Tag Archives: Obama administration

SOPA tweets of the day (updated)

Posted on by
Reply
So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.-
January 14, 2012 5:42 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@rupertmurdoch
Rupert Murdoch
Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.
January 14, 2012 5:54 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@rupertmurdoch
Rupert Murdoch

In terms of lobbying money contributed to the SOPA/PIPA battle, the copyright owners have spent far more on lobbying than the tech industry.  News Corporation believes in strong copyright protection at all costs, but doesn’t feel that personal voice-mails are private.

In addition, the copyright owners are actively suppressing any discussion of these bills on their own media properties. For example, NBC News has had virtually no coverage of the bills but actively supports their enactment.

Update: Google’s official response to Murdoch’s claims:

This is just nonsense. Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.

Related articles

Secret laws, secret memos

Posted on by

Laws in the United States should not be secret. Laws should be subject to judicial review. Operational details of military actions need not be disclosed but the law and rules governing the military, the Department of Justice or any other part of the government should be publicly open.

Neither is occurring under Barack Obama, any more than under George W. Bush.

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.

It is important to note that, not only is this memorandum kept secret, it wasn’t even completed until months after Obama had ordered al-Awlaki killed.

This isn’t American justice.

And the secrecy isn’t limited to international settings. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sonic said it fought the government’s order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was “rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do,” said Sonic’s chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government’s request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full emails.

Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years old, hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing.

The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government secretly obtain information from people’s email and cellphones without a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

And note, that the government was seeking to forbid the ISP and Google from even telling the individual that the government was seeking his information. This is like something from the Soviet Union, not our “democracy.”  More the second story from Boing Boing.

Related articles

America assassinates its own citizens

Posted on by

The United States says it has killed American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and another man, Samir Kahn, in Yemen. Both were American citizens.

These killings were not on any battlefield. In a face-to-face battle, the government clearly does not have to check IDs before shooting those on attack.  But painstakingly seeking out known citizens for killing via remote control would not be hampered by some type of basic due process hearing by outside the executive branch.

The standards applied the Obama Administration for determining whether this action was justified and legal have not been provided to the public, let alone reviewed by any court.  Nor have any facts regarding the actions of these two men been determined by any court. Secret laws and secret memos should not be part of US law. Shameful.

Glenn Greenwald reacts:

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Related articles

Only an expert

Posted on by

Laurie Anderson explains the (non-)solution to our problems: only an expert can do it. This is one song that addresses Oprah, Iraq, torture, and Wall Street financial crimes, while being kick-ass msuically.  The version below is live, but the version on the album, Homeland, is even more terrific.

The studio version is available on iTunes for those who like her work.

Chronicle of an assult on the Constitution

Posted on by

It seems that whenever Americans feel insecure the first actions are to jettison long held Constitutional protections that were created only by revolution and bloodshed. The latest such action, of course, was what happened after the 9/11 attacks, 10 years ago next week.

David Shipler, writing in The American Prospect, outlines chapter and verse of this sad time for the US Constitution. The entire article is worth a read.  The litany of civil liberties abuses is long and should be sufficient to illuminate the very real risks to freedom that fear has generated even in the US.

Here is an excerpt:

… the Patriot Act of 2001 emasculated an array of privacy statutes that had been enacted in the last quarter of the 20th century. In 2008, Congress further amended one of those laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to legalize the extensive surveillance that Bush had clandestinely authorized during the weeks following the attacks. At the time, while legislators and civil-liberties groups were arguing over the Patriot Act’s changes to FISA, Bush was evading FISA by ordering the National Security Agency to monitor Internet and phone communications without judicial oversight. Bush’s program sparked outrage in Congress when The New York Times reported it in 2005, but in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, Congress “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than the president had given himself, according to a joint report by the inspectors general of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice and Defense departments, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The inspectors general did not credit the program with many successes. While it “had value in some counterterrorism investigations,” they found, “it generally played a limited role in the FBI’s overall counterterrorism efforts.” Most officials interviewed for the report “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the monitoring had contributed to counterterrorism. A senior CIA official told the investigators that the surveillance “was rarely the sole basis for an intelligence success, but that it frequently played a supporting role.” Other CIA officials discounted the intelligence as “vague or without context.”

Safety’s threat to liberty

Posted on by

Read this. It provides a nice summary of the six times that Americans gutted their Constitution wrongfully. The first five largely have been corrected. The sixth time remains an open question.

Excerpt:

The Patriot Act, amending those privacy statutes, passed overwhelmingly with little debate six weeks after the attacks. It broadened FISA, which regulates domestic intelligence gathering through a secret court that issues clandestine warrants that don’t require probable cause and particularity, as the Fourth Amendment demands. The law originally authorized this shadow system exclusively to collect intelligence, but the Patriot Act frees investigators to use it for criminal cases as well.

Even that permissive FISA system wasn’t permissive enough for President Bush, who secretly ordered the NSA to intercept Americans’ communications by phone and Internet. The suspicionless sweeps, effectively legalized by Congress in 2008, continue.

Further, by expanding administrative subpoenas known as national security letters (NSLs), the Patriot Act shot holes through three laws that had guarded the privacy of Americans’ credit, banking and communications records. Without suspicion of a crime and with no judicial oversight, NSLs can now be issued by the head of any FBI field office to librarians, Internet providers and financial institutions, among others. Each of the 50,000 NSLs being served annually comes with a lifetime gag order.

One measure that could change the country if fully implemented is the executive branch’s power to subject civilians to military trial. Under the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006 and revised in 2009, the president may unilaterally designate anyone an enemy combatant—even inside the United States—and try non-citizens before military officers, with no judicial involvement except on appeal. Applied only to Guantanamo detainees so far, this mechanism has no geographical restrictions. Nothing in the law prevents its employment in Alabama as well as Afghanistan.

These six deviations show that rights cannot rely on officials’ benevolence. They rely on an ingenious constitutional system that has pulled us back from our periodic wanderings. Let’s hope it does this time, and soon, before counterterrorism’s shortcuts through our rights become the new normal.

Related articles

Making unemployment worse

Posted on by

 There is plenty of evidence, in fact, that the spending cuts already imposed by Republican intransigence are responsible for a great deal of joblessness. Although the private sector added 57,000 jobs in June, that tiny progress was reduced by the 39,000 jobs shed by federal, state and local governments, much of which came from education. As David Leonhardt noted in The Times on Friday, cutbacks in state and local spending have cost the economy about a million public-sector jobs over the last two years, in part because the federal stimulus program, bitterly opposed by Republicans, ended too soon.

That has led to the bizarre spectacle of Republicans condemning the crisis that they helped to create and are refusing to fix. Speaker John Boehner said the poor job numbers were actually the result of the stimulus, regulations and the debt. Mr. Romney, who has been waffling over whether Mr. Obama has made the economy worse or has failed to make it better, chose to say on Friday that the White House was indifferent to high unemployment.

* * *

There is still time for the president to insist that the debt talks include a substantial program to put people to work now, while reducing the deficit over a longer period. To do otherwise is to ignore Friday’s ugly reality.

– New York Times editorial

Related articles

New info on pornoscanners

Posted on by

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a law suit challenging the safety of the x-ray pornoscanners at airport security checkpoints. They have also file numerous Freedom of Information Act requests seeking DHS and TSA documents relating thereto.

Now they have discovered this:

Another document indicates that the DHS mischaracterized the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stating that NIST “affirmed the safety” of full body scanners. The documents obtained by EPIC reveal that NIST disputed that characterization and stated that the Institute did not, in fact, test the devices. Also, a Johns Hopkins University study revealed that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the “General Public Dose Limit.”

So NIST has some doubts about the “safety” of the devices. That makes me feel a lot better.

Related articles

The in-audacity of hope

Posted on by

President Obama, speaking at the LGBT Gala in New York last week, again refused to endorse same-sex marriage. Such refusal came as New York, lead by Andrew M. Cuomo, was legalizing same sex marriage in the state. Why Obama cannot bring himself to openly support a freedom that the majority of citizens now supports is beyond confusing. His failure to support same-sex marriage is a betrayal of his promises of equal rights for all.

This is yet another in a long string of disappointments for those of us who voted for him, expecting that he would alter the policies of the Bush administration. We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guantanamo remains open. The DOJ has refused to investigate credible claims that we tortured prisoners in the so-called war on terror using the cover of wrong-headed opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel. Our civil liberties continue to be eroded by the extension of the Patriot Act and new spying tools claimed by the FBI. We are fighting a third war in Libya, without Congressional approval, despite Administration claims that we are not involved in hostilities. The big banks have been bailed out but not homeowners who owe billions to the banks as a result of abusive loan tactics.  No officials of the banks have been convicted for wrongdoing.

Change? Hope? Nope. Not from Obama.

Obama administration case collapses

Posted on by

The Obama administration has filed (and appears to be planning to file) more cases against government whistle blowers than the George W. Bush administration. It is part of the Obama administration’s consistent attack on civil liberties and hardened governmental secrecy.

Well, one of these cases, against Thomas Drake, formerly of the NSA. I noted this case in an earlier post.  The DOJ had charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 because of his efforts to disclose waste, fraud and abuse at the NSA.  The case has collapsed. Drake agreed to plead to a single misdemeanor, and prosecutors have said they would not object to no jail time. It is a scandal that he and his family were subject to a multi-year federal investigation for simply trying to bring problems to light.  Jane Mayer, staff writer for The New Yorker talks on NPR about the collapsed case here.

Related articles

The secret “Patriot” act (updated)

Posted on by

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) says that the Patriot Act that we all think we know about is bad. But even worse is the secret Patriot Act.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

The true victory achieved by Al Qaeada is the transformation of the US government into an all-seeing police state. And we are doing it to ourselves out of irrational fear.

Full story here.

Update: Further information from the New York Times.

Related articles

Inside Job (updated)

Posted on by

I just watched the film “Inside Job” (link to trailer) that dissects the causes of the “great recession” we are still suffering from. It is the most cogent and understandable explanation of a very complex set of issues I have seen yet. The film won a 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. Now out on Blue Ray and DVD. Watch it.

Update: And it looks like the Federal and New York regulators and prosecutors are finally getting serious about all this.

Your tax dollars at work

Posted on by

Jane Mayer, writing the current issue of The New Yorker, tells an amazing story about a former NSA employee who is charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse inside the NSA. The article also describes the scope and illegality of the country’s warrantless wiretap program against Americans. I strongly recommend you read the entire article.

In December, 2005, the N.S.A.’s culture of secrecy was breached by a stunning leak. [The accused man was not involved in the story.] The Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the N.S.A. was running a warrantless wiretapping program inside the United States. The paper’s editors had held onto the scoop for more than a year, weighing the propriety of publishing it. According to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, President Bush pleaded with the paper’s editors to not publish the story; Keller told New York that “the basic message was: You’ll have blood on your hands.” After the paper defied the Administration, Bush called the leak “a shameful act.” At his command, federal agents launched a criminal investigation to identify the paper’s source.

The Times story shocked the country. Democrats, including then Senator Obama, denounced the program as illegal and demanded congressional hearings. A FISA court judge resigned in protest. In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T. & T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic—both foreign and domestic. A high-capacity fibre-optic cable seemed to be forwarding this data to a centralized location, which, Klein surmised, was N.S.A. headquarters. Soon, USA Today reported that A.T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.

President Bush and Administration officials assured the American public that the surveillance program was legal, although new legislation was eventually required to bring it more in line with the law. They insisted that the traditional method of getting warrants was too slow for the urgent threats posed by international terrorism. And they implied that the only domestic surveillance taking place involved tapping phone calls in which one speaker was outside the U.S.

Drake [the accused former employee] says of Bush Administration officials, “They were lying through their teeth. They had chosen to go an illegal route, and it wasn’t because they had no other choice.” He also believed that the Administration was covering up the full extent of the program. “The phone calls were the tip of the iceberg. The really sensitive stuff was the data mining.” He says, “I was faced with a crisis of conscience. What do I do—remain silent, and complicit, or go to the press?”

Drake faces 35 years in prison if convicted. Yet, the masterminds of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program have gone unprosecuted.

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps [see the first related link below], is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

Related articles

Foreclosure suffering continues…

Posted on by

Watch all these clips about the suffering that is still plaguing Americans and largely caused by mortgage lenders.  It makes so sad and so angry as well. Besides the terrible suffering for the homeowners involved, this type of behavior continues the decline in real estate values for everyone. Over 5 million foreclosures and counting. Where is the outrage? Why is all the governmental support going to the banks and not to people?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The text version of this story is available here.