staff and other senior officials.

Vitko said he knew nothing of Danzig's involvement with Human Genome until a Times reporter asked him about it.

"I'm surprised I didn't," Vitko said. "I'm not aware of it."

Five other present or former biodefense officials who conferred with Danzig said they, too, had been unaware of his position with the company. Danzig, they said, made no mention of it in their presence during group discussions he led or in smaller meetings.

A seventh person, a former Bush administration official, said Danzig informed him during their first meeting that he was on Human Genome's board and that the company was developing "a treatment product for anthrax."

A Times search found seven papers Danzig had written on bioterrorism since 2001. In only one of those did he disclose his tie to Human Genome.

As an advisor to the federal government, Danzig is required to file confidential forms annually, revealing any outside affiliations but not his related compensation. Danzig said he had noted his position with the biotech firm on the forms.

Asked whether he mentioned his corporate role during contacts with government officials, Danzig replied: "If I thought any of it posed a potential conflict that might cause somebody who knew about it to discount my views, I would tell them."

Danzig, 68, is a Yale Law School graduate and Rhodes scholar who became a partner in Washington for the law firm Latham & Watkins.

He served as a Pentagon appointee during the Carter administration and as undersecretary and then secretary of the Navy under President Clinton. He has a long-standing interest in biowarfare.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Danzig advised then-Sen. Barack Obama on national security and bioterrorism. After Obama's election, Danzig was named to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, in addition to his consulting positions with the Defense Department and Homeland Security.

He has received the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award, the Pentagon's highest civilian honor, three times — in 1981, 1997 and 2001.

When Human Genome named Danzig to its board on May 24, 2001, the company's chief executive said his high-level federal experience would "serve us well."

Later that year, the anthrax letters were mailed to congressional leaders and news organizations, contaminating government buildings in Washington, disrupting mail delivery and causing widespread unease in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In response, Human Genome began examining experimental compounds under its control — including one to be used against antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

Called an antitoxin, the drug is intended to neutralize anthrax toxin circulating in an infected person's body. Antibiotics, by contrast, are designed to kill the anthrax bacterium itself. [That is wrong!!! Antibiotics don't kill ANYTHING. Antibiotics are basically birth control pills for bacteria and keep them from reproducing. If you take antibiotics for about a week all the bad bacteria in your body will naturally die out.]

Danzig recalled his reaction when he learned of the experimental drug, initially called ABthrax, in 2002:

"As a board member, I said, 'Hey, I think this is a good idea. I think that if you can do this, it will be beneficial both publicly — it's a good idea to have a drug that does this — and it'll be economically a good thing for the company.'"

He also began speaking out about the threat posed by anthrax and other biodefense matters.

With support from then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Danzig started conducting private briefings and seminars.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Reeves, who participated in the sessions while heading the Defense Department's preparations for biological and chemical warfare, said Danzig presented scenarios related to what he called "reload," the idea that terrorists might launch a series of anthrax attacks, one after another.

"Then you go around the room to the various people who have any responsibilities in those areas, and say, 'What are you going to do now, Coach?'" Reeves recalled. "He's been highly influential in this area, on multiple levels, and across the government."

Russell, the Bush-era biodefense official, said the sessions, held in 2002 and 2003, galvanized support for stockpiling biodefense drugs.

"Those seminars were attended by all the usual suspects and created a consensus in the thinking about the threat," Russell said, adding that Danzig "had a major position of influence. People respected his views. He's a smart guy."

The anthrax letter attacks, Danzig wrote in his "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" paper, exposed national security vulnerabilities "greater than those associated with 9/11." He argued that the country's defenses were inadequate.

Doses of anthrax vaccine would have to be given weeks or months in advance of an attack. As for antibiotics, Danzig suggested that even a novice terrorist could "readily" make a resistant strain.

"Development of an antibiotic-resistant strain ... is quite easy," Danzig wrote. "Even at the high school level, biology students understand that an antibiotic-resistant strain can be developed."

This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training."

Several biodefense scientists said in interviews that producing such strains would not be easy.

"It's not a trivial endeavor," said Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist and anthrax expert. "This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training."

Citing his own published research, Keim said manipulating anthrax to resist antibiotics would decrease the germ's stability and virulence, typically rendering it nonlethal.

Danzig conceded this possibility in a footnote in "Catastrophic Bioterrorism." Nonetheless, he wrote that "we should give great priority" to developing "a third alternative" for coping with an anthrax attack.

An antitoxin was such an alternative, he said. It "could be invaluable if we confronted an attack with a strain that was broadly resistant to antibiotics, or if we became aware of the disease too late to treat it only with antibiotics," he wrote.

Those who would most benefit from a new treatment option, Danzig added, included "the president and his staff, members of Congress, key members of the military."

In another footnote, Danzig disclosed his connection to Human Genome and its experimental antitoxin:

"As a member of the Board of Directors of Human Genome Sciences, a Nasdaq listed company, I have encouraged the company in its efforts to develop an anthrax antitoxin. I do not believe that my views on this point are distorted by any financial interest, but readers will want to make their own determination. Under any conditions, alternative sources could supply antitoxin, and I make no representation as to which would be the best."

During his 11-year tenure on the board, which ended in August, Danzig collected at least $1,054,255 in director's fees and by cashing in grants of Human Genome stock and stock options, according to Fred Whittlesey of Compensation Venture Group, who reviewed the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings for The Times.

Nearly half of Danzig's compensation came from the stock options, of which he had been granted 184,000 by the end of 2011, Whittlesey said.

Danzig also invested his own money in Human Genome, buying 3,000 shares at a cost of $45,955 in May 2002. Danzig said he purchased the stock because "a director ought to have some of his own money at stake," and that he did not profit from the shares.

On March 18, 2003, Human Genome announced that it was developing raxi as a "mechanism of defense against anthrax," including antibiotic-resistant strains.

On May 13, Chief Executive William A. Haseltine told the House Homeland Security Committee that "in order to move forward the company needs a commitment from the federal government" to buy raxi.

Danzig, meanwhile, sought to keep policymakers focused on the threat.

In late October 2003, he co-hosted a two-day bioterrorism seminar at Aspen Wye River Conference Center, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, attended by dozens of senior policymakers — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Julie Gerberding, then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scenarios and recommendations from Danzig's "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" were a centerpiece of the discussion.

When the government signed its initial order for raxi in June 2006, Human Genome's new president, H. Thomas Watkins, described its significance.

"It's a very important contribution to our movement forward as a company," Watkins told Wall Street analysts. "We think it will be a good move for shareholders."

In 2004, President Bush signed into law Project BioShield, which provided billions of dollars for biodefense drugs.

The contracts are administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, based on advice from federal agencies and consultants. Homeland Security must certify the need for a drug before the government can buy it.

Bioterrorism warning

Excerpts from "Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What Is To Be Done?" a 2003 report by Richard Danzig:

Danzig asserts that terrorists could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

He also urges the government to stockpile a new type of drug to combat resistant strains of anthrax.

Danzig, through his seminars, writings and consulting duties, has helped frame the discussion over whether a given biological threat is "material" and whether the government should stockpile medicines to defend against it.

For example, Danzig has served as a member of a Homeland Security review panel that develops the Biodefense Net Assessment, intended to spotlight gaps in the nation's biological defenses. The panel includes officials from Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Danzig declined to discuss his role in the biodefense assessment or his other government consulting duties.

Vitko, who has chaired the biodefense review panel since its inception in 2006, declined to discuss its work or Danzig's participation.

Speaking of Danzig's broader role as a government advisor, Vitko said: "Richard's got incredible insights into this and I think has made major contributions."

He called Danzig one of "the major bio players" and said his views had informed a range of policy considerations, including "how many countermeasures do you need, of what kind."

It was in response to advice from Vitko and his staff that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in 2004 declared anthrax a "material threat," the certification required for the government to buy drugs to fight it.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized its first order of raxi — 20,000 doses at a cost of $174 million.

That year, Ridge's successor, Michael Chertoff, signed a second, more specific declaration, adding "multi-drug-resistant" anthrax to the government's list of material threats.

Asked the basis for the second declaration, Vitko said: "I think the concern was more forward-looking, and saying, 'How could the threat evolve, and are we prepared for that?'"

Since 2009, the Obama administration has ordered an additional 45,000 doses of raxi for $160 million.

Danzig has continued to emphasize the threat. In 2009, he warned in a Pentagon-funded report, "A Policymaker's Guide to Bioterrorism and What to Do About It," that terrorists could try to "exploit our weaknesses," adding:

"They could do this, for example, by developing antibiotic-resistant strains when we have stockpiled a particular antibiotic."

Whether raxi would work as envisioned remains unknown.

Ethical considerations prohibit infecting human volunteers with anthrax. As a result, tests of raxi's effectiveness were conducted exclusively on animals, which may or may not predict its performance in humans. None of those tests used antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

The FDA approved raxi as an anthrax treatment in December, after an advisory committee voted that it was "reasonably likely" to be effective in humans.

Haseltine, the founding president of Human Genome, said the theoretical threat of terrorist-engineered anthrax had been a key factor in selling the drug to the government.

"They had an empty box: What do you do for antibiotic-resistant anthrax? We were able to fill that box for them," Haseltine said.

---

Danzig's twin roles

May 2001 — Washington lawyer Richard J. Danzig is appointed to the board of Human Genome Sciences Inc. in Rockville, Md.

Sept. 11, 2001 — Terrorists crash passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania. Soon after, the mailing of anthrax-laced letters to media organizations and congressional leaders sets the nation further on edge.

Late 2001 — Human Genome Sciences begins testing a compound with the potential to fight antibiotic-resistant anthrax. The work proceeds with Danzig's encouragement.

Early 2002 — Danzig, acting as a Pentagon consultant, begins holding invitation-only seminars for U.S. officials on anthrax and other biological threats.

Spring 2003 — Human Genome announces it is developing a new anthrax drug, raxibacumab, or raxi. Its chief executive tells Congress that "to move forward the company needs a commitment from the federal government" to buy the product.

August 2003 — Danzig circulates a study he prepared for the Pentagon saying that the U.S. "should give great priority" to stockpiling a drug capable of combating antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

June 2006 — The government completes its first order for raxi, worth $174 million, and Human Genome's chief executive calls the contract "a very important contribution to our movement forward as a company."

August 2012 — Human Genome is acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for $3.6 billion. By this point, the government has purchased $334 million worth of raxi, and Danzig has collected more than $1 million since 2001 in compensation from the biotech company.

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Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

Government bureaucrats do it all the time and so should you.

The real problem is when you are detained by the police the questions are frequently rigged or asked in a manor that any answer you give will be an admission of guilt, and that answer will be used against you in court.

Susan Sanchez, is a public defender for the Maricopa County Attorneys office who used to give "Know Your Rights" talks for Phoenix Copwatch. She tells us that when you pulled over and asked by the cop

"How intoxicated are you on a scale of 1 to 10"

Most people who have had only one beer don't realize that if they say they are only intoxicated at a level of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 are admitting that they are legally drunk.

That is because under Arizona law even if you are slightly intoxicated, you are still guilty of DUI. And saying you are only intoxicated at a level of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 is admitting you are drunk.

The only correct answer to that question is zero, but the cop didn't tell you that you could use zero as an answer. The cop told you to give an answer of 1 to 10, and any of those answers is an admission of guilt - even if you don't know it.

Of course you and I know the question is a bunch of BS, but sadly the prosecutor will take the answer you gave to this BS question and ask the jury to convict you with it.

So it's best to refuse to answer any and all police questions, just like this high level bureaucrat at the IRS is doing.

Source

Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

By Richard Simon and Joseph Tanfani

May 21, 2013, 12:15 p.m.

WASHINGTON – A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, R-Calif. The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

According to an inspector general’s report, Lerner found out in June 2011 that some staff in the nonprofits division in Cincinnati had used terms like “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to select some applications for additional screening of their political activities. She ordered changes.

But neither Lerner nor anyone else at the IRS told Congress, even after repeated queries from several committees, including House Oversight, about whether some groups had been singled out unfairly.

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Twitter: @JTanfani

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Twitter: @richardsimon11

FBI names Benghazi suspects — but no arrests yet

Source

FBI names Benghazi suspects — but no arrests yet

Associated Press Tue May 21, 2013 8:02 PM

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn’t enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.

The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya’s post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country’s cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult. America’s relationship with Libya would be weighed as part of those options, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.

The Libyan Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi case already carries. The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama’s re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration’s handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to play down the incident to minimize its effect on the president’s campaign.

The FBI released photos of three of the five suspects earlier this month, asking the public to provide more information on the men pictured. The images were captured by security cameras at the U.S. diplomatic post during the attack, but it took weeks for the FBI to see and study them. It took the agency three weeks to get to Libya because of security problems, so Libyan officials had to get the cameras and send them to U.S. officials in Tripoli, the capital.

The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies identified the men through contacts in Libya and by monitoring their communications. They are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the U.S. diplomatic facility prior to the violence.

Republican lawmakers continue to call for the Obama administration to provide more information about the attack. The White House released 99 pages of emails about the talking points drafted by the intelligence community that Rice used to describe the attack, initially suggesting they were part of a series of regional protests about an anti-Islamic film. In those emails, administration officials agreed to remove from the talking points all mentions of terror groups such as Ansar al-Shariah or al-Qaida, because the intelligence pointing to those groups’ involvement was still unclear and because some officials didn’t want to give Congress ammunition to criticize the administration.

U.S. officials say the FBI has proof that the five men were either at the scene of the first attack or somehow involved because of intercepts of at least one of them bragging about taking part. Some of the men have also been in contact with a network of well-known regional Jihadists, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

The U.S. has decided that the evidence it has now would be enough for a military operation to seize the men for questioning, but not enough for a civilian arrest or a drone strike against them, the officials said. The U.S. has kept them under surveillance, mostly by electronic means. There was a worry that the men could get spooked and hide, but so far, not even the FBI’s release of surveillance video stills has done that.

FBI investigators are hoping for more evidence, such as other video of the attack that might show the suspects in the act of setting the fires that ultimately killed the ambassador and his communications specialist, or firing the mortars hours later at the CIA base where the surviving diplomats took shelter — or a Libyan witness willing to testify against the suspects in a U.S. courtroom.

Administration officials have indicated recently that the FBI is zeroing in.

“Regardless of what happened previously, we have made very, very, very substantial progress in that investigation,” Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers last week.

That echoed comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry to lawmakers last month.

“They do have people ID’d,” Kerry said of the FBI-led investigation. “They have made some progress. They have a number of suspects who are persons of interest that they are pursuing in this and building cases on.”

But options for dealing with the men are few and difficult, U.S. officials said, describing high level strategy debates among White House, FBI and other counterterror officials. Those confidential discussions were described on condition of anonymity by four senior U.S. officials briefed on the investigation into the attack.

The U.S. could ask Libya to arrest the suspects, hoping that Americans would be given access to question them and that the Libyans gather enough evidence to hold the men under their own justice system. Another option is to ask the Libyans to extradite the men to the U.S., but that would require the U.S. to gather enough solid evidence linking the suspects to the crime to ask for such an action.

Asking other countries to detain suspects hasn’t produced much thus far. In this case, the Egyptian government detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad for possible links to the attack, but it remains unclear if U.S. intelligence officers were ever allowed to question him.

Tunisia allowed the U.S. to question Tunisian suspect Ali Harzi, 28, who was arrested in Turkey last October because of suspected links to the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack, but a judge released him in January for lack of evidence.

Finally, the U.S. could send a military team to grab the men, and take them to an offsite location such as a U.S. naval ship — the same way al-Qaida suspect Ahmed Warsame was seized by special operations personnel in 2011 in Somalia. He was then held and questioned for two months on a U.S. ship before being read his rights to remain silent and have an attorney, transferred to the custody of the FBI and taken for trial in a New York court. Warsame pleaded guilty earlier this year and agreed to tell the FBI what he knew about terror threats and, if necessary, testify for the government.

The U.S. has made preparations for raids to grab the Benghazi suspects for interrogation in case the administration decides that’s the best option, officials said. Such raids could be legally justified under the U.S. law passed just after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida, officials said. The reach of the law has been expanded to include groups working with al-Qaida.

The option most likely off the table would be taking suspects seized by the military to Guantanamo Bay, the facility in Cuba that Obama has said he wants to close. “Just as the administration is trying to find the exit ramp for Guantanamo is not the time to be adding to it,” said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo.

Beyond being politically uncomfortable, it’s less effective, he said. “There’ve been a total of seven cases completed since 2001,” with six of them landing in appeals court over issues with the legitimacy of the charges.

----

Political Fallout

Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi, Libya, case already carries.

The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama’s re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration’s handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to downplay the incident to minimize its effect on the president’s campaign.

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Source

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Many of the Founders died to give you your Fifth Amendment rights. You should always take it, like Lois Lerner did, who is a 34 year life time employee of the IRS.

Any defense attorney will tell you to NEVER answer police questions. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

One problem with talking to the police is frequently the questions are rigged, and any answer you give will be an admission of committing a crime. Even if you didn't know you were confessing to a crime.

In Arizona one trick question cops use to convict you of DUI or DWI is to ask "On a scale of 1 to 10 how intoxicated are you".

If you give the cop the answer he asked you for, which is a number between 1 and 10 you have admitted to committing the crime of drunk driving.

In Arizona the slightest bit of intoxication is consider to be drunk driving, so if you answer the question with "1", you have admitted to driving while drunk.

Of course the only answer to that question is ZERO, and the cops don't give you that as an option to answer the question with.

Source

Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting

By William Branigin and Ed O’Keefe, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:46 AM E-mail the writers

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.

IRS controversy: Who knew what, and when

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.

Issa excused Lerner anyway “subject to recall” if the committee determines she did not properly invoke her right. He added that he might consult with the Justice Department about giving Lerner “limited immunity” to testify.

Lerner’s attorney informed the Oversight Committee Tuesday that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment, but she was required to appear anyway. She said in her opening statement that she has been a government employee for more than 34 years, moving to the IRS exempt organizations office in 2001 and becoming the director of that unit in 2006. She said she was responsible for 900 employees and the processing of more than 60,000 applications a year.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” Lerner said.

Appearing before the committee along with Lerner were Douglas Shulman, the Bush administration appointee who led the IRS during President Obama’s first term; J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The House hearing was the latest in a series of Capitol Hill grillings of officials in connection with an audit by George’s office, which reported last week that it found inappropriate targeting of groups applying for tax-exempt status based on terms such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their case files.

In opening the hearing, Issa charged that George, who has been largely spared the grillings reserved for other officials in previous hearings, failed to keep Congress informed about his findings as the audit proceeded.

“We must also insist ... that we not wait 10 months to find out that there’s a there there,” Issa said. He called the delay “the greatest failing of an otherwise well-regarded inspector general.”

George reminded the committee that his office conducted an audit, not an investigation. He said the improper practices by an IRS unit in Cincinnati started in 2010 and were “not fully corrected’ until May 2012. “These practices were inappropriate,” he said. “They remained in effect for approximately 18 months.”

In questioning George, Issa said that under the law, “you have a responsibility to keep us continually and ... equally informed.”

George said there are “established procedures for conducting an audit” to ensure fairness and noted that information given to Capitol Hill “sometimes is not retained on the Hill.”

Issa retorted that the Obama administration has been known to leak information, and he charged that the IRS “maliciously leaked” the inspector general’s main finding in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the audit report.

With Lerner having refused to answer questions, lawmakers also turned their focus to Shulman, whose testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday irked some senators as he rebuffed attempts to blame him for the fiasco in which conservative groups were listed separately for special scrutiny.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House panel, criticized Shulman for not correcting his March 2012 testimony after learning that IRS employees had indeed targeted conservative groups.

“It seems to me that you would come back even if it were a phone call or a letter,” Cummings said. “I mean, common sense.”

Cummings also asked Shulman whether he was upset after learning from Steven T. Miller, who worked under Shulman at the time, that the IRS had targeted conservatives, an issue that members of Congress were concerned about.

“I felt comfort that the IG was going to look into this and report back to Congress at the appropriate time,” Shulman said.

Under questioning from Republicans, Shulman said he did not discuss the IRS targeting of conservative groups with the White House during what one GOP lawmaker said were more than 100 visits there in 2010 and 2011.

“It would not have been appropriate to have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the subject of discriminating against conservative groups,” Shulman said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) also asked George to clarify whether officials at the Treasury Department or the White House ever directed IRS employees in the tax-exempt unit to target certain groups.

“We did pose that question,” George replied, adding that “the response was that there was no direction” of that nature from Treasury to the Cincinnati unit or from the unit’s affiliate office in Washington. He said in response to another question that his auditors “didn’t question anyone as to whether or not they’d received any direction from the White House.”

Norton urged George to look into that issue.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, Shulman said he was “saddened” by some of the agency’s actions regarding applications for tax-exempt status during his tenure.

“I certainly am not personally responsible for making a list that had inappropriate criteria on it,” Shulman said, adding: “With that said, this happened on my watch, and I very much regret that this happened on my watch.”

Asked at one point by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) whether he would apologize to Cornyn’s constituents who were unfairly targeted by the IRS, Shulman said that he was not sure what occurred specifically with Texas-based groups and announced his regret that the wrongdoing occurred on his watch.

“Well, I don’t think that qualifies as an apology,” Cornyn said.

The confrontation Tuesday was one more example of the growing acrimony surrounding congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal as the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, his predecessor and the Treasury Department tax watchdog rejected the idea that political partisanship played any role in singling out conservative nonprofits for heightened scrutiny.

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Miller, the acting commissioner who submitted his resignation under pressure last week, sat alongside Shulman, who headed the IRS from March 2008 to November 2012, as each detailed how they first learned of the situation and the steps they took to remedy it.

Testifying for the first time since IRS officials admitted to the situation, Shulman was asked why he did not come forward before to acknowledge the improper screening that occurred before his departure.

“I did not have a full set of facts” before an IRS inspector general’s audit was made public last week, Shulman told the panel. He said he knew “sometime in the spring of 2012” that “there was a list being used” to designate groups for extra scrutiny and that the term “tea party” in a group’s name was a criterion. But he said that he did not know what other words were on the list and “didn’t know the scope and severity of this.”

“I agree that this is an issue that when someone spotted it, they should have brought it up the chain, and they didn’t,” Shulman said under questioning. “Why they didn’t, I don’t know.”

Shulman said several times that he was “dismayed” and “saddened” to read about the agency’s improper actions in the report released last week and said that he had made certain George’s office looked into the matter once he learned about it.

But Shulman refused several times to take personal responsibility for the situation or to explicitly apologize.

After Cornyn asked for an apology, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered Shulman another opportunity: “Are you responsible?”

“I’m deeply regretful,” Shulman said.

“Okay, never mind,” Roberts said, cutting him off. “Let’s just move on.”

Miller, as he had last week, took full responsibility for the agency’s decision to publicly apologize for the targeting by planting a question to raise the issue.

Under questioning, Miller explained that IRS leaders were aware that George was on the verge of releasing his report, so “we thought we should begin talking about this. We’d thought we’d get out an apology.”

Miller said he worked with Lerner, who leads the agency’s tax-exempt unit, to ensure that she would be asked a question about the controversy during a panel discussion at a conference.

“We wanted to reach out to the — to Hill staff about the same time [the report would] come out,” Miller said. But that strategy “did not work out,” he said. “Obviously, the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea.”

At a separate hearing held by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said he would have “advised against” the decision by the IRS to plant the question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association in Washington instead of first notifying lawmakers.

Lew told the committee that he was not involved in the decision to plant the question but that some Treasury and IRS officials discussed the strategy in advance. He emphasized that the management of the matter was up to the IRS’s discretion.

Discussions about the IRS’s plans to apologize began in late April, according to a senior department official. That’s when IRS officials first told the Treasury that Lerner was considering making a speech in which she would make a public apology for inappropriate conduct. Also in late April, the IRS told Treasury that Miller would apologize when asked in forthcoming congressional testimony.

Treasury did not advise the IRS what it should do, the official said.

In both of these cases, Treasury discussed the potential disclosures with the White House and said that the department planned to defer to the IRS.

Finally, Treasury was told ahead of time that Lerner would be asked a question about the controversy at the American Bar Association conference.

Treasury did not tell the White House about the planned disclosure at the ABA conference.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

“It was very important, in our view . . . that we not take any action that could even be seen to create the appearance of intervening in an ongoing investigation like this. In this case, an independent inspector general audit. And so, of course, we did not,” Carney said.

Aaron Blake, Zachary A. Goldfarb, Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

Cops/FBI kill bombing suspect during questioning

If Ibragim Todashev had taken the 5th and refused to talk to the FBI he would be alive today!!!!

Any defense lawyer will tell you to ALWAYS take the 5th and refuse to answer any and all police questions.

You are NOT a criminal for taking the rights which the Founders died to give you!!!!

The problem is anything you tell the police will be used against you, and the police routinely take benign things you say and twist them around to make it look like you confessed to a crime.

Taking the Fifth and refusing to submit to police questions will prevent this from happening.

Source

Man tied to Boston bombing suspect killed in confrontation with FBI, others

By Sari Horwitz and Jenna Johnson, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:50 AM E-mail the writers

A Chechen man who was friends with one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was shot and killed in Orlando early Wednesday when an interview with the FBI and other police officers erupted into a violent confrontation, the FBI said.

The victim was identified as Ibragim Todashev, 27, who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev through the world of martial arts.

The FBI said in a statement that Todashev was being questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent, two Massachusetts state police officers and other law enforcement personnel when the witness turned violent. The FBI said that the agent, who was not identified, was injured and that Todashev was shot and killed.

Two federal law enforcement officials said that, during the questioning, Todashev had implicated himself and Tsarnaev in a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., two years ago. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said Todashev brandished a knife and threatened the officers during the interview in his apartment.

Tsarnaev had been identified as a potential suspect in the triple slaying shortly after the bombings.

The FBI statement provided few details about the death in Orlando and did not address the Waltham killings. It said only that Todashev initiated a violent confrontation while being questioned. “During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries,” the statement said.

The FBI has been conducting interviews across the United States and in Russia with associates of Tsarnaev and his brother, Dzhokhar, over the past month to learn whether anyone else was associated with the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

The interviews have focused heavily on people from the northern Caucasus area of Russia, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in 2012. The Tsarnaev family has roots in Chechnya, part of the restive region, and the FBI suspects he might have had contact with Islamic militants there last year.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police four days after the bombing. His brother was captured later that day and faces charges that could carry the death penalty. Before he was charged, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI that no one else was involved in the plot and that he and his brother had acted out of anger over the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A team of officers went to Todashev’s apartment in a residential area near Universal Studios in Orlando to interview him about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Khusen Taramov, who said he was a friend of Todashev, told an Orlando television station that Todashev used to live in Boston and knew Tsarnaev through marital arts circles.

“He was not radical at all,” Taramov told WESH-TV. He added that the FBI had been tracking Todashev since the Boston bombing.

At some point, Todashev moved to Florida. He was arrested for aggravated battery this month, according to police records, after getting into a fight with a man in a parking lot.

When the FBI agent and others arrived at his apartment early Wednesday, the law enforcement officials said Todashev initially was cooperative. They said he appeared on the verge of signing a confession to the killings of three people in Waltham in September 2011. They said he had implicated Tsarnaev in the homicides.

But the interview turned violent, the officials said, and Todashev went for a knife. He injured the FBI agent and was shot and killed. The FBI did not say whether he was shot by the agent or one of the other law enforcement officers.

Tsarnaev’s name has surfaced in earlier news reports about the Waltham slayings, which remain unsolved. Stephanie Guyotte, a spokeswoman for Middlesex County’s district attorney’s office, said the investigation is ongoing and refused to say whether Todashev or Tsarnaev was a suspect.

On Sept. 12, 2011, police found three men dead in a well-kept rental house on a short, quiet street in Waltham. The men were identified as Brendan Mess, 25, of Waltham, Erik Weissman, 31, of Cambridge, and Raphael Teken, 37, of Cambridge. The Boston Globe and other news outlets have reported that Tsarnaev was friends with Mess and that the two met through boxing.

A woman who lived next door to the rental house said she home that day and consoled Mess’s distraught girlfriend, who reportedly found the bodies and ran screaming outside. The neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she does not want her name associated with the gruesome slayings, said she was told that the men had their throats slashed and that their bodies were covered with pot.

“She was horrified,” the neighbor said of the girlfriend. “We didn’t hear a thing that night. . . . The fact that all of this attention has come here again is very painful.”

Authorities say that the men died early Sept. 12, but relatives of at least one of the victims insist that the men were killed Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Sept. 11 is the date listed on the tombstone of Weissman, according to photos on an online memorial.

At the time of the killings, Waltham police issued a statement saying that detectives did not think the attack was random and that the victims probably knew their attacker or attackers. The Middlesex district attorney’s office later said in a statement that the men died of “sharp-force injuries of the neck.’’ The Globe reported that the deaths were probably drug-related.

Two friends of Teken and Weissman said they believed the deaths were connected to a massive May 2011 drug bust in nearby Watertown. The bust followed a year-long investigation by federal authorities and resulted in charges against 18 people. Weissman was a founder of a company that produced high-end glass bongs.

Julie Tate and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 21

There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on journalist James Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case.

Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?

When Rosen and I covered the Bush White House together a decade ago, I knew him as a scrappy reporter who had a fascination with Watergate trivia. He later wrote a sympathetic biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced attorney general. Now he’s learning just how abusive a Justice Department can be, from an administration that has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.

My Post colleague Ann E. Marimow, who broke the Rosen story, obtained the affidavit by FBI agent Reginald Reyes seeking access to Rosen’s private e-mails. In the affidavit, Reyes stated that “there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the law against national security leaks. The affidavit detailed how the FBI had monitored Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department and tracked his various phone calls with the suspected leaker, analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

The administration snoops had spied on Rosen enough to know of his Watergate hobby: his Gmail address named for the Nixon aide who installed the secret taping system, and Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” (a modern-day version of Bob Woodward’s fabled flowerpot) in which an e-mail containing one asterisk meant Rosen should contact Kim.

Rosen’s supposed crime? Reyes got his evidence from an e-mail from the reporter: “I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc. . . . I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses. . . . In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.”

That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

And how did Rosen commit this crime? Kim told investigators Rosen is a “very convincing, persistent person” who “would tell me I was brilliant and it is possible I succumbed to flattery.”

Only in this Justice Department could flattery get you a prison term.

President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters that there must be a “balance” between a free press and leaks that “can endanger the lives of men and women in uniform and other Americans serving overseas.”

True, but the 2009 reports that prompted the probe confirmed what was already conventional wisdom, that Kim Jong Un was likely to replace his father, Kim Jong Il, as North Korea’s leader, and that there were worries that North Korea would respond to new sanctions by launching a third nuclear test. As it happens, the intelligence was wrong, and Pyongyang didn’t launch another test at the time.

Carney told the White House press corps Tuesday that Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

If Obama really is “a fierce defender of the First Amendment,” as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this. Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

National Guard reforms are just 'posterior covering'

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National Guard reforms are just 'posterior covering'

Our View: Recommended changes not really changes at all

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 23, 2013 7:52 AM

From the earliest days of the Arizona National Guard scandal, the people at the top of this important institution displayed a sense that if they could just wait out the troubles, the troubles would go away.

Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar, who inexplicably remains the adjutant general of the Guard, clearly feels that way. So does his chief booster and boss, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer.

But the nagging woes have not just gone away. Arizona Republic reporter Dennis Wagner’s continuing, impeccably documented depictions of a military organization rotting from the top down ultimately led to a scathing critique from the outside.

Inexcusably lax discipline, especially among the Guard’s powerful cadre of non-commissioned officers. Appalling leadership lapses. Rampant, often sexual, fraternization with enlisted personnel. Financial fraud.

Every step of the way leading up to the release of the investigative report by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams of the National Guard Bureau, the Arizona Guard’s top leaders argued the accusations were overstated. Adams found otherwise.

Now come the proposed reforms. Salazar unveiled his plans for reforming the Guard’s leadership, setting protocols to avoid corruption and improving the morale of Guard personnel.

It would be unfair to call Salazar’s reforms underwhelming, but many of his proposals to tighten ship add regulations against behaviors already prohibited. Fraternization and harassment have always been forbidden.

The bottom line is execution. Is Salazar, who has been a top Arizona Guard officer for at least five years, capable of implementing the reforms he prescribes? We have our doubts.

As do others. State Sen. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, is attempting to schedule unofficial hearings into conditions within the Arizona Guard, reportedly including testimony from a whistle-blower or two.

If the Guard’s woes originated in part from its isolation from other institutions, that wall is crumbling. The problems uncovered by Wagner ensure people will be watching Salazar’s follow-through for a long time.

The Republic earlier this month called for Salazar to step down, presuming that a longtime member of the Arizona Guard’s cadre was not a likely candidate for reforming things. Brewer nevertheless defended him and has opted to keep him on the job.

Very well. But Salazar’s enthusiasm for real change thus far is not impressive. His new code of conduct, which included restrictions against blowing whistles, were less of a stab at reform and more of a closing of ranks.

We will see if the adjutant general’s two dozen new initiatives are, in fact, “catalysts for broad, systemic program change,” as he called them. Or whether they are more posterior covering.

The Guard doors won’t be closing any time soon.

AG: 4 Americans killed since 2009 in drone strikes

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AG: 4 Americans killed since 2009 in drone strikes

Associated Press Wed May 22, 2013 2:26 PM

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that four American citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen. The disclosure to Congress comes on the eve of a major national security speech by President Barack Obama.

In conducting U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, the government has targeted and killed one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is aware of the killing by U.S. drones of three others, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy.

Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.

“Since entering office, the president has made clear his commitment to providing Congress and the American people with as much information as possible about our sensitive counterterrorism operations,” Holder told Leahy, a Democrat.. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified.”

“The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people,” Holder wrote.

American military propaganda efforts ineffective???

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Report raps military propaganda efforts as ineffective

Tom Vanden Brook, USATODAY4:57 p.m. EDT May 23, 2013

WASHINGTON — Pentagon propaganda programs are inadequately tracked, their impact is unclear, and the military doesn't know if it is targeting the right foreign audiences, according to a government report obtained by USA TODAY.

Since 2005, the Pentagon has spent hundreds of million of dollars on Military Information Support Operations (MISO). These propaganda efforts include websites, leaflets and broadcasts intended to change foreigners' "attitudes and behaviors in support of U.S. Government" objectives, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office. Some of them disclose the U.S. military as the source; others don't.

The Pentagon's response noted that it partly concurred with the GAO criticism. Lt. Col. James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday the military is revising its tracking requirements for propaganda programs, has a pilot program to assess their effectiveness and will soon publish revised guidelines that emphasize better planning of its operations.

The report offers a rare glimpse inside the cloaked world of military propaganda, much of which is held secret by the Pentagon. [Why is is secret??? If our leaders think that America is the best government on the planet their thoughts on the matter shouldn't be secret!!!!] It shows the effort extends from Southeast Asia to South America, with special operations troops deployed to embassies to "erode support for violent extremist ideologies."

The stakes are high. Used effectively, the programs can dampen extremism and increase support for U.S. military operations. However, "if used ineffectively, MISO activities have the potential to undermine the credibility of the United States and threaten (Pentagon) and other agencies' efforts to accomplish key foreign policy goals," the report says.

While the report says some of the military's propaganda teams have succeeded in the 22 countries, "it is unclear whether MISO activities are effective overall."

"Once again we are seeing a misguided spending approach by the government," said Scott Amey, general counsel of the non-partisan watchdog the Project on Government Oversight. "It is horrifying to think that millions are spent on propaganda with little administration of those funds and without some metric of the campaigns' success."

Military propaganda and marketing efforts have been the focus of a series of USA TODAY stories. In 2012, the paper found that the Pentagon had spent as much as $580 million per year on propaganda programs at the height of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but had trouble gauging their effectiveness. It spent $54 million last year, according to the GAO. The GAO refused USA TODAY's request for the report, which was obtained from another government source.

The GAO found three "weaknesses" in the Pentagon's tracking of its propaganda programs:

• The Pentagon and Congress "do not have a complete picture" of the efforts and the funding used to pay for the programs.

• The Pentagon can't measure the effects of propaganda programs well enough to know where to allocate funding.

• Lacking goals, the Pentagon does not have "reasonable assurance" that it is putting resources into countries that need it.

Gregory noted that the Pentagon already provides Congress with substantial data on its MISO programs every three months.

The Pentagon "submits an exhaustive report of all MISO activities to key Congressional staffers," Gregory said. "This report, often well in excess of 100 pages, provides comprehensive tracking of all MISO activities and the resources used to support them."

The report also outlines how propaganda works. In war zones such as Afghanistan, the military deploys three- and four-soldier MISO teams to drop leaflets telling insurgents how to surrender, air radio broadcasts "to explain U.S. military operations in a favorable light," collect local propaganda and devise counterpropaganda, according to the report.

It also relies heavily on contractors to produce advertising, leaflets and radio broadcasts, many of them unattributed to the U.S. government because locals do not trust western influence, senior military officerstold USA TODAY last year. [using contractors is one way to keep the American public from knowing what is going on, because that money is frequently hidden from view]

In safer countries, teams of two to 10 special forces soldiers are deployed at the request of combatant commanders and ambassadors. They lead programs that include helping "instill confidence by local populations in their law enforcement" and offering rewards for information.

Senior State Department officials told GAO that the efforts were valued at embassies. In Bangladesh, for example, the team worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development and "another (Pentagon) organization" to incorporate counter-radicalization messages into disaster response exercises." In Peru, a top-level Drug Enforcement Administration official praised a military team for its effort in the battle against "Shining Path" terrorists.

Less successful: regional websites set up by the military. U.S. Special Operations Command provided $22 million for combatant commands, such as Central Command in the Middle East, to operate regional websites "that offer readers an alternative to extremist ideology." They're "an important tool," according to the Pentagon, but GAO found "instances where the websites are not well-coordinated" with local embassies or even MISO teams in those countries.

In Nepal, for example, the embassy's public affairs office was "unaware of U.S. Pacific Command's website." State Department officials have expressed concern about U.S. Africa Command's website "about the Maghreb region of northern Africa, saying that a program marketed as a (Pentagon) operation may not be well received by countries traditionally sensitive to foreign military presence." Islamic extremists have waged insurgencies against countries such as Mali in northern Africa and are suspected in the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi last fall and three other Americans.

While the Pentagon has taken some steps to coordinate the websites with State Department, senior embassy officials told the GAO the "websites have the potential to unintentionally skew U.S. policy positions or be out of step with other government efforts in a particular country."

The report also pointed out that its reserve forces may not be adequately trained or equipped. In 2006, the Pentagon separated the MISO force into 2,800 special forces soldiers and 4,200 reservists but funded only the active-duty component. The Army's reserve command does not provide funding for language and cultural understanding courses its soldiers are required to have. There is also no dedicated fund to pay for reservists' equipment.

One result, according to the report, is that one reserve company reported asking "local businesses in Iraq and Afghanistan to print MISO products because they did not have working printers, and that these scenarios were not ideal because due to the sensitive nature of the products."

The rise of the fourth branch of government

And at the same time these members of Congress who are doling out pork and cash can deny giving special treatment to the people who gave them campaign contributions by saying "I didn't write those laws. Those laws were created by some unnamed federal bureaucrat in some unnamed federal agency. I am shocked at how those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats are wasting out tax dollars [but of course they never will pass any laws to stop it, because they agree with those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats who are helping them rob us taxpayers blind]"

Government also frequently works like this at the state, county and city levels too. When elected officials can blame unelected bureaucrats for their decisions it makes it a lot easier for them to rob us blind and get reelected at the same time.

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The rise of the fourth branch of government

By Jonathan Turley, Published: May 24 E-mail the writer

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency.

It’s a small percentage of agency matters that rise to the level of presidential notice. The rest remain the sole concern of agency discretion.

As the power of the fourth branch has grown, conflicts between the other branches have become more acute. There is no better example than the fights over presidential appointments.

Wielding its power to confirm, block or deny nominees is one of the few remaining ways Congress can influence agency policy and get a window into agency activity. Nominations now commonly trigger congressional demands for explanations of agencies’ decisions and disclosures of their documents. And that commonly leads to standoffs with the White House.

Take the fight over Richard Cordray, nominated to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is highly qualified, but Republican senators oppose the independence of the new bureau and have questions about its jurisdiction and funding. After those senators repeatedly blocked the nomination, Obama used a congressional break in January to make a recess appointment. Since then, two federal appeals courts have ruled that Obama’s recess appointments violated the Constitution and usurped congressional authority. While the fight continues in the Senate, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such conflicts as products of our dysfunctional, partisan times. Today’s political divisions are mild compared with those in the early republic, as when President Thomas Jefferson described his predecessor’s tenure as “the reign of the witches.” Rather, today’s confrontations reflect the serious imbalance in the system.

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

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Obama, No more drone murders!!! Honest!!! Trust me!!!

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Obama's drone rules leave unanswered questions

By JULIE PACE, AP White House Correspondent

Updated 1:37 am, Saturday, May 25, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama left plenty of ambiguity in new policy guidelines that he says will restrict how and when the U.S. can launch targeted drone strikes, leaving himself significant power over how and when the weapons can be deployed.

National security experts say it's imperative to leave some room in the guidelines, given the evolving fight against terrorism. But civil rights advocates argue too little has been revealed about the program to ensure its legality, even as the president takes steps to remove some of the secrecy.

"Obama said that there would be more limits on targeted killings, a step in the right direction," said Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch. "But a mere promise that the US will work within established guidelines that remain secret provides little confidence that the US is complying with international law."

An unclassified version of the newly established drone guidelines was made public Thursday in conjunction with Obama's wide-ranging address on U.S. counterterrorism policies. Congress' Intelligence committees and the Capitol Hill leadership have been briefed on the more detailed, classified policies, but because those documents are secret, there's no way of knowing how much more clarity they provide.

The president has already been using some of the guidelines to determine when to launch drone strikes, administration officials said. Codifying the strictest standards, they argue, will ultimately reduce the number of approved attacks.

Among the newly public rules is a preference for capturing suspects instead of killing them, which gives the U.S. an opportunity to gather intelligence and disrupt terrorist plots. The guidelines also state that a target must pose a continuing and imminent threat to the U.S.

However, the public guidelines don't spell out how the U.S. determines whether capture is feasible, nor does it define what constitutes an imminent threat.

Former State Department official James Andrew Lewis said Obama must retain some flexibility, given the fluid threats facing the U.S.

"The use of force and engagement of force always require a degree of discretion," said Lewis, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We don't want to change that."

The guidelines also mandate that the U.S. have "near certainty" that no civilians will be killed in a strike. Civilian deaths, particularly in Pakistan, have angered local populations and contributed to a rise in anti-American sentiments in the volatile region.

Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who has filed many court cases on behalf of drone victims' families, said that while he appreciated Obama's concern about civilian casualties, he wasn't confident the new guidelines would change U.S. actions.

"The problem remains the same because there is no transparency and accountability for the CIA because it will remain inside the system and not be visible to outsiders," he said.

Obama, in his most expansive discussion of the drone program, said in his speech Thursday to the National Defense University that he is haunted by the unintentional deaths. But he argued that targeted strikes result in fewer civilian deaths than indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

"By narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life," Obama said.

Administration officials said the new guidelines are applicable regardless of whether the target is a foreigner or U.S. citizen.

Polling suggests the American people broadly support the use of drones to target suspected terrorists in foreign countries, though support drops somewhat if the suspect is a U.S. citizen. A Gallup poll in March found 65 percent of Americans favor using drone strikes in other countries against suspected terrorists, while only 41 percent favored the use of drone strikes overseas against U.S. citizens who are suspected terrorists.

Despite the public support, Obama has come under increased pressure from an unusual coalition of members of Congress of both parties who have pressed for greater transparency and oversight of the drone program.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who serves on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said he would review the guidelines to ensure they keep "with our values as a nation," but indicated lawmakers may ask for additional overtures.

"I commend the president for his effort to define the boundaries of U.S. counterterrorism operations and for stating a commitment to increased accountability," Udall said. "While this is helpful and important, more needs to be done."

Relevant congressional committees are already notified when drone strikes occur. But it's unclear how the administration, under Obama's new transparency pledge, will handle public notifications, particularly when Americans are killed.

The public only knew about the deaths of three Americans by drone strikes through media reports and the fourth when Attorney General Eric Holder disclosed it in a letter to Congress on the eve of the speech.

Under current policy, the official U.S. figures of number of strikes and estimated deaths remain classified.

According to the New America Foundation which maintains a database of the strikes, the CIA and the military have carried out an estimated 416 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, resulting in 3,364 estimated deaths, including militants and civilians. The Associated Press also has reported a drone strike in Somalia in 2012 that killed one.

The think tank compiles its numbers by combining reports in major news media that rely on local officials and eyewitness accounts.

Strikes in Pakistan spiked in 2010 under Obama to 122, but the number has dropped to 12 so far this year. Strikes were originally carried out with permission of the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, though subsequent Pakistani governments have demanded strikes cease.

The CIA and the military have carried out some 69 strikes in Yemen, with the Yemeni government's permission.

___

Associated Press writer Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Transparency isn't coming easily to Obama White House

Sadly it doesn't seem like their is more then a dimes difference between Barack Hussein Obama and George W. Bush.

Sadly with the recent IRS scandal Barack Hussein Obama is now even looking a lot like Richard M. Nixon.

Oh well, at least the American government has the best tyrants and crooks in government that money can buy.

Source

Transparency isn't coming easily to Obama White House

By Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey, Washington Bureau

May 25, 2013, 6:09 p.m.

WASHINGTON — The White House decided to release internal emails about the deadly attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya — but only after summaries of the exchanges had leaked.

The president's spokesman disclosed details of closed-door discussions about a report that found the IRS targeted conservative groups — but did so in a drip-drip-drip fashion that only raised more questions.

And in a speech meant to expose the top-secret drone program to public examination, President Obama shrouded key details, such as whether the CIA would still use drones.

Caught up in a public relations crisis, White House officials have drawn open a few curtains, revealing once-secret documents and answering queries that they would ordinarily have dismissed with an eye roll.

But the sharing has been selective and done under duress. It has come in fits and starts to an administration that promised to be the most open in American history.

Many allies of the president think that with this burst of sunshine he has arrested the run of bad news and taken charge of the "narrative." Even in some Obama-friendly quarters, though, the sharing is seen as too little and too late, and all the more disappointing for the high hopes Obama had set for transparency at the outset of his presidency.

Civil liberties advocates are disappointed that Obama's drone speech glossed over some of the more difficult legal and moral aspects of targeted killings. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a Democrat, questioned the candor of former officials at the Internal Revenue Service.

Lanny Davis, who handled scandals for the Clinton White House, has been critical of the Obama administration.

"The nontransparency instinct of the Obama White House is more about not understanding effective, proactive crisis management," said Davis, who remains an Obama supporter. "The idea is to inoculate by being transparent."

President Clinton survived scandals with the help of advisors known for strategically leaking information that was damaging. One tactic was a document "dump" delivered Friday evening in the hope the story would be old news by Monday.

"You help write bad stories," Davis said. "That's counterintuitive. But you know this stuff is coming out, so it's to your advantage to get it all out quickly, all completely, and make sure it's over and done."

Obama set out to do more than just play defense against scandal. Right after taking office, he sent a memo to federal agencies and promised an "unprecedented level of openness in government." His was the first modern administration to release White House visitor logs.

Before long, though, advocates for open government began to complain that the administration was resisting public records requests and going after whistle-blowers and leakers with vigor.

Then news broke that the Department of Justice had subpoenaed phone records of the Associated Press and emails of a Fox News journalist in pursuit of government leakers. The media peppered the White House with questions about its commitment to the 1st Amendment.

Obama aides went to work to allay concerns. They called in veterans of past administrations and campaigns to ask for advice. Democratic strategists say they talked about candor.

Tad Devine, senior advisor to former Democratic presidential nominees Al Gore and John F. Kerry, thinks the Obama team is embracing the idea. "They understand that by putting out a lot of information they reduce the risk that the Republicans can convince people and the press that they are hiding something," Devine said. "They also understand that time is their enemy in dealing with issues of this nature."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has recently entertained a much wider variety of questions, disclosing names of senior staffers involved in internal meetings and even talking about a conversation he had with Obama about media freedoms. He usually declines to "read out" such events.

Still, administration officials let their account of the IRS troubles evolve — particularly regarding the question of when the White House learned the agency was inappropriately targeting groups that sought tax-exempt status by singling out those with the words "tea party" or "patriots" in their applications.

The White House has struggled to "give accurate information on a timely basis," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who studies the White House and its relationship with media.

"In this case, you can see they've been slow to gather the facts, and it has damaged them," Kumar said. "It has kept the story rolling and makes it appears as though they're not on top of it."

With his administration's transparency under fire, Obama departed from his focus on drones in his speech last week to address it. He said he was troubled that leak investigations could chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.

But he also argued that openness isn't always the most important value — that sometimes the nation's security is at stake. The challenge, he said, is in "striking the right balance."

christi.parsons@latimes.com

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Throwing Money at Nukes

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Throwing Money at Nukes

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: May 26, 2013 15 Comments

The United States has about 180 B61 gravity nuclear bombs based in Europe. They are the detritus of the cold war, tactical weapons deployed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey to protect NATO allies from the once-feared Soviet advantage in conventional arms. But the cold war is long over, and no American military commander can conceive of their ever being used. Even so, President Obama has put $537 million in his 2014 budget proposal to upgrade these bombs. When all is said and done, experts say, the cost of the rebuilding program is expected to total around $10 billion — $4 billion more than an earlier projection — and yield an estimated 400 weapons, fitted with new guided tail kits so that they are more reliable and accurate than the current ones.

This is a nonsensical decision, not least because it is at odds with Mr. Obama’s own vision. In a seminal speech in Prague in 2009 and a strategy review in 2010, Mr. Obama advocated the long-term goal of a world without nuclear arms and promised to reduce America’s reliance on them. He also promised not to field a new and improved warhead.

But the B61 upgrade would significantly increase America’s tactical nuclear capability and send the wrong signal while Mr. Obama is trying to draw Russia into a new round of nuclear reduction talks that are supposedly aimed at cutting tactical, as well as strategic, arsenals.

Even if there is a case to be made for keeping the bombs in Europe as a sign of America’s political commitment to NATO (allied opinion is divided on whether the weapons should stay), many experts doubt that the B61 warheads need to be rebuilt now, if at all. Government-financed nuclear labs have a rigorous program for testing them to make sure they still work.

Moreover, as Congress slashes spending on far more defensible programs like food stamps and Head Start, Mr. Obama’s $537 million request for the B61 bomb in 2014 is 45.5 percent higher than the 2013 figure; the $7.86 billion request for all weapons-related activity in the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-independent agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear warhead programs, is 9 percent above the amount Congress appropriated in 2012.

Mr. Obama’s profligacy apparently has its roots in 2010. That is when the president made a Faustian bargain with Senate Republicans who demanded that he invest more than $80 billion in the nuclear labs as a condition of their allowing the New Start arms reduction treaty with Russia to be approved. It is a mystery why he would feel bound by this commitment at a time when limited dollars should be directed toward real needs, and when Republicans have obstructed him at every turn on those needs.

In addition to overspending on warheads, Mr. Obama has cut the Global Threat Reduction Initiative program, which reduces and protects from terrorism vulnerable nuclear material at sites worldwide, by 15 percent from 2013 levels. His budget is being rewritten by Congress, but in the nuclear area it is a disappointing, and befuddling, measure of his priorities.

Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart

Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart

By KARL W. EIKENBERRY and DAVID M. KENNEDY

Published: May 26, 2013

STANFORD, Calif. — AFTER fighting two wars in nearly 12 years, the United States military is at a turning point. So are the American people. The armed forces must rethink their mission. Though the nation has entered an era of fiscal constraint, and though President Obama last week effectively declared an end to the “global war on terror” that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the military remains determined to increase the gap between its war-fighting capabilities and those of any potential enemies. But the greatest challenge to our military is not from a foreign enemy — it’s the widening gap between the American people and their armed forces.

Three developments in recent decades have widened this chasm. First and most basic was the decision in 1973, at the end of combat operations in Vietnam, to depart from the tradition of the citizen-soldier by ending conscription and establishing a large, professional, all-volunteer force to maintain the global commitments we have assumed since World War II. In 1776, Samuel Adams warned of the dangers inherent in such an arrangement: “A standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People. Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens.”

For nearly two generations, no American has been obligated to join up, and few do. Less than 0.5 percent of the population serves in the armed forces, compared with more than 12 percent during World War II. Even fewer of the privileged and powerful shoulder arms. In 1975, 70 percent of members of Congress had some military service; today, just 20 percent do, and only a handful of their children are in uniform.

In sharp contrast, so many officers have sons and daughters serving that they speak, with pride and anxiety, about war as a “family business.” Here are the makings of a self-perpetuating military caste, sharply segregated from the larger society and with its enlisted ranks disproportionately recruited from the disadvantaged. History suggests that such scenarios don’t end well.

Second, technology has helped insulate civilians from the military. World War II consumed nearly half of America’s economic output. But in recent decades, information and navigation technologies have vastly amplified the individual warrior’s firepower, allowing for a much more compact and less costly military. Today’s Pentagon budget accounts for less than 5 percent of gross domestic product and less than 20 percent of the federal budget — down from 45 percent of federal expenditures at the height of the Vietnam War. Such reliance on technology can breed indifference and complacency about the use of force. The advent of remotely piloted aircraft is one logical outcome. Reliance on drones economizes on both manpower and money, but is fraught with moral and legal complexities, as Mr. Obama acknowledged last week, in shifting responsibility for the drone program to the military from the C.I.A.

Third, and perhaps most troubling, the military’s role has expanded far beyond the traditional battlefield. In Iraq and Afghanistan, commanders orchestrated, alongside their combat missions, “nation-building” initiatives like infrastructure projects and promotion of the rule of law and of women’s rights. The potential for conflict in cyberspace, where military and civilian collaboration is essential, makes a further blurring of missions likely.

Together, these developments present a disturbingly novel spectacle: a maximally powerful force operating with a minimum of citizen engagement and comprehension. Technology and popular culture have intersected to perverse effect. While Vietnam brought home the wrenching realities of war via television, today’s wars make extensive use of computers and robots, giving some civilians the decidedly false impression that the grind and horror of combat are things of the past. The media offer us images of drone pilots, thousands of miles from the fray, coolly and safely dispatching enemies in their electronic cross hairs. Hollywood depicts superhuman teams of Special Operations forces snuffing out their adversaries with clinical precision.

The Congressional Research Service has documented 144 military deployments in the 40 years since adoption of the all-voluntary force in 1973, compared with 19 in the 27-year period of the Selective Service draft following World War II — an increase in reliance on military force traceable in no small part to the distance that has come to separate the civil and military sectors. The modern force presents presidents with a moral hazard, making it easier for them to resort to arms with little concern for the economic consequences or political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans are happy to thank the volunteer soldiers who make it possible for them not to serve, and deem it is somehow unpatriotic to call their armed forces to task when things go awry.

THE all-volunteer force may be the most lethal and professional force in history, but it makes a mockery of George Washington’s maxim: “When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.” Somehow, soldier and citizen must once again be brought to stand side by side.

Let’s start with a draft lottery. Americans neither need nor want a vast conscript force, but a lottery that populated part of the ranks with draftees would reintroduce the notion of service as civic obligation. [The military draft is nothing short of slavery, we don't need it. Slavery is wrong, period!!!!] The lottery could be activated when volunteer recruitments fell short, and weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled Americans, providing an incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters. The Pentagon could also restore the so-called Total Force Doctrine, which shaped the early years of the all-volunteer force but was later dismantled. It called for a large-scale call-up of the Reserves and National Guard at the start of any large, long deployment. Because these standby forces tend to contain older men and women, rooted in their communities, their mobilization would serve as a brake on going to war because it would disrupt their communities (as even the belated and smaller-scale call-up of some units for Iraq and Afghanistan did) in ways that sending only the standing Army does not.

Congress must also take on a larger role in war-making. Its last formal declarations of war were during World War II. It’s high time to revisit the recommendation, made in 2008 by the bipartisan National War Powers Commission, to replace the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires notification of Congress after the president orders military action, with a mandate that the president consult with Congress before resorting to force. This would circumscribe presidential power, but it would confer greater legitimacy on military interventions and better shield the president from getting all the blame when the going got tough.

Congress should also insist that wars be paid for in real time. Levying special taxes, rather than borrowing, to finance “special appropriations” would compel the body politic to bear the fiscal burden — and encourage citizens to consider war-making a political choice they were involved in, not a fait accompli they must accept.

Other measures to strengthen citizen engagement with the military should include decreased reliance on contractors for noncombat tasks, so that the true size of the force would be more transparent; integrating veteran and civilian hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, which would let civilians see war’s wounded firsthand; and shrinking self-contained residential neighborhoods on domestic military bases, so that more service members could pray, play and educate their children alongside their fellow Americans. Schools, the media and organs of popular culture also have a duty to help promote civic vigilance.

The civilian-military divide erodes the sense of duty that is critical to the health of our democratic republic, where the most important office is that of the citizen. While the armed forces retool for the future, citizens cannot be mere spectators. As Adams said about military power: “A wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and a jealous eye over it.”

Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general, was the United States commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and the ambassador there from 2009 to 2011. He is a fellow at Stanford, where David M. Kennedy is an emeritus professor of history. They are, respectively, a contributor to and the editor of “The Modern American Military.”

Did John McCain illegally sneak into Syria???

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Sen. McCain makes trip to Syria to visit rebels

Associated Press Mon May 27, 2013 6:04 PM

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain, a proponent of arming Syrian rebels, quietly slipped into Syria for a meeting with anti-government fighters Monday.

Spokeswoman Rachael Dean confirms the Arizona Republican made the visit. She declined further comment about the trip.

The visit took place amid meetings in Paris involving efforts to secure participation of Syria’s fractured opposition in an international peace conference in Geneva.

And in Brussels, the European Union decided late Monday to lift the arms embargo on the Syrian opposition while maintaining all other sanctions against Bashar Assad’s regime after June 1, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said following the meeting.

Two years of violence in Syria has killed more than 70,000 people. President Barack Obama has demanded that Assad leave power, while Russia has stood by Syria, its closest ally in the Arab world.

McCain has been a fierce critic of Obama administration policy there while stopping short of backing U.S. ground troops in Syria, but he supports aggressive military steps against the Assad regime.

Gen. Salem Idris, chief of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, accompanied McCain across the Turkey-Syria border. McCain met with leaders of the Free Syrian Army from across the country, who asked him for increased U.S. support, including heavy weapons, a no-fly zone and airstrikes on Syrian government and Hezbollah forces, according to The Daily Beast, which first reported the senator’s unannounced visit.

The White House declined to comment late Monday.

A State Department official said the department was aware of McCain crossing into Syrian territory on Monday. Further questions were referred to McCain’s office.

Last Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to provide weapons to rebels in Syria, as well as military training to vetted rebel groups and sanctions against anyone who sells oil or transfers arms to the Assad regime. McCain is a member of the committee.

——

Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper in Paris contributed to this report.

Arizona Guard whistle-blowers get to speak at Capitol

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Arizona Guard whistle-blowers get to speak at Capitol

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 28, 2013 10:55 PM

About a half-dozen National Guard whistle-blowers who spoke during a public forum Tuesday at the state Capitol said leadership shortcomings are to blame for a state military organization rife with corrupt conduct.

“We already have rules and regulations ... about how we’re supposed to conduct ourselves,” Lt. Col. Rob White said. “The problem is when officers don’t uphold those standards.”

“Soldiers and airmen are praying for justice to be restored to the Arizona National Guard,” added Seth Israel, a former staff sergeant who said he turned in all of his medals and retired because of retaliation he faced for reporting sexual harassment and other wrongdoing. “The leadership knew about these issues before they reached critical mass, but no one stood up.”

Those comments came during a discussion hosted by Rep. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, and other House Democrats in the wake of last month’s independent investigation blasting the Guard’s culture.

The National Guard Bureau, a federal umbrella organization, launched its probe after The Arizona Republic documented systemic misconduct that included sexual abuse, cronyism, fraud, theft, drug dealing and reprisal against victims. The review team concluded that fraternization by Guard commanders established a “perception that the leadership lacked the moral high ground to take appropriate steps when disciplinary matters arose.”

Gov. Jan Brewer, who ordered the inquiry, subsequently instructed Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar to prepare and execute reforms in the organization of about 8,000 soldiers, airmen and civilian personnel.

White and others who testified Tuesday said they lost faith in the Guard’s administration and turned to the media last year after failing to win reform through complaints to superior officers, inspectors general, the governor and members of Congress.

Paul Forshey, who retired as the Guard’s legal counsel, or JAG officer, said he decided to speak out last year after Salazar fired Brig. Gen. Michael Colangelo, then the Air Guard’s commander. Colangelo had terminated two subordinate officers for misconduct. His decision was sanctioned by Salazar, who nevertheless issued a letter of reprimand and later dismissed Colangelo.

“He gave him that letter knowing it to be false,” Forshey said.

Forshey noted that the independent investigation substantiated a corrupt culture, and said Brewer employed “a Jedi mind trick” when she declared that the Arizona Guard is “not broken.”

Brewer spokesman Matthew Benson said Tuesday’s hearing illustrates why the governor sought an independent review.

“That assessment has led to a corrective action plan, which will be implemented to lessen incidents of misconduct and make certain violations are addressed quickly and consistently,” he added.

Salazar, who has told Brewer he intends to retire before the end of the year, could not be reached for comment. However, Col. Steve Smith defended his boss at the forum, and complained that news coverage of the controversy has been inaccurate.

“I still believe we have a very strong organization,” said Smith, who was promoted to a new command this month. “We have great leadership. ... There is no other institution in this state of Arizona that is more trusted than the National Guard.”

Others maintained that the Guard has a toxic atmosphere, and questioned Salazar’s ability to create a new culture.

“This culture lacks integrity at the top,” said Cynthia Dowdall,the ex-wife of a retired Air Guard officer. “It’s a culture that destroys many military members and many military families.”

McCune Davis said she convened Tuesday’s informal session after GOP legislative leaders declined to hold formal hearings. A panel of six House Democrats listened to public comments.

“The Arizona Guard — and its reputation — is something we must protect,” McCune Davis said.

McCune Davis said she will submit a report to Brewer. She declined comment on whether Salazar should remain as Guard commander.

Father of Chechen killed in Florida says FBI murdered him

Father of Chechen killed in Florida says FBI murdered him

By Will Englund, Thursday, May 30, 8:17 AM E-mail the writer

MOSCOW – After FBI agents questioned Ibragim Todashev for hours on end about one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, his father alleged Thursday, they murdered him to keep him from talking.

Abdulbaki Todashev, who applied Thursday for a U.S. visa so that he can pick up his son’s body in Orlando, where he died, said that he has heard nothing from U.S. officials about the May 22 shooting.

“I want justice, I want an investigation,” he said at a Moscow news conference. “They come to your house like bandits, and they shoot you.”

Ibragim Todashev, 27, was an acquaintance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged organizer of the Boston bombing. Todashev had moved to Florida two years ago from Massachusetts, his father said. He said FBI officials questioned him on three separate occasions this spring.

The first time, they asked him about the bombing. The second time, his father said, they asked him about a triple murder in Waltham, Mass., that police suspect Tsarnaev may have carried out. The third interview, which took place at Todashev’s home and included Massachusetts state troopers, ended with his death, his father said.

Despite earlier accounts of the incident,two law enforcement officials told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Todashev was not armed. He was shot seven times. The FBI has said that he attacked an agent, just moments after confessing to his part in the Waltham slayings.

The elder Todashev displayed photographs of his son’s body — apparently the same pictures as those shown by the younger man’s widow at a Florida news conference Wednesday evening — that he said show six shots to the body and a “control” shot to the back of the head.

“This is proof of cold-blooded murder,” said Maxim Shevchenko, a journalist and member of the presidential human rights council who organized Thursday’s news conference.

It was an “extrajudicial execution,” said Zaurbek Sadakhanov, a Chechen lawyer who also was present. “Why was he interrogated three times without a lawyer? Why no recording? Why seven shots? And why should I believe their version? Why do American policemen believe they can do whatever they want?”

Todashev’s father said his son had been planning to return to Chechnya on May 24, though he had apparently canceled his tickets before he was killed on May 22. He suggested that the FBI didn’t want his son to return to Russia.

“Maybe my son knew some sort of information that the police didn’t want to get out,” he said. “They shut him up. That’s my opinion.”

Ibragim Todashev was the eldest of 12 children. His father said the family fled Chechnya after the wars of secession erupted, eventually finding a haven in the Volga River city of Saratov. Abdulbaki Todashev had once studied to be a veterinarian there, in the Soviet era.

Ibragim Todashev studied English for three years in Saratov, then, in 2008, returned with his family to by-then more stable Chechnya and completed his fourth year of higher education at Grozny University, his father said. The elder Todashev got a job with the city, and today he is the head of the administrative unit of the Grozny mayor’s office.

As soon as he left the university, Ibragim Todashev went to the United States on a program that enabled him to perfect his English, his father said. Three or four months later, when it was time to return, he called his father and said he wanted to stay on a while.

“I wasn’t against it,” the father said. Chechnya was still struggling, and life in the United States had to be more secure. Ibragim was living in Boston, and got to know Tsarnaev because they belonged to the same gym, his father said. They had each other’s phone numbers, “but they were never close friends,” he said.

Ibragim Todashev applied for a green card, which meant he had to stay in the United States. He stayed active in mixed martial arts, but a knee injury and surgery on his meniscus put an end to those dreams. Two months ago, his father said, he received the green card, and that’s when he started making plans to come back to Grozny for a visit, knowing he would be able to reenter the United States .

After the Boston bombing, the younger Todashev called his father and told him he was being watched. He said he didn’t believe Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar were responsible for the bombing. “This is a set-up,” he told his father. And he told him about the first two rounds of questioning by the FBI.

Todashev said he learned of his son’s death when Khusen Taramov, a friend and fellow-Chechen, called him. Taramov had been at Todashev’s apartment the night of May 22. The FBI called and asked Ibragim Todashev to come by for more questioning, but he told them they could find him at home, his father said Thursday.

When they arrived, they took Taramov aside and interrogated him outdoors for several hours, the father said, then told him to go. A few hours later, the younger Todashev was shot.

Abdulbaki Todashev is convinced his son is innocent of the Waltham murders. “I raised him. I know what kind of person he is,” he said.

Shevchenko decried the “systematic persecution of Chechens” in the United States and criticized the Russian Foreign Ministry for not doing more to stand up for Chechens who are abroad.

The lawyer, Sadakhanov, said he had some advice for Taramov: Leave the country. “Nowadays it’s not safe to be a witness in the United States,” he said.

Some IED incidents I was involved in????

Sure nobody was hurt and no property was damaged but I suspect the police officers at the Homeland Security wouldn't want to let that get into their way of bragging that they are heroes who saved the country and the world from phoney baloney alleged terrorists like me.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

His prank, if we can believe what the police said is putting some dry ice in a pop bottle and letting the bottle pop when the dry ice turned to gas and forced the top off of the pop bottle.

Back in the old days when 16 ounce pop bottles were made out of glass I had bought a 16 ounce bottle of Coke on my trip to the grocery store.

When I got home I unloaded my groceries and took them inside, but I forgot about the unopened 16 ounce bottle of soda pop and left it on the roof of my VW.

I heard a small explosion or pop while I was inside my house, but I didn't think anything of it.

It wasn't until later that I went outside and saw that the sun had heated up my pop bottle causing it to explode.

I thought I was lucky, because if I had been out side when the bottle of Coke had exploded I might have been injured by flying glass.

I cleaned up the glass and didn't think anything about it.

Of course I am lucky it happened 20 years ago and not now.

If it had happened now, I probably would be arrested for having an illegal explosive device which would probably get me 20 years in prison. Yea, don't tell the goons at Homeland Security that a 16 ounce bottle of Coke is not an IED because that might get in their way of making themselves look like heroes by arresting me for being a terrorist who is endangering the whole American way of life.

I probably would also be charged with a terrorist bombing attack and attempted murder of everybody who lived on my street.

Of course don't try to use and logic and reason and tell the goons at Homeland Security that this wasn't a bombing attack nor was it was an attempted mass murder. I just forgot to bring my Coke inside and it blew up in the hot Arizona sun.

Of course they could care less about the facts if it gets in the way of arresting me and pretending that they saved America from another terrorist attack and that they are heroes for arresting some smuck who left his Coke in the Arizona sun.

Here is another incident that happened years ago and involved IED or Improvised Explosive Devices as the cops and Homeland like to call them. I guess us normal people don't call them IEDs or improvised explosive devices like the cops do, but bottles of soda pop.

Again I suspect that if the goons at Homeland Security had been around when this had happened I would also h ave been arrested and put in prison for many years over this incident which involved a bottle of soda pop.

I was at work and me and a co-worker were walking to Circle K to get some junk food.

My friend had a two liter bottle of soda pop and for some reason he tossed it up into the air.

When the bottle hit the ground it burst open and took off like a rocket flying thru the air. It was pretty cool. I suspect all the carbon dioxide gas it the soda pop provided the energy.

And we were both lucky that the 2 liter bottle of pop didn't hit either of us. It could have caused some serious damage.

Again we didn't think anything of the incident, other then that the pop bottle looked pretty cool when it took off like a rocket.

We told our other co-workers about the incident when we got back from our junk food run to Circle K.

Of course if that had happened today we both probably would have been arrested and charged with possession of explosive devices, IEDs or improvised explosives devices as the goons at Homeland Security love to call them.

Of course that sounds so much more dangerous then calling the bottles of soda pop.

And of course the goons from Homeland Security would probably be laughed out of court if they tried to tell the judge they were arresting us for possession of a soda pop bottle. So that probably why they love to say IEDs instead of 2 liter bottles of soda pop.

Of course my friend, who thru the bottle of soda pop would have been arrested for attempted murder. Attempted murder of me.

And since I was there I probably would have also been arrested on a charge of being an accessory to attempted murder. Yea, the attempted murder of myself. How silly!!!!

But it's not silly to the cops who would be using this bogus incident in an attempt to make themselves look like heroes that saved the world from a phoney baloney terrorists like me and my friend.

Border technology remains flawed

Think of it as a government welfare program for the corporations in the military industrial complex. And a jobs program for cops or CBP officers as the article calls them (21,394 now, plus 3,500 to be hired).

The $106 billion spend in the article amounts to $350 for each of the 300 million men, women and children in the USA, or about $700 for every adult.

Remember the money is mainly being spend to keep Mexicans from entering the USA. If you look at it in those terms, the $106 billion spent amounts to $960 for each of the 110 million people in the Mexico, or about $1,900 for every adult in Mexico.

This is also pretty much proof that the American war on drugs is a dismal failure. Despite spending these billions of dollars any high school kid in America knows where to buy a bag of marijuana.

One thing that surprised me in the article was that the high tech drones the American government uses to murder people in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more to operate then the old fashioned planes flown by humans.

The second article says the P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft which are flown by humans cost less to operate then the Predator B drones which cost $3,234 an hour to operate.

Source

Border technology remains flawed

$106 billion has been spent on border security over the past 5 years

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Jun 2, 2013 9:19 AM

TUCSON - A long, sharp, high-pitched beep sounds every 30 or 40 seconds at the Border Patrol’s windowless sector-control room.

Agents here monitor a vast array of video screens and sensors linked to cameras, radar and other surveillance equipment along 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border — including hundreds of ground sensors that beep loudly whenever one detects something.

That something might be a drug smuggler or a migrant — but far, far more often, it’s a cow, or the wind, or some other false alarm, which may be why the agents seem to pay these constant beeps little mind.

To complement the 651 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexican border, Customs and Border Protection deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more.

But, as the ceaseless beeping of the sensor alarms illustrates, many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage. Then, too, CBP — despite spending more than $106 billion over the past five years militarizing and securing the border — struggles to mesh these pieces smoothly together so it can make good use of the data they provide.

The flaws, the gaps and the challenges in analyzing the data have left CBP, of which the Border Patrol is a part, unable to answer such seemingly basic questions as how well all of this technology works and how many of the people and how much of the drugs coming across the border make it through.

Many border-security analysts see that lack of answers as problematic, given current plans in Congress.

The comprehensive immigration-reform bill being debated in the Senate would boost border-security spending by as much as $6.5 billion over the next five years. That would roughly quadruple the more than $2 billion in Customs and Border Protection’s existing budget plans for more technology and to fix what’s in place.

In a nutshell, the bill would require the Border Patrol to build more fencing, more stations and more remote “forward-operating bases” near the border; to increase surveillance to cover the entire border 24 hours a day, seven days a week; to deploy more planes, helicopters and drones; to increase horse patrols; and to improve radio equipment and communication with other federal, state and local law enforcement.

The bill also mandates hiring another 3,500 CBP officers (who work at ports of entry, versus Border Patrol agents, who work the rest of the border), a 16-percent increase, among other provisions. And it would require the Border Patrol to apprehend or turn back 90 percent of would-be border crossers.

Within Congress, tighter border security has been treated as a precondition for any reform of immigration policy, but many analysts and academics who study the border express doubts about the need for more fences, agents and surveillance.

The number of Border Patrol agents nearly doubled over the last seven fiscal years, to 21,394. But over that time period, the number of migrants heading north plunged — mostly because of the U.S. economic downturn, most analysts say, but also in part because of the increasing dangers of going north as more fences and surveillance pushed crossers into more remote areas. Border Patrol apprehensions fell 69 percent over those years, from nearly 1.2 million to fewer than 365,000.

In 2005, Border Patrol agents apprehended an average of 106 people a year apiece. Last year, each agent apprehended an average of 17 people, or about one person every three weeks. In the Tucson Sector, each agent averaged 28 apprehensions a year, or about one every 13 days. In Yuma, each agent averaged one every two months. In the El Paso Sector, the least busy, each agent averaged 3.5 apprehensions a year.

“On a lot of parts of the border, it’s gotten to the point that every person we put out there makes less and less of an additional difference,” said Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank that seeks to connect academic research to public-policy discussion.

Complicating this picture is the fact that over the six months ending in March, Border Patrol apprehensions along the Southwest border climbed 13 percent from a year earlier, to just over 189,000. Most of that increase is happening in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Even with this rebound, apprehension numbers over that period are still the third lowest since 1972, above only last year and the year before.

Looking at the current state of border security, most analysts agree on some needs — such as improving radio communications — but some say CBP really should focus on what it has in hand.

“It’s not just putting a surveillance camera somewhere and you’re done; the challenge is integrating the data into Border Patrol operations. ... The Department of Homeland Security (which includes CBP) needs to step back ... and integrate the technology they have now before they get any new technology,” said James Lewis, director of the technology and public-policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative D.C. foreign-policy think tank focused on political, economic and security issues.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said what is “really needed is a serious management effort to see what works and what doesn’t.” The lack of such an assessment “is at some level an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars, given that we spend $18 billion a year on immigration enforcement,” added Alden, one of the authors of a recent study on the effectiveness of border enforcement.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the “Gang of Eight” promoting immigration reform in Washington along with Arizona’s other Republican senator, John McCain, said Saturday that the issues of added border security and technology snafus have been thoroughly discussed.

“We believe the situation clearly is better on the border than in times past; the frustration with all of us is with conflicting information out of DHS. Within the same report, they’ll use increased apprehensions to signal success, and decreased apprehensions to signal success,” Flake said.

“We haven’t had a comprehensive plan by the Border Patrol to reach certain metrics of effectiveness. We did come to the conclusion that more barriers in certain places, more manpower where they need it and more technology would help ... but in combination with employer enforcement, and a legal framework for people to come in.”

The Republic made several requests to interview Mark Borkowski, the CPB’s assistant commissioner in charge of technology and acquisition. DHS and CPB did not make him or other agency officials available.

Faulty ground sensors

The ground sensors offer one example of the challenge of making sure technology works properly. About 13,400 have been deployed piecemeal along the border over several decades. They are typically placed along known or suspected migrant or smuggler routes, and may detect vibrations (for foot traffic), metal (for vehicles) or have acoustic or infrared sensors. Sensors from the Vietnam War era remain in use.

A possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty radio communications, may have contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire incident Oct. 2. As is often the case with sensor alarms, agents didn’t detect anyone but each other when they arrived. Ivie, responding separately, apparently mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire. One of the agents shot and killed him.

But false alarms are nothing new.

In 2005, Homeland Security’s inspector general reported that only 4 percent of the alarm signals detected migrants or smugglers (34 percent were confirmed false alarms, 62 percent couldn’t be determined). The sensors, which run on batteries, frequently fail because of corrosion or bugs eating through wires.

They were supposed to be replaced as part of the $1.1 billion Secure Border Initiative, a massive 2006 effort to boost security at the border. But most of the money was spent on a problematic network of high-tech towers, known as SBInet.

The towers, to be equipped with video and infrared cameras and radar, were to cover the whole border. By the time Homeland Security pulled the plug in 2010, after a host of problems, the contractor, Boeing, had completed only 15 towers covering a 72-mile stretch of Arizona’s border. Most of the old ground sensors — with their false-alarm problems — remained.

In January 2011, Homeland Security launched another initiative, the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan.

That plan called for spending $1.5 billion over 10 years to integrate the SBInet towers, build new camera towers, buy trucks loaded with surveillance gear — and replace 525 ground sensors in Arizona with more sophisticated military models. The military sensors use a combination of technologies that can distinguish more accurately between, say, a four-legged coyote and the two-legged kind, and can even detect the direction of travel.

But CBP confirmed this past week that — eight years after the problems were identified — the sensors still had not been replaced.

However, under the new technology plan, Arizona agents have received:

Twenty-three hand-held thermal-imaging devices (like night-vision binoculars).

Two “scope trucks” – modified Ford 150 4x4 trucks with day and night cameras mounted on retractable poles.

Twelve “agent portable surveillance systems,” which include radar, video and infrared video sensors and can be carried in a box and set up on tripods.

Drone problems

Drones, too, have proven problematic. So far, CBP has acquired 10 drones, all versions of the Predator B made by General Atomics, for about $18 million apiece. CBP’s unarmed drones carry radar, video and infrared sensors.

Theoretically, the drones can fly for up to 20 hours at a time. But last year, according to CBP, the drones flew an average of 94 minutes a day. The main problem: CBP spent so much of its budget buying the drones that it hadn’t set aside enough to operate them.

“They’re on the ground most of the time for lack of funding,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security-policy analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights organization that studies the effects of U.S. policies on Latin America. “They cost $3,234 an hour to operate. They haven’t had the budget for maintenance or crews.”

Last year, Homeland Security’s inspector general found that, because of poor planning, CBP not only flew the drones less than one-third the number of planned hours in 2011, but also had to use $25 million from other budgets pay for the hours the drones did fly.

CBP also didn’t have enough operational support equipment at the airfields where the drones are based, and didn’t prioritize missions effectively, the inspector general found — all findings with which CBP concurred. Flight hours last year rose 30 percent from the year before, to 5,700, but were still well below half the target hours. Budget cuts this year because of the congressional sequester are likely to further limit flight hours, Isacson said.

The drones are sensitive to high winds and thunderstorms. They face Federal Aviation Administration flight restrictions because they are less able than manned aircraft to detect other aircraft and avoid collisions. And their use raises privacy concerns.

At a Senate hearing in March, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., cited reports that “DHS has customized its drone fleet to carry out domestic surveillance missions such as identifying civilians carrying guns ...” that fly in the face of civil liberties. “We must ask whether the trade-off in terms of border security is worth the privacy sacrifice.”

But CBP officials have said they believe FAA concerns and other issues can be addressed, and that drones can help increase surveillance wherever it’s most needed.

More coordination

In practice, every piece of technology at the border has limitations:

Eight aerostats, or tethered radar blimps, that CBP is taking over from the military, can’t be flown in high winds, and the line-of-sight radar makes them less effective in rugged, mountainous areas, which is much of the Tucson Sector. In May 2011, an aerostat crashed in a Sierra Vista neighborhood after coming loose in 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts.

CBP limits the use of its 16 Blackhawk helicopters because the high rate at which they guzzle fuel makes them very expensive to operate, according to pilots; and CBP budget documents confirm plans to temporarily ground nine of the 16 Blackhawks next year pending enough money for renovations.

The 16 workhorse P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft are, on average, 42 years old. Refurbishing costs $28 million apiece.

But the bigger issue is a lack of coordination in fitting all of the pieces together and making effective use of the data they provide, said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “It’s still hard for CBP to figure out what we get out of all these billions that have been spent,” he said, which hampers planning for the future.

Others argue that focus now should be on the ports of entry rather than on the vast spaces between them.

By some estimates, as many as 40 percent of undocumented migrants are people who entered legally through ports of entry and overstayed their visas, said Eric Olson, at the Wilson Center. And, according to CBP data, most hard drugs are smuggled through the ports.

“A strong case can be made now that the biggest risks are at the ports of entry,” Olson said.

Olson supports the bill’s call to add 3,500 more CBP officers, which he said also potentially “has a huge benefit, which is making the ports more efficient and reducing wait times for business and for legal travelers between the U.S. and Mexico.”

Outside analysts aren’t the only ones suggesting Congress reconsider its focus on more security.

A May 3 Congressional Research Service study invited members of Congress to consider that “certain additional investments at the border may be met with diminishing returns.” Some lawmakers, the report said, “may question the concrete benefits of deploying more sophisticated surveillance systems across ... vast regions in which too few personnel are deployed to respond to the occasional illegal entry that may be detected.”

For their part, Homeland Security, CBP and Border Patrol officials in recent months reiterated Secretary Janet Napolitano’s insistence that the border is more secure than ever before. And Assistant Commissioner Borkowski earlier this year made it clear CBP learned one lesson from its past struggles with technology: He said CBP won’t even consider buying technology unless it has been proven to work in the field.

But Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., sees the push for border security as political. “Without it, you don’t have a path to citizenship or any real compromise” in the immigration bill, he said.

“But if we’re going to put more resources on the border, we should modernize the ports of entry, to expedite trade and travel,” Grijalva said. More drones, towers and sensors “may have symbolic value. But it’s fighting a perception, rather than a reality.”

Source

Border technology tools: Pros, cons and cost

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:29 PM

U.S. Customs and Border Protection currently relies on a variety of technological tools to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition to nearly 651 miles of barriers, the agency deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more.

But many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage.

An immigration-reform bill being debated in the Senate would boost border-security spending by as much $6.5 billion over the next five years.

Here's a look at the current tech tools used by CBP, including pros, cons and cost of each.

Border technology tools

What: MQ9 Predator B and Guardian Drones

Pros: Has capacity to fly for 20 hours at a stretch.

Cons: High cost, lack of trained pilots and FAA regulations limit use; sensitive to strong winds; can’t detect and avoid other aircraft.

Cost: $24 million each, plus $3,234 per hour to fly each drone

Number: 10 deployed, CBP plans to have 17 by 2017

What: P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft (four-engine turboprop)

Pros: Cheaper to fly per hour than drones, has wide-range radar.

Cons: Aircraft are 42 years old on average

Cost: $28 million each to refurbish.

Number: 14 of 16 deployed are being refurbished.

What: MQ9 Predator B and Guardian Drones

Pros: Has capacity to fly for 20 hours at a stretch.

Cons: High cost, lack of trained pilots and FAA regulations limit use; sensitive to strong winds; can’t detect and avoid other aircraft.

Cost: $24 million each, plus $3,234 per hour to fly each drone

Number: 10 deployed, CBP plans to have 17 by 2017

What: P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft (four-engine turboprop)

Pros: Cheaper to fly per hour than drones, has wide-range radar.

Cons: Aircraft are 42 years old on average

Cost: $28 million each to refurbish.

Number: 14 of 16 deployed are being refurbished.

What: KA-350 CER Multi-Role Enforcement aircraft (twin-engine turboprop)

Pros: Wider field of view/radar search area than drone, can carry more gear.

Cons: Shorter range, flight time limited to 7 hours.

Cost: $21.5 million each

Number: 2 deployed, 2 more being acquired; plans call for 30 more

What: UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters

Pros: All-weather capability, large, powerful engines.

Cons: CBP planning temporary grounding of 9 of 16 Blackhawks because of high fuel consumption and operating costs. Noisy in flight, so smugglers can hear it coming.

Cost: $17.5 million each to convert, upgrade existing craft

Number: 16

What: Unattended ground sensors

Pros: Relatively inexpensive.

Cons: Deployed older units, some from Vietnam era, have high rate of false alarms (a DHS study found only 4 percent of alarms actually detected migrants or smugglers). New, more accurate units not yet deployed and integrated into sensor systems.

Cost: Base price for new units, also used by military, ranges from $5,000 to $7,000 for the basic sensor, to about $15,000 per unit fully deployed with relays, accessories.

Number: 12,800 (mostly older units)

What: Remote Video Surveillance Systems (day/night cameras mounted on 80 –foot pole)

Pros: Already in place, offer surveillance in remote areas.

Cons: Require frequent repair, hot or cold weather can cause cameras to get stuck; can’t automatically detect movement or activity; vulnerable to power outages; aren’t mobile.

Cost: $224 million contract planned.

Number: 337 currently deployed

What: SBInet Sensor Towers

Pros: Cameras and radar provide surveillance in remote areas

Cons: No mobility, line-of-sight gaps in coverage, proprietary software

Cost: $11 million per tower to erect, plus $1.2 million per tower per year to operate and maintain.

Number: 15 towers (plus 10 communications towers)

What: Integrated Fixed Towers

Pros: Using off-the-shelf technology making them more reliable, easier to integrate than SBInet towers

Cons: Purely theoretical at this point; contract expected to be issued by early 2014.

Cost: $1.1 billion contract planned

Number: 67 planned

What: Aerostats

Pros: Can stay aloft for days at a time.

Cons: Can’t be used in high winds (one crashed in Sierra Vista in May 2011 in 50 m.p.h. wind gusts); line-of-sight radar makes them less useful in mountainous areas, such as southeastern Arizona.

Cost: $4.7 million a year to maintain and operate

Number: 8

What: Aerostats

Pros: Can stay aloft for days at a time.

Cons: Can’t be used in high winds (one crashed in Sierra Vista in May 2011 in 50 m.p.h. wind gusts); line-of-sight radar makes them less useful in mountainous areas, such as southeastern Arizona.

Cost: $4.7 million a year to maintain and operate

Number: 8

Chicago terror case sparks debate about undercover stings

Of course in all of them when you read the fine print the FBI created the terrorist plots themselves and then suckered young Muslim Americas into becoming participants in the terrorist plot.

NONE of these so called terrorist plots would have existed in FBI agents had not created them.

As I always do I say the FBI agents are creating jobs for themselves, by creating these imaginary terrorist plots and then suckering naive, patriotic Muslim kids into becoming participants in them.

And in all of the cases I can remember the young Muslim kids were not arrested until after they had been given dummy explosive devices by the FBI and tried to detonate them.

Last I should say these imagainary crimes which are created by the FBI are not limited to terrorist cases. They do it all the time with other things such as drug war crimes, money laundering, gambling andguns.

Source

Chicago terror case sparks debate about undercover stings

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter

June 1, 2013

To the federal government, Sami Samir Hassoun was a determined terrorist with dangerous plans for Chicago — explosive devices, biological attacks and sniper shootings on police. His family and defense team say he was nothing more than a shameless storyteller who did not possess the sophistication to execute his outlandish and violent ideas.

He was arrested in an undercover sting run by FBI agents, charged, convicted and, on Thursday, sentenced to 23 years in prison for planting what he thought was a bomb near Wrigley Field.

Undercover stings like the one that led to Hassoun's arrest have long been employed by law enforcement, but over the past five years, their use and the use of informants have become more established tools in terrorism investigations across the country. In Chicago, three such terror plots, including Hassoun's, have been interrupted in recent years, authorities said.

But the use of such sting operations, particularly on younger targets, does not come without controversy. Defense attorneys and other critics say the government almost promotes criminal behavior by keeping would-be terrorists engaged, and comes dangerously close to entrapment — when law enforcement authorities coax someone who has not shown a predisposition to commit a crime to follow through.

Prosecutors say the undercover stings are critical to their battle against terror plots, especially those that are homegrown.

Hanging in the balance, they say, is the frightening possibility that law enforcement will miss the chance to stop an attack like the one at this year's Boston Marathon, where two brothers allegedly planted explosives near the finish line of the nation's most famous running race, killing three people and injuring more than 260.

"You can't ignore the potential threat. You have to see how serious it is," said Chicago attorney Dan Collins, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw one of the city's most serious terror cases. "Whether you are a bragger or the shyest person on the planet, you do have the ability to present a threat."

In Hassoun's case, authorities learned of his plans from an informant. Undercover agents told Hassoun, who then was 22, that they were religious radicals and even paid him to carry out the bombing, later providing him with a phony explosive device.

Prosecutors said Hassoun was already committed to his plan when agents got involved.

In the two other local cases, the FBI also used covert operations to draw out targets; in those cases, the suspects were teenagers.

Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, of Aurora, was accused of going online at age 18 to join what he thought was a violent militant group with ties to al-Qaida in war-torn Syria. In reality, it was an FBI-run Internet site.

Tounisi's close friend Adel Daoud, also 18, came under the scrutiny of the FBI after posting messages online about killing Americans, authorities said. Undercover FBI analysts exchanged messages with him, ultimately arranging to meet.

As with Hassoun, they provided Daoud with a phony explosive device, this one a car he thought was rigged with a bomb, authorities said.

Tounisi and Daoud cut young and sympathetic figures in court that contrasted with the violent plans at the center of the charges against them. Their alleged exchanges with the government on the Internet also hint at their youth and immaturity, with Daoud using phrases like "LOL" and Tounisi allegedly wondering if his small stature would leave him ill-equipped for a fight. Both defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Daoud's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, said last week that he is considering an entrapment defense.

"Adel Daoud was a very impressionable young kid, an immature 18-year-old who got involved in a school project on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida," he said.

While the cases are unique in many ways, the ages of the people swept up in them is a cause for concern, said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University.

"The youth of these kids is very troubling," she said. "We need to begin to understand these young men who begin to show evidence of violence and willingness to break the law earlier in their lives … directing that, not in terms of law enforcement, but in other social services."

The stings are also a concern for Muslim-Americans. Dr. Zaher Sahloul, former chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, said the stings play on the vulnerabilities of disaffected, immature youths.

"I am very uncomfortable with these tactics," he said. "It touches on a very raw, open wound in the community."

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde said officials appreciate the desire of Muslim community leaders to intervene with youths who exhibit violent inclinations, and even encourage it. But she stressed the need for law enforcement to move quickly when a potential threat emerges.

"The challenge we are facing is that so much of this is going on online," Hyde said. "And the radicalization is occurring at a relatively fast rate."

At Hassoun's sentencing last week, his age and the prospect that he was entrapped by the government were key points of discussion. Hassoun's attorneys criticized the undercover agents for "moving the ball forward" in the plot, saying Hassoun would never have accomplished it without them.

Prosecutors devoted much of their argument to rebutting that notion, saying he had formulated concrete terror plans and was determined to see them through to fruition. He never wavered, the prosecutors said, and he ignored opportunities to back out. They said they were not giving Hassoun ideas but testing his commitment to his own notions.

"How is the FBI supposed to know that Mr. Hassoun might not engage in this kind of chatter with someone else, someone who can really build a bomb?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Tinos Diamantatos said in court.

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman, in sentencing Hassoun, acknowledged the tension in these cases. He noted Hassoun's troubled youth and said the FBI had "led" him during its undercover investigation. But the judge, who also mentioned the Boston Marathon bombings, took pains to say Hassoun never took advantage of the chances the agents gave him to abandon the plot. He gave the agents credit for thwarting Hassoun's plans.

"This is the type of law enforcement we should all applaud," he said.

asweeney@tribune.com

After vowing transparency, US silent on drone killing

After vowing transparency, US silent on drone killing

WASHINGTON: A week after President Barack Obama cracked the lid of secrecy on his drone war, the United States refused Wednesday to confirm it had killed a top Pakistani Taliban leader in an airborne attack.

Pakistani security and intelligence sources said that Waliur Rehman, deputy leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) had perished in an American drone strike, along with at least five other people, in North Waziristan.

But senior officials in Washington stuck to their normal practice of declining to provide details of US operations, and only hinted that Rehman, wanted for attacks on Americans and Pakistanis, had been killed.

The attack appeared to be the first known US drone strike since Obama's speech last week laying out new criteria for the covert use of unmanned aerial vehicles in strikes against terror suspects and militants.

“We are not in a position to confirm the reports of Waliur Rehman's death,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

“If those reports were true, or prove to be true, it's worth noting that his demise would deprive the TTP of its second-in-command and chief military strategist,” Carney said.

Rehman is also wanted in connection with attacks on US and Nato personnel across the Afghan border and for involvement in the attack on American citizens in Khost, Afghanistan on December 30, 2009.

That strike, though Carney did not describe it in detail, was a dark day in CIA history, when seven counter-terrorism agents and security contractors were killed in a suicide bombing inside a US base.

Carney would not confirm whether the attack on Rehman satisfied the new criteria for drone strikes established by Obama last week during a speech that aimed to recast the country's decade-long battle against terrorism.

In the speech, Obama said lethal force would only be used to “prevent or stop attacks against US persons,” when capture is not feasible and if a target poses a “continuing, imminent threat” to Americans.

Carney pointed to a clause in Obama's remarks in which he said that in the “Afghan war theater” Washington must support its troops until the Nato withdrawal is complete in 2014.

He appeared to be making a case that Rehman's killing may have satisfied the new guidelines because he may have posed a direct and imminent threat to US troops across the border in Afghanistan.

The president said in his speech that strikes would continue against “high value Al-Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces.”A CIA spokesman also declined to confirm Rehman's death.

Carney dismissed the idea that keeping reporters in the dark about the reported attack conflicted with Obama's pledge for more transparency over the drone war. He said the speech at the National Defense University last week contained an “extraordinary amount of information.” “It does not mean that we are going to discuss specific counter-terror operations,” Carney said.

Security, tribal and intelligence officials told AFP in Pakistan that Rehman, who had a $5 million US government bounty on his head, was the target of the strike and was killed.

Pakistani security officials said the others killed in the attack were TTP cadres, including two local-level commanders. There were no initial reports of civilian casualties.

According to Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism, CIA drone attacks targeting suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan have killed up to 3,587 people since 2004, including as many as 884 civilians.

The frequency of drone strikes in Pakistan has tailed off in recent months, with the previous one coming on April 17.

Source

After vowing transparency, US mum on drone killing

By AFP / Web Desk

Published: May 29, 2013

WASHINGTON: The United States on Wednesday refused to confirm that it killed the number two in the Pakistani Taliban, despite President Barack Obama’s promise of more transparency on the drone war.

The killing of Waliur Rehman, deputy leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was the first known US drone strike since Obama’s speech last week laying out new criteria for the covert use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

His death was the first test of whether US authorities would provide more transparency on drone operations by the CIA or the military after Obama’s pledge of greater accountability over the use of such attacks.

“We are not in a position to confirm the reports of Waliur Rehman’s death,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney said, following an attack in which the TTP number two and at least five others were killed.

“If those reports were true, or prove to be true, it’s worth noting that his demise would deprive the TTP of its second-in-command and chief military strategist.” Carney said.

Carney said Rehman was also wanted in connection with attacks on US and Nato personnel in Afghanistan and for involvement in the attack on American citizens in Khost, Afghanistan on December 30, 2009.

That strike, though Carney did not describe it in detail, was a dark day in CIA history, when seven counter-terrorism agents and security contractors were killed in a suicide bombing in a remote outpost.

Carney would not confirm whether the attack on Rehman satisfied the new criteria for drone strikes established by Obama last week during a speech that aimed to recast the country’s decade-long battle against terrorism.

In the speech, Obama said that lethal force would only be used to “prevent or stop attacks against US persons,” when capture is not feasible and if a target poses a “continuing, imminent threat” to Americans.

But Carney pointed out a clause in Obama’s speech in which he said that in the “Afghan war theater” Washington must support its troops until the Nato withdrawal is complete in 2014.

The president said that strikes would continue against “high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces.”

A CIA spokesperson also declined to confirm Rehman’s death.

Security, tribal and intelligence officials told AFP in Pakistan that Rehman, who had a $5 million US government bounty on his head, was the target of the strike in North Waziristan and was killed.

Pakistani government condemns drone strike

The Pakistani government “expressed serious concerns” over the US drone strike that killed Waliur Rehman on Wednesday, according to a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Pakistan has maintained its stance that US drone strikes are counter-productive, result in the loss of innocent lives and violate Pakistani sovereignty.

Obama signs bill on lying about military medals

Source

Obama signs bill on lying about military medals

3:21 p.m. EDT June 3, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Obama has signed a bill making it a crime to lie about receiving a military medal.

The Stolen Valor Act cleared both chambers of Congress last month. The White House said Obama signed it Monday.

The measure revives a law struck down by the Supreme Court in 2006. The court said it may be disreputable to lie about receiving a medal, but it's protected under the First Amendment.

The new law is narrower, making it a crime to lie about being decorated with the intent to profit personally or financially. That could include those who claim medals in order to receive veterans benefits, land a government contract or get a job reserved for veterans.

Violators could face up to a year in prison.

Obama officials defend collecting phone records

Source

Obama officials defend collecting phone records

Associated Press Thu Jun 6, 2013 7:17 AM

WASHINGTON — A British newspaper reported that the United States has been collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans under a top secret court order. The Obama administration on Thursday defended the government’s need to collect telephone records of American citizens, calling such information “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats.”

While defending the practice, a senior Obama administration official did not confirm the report Wednesday in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The disclosure was likely to bring questions from both Republicans and Democrats of how far the Obama administration’s surveillance policies go, following the government’s tracking of Associated Press journalists’ phone records in a leak investigation.

The White House has been on the defensive against Republicans who claim the administration is too intrusive in Americans’ lives, citing the federal tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny as proof.

Republicans also claim Obama aides manipulated the government’s response to last year’s deadly attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, to remove any links to terrorism in the heat of a presidential election, which the White House denies.

The controversies collectively could erode the American people’s trust in Obama and derail his second term agenda.

The court order to collect phone records was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported. The order requires Verizon, one of America’s largest telecommunications companies, on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the National Security Agency information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly discuss classified matters.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment. The NSA had no immediate comment.

Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn’t specify which type of phone customers’ records were being tracked.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as are location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.

The administration official said, “On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls.”

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was very controversial.

The secret court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of “all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the “business records” provision of the USA Patriot Act, which passed after Sept. 11, 2001.

The NSA tracking phone calls of millions of Verizon customers???

Not just Verizon? Secret NSA effort to gather phone data is years old

By Richard A. Serrano and Kathleen Hennessey

June 6, 2013, 8:54 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The massive National Security Agency collection of telephone records disclosed Wednesday was part of a continuing program that has been in effect nonstop since 2006, according to the two top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.

Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: "This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. [Which means every member of the Senate approved of it???] To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

The statements by the two senators, whose committee positions give them wide access to classified data, appeared to rule out the possibility that the court order directing Verizon to turn over telephone records was related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The order was effective as of April 19, shortly after the bombings, which had sparked speculation about a link.

Instead, the surveillance, which was revealed Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, appears to have been of far longer duration. Although the senators did not specify the scope of the surveillance, the fact that it has been in place since 2006 also suggests that it is not limited to any one phone carrier.

The Obama administration defended the program Thursday, saying the data collection “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.” [So every one of these millions of Americans the NSA spied on is a terrorist according to Obama???]

A senior administration official released a statement which did not confirm the existence of the court order authorizing the surveillance, which, according to the copy released by the Guardian, is marked "Top Secret." It was issued in late April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that meets in Washington, and allowed the government to collect the bulk data until July 19.

"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber," the official said. "It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.

The court order was authorized under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect business records in bulk if its requests are approved by the court. [I think that is a big word for the police state Patriot Act]

The official said telephone data allow "counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

The official requested anonymity to discuss the counterterrorism program.

In defending the data collection program, the administration official sought to spread responsibility, noting that “all three branches” of government were tasked with review and oversight of surveillance. [So all three branches of government are spying on us???]

"There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," the official said. He said that involves oversight by the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA court.

Separately, the Justice Department released a letter defending the administration’s handling of the FISA law that they had sent in 2011 to two senators who had objected to it.

“We do not believe the Executive Branch is operating pursuant to ‘secret law’ or ‘secret opinions of the Department of Justice,’ “ said the letter, signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Ronald Weich. The “Intelligence Community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the Intelligence Communities of both Houses.”

“Many other collection activities are classified,” Weich added, saying that “this is necessary because public disclosure of the activities they discuss would harm national security and impede the effectiveness of the intelligence tools that Congress has approved.”

Weich further defended the program by saying intelligence officials have “determined that public disclosure of the classified use” of the law “would expose sensitive sources and methods to our adversaries and therefore harm national security.”

He said collection of records, as now underway with Verizon phone logs, was different than material obtained through grand jury subpoenas. Grand jury subpoenas, he said, can be obtained by prosecutors without court approval. In contrast, he said, the intelligence collections can be done only with approval from a federal judge sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most importantly, he noted that FISA courts require a showing by officials that the records sought “are relevant to an authorized national security investigation.”

The Weich letter was sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-0re.).

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is testifying Thursday morning before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and is expected to address the matter further.

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kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Rick.Serrano@latimes.com

Twitter: @khennessey

President Obama’s Dragnet

Source

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: June 6, 2013

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by issuing a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans. “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

What You Should Know About NSA Phone Data Program

What You Should Know About NSA Phone Data Program

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 6, 2013 at 4:04 PM ET

WASHINGTON — The government knows who you're calling.

Every day. Every call.

Here's what you need to know about the secret program and how it works:

___

Q: What happened and why is it a big deal?

A: The Guardian newspaper published a highly classified April U.S. court order that allows the government access to all of Verizon's phone records on a daily basis, for both domestic and international calls. That doesn't mean the government is listening in, and the National Security Agency did not receive the names and addresses of customers. But it did receive all phone numbers with outgoing or incoming calls, as well as the unique electronic numbers that identify cellphones. That means the government knows which phones are being used, even if customers change their numbers.

This is the first tangible evidence of the scope of a domestic surveillance program that has existed for years but has been discussed only in generalities. It proves that, in the name of national security, the government sweeps up the call records of Americans who have no known ties to terrorists or criminals.

Q: How is this different from the NSA wiretapping that was going on under President George W. Bush?

A: In 2005, The New York Times revealed that Bush had signed a secret order allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without court approval, a seismic shift in policy for an agency that had previously been prohibited from spying domestically. The exact scope of that program has never been known, but it allowed the NSA to monitor phone calls and emails. After it became public, the Bush administration dubbed it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was a critical tool in protecting the United States from attack.

"The NSA program is narrowly focused, aimed only at international calls and targeted at al-Qaida and related groups," the Justice Department said at the time.

But while wiretapping got all the attention, the government was also collecting call logs from American phone companies as part of that program, a U.S. official said Thursday. After the wiretapping controversy, the surveillance continued, albeit with court approval. That's what we're seeing in the newly released court document: a judge's authorization for something that began years ago with no court oversight.

Q: Why does the government even want my phone records?

A: They're not interested in your records, in all likelihood, but your calls make up the background noise of the global phone system.

Look at your monthly phone bill, and you'll see patterns: calls home as you leave work, food delivery orders on Friday nights, that once-a-week call to mom and dad.

It's like that, except on a monumentally bigger scale. Armed with the nation's phone records, the NSA's computers can identify what normal call behavior looks like. Abnormal call behavior begins to stand out.

When the computers spot something out of the ordinary, the government can identify what are known in intelligence circles as "communities of interest" — the networks of people who are in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers.

Over time, the records also become a valuable archive. When officials discover a new phone number linked to a suspected terrorist, they can consult the records to see who called that number in the preceding months or years.

Once the government has narrowed its focus on phone numbers it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

___

Q: So a judge approved this. Does that mean someone had to show probable cause that a crime was being committed?

A: No. The seizure was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates under very different rules from a typical court. Probable cause is not required.

The court was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and is known in intelligence circles as the FISA court. Judges appointed by the president hear secret evidence and authorize wiretapping, search warrants and other clandestine efforts to monitor suspected or known spies and terrorists.

For decades, the court was located in a secure area at Justice Department headquarters. While prosecutors in criminal cases must come to court seeking subpoenas, the FISA judges came to the Justice Department. That changed in 2008 with the construction of a new FISA court inside the U.S. District Court in Washington. The courtroom is essentially a vault, designed to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on what goes on inside.

In this instance, Judge Roger Vinson authorized the NSA to seize the phone records under a provision in the USA Patriot Act, which passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and vastly expanded the government's ability to collect information on Americans.

___

Q: If not probable cause, what standard did the government use in this case?

A: The judge relied on one of the most controversial aspects of the Patriot Act: Section 215, which became known colloquially as the "library records provision" because it allowed the government to seize a wide range of documents, including library records. Under that provision, the government must show that there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that the records are relevant to an investigation intended to "protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Exactly what "relevant" meant has been unclear. With the release of the classified court order, the public can see for the first time that everyone's phone records are relevant.

The Justice Department has staunchly defended Section 215, saying it was narrowly written and has safeguarded liberties.

Some in Congress, however, have been sounding alarms about it for years. Though they are prohibited from revealing what they know about the surveillance programs, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall or Colorado have said the government's interpretation of the law has gone far beyond what the public believes.

"We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act," the senators wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year.

___

Q: Why don't others in Congress seem that upset about all this?

A: Many members of Congress have known this was going on for years. While Americans might be surprised to see, in writing, an authorization to sweep up their phone records, that's old news to many in Congress.

"Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday. "It's been going on for some seven years."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss issued a similar statement:

"The executive branch's use of this authority has been briefed extensively to the Senate and House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and detailed information has been made available to all members of Congress."

___

Q: What does the Obama administration have to say about this?

A: So far, very little. Despite campaigning against Bush's counterterrorism efforts, President Barack Obama has continued many of the most controversial ones including, it is now clear, widespread monitoring of American phone records.

The NSA is particularly reluctant to discuss its programs. Even as it has secretly collected millions of phone records, it has tried to cultivate an image that it was not in the domestic surveillance business.

In March, for instance, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, emailed an Associated Press reporter about a story that described the NSA as a monitor of worldwide internet data and phone calls.

"NSA collects, monitors, and analyzes a variety of (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) signals and communications for indications of threats to the United States and for information of value to the U.S. government," she wrote. " (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) is the operative word. NSA is not an indiscriminate vacuum, collecting anything and everything."

___

Q: Why hasn't anyone sued over this? Can I?

A: People have sued. But challenging the legality of secret wiretaps is difficult because, in order to sue, you have to know you've been wiretapped. In 2006, for instance, a federal judge in Detroit declared the NSA warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional. But the ruling was overturned when an appeals court that said the plaintiffs — civil rights groups, lawyers and scholars — didn't have the authority to sue because they couldn't prove they were wiretapped.

Court challenges have also run up against the government's ability to torpedo lawsuits that could jeopardize state secrets.

The recent release of the classified court document is sure to trigger a new lawsuit in the name of Verizon customers whose records were seized. But now that the surveillance program is under the supervision of the FISA court and a warrant was issued, a court challenge is more difficult.

Suing Verizon would also be difficult. A lawsuit against AT&T failed because Congress granted telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for cooperating with warrantless surveillance. In this instance, Verizon was under a court order to provide the records to the government, making a lawsuit against the company challenging.

Uncle Sam reads your email and listens to your phone calls

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Sure the jackbooted thugs in the FBI, Homeland Security, DEA, BATF, and ICE who created this program are the problem, but the real problem is the members of the US Congress and US Senate who passed the unconstitutional laws such as the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allow the police thugs in those government agencies to do this.

The article didn't mention this but in addition to monitoring our phone conversations and reading our emails the government at both the Federal, state, county and city levels routinely monitor our websites, chat rooms, Facebook, Tweeter and other internet activities.

Every day some of my web pages get a visit from an IP address in Shady Grove, Maryland, which I suspect is the home of some Federal police agency. On a map Shady Grove, Maryland looks like a suburb in the Washington, D.C. metro area and I suspect it is the home of one branch or another of the US Department of Homeland Security.

I have read a number of articles in the Arizona Republic about people who have been arrested by police from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Public Safety who troll the internet pretending to be horny underage girls who want to have sex with older men.

Source

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Associated Press Fri Jun 7, 2013 7:42 AM

A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records — hundreds of millions of calls — in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.

At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists — and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.

Some critics in Congress, as well as civil liberties advocates, declared that the sweeping nature of the National Security Agency program represented an unwarranted intrusion into Americans' private lives. But a number of lawmakers, including some Republicans who normally jump at the chance to criticize the Obama administration, lauded the program's effectiveness. Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the United States, "possibly saving American lives."

Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.

The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple said in statements that they do not provide the government with direct access to their records.

"When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law," the company said.

The leaks about the programs brought a sharp response from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. In an unusual statement late Thursday, Clapper called disclosure of the Internet surveillance program "reprehensible" and said the leak about the phone record collecting could cause long-lasting and irreversible harm to the nation's ability to respond to threats.

Clapper said news reports about the programs contained inaccuracies and omitted key information. He declassified some details about the authority used in the phone records program because he said Americans must know the program's limits. Those details included that a special national security court reviews the program every 90 days and that the court prohibits the government from indiscriminately sifting through phone data. Queries are only allowed when facts support reasonable suspicion, Clapper said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."

But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Americans have no cause for concern. "If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said. [Yea, and if this were Nazi Germany, I am sure Sen. Lindsey Graham would have said the Jews shouldn't be alarmed at some of the things Hitler was doing, after all they were aimed at Jews, but rather at helping the Nazis catch bad criminals.]

A senior administration official pointed out that the collection of communication cited in the Washington Post and Guardian articles involves "extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court [FISA courts, secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep records of their decisions that are open to the public, and which meet in location which the public is not allowed], to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons." The official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and requested anonymity, added that Congress had recently reauthorized the program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the order was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice that is supervised by federal judges who balance efforts to protect the country from terror attacks against the need to safeguard Americans' privacy. The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.

While the scale of the program might not have been news to some congressional leaders, the disclosure offered a public glimpse into a program whose breadth is not widely understood. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said it was the type of surveillance that "I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it."

The government has hardly been forthcoming.

Wyden released a video of himself pressing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the matter during a Senate hearing in March.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked.

"No, sir," Clapper answered.

"It does not?" Wyden pressed.

Clapper quickly softened his answer. "Not wittingly," he said. "There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly."

There was no immediate comment from Clapper's office Thursday on his testimony in March.

The public is now on notice that the government has been collecting data — even if not listening to the conversations — on every phone call every American makes, a program that has operated in the shadows for years, under President George W. Bush, and continued by President Barack Obama.

"It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records," wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.

Without confirming the authenticity of the court order, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said such surveillance powers are "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats," by helping officials determine if people in the U.S. who may have been engaged in terrorist activities have been in touch with other known or suspected terrorists.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., stressed that phone records are collected under court orders that are approved by the Senate and House Intelligence committees and regularly reviewed.

And Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada played down the significance of the revelation.

"Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," he said. "This is a program that's been in effect for seven years, as I recall. It's a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not." [Yea, and Harry Reid probably would have said the same things to the Jews in Nazi Germany. Trust your government, these laws are not aimed at murdering Jews, but at catching criminals. Trust the government, we are here to help you, not harm you!!!]

But privacy advocates said the scope of the program was indefensible.

"This confirms our worst fears," said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "If the government can track who we call," he said, "the right to privacy has not just been compromised — it has been defeated."

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was "extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation." [Another government liar who will say anything to get elected??? If this tyrant is so concerned about the Patriot Act he created why doesn't he pass a law to repeal it??? Probably because he is getting money from the special interest groups in the FBI and other Homeland Security agencies]

Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.

House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to explain why the program is necessary.

It would "be helpful if they'd come forward with the details here," he said.

The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead. [I have always said Obama is a carbon copy clone of George W. Bush, now it seems like Obama is also a clone of Richard M. Nixon!!!]

At a minimum, it's all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, according to The Guardian.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify "communities of interest" — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

Rogers said once the data has been collected, officials still must follow "a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number." [From what I have read these FISA courts are secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep public records of their decisions. So that really isn't a system of checks and balances to prevent government abuses, in fact it's an invitation to government abuses]

But Jim Harper, a communications and privacy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, questioned the effectiveness of pattern analyses to intercept terrorism. He said that kind of analysis would produce many false positives and give the government access to intricate data about people's calling habits.

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company isn't allowed to comment on any such court order.

"Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers' privacy," he wrote. "Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply."

The company listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. [That is about one third of American's population of 310 million people]

The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability."

Under Bush, the NSA built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the data collection continued under the Patriot Act, the official said. The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Seizing cellphone records abuses liberty

Source

Seizing cellphone records abuses liberty

Our View: Data mining is legal, useful - but not a blank check

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jun 7, 2013 7:44 AM

There is a rich vein of irony in Wednesday’s revelation by a London newspaper that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of telephone records from Verizon every day and has a court’s approval to do it.

This is the Obama administration’s NSA, after all. The administration that arrived in 2008 on a mission to repudiate and abandon all the “war on terror” transgressions of its predecessor.

And it is led by a president who just two weeks ago in a major national-security speech expressed concerns about the “expanded surveillance” brought about by the war on terror. He spoke of the need to re-establish balance “between our interests in security and our values of privacy.”

This current NSA “data mining” of millions of phone records is a practice indistinguishable from those conducted at the height of the Patriot Act-authorized war on terror — unchanged except in the scope of the surveillance, which appears far more sweeping than any snooping authority sought by the George W. Bush administration.

Not a lot of “balance” there.

Still, there needs to be some balance struck regarding the meaning of the NSA data-mining story itself. It is not the horrifying, new intrusion on privacy it appears to be.

First, the practice is legal and has been for a long time. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1979 concluded in Smith vs. Maryland that because phone records are held by phone companies, the data about those phone records (as opposed to the content of the phone calls) is not privileged information. The government’s right to access the data for national-security purposes is explicitly authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Just as during the Bush administration’s post-9/11 pursuit of terror suspects, the Obama administration’s interest in acquiring the data is almost certainly an effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

We can say “almost certainly” with fair confidence. The court that approved the data mining was the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1978 precisely for this purpose.

Further, the court orders, however sweeping, appear to have been witnessed by (and tacitly approved by) congressional Intelligence Committee members.

That hasn’t made the government’s habit of gathering the data any less controversial. For many civil libertarians and critics of the Bush administration, data mining of phone records was evidence of the unconstitutional, unchecked power of the “unitary executive.”

That concern continues today.

Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have been cryptically expressing grave concerns for years about what they saw as the administration’s overuse of its surveillance powers. This widespread phone-snooping story is at least part of what they were hinting at.

But it is especially troubling for this administration, given the recent revelations about its willingness to use — which is to say, abuse — the enormous powers of government against political enemies.

The Internal Revenue Service treatment of conservative non-profit organizations may not have been explicitly ordered by the administration. But there is ample evidence the IRS was enthusiastically encouraged by the president and his aides to single out “tea partyers” for special scrutiny.

And the Obama Justice Department’s grim labeling of a Fox News reporter as a suspected espionage co-conspirator underscores the view that the administration is not shy about using its power politically.

There most certainly is a necessary “balance” to be struck between national security and individual liberty. President Barack Obama has not found that balance. He needs to.

Obama defends phone data collection program

F*ck you Obama, I will take 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience any day of the year over having your police thugs spy on me to protect me from enemies which YOUR foreign policies created!!!!

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Obama defends phone data collection program

Josh Lederman and Donna Cassata Fri Jun 7, 2013 10:08 AM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama vigorously defended sweeping secret surveillance into America’s phone records and foreigners’ Internet use, declaring “we have to make choices as a society.”

Taking questions Friday from reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif., Obama said, “It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon’s land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too. Another secret program revealed Thursday scours the Internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine U.S.-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.

In his first comments since the programs were publicly revealed this week, Obama said safeguards are in place.

“They help us prevent terrorist attacks,” Obama said. He said he has concluded that prevention is worth the “modest encroachments on privacy.” [Yea, and modest violations of the Bill of Rights, as if a modest violations are OK]

Obama said he came into office with a “healthy skepticism” of the program and increased some of the “safeguards” on the programs. He said Congress and federal judges have oversight on the program, and a judge would have to approve monitoring of the content of a call and it’s not a “program run amok.” [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

He said government officials are “’’looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

“They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism,” Obama said. [per the 4th Amendment you have to have "probable cause" to spy on people and when you say "might" you don't have "probable cause"]

The president’s remarks followed an unusual late-night statement Thursday from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who denounced the leaks of highly classified documents that revealed the programs and warned that America’s security will suffer. He called the disclosure of a program that targets foreigners’ Internet use “reprehensible,” and said the leak of another program that lets the government collect Americans’ phone records would change America’s enemies behavior and make it harder to understand their intentions.

“The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Clapper said of the phone-tracking program.

At the same time, Clapper offered new information about the secret programs.

“I believe it is important for the American people to understand the limits of this targeted counterterrorism program and the principles that govern its use,” he said.

Among the previously classified information about the phone records collection that Clapper revealed:

—The program is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court which determines the legality of the program. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The government is prohibited from “indiscriminately sifting” through the data acquired. It can only be reviewed “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” He also said only counterterrorism personnel trained in the program may access the records.

—The information acquired is overseen by the Justice Department and the FISA court. Only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed, he said. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The program is reviewed every 90 days. [Yea, by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The Obama administration’s defense of the two programs came as members of Congress were vowing to change a program they voted to authorize and exasperated civil liberties advocates were crying foul, questioning how Obama, a former constitutional scholar who sought privacy protections as a U.S. senator, could embrace policies aligned with President George W. Bush, whose approach to national security he had vowed to leave behind.

Clapper alleged that articles about the Internet program “contain numerous inaccuracies.” He did not specify.

Senior administration officials defended the programs as critical tools and said the intelligence they yield is among the most valuable data the U.S. collects. Clapper said the Internet program, known as PRISM, can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S, and that data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum. [Yea, and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records will guarantee that!!!]

Leaders of Congress’ intelligence panels dismissed the furor over what they said was standard three-month renewal to a program that’s operated for seven years. Committee leaders also said the program recently helped thwart what would have been a significant domestic terrorist attack.

The NSA must collect the phone data in broad swaths, Clapper said, because collecting it narrowly would make it harder to identify terrorism-related communications. [Why not just add a section to the Patriot Act that requires every American to give the keys to their home so an FBI agent can stop in any time and spy on them just to make sure they are not up to no good??? Hey, it's not flushing the 4th Amendment down the toilet any more then the rest of the Patriot Act does!!!!]

But the widespread notion of a government dragnet ensnaring terror suspects and innocent Americans pushed typical political foes to stand together against Obama as he enforces what many likened to Bush-era policies.

“When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call from is private information,” [yea, between them the FBI, NSA and only a few thousand other people in the government] said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “As a result of the disclosures that came to light today, now we’re going to have a real debate in the Congress and the country and that’s long overdue.”

Officials from Clapper’s office, the Justice Department, NSA and FBI briefed 27 senators for some two hours late Thursday at a hurriedly convened session prompted by severe criticism and uncertainty about the program.

“The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this administration has now sunk to a new low.”

Paul said he will introduce legislation ensuring that the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to government search of phone records. [Well at least he actually admits the Patriot Act has made the 4th Amendment null and void and he will pass legislation to un-repeal the 4th Amendment for a few purposes]

The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011. Republicans who usually don’t miss a chance to criticize the administration offered full support.

“I’m a Verizon customer. I could care less if they’re looking at my phone records. … If you’re not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you got nothing to worry about,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. [So if I associate with somebody the government considers a terrorist I have something to worry about??? Like my cousin who is an immigrant from Syria???]

The disclosures come at a particularly inopportune time for Obama. His administration already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service’s improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists’ phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.

At a minimum, it’s all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret FISA court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, The Guardian reported.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA’s computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify “communities of interest” — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said that once the data has been collected, officials still must follow “a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number.” [Yea, checks and ballances by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The steps are shrouded in government secrecy, which some lawmakers say should change.

“The American public can’t be kept in the dark about the basic architecture of the programs designed to protect them,” said Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. [Yea and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records are part of the architecture designed to protect us!!!!]

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company can’t comment on any such court order. He said Verizon take steps to protect customers’ privacy, but must comply with court orders. Verizon listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April.

The NSA is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency “is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans’ civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability.”

Emerging from the briefing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Intelligence committee, said the government must gather intelligence to prevent plots and keep Americans alive. “That’s the goal. If we can do it another way, we’re looking to do it another way. We’d like to.”

She said Congress is always open to changes, “but that doesn’t mean there will be any.”

Obama has declared war on the Bill of Rights, not terrorists

President Obama says he is hunting down terrorists by using the Patriot Act to tap our phones and read our email.

I think Obama is cherry picking the evidence to justify that.

Less then 1 percent of the people arrested under the Patriot Act have been arrested for terrorist crimes.

Over 50 percent of the arrests under the Patriot Act have been for victimless drug war crimes.

I think Obama is at war with not with terrorists, but with the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the American People.

Thanks

*************
Tempe, Arizona

According to this article: arrests for Patriot Act violations are 1,618 for drug war crimes, 122 for fraud and 15 for terrorist crimes

According to this article: 62 percent of Patriot Act arrests were for drug war crimes, less then 1 percent were for terrorist crimes

Go NSA - N S A

F-35 fighter jet struggles to take off

Source

F-35 fighter jet struggles to take off

Reporting from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

June 12, 2013

Far beyond the electronic security gates and razor-wire topped fences, Col. Rod Cregier surveys a team of technicians busily readying a lithe F-35 fighter jet for its next test flight.

As the F-35 program director at the base, Cregier and his team play a crucial role in a nationwide military effort to get the high-tech jet ready for battle.

After a decade of administrative problems, cost overruns and technical glitches, the F-35 is still not ready for action. The program has consistently come under political attack even though the military considers it crucial to the nation's defense needs.

Cregier believes the program is finally on course and said he is convinced that the jet can successfully replace the military's aging fighter fleets — some 34 years old — though he does not downplay the significant challenges his team faces.

"This is an incredibly complex aircraft, the most complex aircraft ever built," Cregier said. "Getting it right isn't easy."

In the skies above the Mojave Desert, test pilots today are pushing the radar-evading F-35 to new heights and flying to ever-increasing speeds to uncover design flaws. Just last week, an F-35 launched a missile in mid-flight from its internal weapons bay for the first time in a test flight for the Air Force.

But problems constantly crop up. Twice this year alone, F-35s have been grounded after different parts failed.

Testing the F-35 is key to the Pentagon's ultimate plan to build 2,457 of the planes. Known as the Joint Strike Fighter, the program centered around a plan to develop one basic fighter plane that could — with a few tweaks — be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

The idea is that it can take off and land on runways and aircraft carriers, as well as hover like a helicopter. No one fighter aircraft has had all these capabilities. From an engineering standpoint, it's a challenging task for plane maker Lockheed Martin Corp. because the requirements of the different services vary so much.

Each day, test pilots are expanding the edges of the F-35's flight envelope of all three variants at Edwards Air Force Base and Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland.

Pressure intensified on the test teams last week when the Marines Corps said it wanted its F-35s to be ready for combat by the end of 2015 — one year earlier than planned. The Air Force also moved up its date, to 2016. The Navy plans to see its F-35s aboard U.S. aircraft carriers by early-2019.

This is an ambitious plan, considering the Government Accountability Office estimated that F-35 flight testing, which has repeatedly fallen behind schedule, is only about one-third complete.

On more than one occasion the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation has lowered the plane's performance specifications by reducing turn performance and slowing the acceleration rate.

The most demanding testing still lies years ahead.

The GAO estimated the program would cost an unprecedented $12.6 billion a year on average through 2037 — that's an average of about $1.4 million an hour for the next two and a half decades. [$12.6 billion a year is about $42 for every one of the 300 million men, woman and children in the USA. or about $84 for each adult in the USA]

The per-plane cost estimates have climbed to $161 million today from $81 million in 2001, the GAO said.

The Pentagon has been relentless in its pursuit to develop the F-35 because its fighter planes are aging fast. The Air Force's 1,664 fighters' average age is 23 years — considered the oldest in its history. [And I say so what!!! The American government spends more on our military then ALL the other nations of the world combined. We are the supreme bully on planet earth.]

Test pilots say some of the F-35's delays can be traced to the concept that computer simulation and modeling would recognize many of the F-35 design problems right away, instead of the old-fashioned method of testing: in the air.

Under this premise, the Pentagon approved a plan to manufacture F-35s while simultaneously testing them. The plan, called concurrency, calls for scores of F-35s to be sent back to Lockheed for rework after testing is done.

Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, called this approach "acquisition malpractice" last year and said that predictions were too optimistic.

"Now we're paying the price for being wrong," Kendall said.

There are 61 F-35s already delivered, 81 completely built and others still being assembled at Lockheed's facility in Ft. Worth, Texas. The Pentagon estimated that retrofit costs for the first 90 aircraft will amount to $1.2 billion.

Lockheed Martin has given more than $2.8 million in donations to political candidates from all 50 states in the 2012 cycle, and promotes the fact that the F-35 program provides 127,000 direct and indirect jobs in 47 states and Puerto Rico.

Winslow T. Wheeler, a military budget specialist and frequent Pentagon critic at the Project for Government Oversight, said the decision to test and build the F-35 at the same time was a political move to get federal funding flowing to congressional districts before actual performance of the weapon system was shown.

Lockheed has long had political muscle — the company donated to 425 of 535 Congressional members in the 2012 cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org — and has garnered bipartisan support around the F-35 program.

The company promotes the fact that the F-35 provides 127,000 direct and indirect jobs in 47 states and Puerto Rico. It expects to pump an estimated $6 billion into California's economy this year involving 298 companies and resulting in 28,000 jobs.

"It's a way for the contractor to get the hooks in Congress," he said. "For a contractor, the measure of success in a program is getting it started. Once you get that money rolling in, it doesn't matter whether or not the thing you built works."

Supporters and critics alike say the F-35's escalating price represents an inescapable roadblock that Congress must face. The government's track record is clear: The more a plane costs, the fewer it buys.

Two decades ago, officials wanted 648 F-22 fighter jets for $149 million per plane. Eventually, the military ended up with only 188 at a price tag of $412 million each. Before that, the Pentagon wanted 132 new B-2 stealth bombers at about $500 million per plane. It ultimately bought 21 at $2.1 billion each.

Steve O'Bryan, a Lockheed vice president, admits the "early effects of concurrency were more disruptive" than the company had initially thought, but that the program is back on track. He said the F-35 will have completed 50% of testing by year's end.

"We're now at a tipping point with this program," O'Bryan said. "We've figured things out, brought costs down, increased orders from international partners."

He was backed up in the Pentagon's latest cost estimates that were released last month. The report said that — for the first time ever — the F-35's development and production cost had decreased by 1.1% to $391.2 billion from $395.7 billion, and O'Bryan expects the downward trend to continue. [I wonder if this is another one of those Congressional account math techniques where a 1.1 decrease really means a 50 percent increase because they uses smoke and mirrors in their accounting methodology???]

Because of F-35 delays, the GAO said the military will spend about $8 billion to extend the life of its Cold War-era fighter aircraft and to buy new versions of the planes.

Lockheed is making its F-35 sales pitch overseas, where there is growing interest from places such as South Korea and Singapore. There are already foreign buyers relying on the program. Lockheed plans on selling hundreds of F-35s to the some the U.S.'s closest military partners: Britain, Italy, Australia, Canada, Norway, Turkey, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The intense interest is felt back on the air base at Edwards, where Cregier stands in front of an F-35 called the "show pony." The plane bears eight stickers representing the flags of all the partner countries.

"Everyone is aware that money and politics is a big part of this program," Cregier said. "My job is to filter that away from the force."

Contact the reporters

Follow W.J. Hennigan (@wjhenn) and Ralph Vartabedian (@RVartabedian) on Twitter

Obama to step up military support of Syrian rebels

Source

Obama to step up military support of Syrian rebels

Associated Press Thu Jun 13, 2013 5:03 PM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has authorized sending weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time, U.S. officials said Thursday, after the White House disclosed that the United States has conclusive evidence President Bashar Assad’s government used chemical weapons against opposition forces trying to overthrow him.

Obama has repeatedly said the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” triggering greater American intervention in the two-year crisis.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the strongest proponents of U.S. military action in Syria, said he was told Thursday that Obama had decided to “provide arms to the rebels,” a decision confirmed by three U.S. officials. The officials cautioned that no decisions had been made on the specific type of weaponry or when it would reach the Syrian rebels, who are under increasing assault from Assad’s forces.

Still, the White House signaled that Obama did plan to step up U.S. involvement in the Syrian crisis in response to the chemical weapons disclosure.

“This is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we are providing,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

The U.S. has so far provided the Syrian rebel army with rations and medical supplies.

Thursday’s announcement followed a series of urgent meetings at the White House this week that revealed deep divisions within the administration over U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war. The proponents of more aggressive action — including Secretary of State John Kerry — appeared to have won out over those wary of sending weapons and ammunition into a war zone where Hezbollah and Iranian fighters are backing Assad’s armed forces, and al-Qaida-linked extremists back the rebellion.

Obama still opposes putting American troops on the ground in Syria and the U.S. has made no decision on operating a no-fly zone over Syria, Rhodes said.

U.S. officials said the administration could provide the rebels with a range of weapons, including small arms, ammunition, assault rifles and a variety of anti-tank weaponry such as shoulder-fired remote-propelled grenades and other missiles. However, a final decision on the inventory has not been made, the officials said.

Most of those would be weapons the opposition forces could easily use and not require much additional training to operate. Obama’s opposition to deploying American troops to Syria makes it difficult to provide much large-scale training. Other smaller- scale training can be done outside Syria’s borders.

All of the officials insisted on anonymity in order to discuss internal administration discussions.

Word of the stepped up assistance followed new U.S. intelligence assessments showing that Assad has used chemical weapons, including sarin, on a small scale multiple times in the last year. Up to 150 people have been killed in those attacks, the White House said, constituting a small percentage of the 93,000 people killed in Syria over the last two years.

The White House said it believes Assad’s regime still maintains control of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and does not see any evidence that rebel forces have launched attacks using the deadly agents.

The Obama administration announced in April that it had “varying degrees of confidence” that sarin had been used in Syria. But they said at the time that they had not been able to determine who was responsible for deploying the gas.

The more conclusive findings announced Thursday were aided by evidence sent to the United States by France, which, along with Britain, has announced it had determined that Assad’s government had used chemical weapons.

Obama has said repeatedly that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game changer” for U.S. policy on Syria, which until now has focused entirely on providing the opposition with nonlethal assistance and humanitarian aid.

The White House said it had notified Congress, the United Nations and key international allies about the new U.S. chemical weapons determination. Obama will discuss the assessments, along with broader problems in Syria, next week during the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland.

Among those in attendance will be Russian President Vladimir Putin, one of Assad’s most powerful backers. Obama and Putin will hold a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of the summit, where the U.S. leader is expected to press his Russian counterpart to drop his political and military support for the Syrian government.

“We believe that Russia and all members of the international community should be concerned about the use of chemical weapons,” Rhodes said.

Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said his country was “not surprised by the determination made by the U.S. government,” given its own assessments, and was in consultation with the Americans about next steps.

The U.S. has so far provided the Syrian rebel army with rations and medical supplies. In April, Kerry announced that the administration had agreed in principle to expand its military support to the opposition to include defensive items like night vision goggles, body armor and armored vehicles.

The Syrian fighters have been clamoring for bolder Western intervention, particularly given the estimated 5,000 Hezbollah guerrillas propping up Assad’s forces. Assad’s stunning military success last week at Qusair, near the Lebanese border, and preparations for offensives against Homs and Aleppo have made the matter more urgent.

While McCain has pressed for a greater role for the U.S. military, other lawmakers have expressed reservations about American involvement in another conflict and fears that weapons sent to the rebels could fall into the hands of al-Qaida-linked groups.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the Assad regime but expressed serious concerns about the United States being pulled into a proxy war.

“There are many actions that the United States can take to increase our humanitarian assistance to refugee populations and opposition groups short of injecting more weapons into the conflict,” Murphy said. “I urge the president to exercise restraint and to consult closely with Congress before undertaking any course of action to commit American military resources to Syrian opposition forces.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, also urged the White House to consult with Congress.

“It is long past time to bring the Assad regime’s bloodshed in Syria to an end,” he said through a spokesman, Brendan Buck. “As President Obama examines his options, it is our hope he will properly consult with Congress before taking any action.”

PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - Use it to encrypt your data

Personally I suspect that if you can encrypt it the government can decrypt it. The only question is how long will it take for the government to decrypt it and how much will it cost the government to decrypt it.

When Phil Zimmermann first invented PGP the US government threatened to put him in jail if he gave people outside of the USA copies of the software. The government says PGP is a munition and therefor subject to the governments control.

Phil Zimmermann got around that problem and put the source code on the internet and the cat has been out of the bag since then. The government didn't carry out it's threat to put him in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

http://www.gnupg.org/

The free version of PGP

http://www.pgpi.org/

More free PGP software

http://www.symantec.com/encryption

The commercial version of PGP

http://cryptography.org/getpgp.htm

Where to get PGP

http://www.openpgp.org/

http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/

Obama Africa trip to cost $60 to $100 million

I think this article shows that modern American Presidents are royal rulers that live in luxury with police state protections that far surpass anything a royal Roman Emperor could have dreamed about.

Source

Source: President Obama Africa trip could cost $60 million

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura The Washington Post Fri Jun 14, 2013 10:22 AM

When President Obama makes his first extended trip to sub-Saharan Africa this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances.

Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The elaborate security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander in chief on trips abroad.

Any journey by the president, such as one scheduled next week for Northern Ireland and Germany, is an immense and costly logistical challenge. But the trip to Africa is complicated by a confluence of factors that could make it one of the most expensive of Obama’s tenure, according to people familiar with the planning.

The first family is making back-to-back stops from June 26 to July 3 in three countries where U.S. officials are providing nearly all the resources, rather than depending heavily on local police forces, military authorities or hospitals for assistance.

The president and first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document.

But officials said Thursday that the safari had been canceled in favor of a trip to Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.

When The Post first asked White House officials about the safari last week, they said no final decision had been made. A White House official said Thursday that the cancellation was not related to The Post’s inquiries.

“We do not have a limitless supply of assets to support presidential missions, and we prioritized a visit to Robben Island over a two-hour safari in Tanzania,” said spokesman Josh Earnest. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t do both.” [Well $60 to $100 million for a stinking trip to Africa is close to a limitless supply of assets]

Internal administration documents circulated in April show that the Obama family was scheduled to go to both Robben Island and the safari park, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also made trips to multiple African nations involving similarly laborious preparations. Bush went in 2003 and 2008, bringing his wife on both occasions. Bush’s two daughters went along on the first trip, which included a safari at a game preserve on the Botswana-South Africa border.

“Even in the most developed places of Western Europe, the level of support you need for mass movements by the president is really extraordinary,” said Steve Atkiss, who coordinated travel as special assistant for operations to Bush. “As you go farther afield, to less-developed places, certainly it’s more of a logistical challenge.”

White House and Secret Service officials declined to discuss the details of the security operations, and administration aides cautioned that the president’s itinerary is not finalized.

Obama’s overseas travels come as government agencies, including the Secret Service, are wrestling with mandatory, across-the-board spending cuts. The service has had to slice $84 million from its budget this year, and this spring the agency canceled public White House tours to save $74,000 a week in overtime costs.

Many details about foreign presidential trips are classified for national security reasons, and there is little public information about overall costs. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that Clinton’s 1998 trip to six African nations cost the U.S. government at least $42.7 million. Most of that was incurred by the military, which made 98 airlift missions to transport personnel and vehicles, and set up temporary medical evacuation units in five countries.

That figure did not include costs borne by the Secret Service, which were considered classified.

Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, according to one person familiar with the journey, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. The Secret Service planning document, which was provided to The Post by a person who is concerned about the amount of resources necessary for the trip, does not specify costs.

“The infrastructure that accompanies the president’s travels is beyond our control,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “The security requirements are not White House-driven, they are Secret Service-driven.”

Current and former government security officials involved in presidential trips said White House staff also help determine what’s required, because they plan the visits and parameters. The Secret Service and military respond to that itinerary by providing what their agencies consider the required security.

White House officials said the trip was long overdue, marking Obama’s first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa aside from a 22-hour stopover in Ghana in 2009. The emerging democracies on the itinerary are crucial partners in regional security conflicts, Rhodes said.

Obama will hold bilateral meetings with each country’s leader and seek to forge stronger economic ties at a time when China is investing heavily in Africa. He also will highlight global health programs, including HIV/AIDS prevention.

The first lady, who toured South Africa and Botswana without the president in 2011, will headline some events on her own during the week. The stops will add to the logistical challenges, because she will require her own security detail and vehicles, the planning document shows.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan declined to discuss details of the journey. “We always provide the appropriate level of protection to create a secure environment,” he said.

According to the Secret Service document, Obama will spend a night in Dakar, Senegal, two nights in Johannesburg, a night in Cape Town and one night in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Among the 56 vehicles for the trip are parade limousines for the president and first lady, a specialized communications vehicle for secure telephone and video connections, a truck that jams radio frequencies around the presidential motorcade, a fully loaded ambulance that can handle biological or chemical contaminants and a truck for X-ray equipment.

The Secret Service transports such vehicles, along with bulletproof glass, on most trips, including those inside the United States, White House officials said. But with quick stops in three countries, the agency will need three sets of each, because there is not enough time to transfer the equipment, according to the planning document.

One hundred agents are needed as “post-standers” — to man security checkpoints and borders around the president — in each of the first three cities he visits. Sixty-five are needed to meet up with Obama in Dar es Salaam. Before the safari in Mikumi National Park was canceled this week, an additional 35 post-standers had been slated to protect the Obamas and their two daughters there, according to the document.

In addition, 80 to 100 additional agents will be flown in to work rotating shifts, with round-the-clock coverage, for Obama’s and his family’s security details, counterassault teams and logistics coordinators.

The planning document does not provide a total number of how many individual agents will be involved in the trip; some will work in more than one location.

Officials said the Secret Service does not want the president traveling anywhere without a top-rated trauma center nearby. The White House medical unit makes decisions about which foreign hospitals meet its standards when it makes advance visits to the locations for planned trips, officials said.

In much of the developing world, the U.S. Navy provides a “floating hospital” on an aircraft carrier or amphibious ship nearby, officials said.

“This is what you need to support the American presidency,” Atkiss said of the requirements, “regardless of who the president is.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

Source

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: June 13, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

By Raphael Satter

Associated Press

Posted: 06/14/2013 09:29:47 AM PDT

LONDON -- Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.

But given the revelations spilling out into the media, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying by the U.S. agency.

For some, it's a matter of indifference who or what is rifling through their electronic records. Others, mindful of spy agencies' history of abuse, are more concerned.

Here are some basic tips to avoid having your personal life turned into an intelligence report:

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ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS

Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe -- not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.

To beat the snoops, experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

[The government probably can still decrypt and read your emails, but the only question is how long will it take them to decrypt the data, and how much will it cost them. If you are committing a victimless less crime that should be legal, play it safe and don't send it over the internet. On the other hand it's a great idea to use PGP to encrypt your weekly grocery shopping list and useless chit chat you talk to friends about. Make it expensive for the government to spy on you an collect useless information.]

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USE TOR

Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.

Disadvantages: Browsing the web with TOR can be painfully slow. And some services -- like file swapping protocols used by many Internet users to share videos and music -- aren't compatible.

[If you ask me TOR sounds pretty useless. The data you send on the internet is already split into packets and some times the packets travel different paths to get to the final destination]

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DITCH THE PHONE

Your everyday cell phone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cell phone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cell phone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.

An even bigger issue is that cell phones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give the NSA a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cell phones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home. [And remember cell phones are just RADIO TRANSMITTERS. Everything you say is broadcast on the radio, and ANYBODY can listen in. Grab one of those old TV sets with 81 channels and tune in to the high end of the dial. Hear that junk. It's cell phone calls. If you can hear it on an old TV set, the government can also listen in.]

Disadvantages: Not having a cell phone handy when you really need it. Other alternatives, like using "burner" phones paid for anonymously and discarded after use, rapidly become expensive.

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CUT UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS

The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. So stick to cash, or, if you're more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around.

Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online currency, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.

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DON'T KEEP YOUR DATA IN AMERICA OR WITH AMERICAN COMPANIES

U.S. companies are subject to U.S. law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials -- not just at the NSA -- can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.

If you don't like the sound of PRISM, National Security Letters, or anything to do with the Patriot Act, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.

Disadvantages: Silicon Valley's Internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What's more, there's no guarantee that European spy agencies don't have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.

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STEER CLEAR OF MALICIOUS SOFTWARE

If they can't track it, record it, or intercept it, an increasing number of spies aren't shy about hacking their way in to steal your data outright. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, warned the Guardian that his agency had been on a worldwide binge of cyberattacks.

"We hack everyone everywhere," he said.

Former officials don't appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as "commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries' network." In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that "we are the best at doing it. Period."

Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus program, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.

Disadvantages: Keeping abreast of all the latest updates and warily scanning emails for viruses can be exhausting.

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SO WILL ALL THIS KEEP MY DATA SAFE FROM SPYING?

Safer, maybe.

Using anonymity services and encryption "simply make it harder, but not impossible for a dedicated investigator to link your activities together and identify you," Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said in an email.

"Someone can always find you ---- just depends on how motivated they are (and how much information they have access to)."

Pushing the envelope, NSA-style

Pushing the envelope, NSA-style

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: June 13 E-mail the writer

Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record “mail cover,” i.e., what’s written on the outside of an envelope — the addresses of sender and receiver. [I have to disagree with that decision. If I pay a private company to provide me with mail service I think it would be wrong for them to tell everybody on the plant who I was sending and receiving letters to and from. And I would switch companies if I found out they were blabbing that information all over the planet]

The National Security Agency’s recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom — the outside of the envelope, as it were. The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order. [Again I disagree with that logic. My phone company should not be telling everybody on the planet who I make calls to and who I receive calls from. And I would switch companies if I found out they were giving out this information]

The constitutional basis for this is simple: The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what’s written on an envelope. It’s dropped in a public mailbox, read by workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter carrier. It’s already openly been shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and (e-)mailed back to you by a third party, namely the phone company. [Again I disagree with the Supreme Courts definition of a "reasonable expectation of privacy"]

Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the point directly regarding the telephone: The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its record. There is therefore nothing constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern recognition.

But doesn’t the other NSA program — the spooky-sounding James Bond-evoking PRISM — give you the willies? Well, what we know thus far is that PRISM is designed to read the e-mails of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States. If an al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is e-mailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it.

As former attorney general Michael Mukasey explained, the Constitution is not a treaty with the rest of the world; it’s an instrument for the protection of the American citizenry. And reading other people’s mail is something countries do to protect themselves. It’s called spying. [Again I have to disagree with that. The American government should not be SPYING on ANYONE, including foreign countries. If we declare war on a county I see no problems with spying on them as part of the war effort, but spying on a country we are not at war with is wrong]

Is that really shocking?

The problem here is not constitutionality. It’s practicality. Legally this is fairly straightforward. But between intent and execution lies a shadow — the human factor, the possibility of abuse. And because of the scope and power of the NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties.

The real issue is safeguards. [The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the safeguards here, and they both have been flushed down the toilet by Congress and the President!!!] We could start by asking how an Edward Snowden — undereducated, newly employed, rootless and grandiose — could have been given such access and power. We need a toughening of both congressional oversight and judicial review, perhaps even some independent outside scrutiny. Plus periodic legislative revision — say, reauthorization every couple of years — in light of the efficacy of the safeguards and the nature of the external threat.

The object is not to abolish these vital programs. [Again I disagree, these programs should be ABOLISHED] It’s to fix them. Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation — provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government, and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling.

There are nonetheless two other reasons these revelations have sparked such anxiety. Every spying program is a compromise between liberty and security. Yet here is a president who campaigned on the proposition that he would transcend such pedestrian considerations. “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he declared in his first inaugural address, no less.

When caught with his hand on your phone data, however, President Obama offered this defense: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy. . . . We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

So it wasn’t such a false choice after all, was it, Mr. President? [OK, now it looks like we can agree on something??? Emperor Obama is a tyrant and hypocrite!!!]

Nor does it help that just three weeks ago the president issued a major foreign-policy manifesto whose essential theme was that the war on terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.”

Now it turns out that Obama’s government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror intelligence operation. But if the tide of war is receding, why this vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat — that you assure us is receding?

Which is it, Mr. President? Tell it straight. We are a nation of grown-ups. We can make choices. Even one it took you four years to admit is not “false.”

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Five myths about privacy

Five myths about privacy

By Daniel J. Solove, Published: June 13

Daniel J. Solove is a law professor at George Washington University, the founder of the privacy and data-security training company TeachPrivacy and the author of “Nothing to Hide.”

The disclosure of two secret government surveillance programs — one involving phone records and the other personal data from Internet companies — has sparked debate about privacy and national security. Has the government gone too far? Or not far enough? How much privacy should we sacrifice for security? To discuss these issues productively, some myths must be dispelled.

1. The collection of phone numbers and other “metadata” isn’t much of a threat to privacy.

Don’t worry, argue defenders of these surveillance programs: The government is gathering innocuous data, not intimate secrets. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama declared. Intelligence agencies are “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

But “metadata” about phone calls can be quite revealing. Whom someone is talking to may be just as sensitive as what’s being said. Calls to doctors or health-care providers can suggest certain medical conditions. Calls to businesses say something about a person’s interests and lifestyle. Calls to friends reveal associations, potentially pointing to someone’s political, religious or philosophical beliefs.

Even when individual calls are innocuous, a detailed phone record can present a telling portrait of the person associated with a telephone number. Collect millions of those records, and there’s the potential to trace the entire country’s social and professional connections.

2. Surveillance must be secret to protect us.

The administration and intelligence agencies have been quick to defend the classified status of the phone and Internet surveillance programs. “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander went further: “Grave harm has already been done by opening this up.” Presidents Obama and George W. Bush have both perpetuated this myth.

Of course, if the government is trying to gather data about a particular suspect, keeping the specifics of surveillance efforts secret will decrease the likelihood of that suspect altering his or her behavior.

But secrecy at the level of an individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret. The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security. What kind of information is gathered? How is it used? How securely is it kept? What kind of oversight is there? Are these activities even legal? These questions can’t be answered, and the government can’t be held accountable, if surveillance programs are completely classified.

With the phone and Internet programs, it isn’t clear that sufficient protective measures are in place. The president and security officials assure us there are, but without transparency, we can’t really know.

3. Only people with something to hide should be concerned about their privacy.

In the wake of the leaks about government surveillance, writer and privacy supporter Daniel Sieradski started a Twitter account with the handle @_nothingtohide and has been retweeting variations on this myth. A typical tweet: “I don’t care if the government knows everything I do. I am fully confident that I will not be arrested.”

When privacy is compromised, though, the problems can go far beyond the exposure of illegal activity or embarrassing information. It can provide the government with a tremendous amount of power over its people. It can undermine trust and chill free speech and association. It can make people vulnerable to abuse of their information and further intrusions into their lives.

Even if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.

4. National security requires major sacrifices in privacy.

Obama invoked this myth this month when he said, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” The implication is that those upset about surveillance fail to recognize that we must trade some privacy for security.

But usually it’s not either-or. As Obama himself said in his 2009 inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Protecting privacy doesn’t need to mean scuttling a security measure. Most people concerned about the privacy implications of government surveillance aren’t arguing for no surveillance and absolute privacy. They’d be fine giving up some privacy as long as appropriate controls, limitations, oversight and accountability mechanisms were in place.

This sentiment was evident in the public outcry over the Transportation Security Administration’s use of full-body X-ray scanners that displayed what looked like nude images of airline passengers. No one wanted to end airport security checks. They wanted checks that were less intrusive. Congress required the TSA to use less-revealing software, and the agency ended up switching to different machines.

5. Americans aren’t especially bothered by government intrusions into their privacy.

“The public is just fine with government snooping in the name of counterterrorism,” read one Washington Post headline this past week. Indeed, a Post and Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans prioritized the investigation of possible terrorist threats over the protection of personal privacy and considered it “acceptable” for the NSA to use secret court orders to access phone records to investigate terrorism.

Yet the same poll showed that the public was more closely divided on whether “the U.S. government should be able to monitor everyone’s e-mail and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks.” And a Gallup poll found that only 37 percent of Americans approved of the NSA obtaining phone records and Internet communications as part of efforts to investigate terrorism, while 53 percent disapproved.

I would expect polls to show even more support for privacy if it weren’t falsely pitted — in public debates and in poll questions themselves — against stopping terrorist attacks. We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance of its citizens.

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Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

NUEVA YORK, EU.- Envueltos en el escándalo de vigilancia en internet del Gobierno de Estados Unidos, Facebook y Google, dos íconos de la era digital, sufren un golpe a su reputación que los ha dejado en una posición cuando menos incómoda frente a sus usuarios.

Ambas compañías, al igual que Microsoft, dueña de Skype; AOL; Yahoo!; PalTalk y Apple, desmintieron rotundamente su colaboración con el programa PRISM, a través del cual la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad (NSA, por sus siglas en inglés) monitorea las conversaciones en la red de redes.

En días recientes, el diario británico The Guardian reveló la existencia de PRISM gracias a un subcontratista de la agencia, Edward Snowden, quien filtró los documentos a la prensa y que huyó a Hong Kong.

Pero las desmentidas de Larry Page, CEO de Google, y Mark Zuckerberg, líder de Facebook, en las que afirman que no brindaron acceso directo a sus servidores, estuvieron lejos de despejar las dudas que azotan la credibilidad de ambas empresas.

“Es más probable que no estén autorizadas a revelar su participación, a confirmar una cosa o la otra”, afirmó a REFORMA Dave Naass, vocero de Electronic Frontier Foundation, un grupo que pelea por la privacidad de los usuarios de internet.

Naass dijo que la semántica de los comunicados de ambos empresarios fue escogida para evitar reconocer la participación en un programa clasificado, y que lo más probable es que las compañías estaban al tanto del monitoreo.

La otra alternativa es que los servicios de Inteligencia vulneraron la seguridad de las empresas sin que estas se enteraran, algo que también sería perjudicial para la reputación de ambos gigantes.

Muchos usuarios descargaron en las redes sociales el malestar con ambas compañías. En Twitter, que se negó a participar del programa de monitoreo, circulaba ayer una fotografía que mostraba a nueva “política de seguridad de Facebook”. Una de las nuevas opciones para compartir información incluía un nuevo grupo: “Amigos y la CIA”; o “Sólo yo y la CIA”.

“Facebook es una sucursal del FBI”, se quejó Phil Wang, en uno de los cientos de comentarios que los usuarios de la red social dejaron en el mensaje que Zuckerberg publicó luego de puntillosos reportes periodísticos, uno de ellos en The New York Times, en los que se explicaba cómo se tejió la colaboración de las compañías con el Gobierno.

Con todo, aún es una incógnita si las empresas deberán enfrentar consecuencias más severas como un menor tráfico. Gracias a la penetración de los celulares inteligentes, los estadounidenses pasan en promedio 32 minutos al día en Facebook, según un informe de la consultora IDC. Google es el principal motor de búsqueda del mundo.

Ilya Shapiro, del Instituto Cato, un centro de estudios libertario de Washington, dijo que no se puede descartar que las empresas enfrenten reclamos por colaborar con Washington y entregar información privada de sus usuarios.

“Pero eso depende del acuerdo de privacidad, ese contrato que nadie lee”, matizó Shapiro a REFORMA.

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

Personally I wouldn't bet that NSA proof encryption exists. I suspect that NSA if it wants to spend lots of money and time can decrypt just about anything.

If you are going to encrypt your emails using the longest possible keys to make NSA work a little bit harder and longer to crack your emails.

Also encrypt everything you send. Make the folks at NSA spend lots of money to read that grocery list you sent to your boy friend or girl friend. Encrypt the chit chat you email your friends about the Super Bowl or what ever. Make NSA spend big bucks to learn useless details of your private life.

Also remember that the more emails that your friends send to you using the same public key makes it easier for NSA to crack your code. So change your public and private keys frequently.

The best policy to follow is that if you don't want the government to read your messages don't put them on the internet. And remember the government also listens to our phone calls. If you don't want the government to hear it, don't say it on a telephone.

Source

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: June 14, 2013 at 10:50

Computer programmers believe they know how to build cryptographic systems that are impossible for anyone, even the U.S. government, to crack. So why can the NSA read your e-mail?

Last week, leaks revealed that the Web sites most people use every day are sharing users’ private information with the government. Companies participating in the National Security Agency’s program, code-named PRISM, include Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During the 1990s, a “cypherpunk” movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for governments to spy on ordinary users’ private communications.

The government seemed to believe this story, too. “The ability of just about everybody to encrypt their messages is rapidly outrunning our ability to decode them,” a U.S. intelligence official told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. The government classified cryptographic software as a munition, banning its export outside the United States. And it proposed requiring that cryptographic systems have “back doors” for government interception.

The cypherpunks won that battle. By the end of the Clinton administration, the government conceded that the Internet had made it impossible to control the spread of strong cryptographic software. But more than a decade later, the cypherpunks seem to have lost the war. Software capable of withstanding NSA snooping is widely available, but hardly anyone uses it. Instead, we use Gmail, Skype, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger and other applications whose data is reportedly accessible through PRISM.

And that’s not a coincidence: Adding strong encryption to the most popular Internet products would make them less useful, less profitable and less fun.

“Security is very rarely free,” says J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. “There are trade-offs between convenience and usability and security.”

Most people’s priority: Convenience

Consumers have overwhelmingly chosen convenience and usability. Mainstream communications tools are more user-friendly than their cryptographically secure competitors and have features that would be difficult to implement in an NSA-proof fashion.

And while most types of software get more user-friendly over time, user-friendly cryptography seems to be intrinsically difficult. Experts are not much closer to solving the problem today than they were two decades ago.

Ordinarily, the way companies make sophisticated software accessible to regular users is by performing complex, technical tasks on their behalf. The complexity of Google, Microsoft and Apple’s vast infrastructure is hidden behind the simple, polished interfaces of their Web and mobile apps. But delegating basic security decisions to a third party means giving it the ability to access your private content and share it with others, including the government.

Most modern online services do make use of encryption. Popular Web services such as Gmail and Hotmail support an encryption standard called SSL. If you visit a Web site and see a “lock” icon in the corner of your browser window, that means SSL encryption is enabled. But while this kind of encryption will protect users against ordinary bad guys, it’s useless against governments.

That’s because SSL only protects data moving between your device and the servers operated by Google, Apple or Microsoft. Those service providers have access to unencrypted copies of your data. So if the government suspects criminal behavior, it can compel tech companies to turn over private e-mails or Facebook posts.

That problem can be avoided with “end-to-end” encryption. In this scheme, messages are encrypted on the sender’s computer and decrypted on the recipient’s device. Intermediaries such as Google or Microsoft only see the encrypted version of the message, making it impossible for them to turn over copies to the government.

Software like that exists. One of the oldest is PGP, e-mail encryption software released in 1991. Others include OTR (for “off the record”), which enables secure instant messaging, and the Internet telephony apps Silent Circle and Redphone.

But it’s difficult to add new features to applications with end-to-end encryption. Take Gmail, for example. “If you wanted to prevent government snooping, you’d have to prevent Google’s servers from having a copy of the text of your messages,” Halderman says. “But that would make it much harder for Google to provide features like search over your messages.” Filtering spam also becomes difficult. And end-to-end encryption would also make it difficult for Google to make money on the service, since it couldn’t use the content of messages to target ads.

A similar point applies to Facebook. The company doesn’t just transmit information from one user to another. It automatically resizes users’ photos and allows them to “tag” themselves and their friends. Facebook filters the avalanche of posts generated by your friends to display the ones you are most likely to find the most interesting. And it indexes the information users post to make it searchable.

These features depend on Facebook’s servers having access to a person’s private data, and it would be difficult to implement them in a system based on end-to-end encryption. While computer scientists are working on techniques for creating more secure social-media sites, these techniques aren’t yet mature enough to support all of Facebook’s features or efficient enough to serve hundreds of millions of users.

Other user headaches

End-to-end encryption creates other headaches for users. Conventional online services offer mechanisms for people to recover lost passwords. These mechanisms work because Apple, Microsoft and other online service providers have access to unencrypted data.

In contrast, when a system has end-to-end encryption, losing a password is catastrophic; it means losing all data in the user’s account.

Also, encryption is effective only if you’re communicating with the party you think you’re communicating with. This security relies on keys — large numbers associated with particular people that make it possible to scramble a message on one end and decode it on the other. In a maneuver cryptographers call a “man in the middle” attack, a malicious party impersonates a message’s intended recipient and tricks the sender into using the wrong encryption key. To thwart this kind of attack, sender and recipient need a way to securely exchange and verify each other’s encryption keys.

“A key is supposed to be associated closely with a person, which means you want a person to be involved in creating their own key, and in verifying the keys of people they communicate with,” says Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University. “Those steps tend to be awkward and confusing.”

And even those who are willing to make the effort are likely to make mistakes that compromise security. The computer scientists Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar explored these problem in a famous 1999 paper called “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt.” They focused on PGP, which was (and still is) one of the most popular tools for users to send encrypted e-mail.

PGP “is not usable enough to provide effective security for most computer users,” the authors wrote.

Users expect software to “just work” without worrying too much about the technical details. But the researchers discovered that users tended to make mistakes that compromise their security. Users are supposed to send other people their “public key,” used to encode messages addressed to them, and to keep their private key a secret. Yet some users foolishly did the opposite, sending others the private key that allowed eavesdroppers to unscramble e-mail addressed to them. Others failed to make backup copies of their private encryption keys, so when their hard drives crashed, they lost access to their encrypted e-mail.

Using PGP is such a hassle that even those with a strong need for secure communication resist its use. When Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the details of the PRISM program, first contacted Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian in February, he asked the journalist to set up PGP on his computer so the two could communicate securely. He even sent Greenwald a video with step-by-step directions for setting up the software. But Greenwald, who didn’t yet know the significance of Snowden’s leaks, dragged his feet. He did not set up the software until late March, after filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was also in contact with Snowden, met with Greenwald and alerted him to the significance of his disclosures.

Going with the flow

Felten argues that another barrier to adopting strong cryptography is a chicken-and-egg problem: It is only useful if you know other people are also using it. Even people who have gone to the trouble of setting up PGP still send most of their e-mail in plain text because most recipients don’t have the capability to receive encrypted e-mail. People tend to use what’s installed on their computer. So even those who have Redphone will make most of their calls with Skype because that’s what other people use.

Halderman isn’t optimistic that strong cryptography will catch on with ordinary users anytime soon. In recent years, the companies behind the most popular Web browsers have beefed up their cryptographic capabilities, which could make more secure online services possible. But the broader trend is that users are moving more and more data from their hard drives to cloud computing platforms, which makes data even more vulnerable to government snooping.

Strong cryptographic software is available to those who want to use it. Whistleblowers, dissidents, criminals and governments use it every day. But cryptographic software is too complex and confusing to reach a mass audience anytime soon. Most people simply aren’t willing to invest the time and effort required to ensure the NSA can’t read their e-mail or listen to their phone calls. And so for the masses, online privacy depends more on legal safeguards than technological wizardry.

The cypherpunks dreamed of a future where technology protected people from government spying. But end-to-end encryption doesn’t work well if people don’t understand it. And the glory of Google or Facebook, after all, is that anyone can use them without really knowing how they work. trained to follow specific procedures in dealing with passengers and fare issues. “

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

And of course that is why the Founders gave us the 4th, 5th and most importantly the Second Amendments to keep these government tyrants in check.

But sadly the Bill of Rights and Constitution doesn't work that well and our current royal government masters have pretty much flushed the 4th Amendment down the toilet and have used the Patriot Act along with a bunch of rhetoric on terrorists to justify their spying on us.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

Associated Press Sun Jun 16, 2013 1:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Current and former top U.S. officials on Sunday defended the government’s collection of phone and Internet data following new revelations about the secret surveillance programs, saying the operations were essential in disrupting terrorist plots and did not infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.

In interviews on Sunday television talk shows, guests ranging from President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA and National Security Agency head Michael Hayden said the government’s reliance on data collection from both Americans and foreign nationals was constitutional and carefully overseen by executive, legislative and court authorities.

All three branches of government, using “aggressive internal checks inside the administration, from inspectors general and routine audits, are overseeing how we do these programs,” McDonough said. He added, “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking.”

The latest reassurances came as a new Washington Post report Sunday described the massive intertwined structure of four major data collection programs that have been set up by the government since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Post report follows earlier stories based on documents provided by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Two secret programs, the Post reported in its new disclosures, are aimed at phone and Internet metadata, while two more target contents of phone and Internet communications.

Metadata includes logs and timing of phone calls and lists of Internet communications, but does not include the actual contents of communications. Even without knowing those contents, intelligence officials can learn much from metadata, including likely locations and patterns of behavior.

A previously reported surveillance program aimed at the phone logs and location information of millions of Americans is called Mainway, the Post reported. A second program targeting the Internet contact logs and location information of foreign users is called Marina.

A third program, which intercepts telephone calls and routes their contents to government listeners, is called Nucleon.

A fourth program, Prism, exposed recently by Snowden, forces major Internet firms to turn over the detailed contents of Internet communications. Prism is aimed at foreign users but sometimes also sweeps up the content of Americans’ emails and other Internet communications, officials have acknowledged.

“The metadata story does touch upon Americans in a massive way with phone records but not the content. The Prism story is about foreigners and it is about content,” Hayden told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said that any phone metadata from Americans swept up in the surveillance is held under careful safeguards, kept in a “lockbox” that can only be accessed if it becomes relevant to terror investigations. U.S. officials also said Saturday that gathered data is destroyed every five years.

“This is a lock box with only phone numbers, no names, no addresses in it, we’ve used it sparingly,” Rogers said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But one Congressional critic of the secrecy surrounding the government’s surveillance raised doubts about the effectiveness of the widespread collection of Americans’ phone metadata.

“I don’t think collecting millions and millions of Americans’ phone calls — now this is the metadata, this is the time, place, to whom you direct the calls — is making us any safer,” said Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat. Udall said he would introduce a bill this week to narrow the reach of that collection to only “those who have a link to terrorism.”

Hayden said he worried that news reports about the programs have often provided erroneous information, “much to the harm of a rational national debate.” He did not specify those concerns.

The disclosures, provided in recent days by both the Post and The Guardian newspaper, came from classified documents exposed by Snowden, 29, who was working as a private contractor with the NSA and later said he grew disenchanted by what he saw as a growing secret American surveillance apparatus. After working with the two newspapers, Snowden turned up in Hong Kong, prompting concern that he might cooperate with Chinese authorities.

“I am very, very worried that he still has additional information that he hasn’t released yet, the Chinese would welcome the opportunity and probably be willing to provide immunity for him or sanctuary for him, if you will, in exchange for what he presumably knows,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Cheney added that he has “trouble believing” Snowden had access to all the materials he has disclosed, suggesting the possibility that Snowden had an accomplice inside U.S. security circles.

“I think you have to ask that question,” Cheney said.

McDonough, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” declined to speculate on Snowden’s dealings with China or his access to secret documents, citing a law enforcement investigation. But he cautioned against “some of the hyperbole that now is being thrown around from him and from others involved in this debate that would somehow cast a pall on the intelligence community.”

But McDonough also disputed Snowden’s claim that he had the ability to listen in on any phone conversation, including the president’s.

“That’s incorrect,” McDonough said.

Uncle Sam wants to know more about your Facebook page

Facebook reveals number of requests under government Internet surveillance program

By Brandon Bailey

Mercury News

Posted: 06/14/2013 08:45:50 PM PDT

MENLO PARK -- For the first time, Facebook late Friday disclosed the number of requests it received for user data from all government entities, and became the first Silicon Valley company to include in that figure the number of ultrasecret national security requests.

In a blog post, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot revealed that for the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. -- including local, state, and federal authorities, and including criminal and national security-related requests -- was between 9,000 and 10,000.

run the gamut -- everything from a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.

The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9,000 to 10,000 requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts, he noted.

But with more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, Ullyot added, "this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S., state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months."

Reports surfaced last week that government officials were collecting huge amounts of private Internet and telephone data -- disclosures enabled by leaks from a former National Security Agency contractor. Since then, Ullyot said, Facebook has been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities, urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders the company is required to comply with.

Google (GOOG) followed up Tuesday by announcing it has asked the FBI and Department of Justice for permission to begin reporting how many data requests the company receives from the government under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. FISA, the authority used by the government for its secret PRISM program aimed at tracking online activities of some Internet users, requires companies to keep those requests secret.

"We're pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) -- which until now no company has been permitted Facebook on Friday became the first Silicon Valley company to disclose how many requests for user data it has received under the U.S. government's ultrasecret foreign-intelligence surveillance laws. (Robert Galbraith / Reuters) to do," Ullyot wrote. As of Friday, he said, the government will only authorize Facebook to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range.

Ullyot called the initial step "progress," and said the company is continuing to push for even more transparency, "so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds."

Civil liberties groups that have criticized the government's data-gathering efforts say that such disclosures are helpful, but they have also complained that the broad ranges that the companies have reported are too vague and do not provide a full picture of government surveillance.

Until now, Facebook has not disclosed any data about government information requests, saying it was not allowed to provide a complete picture of those requests because of government secrecy rules.

Google has previously disclosed certain types of requests, including so-called "National Security Letters" issued under the Patriot Act, but it has not been allowed to say anything about requests issued under FISA.

Facebook's move revealed a split within the tech industry: Microsoft issued a similar report Friday that also provided a total number of government data requests that included an unspecified number of FISA requests. But Google criticized that approach, saying it was not helpful for the government to require the companies to provide only a single total for all types of requests.

"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests. We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters," Google said in a statement reported by several tech blogs. "Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."

Another tech company, Twitter, echoed Google's concern. Twitter legal director Benjamin Lee posted a tweet on his personal account late Friday, saying "We agree with @google: It's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests -- including FISA disclosures -- separately."

Mercury News Staff Writer Tracy Seipel contributed to this report. Contact Brandon Bailey at bbailey@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Associated Press Fri Jun 14, 2013 9:32 PM

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s top attorney said Friday night that after negotiations with national security officials the company has been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.

Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.

Facebook was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.

Ullyot said the company wanted to reveal the information because of “confusion and inaccurate reporting” on the issue, and to show that only “a tiny fraction of one percent” of its 1.1 billion users have been affected.

In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.

The companies have sought to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named “PRISM” that was revealed in leaks last week.

“We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a statement from Google said. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.”

Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users’ data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.

“We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested,” Ullyot said.” And we respond only as required by law.”

Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure

Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure

Posted: Sunday, June 16, 2013 8:41 am

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.

The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

___

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

___

When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.

"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.

Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.

Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.

___

A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.

"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth.

State photo-ID databases become troves for police

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State photo-ID databases become troves for police

Written by Craig Timberg Ellen Nakashima

Published: June 16

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The faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases that state officials assembled to prevent driver’s-license fraud but that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations.

The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial-recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens.

The most widely used systems were honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as soldiers sought to identify insurgents. The increasingly widespread deployment of the technology in the United States has helped police find murderers, bank robbers and drug dealers, many of whom leave behind images on surveillance videos or social-media sites that can be compared against official photo databases.

But law enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities.

Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face.

“Where is government going to go with that years from now?” said Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann, a conservative Republican who has fought the creation of such systems there. “Here your driver’s license essentially becomes a national ID card.”

Facial-recognition technology is part of a new generation of biometric tools that once were the stuff of science fiction but are increasingly used by authorities around the nation and the world. Though not yet as reliable as fingerprints, these technologies can help determine identity through individual variations in irises, skin textures, vein patterns, palm prints and a person’s gait while walking.

The Supreme Court’s approval this month of DNA collection during arrests coincides with rising use of that technology as well, with suspects in some cases submitting to tests that put their genetic details in official data­bases, even if they are never convicted of a crime.

Facial-recognition systems are more pervasive and can be deployed remotely, without subjects knowing that their faces have been captured. Today’s driver’s- license databases, which also include millions of images of people who get non-driver ID cards to open bank accounts or board airplanes, typically were made available for police searches with little public notice.

Thirty-seven states now use ­facial-recognition technology in their driver’s-license registries, a Washington Post review found. At least 26 of those allow state, local or federal law enforcement agencies to search — or request searches — of photo databases in an attempt to learn the identities of people considered relevant to investigations.

“This is a tool to benefit law enforcement, not to violate your privacy rights,” said Scott McCallum, head of the facial-recognition unit in Pinellas County, Fla., which has built one of the nation’s most advanced systems.

The technology produces investigative leads, not definitive identifications. But research efforts are focused on pushing the software to the point where it can reliably produce the names of people in the time it takes them to walk by a video camera. This already works in controlled, well-lit settings when the database of potential matches is relatively small. Most experts expect those limitations to be surmounted over the next few years.

That prospect has sparked fears that the databases authorities are building could someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas. Whatever the security benefits — especially at a time when terrorism remains a serious threat — the mass accumulation of location data on individuals could chill free speech or the right to assemble, civil libertarians say.

“As a society, do we want to have total surveillance? Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are . . . without any immediate probable cause?” asked Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied government facial databases. “A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.”

A facial ‘template'

Scott McCallum, systems analyst and co-administrator of the facial-recognition program for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida, discusses aspects of one of the most advanced facial recognition programs used for law enforcement in the country.

Facial-recognition systems analyze a person’s features — such as the shape of eyes, the curl of earlobes, the width of noses — to produce a digital “template” that can be quickly compared with other faces in a database.

The images must be reasonably clear, though newer software allows technicians to sharpen blurry images, bolster faint lighting or make a three-dimensional model of a face that can be rotated to ease comparisons against pictures taken from odd angles.

For the state officials issuing driver’s licenses, the technology has been effective at detecting fraud. As millions of images are compared, the software typically reveals the identities of hundreds or thousands of people who may have more than one driver’s license.

When searches are made for criminal investigations, typically a photo called a “probe” is compared against existing images in a database. The analytical software returns a selection of potential matches, though their accuracy can vary dramatically. A probe image of a middle-aged white man, for example, could produce a possible match with a 20-something African American woman with similarly shaped eyes and lips. Many systems include filters that allow searchers to specify race, sex and a range of possible ages for a suspect.

“It’s a fine line where you need to protect the rights of the citizens, but you also are protecting the right of citizens when you ferret out crime,” said Anthony J. Silva, administrator of Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles and a former town police chief.

Establishing identity, Silva said, is essential to effective police work: “I can’t tell you how many times I was handed fraudulent documents. And when you are on the street at 3 a.m., who do you call?”

Pennsylvania’s Justice Network, which has allowed police anywhere in the state to compare a facial image with mug-shot databases, has become a key in­vestigative tool, officials said, and last month it added access to 34 million driver’s-license photos. (Some residents have several images, taken over years.)

A detective in Carlisle, Pa., attempting to learn the real name of a suspect known on the street as “Buddha the Shoota” compared a Facebook page picturing the man with the mug-shot database and got a promising lead.

“Facebook is a great source for us,” said Detective Daniel Freedman, who can do facial searches from his department-issued smartphone. “He was surprised when we walked in and said, ‘How you doin’, Buddha?’  ”

He said the suspect responded, “How you know that?” — to which Freedman replied simply, “We’re the police.”

Safeguards and trends

There typically is little concern when facial-recognition systems relying on criminal databases help identify suspects in narrowly targeted investigations. But searches against images of citizens from driver’s licenses or passports, as opposed to mug shots of prisoners, raise more complex legal questions.

Police typically need only to assert a law enforcement purpose for facial searches, whether they be of suspects or potential witnesses to crimes. Civil libertarians worry that this can lead to broadly defined identity sweeps. Already many common but technically illegal activities — blocking a sidewalk, cycling at night without a light or walking a dog without a leash — can trigger police stops and requests for identification, they say.

“The potential for abuse of this technology is such that we have to make sure we put in place the right safeguards to prevent misuse,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “We also need to make sure the government is as transparent as possible in order to give the American people confidence it’s using this technology appropriately.”

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)

A few states, including Washington, Oregon and Minnesota, have legal barriers to police accessing facial-recognition technology in driver’s-license registries. New Hampshire’s legislature passed a law prohibiting ­motor vehicle officials from collecting any biometric data.

But the broader trend is toward more sophisticated databases with more expansive access. The current version of the Senate’s immigration bill would dramatically expand an electronic photo-verification system, probably relying on access to driver’s-license registries.

Montana has a facial-recognition system to help prevent fraud in its driver’s-license registry, but officials are still debating whether to allow police any kind of access.

“I can see it’s an amazingly powerful tool. It has a lot of possibilities,” said Brenda Nordlund, the administrator of the Motor Vehicle Division there. “I don’t know if that’s what citizens expect when they come in and get their driver’s-license pictures taken.”

There are substantial variations in how states allow police searches of their driver’s-license databases. Some allow only licensing-agency officials to conduct the actual searches. Others let police do searches themselves, but only from a headquarters office. And still others have made the technology available to almost any officer willing to get trained.

The District of Columbia has facial-recognition technology for its driver’s-license registry but does not permit law enforcement searches, spokeswoman Vanessa Newton said. Virginia motor vehicle officials have run a pilot program experimenting with facial-recognition technology but have not made a decision on whether police will have access to such a system if it is eventually installed, spokeswoman Sunni Brown said. Maryland does not use such technology in its driver’s-license registry.

Police long have had access to some driver’s-license information — including photographs — when they are investigating criminal suspects whose names they know. But facial-recognition technology has allowed police working from a photo of an unknown person to search for a name.

Las Vegas police, for example, called on authorities two states away in Nebraska for help solving a homicide. Based on a tip, investigators had a page from a social-media site featuring the image of an unknown suspect; the tipster said the woman in the photo had lived in Nebraska. The facial-recognition software produced a hit on a driver’s license there, cracking open the case.

“That picture hung on our wall for a long time,” said Betty Johnson, vehicle services administrator in Nebraska. “We are pretty darn proud of that one.”

Who has the databases?

A single private contractor, MorphoTrust USA, which is based in a suburban Boston office park but is owned by French industrial conglomerate Safran, dominates the field of government facial- recognition technology systems. Its software operates in systems for the State Department, the FBI and the Defense Department. Most facial-recognition systems installed in driver’s-license registries use the company’s technology, it says.

The largest facial database belongs to the State Department and includes about 230 million searchable images, split almost equally between foreigners who apply for visas and U.S. citizens who hold passports. Access for police investigations, though, is more limited than with state driver’s-license databases.

The FBI’s own facial-recognition database has about 15 million criminal mug shots. Bureau officials are pushing to expand that by tens of millions more by encouraging states to upload their criminal justice photos into the national system. The FBI does not collect driver’s-license images, but the bureau has developed access to state systems that do.

That effort began with“Project Facemask,” which compared images of federal suspects and fugitives against photos in North Carolina’s driver’s-license registry, helping identify a double-homicide suspect who had changed his name and moved to that state from California. The FBI now has agreements giving access to driver’s-license databases in 10 states for investigative purposes. Many motor vehicle officials say they also run searches for federal agents who request them, typically through “fusion centers” that ease the sharing of information among state, local and federal authorities.

Depending on the importance of the case, federal agents can potentially tap facial databases held by driver’s-license registries, state criminal justice systems, the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department, which has several million searchable faces, mostly Afghans and Iraqi men. Together these amount to an estimated 400 million facial images in government hands, though the rules on access to each database vary. (Often an individual is pictured in more than one database, or even more than once in a single one.)

Federal investigators searched several facial databases in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in April, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But the images were not clear enough to produce hits, even though both of the alleged bombers had driver’s licenses in Massachusetts, a state that uses facial-recognition technology.

Yet as facial databases grow and video cameras become more prevalent and powerful, such searches will become more effective, experts say.

“More and more, what you’re going to see is criminals and other people whose images were taken over the years are digitized, [and] put into these databases, and incidents like Boston will be easier to solve,” said James Albers, senior vice president for government operations for MorphoTrust USA.

Jake Ruberto, left, and and Scott McCallum, co-administrators of the facial-recognition program run by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. Jake Ruberto, left, and and Scott McCallum, co-administrators of the facial-recognition program run by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Dressback has been using facial-recognition software for more than six years. Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Dressback has been using facial-recognition software for more than six years. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

Pinellas County

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office says its facial-recognition unit conducts 5,000 searches a month and has assisted in nearly 1,000 arrests since 2004. A bulletin board in the office is lined with success stories: A teenage boy who was sending lewd messages to young girls through multiple Facebook accounts was identified, as was a suicide victim and an alleged bank robber — whose scowling image was captured by the branch’s surveillance camera.

In another case, a man reported a stolen computer but then noticed that an online photo album he long had maintained was automatically uploading new snapshots of a couple he did not recognize. When the sheriff’s office ran a search, the pictures matched faces in both the mug-shot and driver’s-license data­bases. The couple soon fingered an acquaintance who was arrested for stealing the computer and then selling it to them.

The sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes St. Petersburg and its suburbs, built its facial-recognition system over more than a decade, relying for most of that time on mug shots collected at prisons and police booking centers across the state.

The system now has partnerships with the sheriff’s offices in more than half of Florida’s counties and many other government agencies. This year the unit added the ability to search more than 20 million driver’s-license records, bringing the number of facial images in the database to 30 million, officials say.

The Pinellas County system also has access to 250,000 mug shots — though not driver’s-license images — from the Northern Virginia Regional Identification System, a joint project of Washington area jurisdictions, including some Maryland counties.

Pinellas Deputy Jeremy Dressback, a community policing officer, uses access from the laptop in his patrol car to keep track of the people he encounters on a dingy country stretch notorious for prostitution, drugs and seedy motels.

On a recent patrol, when a scruffy-looking man he did not recognize walked up to one of the motels, Dressback stopped him on suspicion of trespassing and asked for identification. The man did not have a driver’s license but gave his name — James A. Shepherd, age 33, from Kentucky — and said he was staying at the motel with his girlfriend.

Dressback pulled out a digital camera, asked permission to take a picture and then snapped a shot. When the image did not match anyone in the facial-recognition system, Dressback downloaded the picture to his laptop computer and attached it to a field report on Shepherd as a “suspicious person.”

Shepherd, who said he was a roofer returning from work, grumbled at the intrusion, even though he had agreed to have his picture taken. “I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database,” Shepherd said before adding, “But I have been arrested quite a few times.”

When his girlfriend walked by moments later — they were indeed staying at the motel — Shepherd directed her toward their room.

“Get out of here,” he said. “You’ll be in his database in 10 seconds.”

Brook Silva-Braga contributed to this report.

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Feds want what Apple Computer has on you!!!

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Apple received more than 4,000 government requests for customer data over six months

By Hayley Tsukayama, Updated: Monday, June 17, 5:48 AM E-mail the writer

Apple has released information on how many data requests it receives from U.S. law enforcement, as it joins Facebook, Microsoft and others in pushing for looser restrictions on what tech companies can share with their customers.

The effort comes in the wake of reports that the National Security Administration has a wide-ranging surveillance program that analyzes consumer information from companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

According to the statement, Apple said it has recently been authorized to reveal that it has received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from federal, state and local U.S. authorities for customer data between Dec. 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Those requests, the company said affected between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. Apple said the company’s legal team reviews each request to see if it is appropriate.

“We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve,” a statement on the company’s Web site says.

The statement does not explicitly mention how many of these requests have been made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or by the NSA. The company said the figures dealt specifically with “requests we receive related to national security.” Apple did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on that point.

The most common type of request, Apple said, comes from local authorities “investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple’s statements follows Friday statements from Facebook and Microsoft that broadly disclosed the number of FISA requests those companies have received in the last six months of 2012. The companies used similar examples of why officials may want the information, such as aiding in a search for missing children.

Apple also said that there are certain kinds of information that it does not provide to law enforcement because it simply doesn’t keep it. This, the company said, includes conversations that take place over its proprietary Messages service, or its video-conferencing FaceTime program. The company also said that it does not store data related to consumers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in a way that they can be traced back to an individual.

The statement did not mention other data Apple keeps on its servers, such as consumer e-mails, videos, photos or files stored on its servers.

New Leak Indicates Britain and U.S. Tracked Diplomats

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New Leak Indicates Britain and U.S. Tracked Diplomats

By SCOTT SHANE and RAVI SOMAIYA

Published: June 16, 2013 8 Comments

A new set of classified documents disclosed Sunday suggested that Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has provided a trove of documents to The Guardian newspaper, had obtained a wider range of materials about government surveillance than had been known, including one document revealing how American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009.

The latest disclosures, appearing again in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations was to open in Northern Ireland, where some of the leaders who were intelligence targets four years ago will be in attendance.

The newspaper reported Sunday night that Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q., the British eavesdropping agency that works closely with the N.S.A., monitored the e-mail and phones of other countries’ representatives at two London conferences, in part by setting up a monitored Internet cafe for the participants. In addition, the United States intercepted the communications of Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president and now the prime minister, the newspaper said.

The Guardian posted some G.C.H.Q. documents on its Web site with part of the contents blacked out. A spokesman for The Guardian said Sunday that the paper decided to redact the documents, and that enough was published “to show the authenticity of the report.”

The documents indicated that e-mail interception and key-logging software was installed on the computers in the ersatz Internet cafe, that foreign diplomats’ BlackBerry messages and calls were intercepted, and that 45 analysts tracked who was phoning whom at the meeting.

Richard J. Aldrich, a professor of international security at the University of Warwick and the author of a history of the G.C.H.Q., said the logos of the N.S.A. and Canadian intelligence on one of the British documents suggested that they were accessible to Mr. Snowden “under the auspices of a joint program.”

He said Mr. Snowden’s leak showed that British and American diplomats and politicians got a real-time feed of intelligence on their counterparts at major summit meetings. “Now this is integrated into summit diplomacy, almost like a newsreader getting a feed in their ear,” he said.

American intelligence officials have expressed alarm at the variety of highly classified material Mr. Snowden obtained, suggesting that his actions revealed a shocking breach in the fundamental principle that intelligence officers should have access only to the material they need to do their jobs. On Sunday, a spokesman for the British foreign service said he would not comment on intelligence matters.

Mr. Snowden, 29, who left the N.S.A. station in Hawaii this spring and is now thought to be hiding in Hong Kong, delivered hundreds of N.S.A. documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Their initial reports covered the routine collection of data on all phone calls handled by the major American telephone companies and an N.S.A. program called Prism that collects the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet services like Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Disclosures linked to Mr. Snowden now rank among the most significant breaches in the strict secrecy of the N.S.A., the largest American intelligence agency, since its creation in 1952. It suffered a handful of defections during the cold war; more recently, insiders have revealed warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States.

By contrast, the latest disclosures have exposed surveillance approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and shared with Congress.

A letter delivered to Congress on Saturday from the office of James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that the surveillance programs had helped thwart “dozens” of terrorist plots in the United States and more than 20 other countries.

While the N.S.A. collects and stores the phone records of millions of Americans each year, it examines the records only when there is suspicion of a connection to terrorism, the letter said, adding that in 2012, fewer than 300 phone records were reviewed.

The Guardian’s latest reports offered a rare window onto the everyday electronic spying that the agency does in close cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said the reports have “confirmed longstanding suspicions that N.S.A’s surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew.” He added, “We desperately need to have a public discussion about the proper limits on N.S.A.”

But he said the reports of spying on world leaders, while distressing to the eavesdroppers because it will make their targets more wary, contained no surprises. “This is just what intelligence agencies do — spy on friends and enemies alike,” he said. “Only because the shroud of secrecy that covers all of N.S.A. operations is so thick does a glimpse like this come as a shock.”

While some members of Congress have raised questions about the sweep of the N.S.A.’s collection of data on Americans, leaders of both parties have defended the programs and denounced Mr. Snowden before The Guardian published its latest report.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” former Vice President Dick Cheney praised the agency and called Mr. Snowden a criminal and a traitor. “I think it’s one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States,” he said.

The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, appearing on “Face the Nation” on CBS, said leaking information about American surveillance “in effect gives the playbook to those who would like to get around our techniques and our practices, and obviously that’s not in our interest in the long haul.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting from Washington, and John F. Burns from London.

Living With the Surveillance State

Living With the Surveillance State

By BILL KELLER

Published: June 16, 2013 326 Comments

MY colleague Thomas Friedman’s levelheaded take on the National Security Agency eavesdropping uproar needs no boost from me. His column soared to the top of the “most e-mailed” list and gathered a huge and mostly thoughtful galaxy of reader comments. Judging from the latest opinion polling, it also reflected the prevailing mood of the electorate. It reflected mine. But this is a discussion worth prolonging, with vigilant attention to real dangers answering overblown rhetoric about theoretical ones.

Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the N.S.A. but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack. Reluctantly, he concludes that a well-regulated program to use technology in defense of liberty — even if it gives us the creeps — is a price we pay to avoid a much higher price, the shutdown of the world’s most open society. Hold onto that qualifier: “well regulated.”

The N.S.A. data-mining is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards. We have a vague feeling of uneasiness about these transactions, but it rarely translates into serious thinking about where we set the limits.

Exhibit A: In last Thursday’s Times Joseph Goldstein reported that local law enforcement agencies, “largely under the radar,” are amassing their own DNA databanks, and they often do not play by the rules laid down for the databases compiled by the F.B.I. and state crime labs. As a society, we have accepted DNA evidence as a reliable tool both for bringing the guilty to justice and for exonerating the wrongly accused. But do we want police agencies to have complete license — say, to sample our DNA surreptitiously, or to collect DNA from people not accused of any wrongdoing, or to share our most private biological information? Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project and a member of the New York State Commission on Forensic Science, says regulators have been slow to respond to what he calls rogue databanks. And a recent Supreme Court ruling that defined DNA-gathering as a legitimate police practice comparable to fingerprinting is likely to encourage more freelancing. Scheck says his fear is that misuse will arouse public fears of government overreach and discredit one of the most valuable tools in our justice system. “If you ask the American people, do you support using DNA to catch criminals and exonerate the innocent, everybody says yes,” Scheck told me. “If you ask, do you trust the government to have your DNA, everybody says no.”

Exhibit B: Nothing quite says Big Brother like closed-circuit TV. In Orwell’s Britain, which is probably the democratic world’s leading practitioner of CCTV monitoring, the omnipresent pole-mounted cameras are being supplemented in some jurisdictions by wearable, night-vision cop-cams that police use to record every drunken driver, domestic violence call and restive crowd they encounter. New York last year joined with Microsoft to introduce the eerily named Domain Awareness System, which connects 3,000 CCTV cameras (and license-plate scanners and radiation detectors) around the city and allows police to cross-reference databases of stolen cars, wanted criminals and suspected terrorists. Fans of TV thrillers like “Homeland,” “24” and the British series “MI-5” (guilty, guilty and guilty) have come to think of the omnipresent camera as a crime-fighting godsend. But who watches the watchers? Announcing the New York system, the city assured us that no one would be monitored because of race, religion, citizenship status, political affiliation, etc., to which one skeptic replied, “But we’ve heard that one before.”

Exhibit C: Congress has told the F.A.A. to set rules for the use of spy drones in American air space by 2015. It is easy to imagine the value of this next frontier in surveillance: monitoring forest fires, chasing armed fugitives, search-and-rescue operations. Predator drones already patrol our Southern border for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, border surveillance may be critical in persuading Congress to pass immigration reform that would extend our precious liberty to millions living in the shadows. I for one would count that a fair trade. But where does it stop? Scientific American editorialized in March: “Privacy advocates rightly worry that drones, equipped with high-resolution video cameras, infrared detectors and even facial-recognition software, will let snoops into realms that have long been considered private.” Like your backyard. Or, with the sort of thermal imaging used to catch the Boston bombing fugitive hiding under a boat tarp, your bedroom.

And then there is the Internet. We seem pretty much at peace, verging on complacent, about the exploitation of our data for commercial, medical and scientific purposes — as trivial as the advertising algorithm that pitches us camping gear because we searched the Web for wilderness travel, as valuable as the digital record-sharing that makes sure all our doctors know what meds we’re on.

In an online debate about the N.S.A. eavesdropping story the other day, Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, pointed out that we have grown comfortable with the Internal Revenue Service knowing our finances, employees of government hospitals knowing our medical histories, and public-school teachers knowing the abilities and personalities of our children.

“The information vacuumed up by the N.S.A. was already available to faceless bureaucrats in phone and Internet companies — not government employees but strangers just the same,” Posner added. “Many people write as though we make some great sacrifice by disclosing private information to others, but it is in fact simply the way that we obtain services we want — whether the market services of doctors, insurance companies, Internet service providers, employers, therapists and the rest or the nonmarket services of the government like welfare and security.”

Privacy advocates will retort that we surrender this information wittingly, but in reality most of us just let it slip away. We don’t pay much attention to privacy settings or the “terms of service” fine print. Our two most common passwords are “password” and “123456.”

From time to time we get worrisome evidence of data malfeasance, such as the last big revelation of N.S.A. eavesdropping, in 2005, which disclosed that the agency was tapping Americans without the legal nicety of a warrant, or the more recent I.R.S. targeting of right-wing political groups. But in most cases the advantages of intrusive technology are tangible and the abuses are largely potential. Edward Snowden’s leaks about N.S.A. data-mining have, so far, not included evidence of any specific abuse.

The danger, it seems to me, is not surveillance per se. We have already decided, most of us, that life on the grid entails a certain amount of intrusion. Nor is the danger secrecy, which, as Posner notes, “is ubiquitous in a range of uncontroversial settings,” a promise the government makes to protect “taxpayers, inventors, whistle-blowers, informers, hospital patients, foreign diplomats, entrepreneurs, contractors, data suppliers and many others.”

The danger is the absence of rigorous, independent regulation and vigilant oversight to keep potential abuses of power from becoming a real menace to our freedom. The founders created a system of checks and balances, but the safeguards have not kept up with technology. Instead, we have an executive branch in a leak-hunting frenzy, a Congress that treats oversight as a form of partisan combat, a political climate that has made “regulation” an expletive and a public that feels a generalized, impotent uneasiness. I don’t think we’re on a slippery slope to a police state, but I think if we are too complacent about our civil liberties we could wake up one day and find them gone — not in a flash of nuclear terror but in a gradual, incremental surrender.

Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA

Durst: Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA

Posted: Monday, June 17, 2013 10:31 pm | Updated: 10:51 pm, Mon Jun 17, 2013.

Guest Commentary by Will Durst

Dear U.S. Citizen: Please accept our most egregiously sincere apologies for the difficulties and inconveniences the secret monitoring of your phone records and email and GPS units and foreign travel and bank accounts and yes, even your snail mail has evidently caused.

We here at the NSA strive for the perfection of our services, which depend on the chronic obliviousness of you, our valued customers. Unfortunately, due to one disgruntled deadbeat (who escaped to China to avoid government persecution- which is like joining the Army because you're tired of people telling you what to do) you now know of our continuing efforts to keep you safe. That was never our intention.

When you are even tangentially aware of the absurd lengths the National Security Agency will go to keep you and your loved ones out of harm's way, our mission has failed. If you knew half the crap we have to slog through here, your hair would curl, but that's another story altogether.

Yes, we're pretty much keeping tabs on everything everyone says and does, all the time, which we understand upsets a few of you. Folks. Don't worry. Nobody's actually listening to any of this stuff. We're just used to collecting it. If it makes you feel any better, think of this whole enterprise as an exceedingly long, government-subsidized episode of "Hoarders." You can trust us.

And seriously, anybody who didn't suspect this kind of snooping was going on is not to be trusted with knives in the kitchen without a fencing mask. Privacy is soooo 20th Century. You share the regularity of your bowel movements on Facebook, but we check around to find out who's making coded phone calls to al-Qaida and suddenly everybody's nose is out of joint? You kidding me?

Unfortunately, one of our representatives testified in front of Congress, "no, we aren't collecting data on Americans," when what he meant to say is, "yes, we ARE collecting data on Americans." James Clapper simply gave the "least untruthful answer possible." Then again, Congress knows that getting a straight answer from us is harder than bending a wire coat-hanger into a number representing pi to the sixth digit with your teeth. All for your protection.

See, the problem is, nobody knows who the enemy is anymore. Narrowing suspicion is much too time-consuming. Lot easier to wiretap the entire nation than try to pick out the one or two most devious of you. Besides, what could be more democratic than spying on everybody?

We call the process data mining. And you, the soft quarry, are producing up to a billion records a day. Which is real similar to pulverizing Everest, then sifting through the rubble for a blue pebble. It ain't easy, people. Lot of haystacks, not so many needles.

To ensure this glitch never occurs again, we are rectifying the glitcher in order to return our service to the high-level quality that you, the citizens of America, have come to expect. For the inconvenience we have caused, each household in America will receive 3 free months of HBO.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this matter, please contact your Congressperson. Thanks for your understanding, and please, don't bother looking for us. You can be sure, we'll be looking after you.

Sincerely.

Your ever-vigilant friends at the NSA.

P.S. Don't forget to "like us" on Facebook.

Recipient of seven consecutive nominations for Stand-Up of the Year, Will Durst's new one-man show, "BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG," is presented every Tuesday at The Marsh, San Francisco. Go to... themarsh.org for more info. Or willdurst.com

NSA director defends sweeping surveillance program

Source

NSA director defends sweeping surveillance program, says plot against Wall Street thwarted

By Associated Press, Published: June 17 | Updated: Tuesday, June 18, 8:29 AM

WASHINGTON — The director of the National Security Agency said Tuesday the government’s sweeping surveillance programs have foiled some 50 terrorist plots worldwide, including one directed at the New York Stock Exchange, in a forceful defense of spy operations that was echoed by the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee.

Army Gen. Keith Alexander said the two recently disclosed programs — one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism — are critical in the terrorism fight.

Intelligence officials have disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks, and Alexander offered some information on other attempts.

He said the NSA was monitoring a known extremist in Yemen who was in contact with an individual in the United States. Identifying that person and other individuals, Alexander said, officials “were able to detect a nascent plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. ... The FBI disrupted and arrested these individuals.”

The programs “assist the intelligence community to connect the dots,” Alexander told the committee in a rare, open Capitol Hill hearing.

Alexander got no disagreement from the leaders of the panel, who have been outspoken in backing the programs since Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed information to The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the committee, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, said the programs were vital to the intelligence community and assailed Snowden’s actions as criminal.

“It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside,” Rogers said.

Ruppersberger said the “brazen disclosures” put the United States and its allies at risk.

The general counsel for the intelligence community said the NSA cannot target phone conversations between callers inside the U.S. — even if one of those callers was someone they were targeted for surveillance when outside the country.

The director of national intelligence’s legal chief, Robert S. Litt, said that if the NSA finds it has accidentally gathered a phone call by a target who had traveled into the U.S. without their knowledge, they have to “purge” that from their system. The same goes for an accidental collection of any conversation because of an error.

Litt said those incidents are then reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which “pushes back” and asks how it happened, and what the NSA is doing to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.

The hearing came the morning after President Barack Obama, who is attending the G-8 summit in Ireland, vigorously defended the surveillance programs in a lengthy interview Monday, calling them transparent — even though they are authorized in secret.

“It is transparent,” Obama told PBS’ Charlie Rose in an interview. “That’s why we set up the FISA court,” the president added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

Obama said he has named representatives to a privacy and civil liberties oversight board to help in the debate over just how far government data gathering should be allowed to go — a discussion that is complicated by the secrecy surrounding the FISA court, with hearings held at undisclosed locations and with only government lawyers present. The orders that result are all highly classified.

“We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place ... that their phone calls aren’t being listened into; their text messages aren’t being monitored, their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere,” the president said.

A senior administration official said Obama had asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to determine what more information about the two programs could be made public, to help better explain them. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

Snowden on Monday accused members of Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of the would-be New York subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, in 2009.

In an online interview with The Guardian in which he posted answers to questions, he said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs — a point Obama conceded in his interview without mentioning Snowden.

“We might have caught him some other way,” Obama said. “We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn’t go off. But, at the margins, we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” he said.

Obama repeated earlier assertions that the NSA programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties — something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he’d formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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