Tag: ek Politics

Panama arrests ex-CIA station chief sought by Italy in rendition case

By Tim Johnson, McClatchy

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Robert Seldon Lady was the CIA station chief in Milan when Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was pulled from the streets of that city as part of an operation that Italian prosecutors later said involved 22 American agents, all of whom fled Italy shortly afterward.

Italy’s main news agency, ANSA, reported that Lady was detained in Panama and that Italian Justice Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri would have two months to formally request his extradition.

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Italy’s top court of appeals in September confirmed a nine-year jail term for Lady in the extraordinary case, the first attempt by a foreign judiciary to prosecute U.S. officials for the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition – the practice of sending a person detained in one country to another country for questioning without requesting the approval of a court.

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Nasr was snatched from Milan’s Via Guerzoni before noon Feb. 17, 2003, by two men who sprayed chemicals in his face and forced him into a white van. He turned up in an Egyptian prison, where he spent four years before his release. U.S. officials suspected him of recruiting radical Muslims in Italy for jihad in the Middle East, but he was never charged with a crime in Italy or Egypt.

Italian prosecutors said they proved that the van was part of a CIA scheme to round up Nasr, move him to an air base north of Venice and on to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, before delivering him to Egyptian interrogators.

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If Lady now faces the threat of being returned to Italy, Nasr has fared little better. During his four years in an Egyptian jail, Nasr tried to commit suicide three times, his attorney told Knight-Ridder newspapers, which was later bought by The McClatchy Co., in 2006.

“He’s been exposed to torture ever since he was kidnapped in Italy,” attorney Montasser Zayat said then. “He said he was beaten even on the plane that took him to Germany before he was handed to Egypt.”

Lady has since been released and has flown back to the United States.  An INTERPOL Warrant for his arrest remains in force.

Germany backs away from claims NSA program thwarted five attacks

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy

Thursday, July 18, 2013

(German Interior Minister Hans-Peter) Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.” And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs.

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(O)pposition politicians and commentators now are talking about the arrogance of the U.S. application of “winner’s power” (a reference to the political authority the United States had here during the Cold War, when Germany was divided between east and west, and West Germany leaned heavily on America for support), and how traditionally strong relations between the two countries have been harmed by the scandal.

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Perhaps most troubling was how quickly the government backed down on the claims that the surveillance helped foil terror plots. Gisela Piltz, a Liberal Party member of the Bundestag intelligence committee, said she could not give exact details of what took place in the secret hearing but noted: “There was a clear discrepancy between the previously reported number of foiled terror attacks and the number we talked about.”

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Piltz said that while terrorism is a real threat, the U.S. monitoring programs have done little to prevent it.

“Germans are not safer because of U.S. espionage,” Piltz said. “It is true Germany has been lucky not to have suffered a terror attack, but there has to be a balance. We cannot sacrifice freedom for security, and when in doubt I would always opt for freedom.”

Potentially some good news in victim compensation in the Deepwater Horizon spill.  In March BP agreed to a  scheme for awarding financial damages with lawyers representing the class of people who suffered economic harm.

In the 1000 page agreement, certified by a Louisiana Judge, awards were to be determined by the income and revenue before and after the disaster.

As it turns out the amount could double or more the $8.5 Billion BP estimated AND their fines for environmental damage could be $23 Billion more than the $25 Billion they have already spent on clean up.

So in total this could end up costing them north of $55 Billion.  Good news if you believe in justice and accountability, bad news if you’re a BP shareholder.

US government assessment of BP oil spill ‘will not account for damage’

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Thursday 11 July 2013 08.17 EDT

A report from the National Research Council said the US government’s efforts to put a price on damage from the April 2010 disaster failed to capture the full extent of the environmental and economic losses in Gulf waters and coastal areas, fisheries, marine life, and the deep sea caused by BP’s runaway well.

Compiled by a team of 16 scientists at the request of Congress, the study went on to call for a sweeping overhaul of methods for putting a price on environmental losses – especially after an event on the scale of the BP disaster.

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The researchers noted that 20 million people in the US alone lived and worked around the Gulf of Mexico. Before the April 2010 disaster, the Gulf accounted for about a quarter of the country’s seafood catch. It also provided about 30% of America’s oil and nearly 20% of natural gas. Meanwhile, coastal wetlands provided protection against storm surges.

But the report noted: “Disruptions in the ecosystem caused by the oil spill could impair these services, leading to economic and social impacts that may not be apparent from an assessment of environmental damage alone.”

The April 2010 explosion killed 11 workers aboard the oil rig, and spewed more than 4m barrels of oil into the Gulf, according to the US government’s estimate. It was the worst offshore oil spill in US history.

BP says it has spent $25bn so far in clean-up and restoration costs. It owes the government an additional $4.5bn in fines. The company is also on the hook for an $8bn settlement of economic claims – a figure which is uncapped and growing.

BP could be facing even more expensive litigation in the autumn, involving fines of up to $17.5bn under the Clean Water Act.

Billions more hinge on the outcome of a trial involving claims by the federal government and five Gulf states for restoring damage to natural resources. Government scientists are now engaged in a closely guarded exercise of trying to get a full accounting of the damage done to the Gulf, and the cost of restoring oiled coastlines and waters, and protecting populations of marine wildlife, such as dolphins, which have suffered die-offs since the disaster.

BP appeals against ‘inflated’ Deepwater Horizon claims

Associated Press

Monday 8 July 2013 14.45 EDT

Ted Olson made the arguments in a packed courtroom before a three-judge panel of the 5th US circuit court of appeals. A lower court has already refused to block payments to businesses that claim the spill cost them money.

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Olson, who served as solicitor general under former president George W Bush, attacked the payout process. “Irreparable injustices are taking place and money is being dispensed to parties from whom it may not be recoverable,” he said. Under the settlement, BP initially estimated that it would pay $7.8bn (£5.2bn) to resolve claims by tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents and businesses. Now the company says it no longer can give a reliable estimate for how much the deal will cost, amid reports that it could be double the initial forecast.

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Awards to businesses are based on a comparison of their revenues and expenses before and after the spill. BP says a “policy decision” that Juneau announced in January 2013 allows businesses to manipulate those figures.

The panel opened Monday’s hearing by asking Olson whether the court has jurisdiction in a case involving a settlement already approved by the parties in the case and a US district court judge. Judge James Dennis seemed sceptical at times, asking: “How can we go beyond the four corners of the agreement?”

Deepwater Horizon: BP cry foul as 10,000 claims flood in each month

Dominic Rushe, The Observer

Saturday 6 July 2013

Last week, the judge Carl Barbier, who is overseeing the multibillion-dollar civil damages case against BP, appointed Louis Freeh, a former judge and head of the FBI, to look into allegations of misconduct at the office that administers compensation claims.

So far, the company has had little luck arguing against the scheme that it set up last March. A panel of three judges will hear tomorrow’s appeal, in which each side has 20 minutes to state its case. BP argues that the compensation committee is ignoring the accepted legal meaning of words such as “revenue” and “earnings” in the way that it assesses claims.

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(Daniel) Jacobs (visiting scholar at UCLA institute of the environment and sustainability) said Freeh’s appointment was further evidence of Barbier’s determination to make sure that BP received a fair hearing. “If you really want something investigated, you hire Freeh. He is going to get to the bottom of it. I have a lot of faith in Barbier, he’s doing an incredible job. These are serious allegations and they are being treated seriously,” he said.

“BP has been whining for a while, maybe because they think Juneau is more lenient than Feinberg, but Barbier has the jurisdiction to reverse any of these awards and is overseeing the appeals process. I don’t know what else BP wants to be done here.”

Jacobs added that it was difficult to see BP as an innocent victim given its record in the US. The company has been fined and publicly censured for other accidents, including the Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that killed 15 people and injured 170.

“BP writ large is a felon and a recidivist. They have a terrible record in the environmental arena and other areas.”

Snowden’s surveillance leaks open way for challenges to programs’ constitutionality

By Jerry Markon, Washington Post

Published: July 15

(T)he legal landscape may be shifting, lawyers say, because the revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and the principal source of the leaks, forced the government to acknowledge the programs and discuss them. That, they say, could help plaintiffs overcome government arguments that they lack the legal standing to sue or that cases should be thrown out because the programs are state secrets. A federal judge in California last week rejected the government’s argument that an earlier lawsuit over NSA surveillance should be dismissed on secrecy grounds.

“There is one critical difference from the Bush era. We now have indisputable physical evidence that the conduct being challenged is actually taking place,” said Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security law at American University law school. He said Snowden’s disclosures make it “more likely” that cases will at least be allowed to go forward in court, leading to a years-long legal battle over surveillance and privacy.

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Steven G. Bradbury, a Washington lawyer and senior Justice Department official in that administration, expressed skepticism that the new lawsuits would turn out better than previous ones.

He said the plaintiffs would have difficulty showing that they specifically were harmed by the programs, because the data collection was so vast, and that judges could rule that government officials are immune from such suits. And even though Obama administration officials have discussed the programs, Bradbury said the government could still get cases thrown out under what is known as the state secrets privilege.

Created in the 1950s and rarely used until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it allows officials to urge courts to dismiss cases on the grounds of potential damage to national security or foreign policy. “The further details of these programs are still state secrets,” Bradbury said.

Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the state secrets argument doesn’t apply in cases involving electronic surveillance. She pointed to last week’s decision by a federal judge in California that rejected the government’s efforts to throw out on state secret grounds a 2008 lawsuit, brought by EFF, that includes earlier incarnations of the NSA’s surveillance programs, as well as current ones. The lawsuit is now proceeding.

Although other courts are not bound by the decision, Cohn said it could be a “tremendous boon” to plaintiffs in cases filed in the past month. “It’s tremendous, because anything that allows these cases to proceed is important,” she said.

She added that her organization plans to file a lawsuit this week stemming from Snowden’s recent revelations and that she has heard about at least two additional suits in the pipeline. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also has vowed to bring legal action against the government over its broad surveillance efforts; a spokeswoman for Paul said he is evaluating his options.

And lo it came to pass.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Sues NSA Over Surveillance

By Karen Gullo, Bloomberg News

Jul 16, 2013 1:58 PM ET

The lawsuit, filed today in federal court in San Francisco, focuses on warrantless collection of U.S. communications under an intelligence program partly disclosed by ex-government security contractor Edward Snowden and later acknowledged by the administration. The EFF sued on behalf of groups including Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace and Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Any judicial, executive or executive authorization” of the “Associational Tracking Program or the acquisition and retention of the communications information of plaintiffs, their members, and their staffs is unlawful and invalid,” EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said in the complaint.

Millions of US license plates tracked and stored, new ACLU report finds

Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Wednesday 17 July 2013 10.07 EDT

Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.

A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.

“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”

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Many police authorities have few or no regulations over use of the scanners other than that they should not be deployed to track people of personal interest such as spouses or friends. Pittsburg police department in California stated on the documents submitted to ACLU that the scanners can be used for “any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation – reasonable suspicion or probably cause is not required”. The police department in Scarsdale New York was glowing about the potential of the technology, saying the scanners had potential that “is only limited by the officer’s imagination”.

Boston Strangler: DNA testing of suspect’s corpse may lay identity to rest

Associated Press

Friday 12 July 2013 03.09 EDT

Investigators helped by advances in DNA technology finally have forensic evidence linking longtime suspect Albert DeSalvo to the last of the 1960s killings attributed to the Boston Strangler, leading many involved in the case to hope it can finally be put to rest.

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DeSalvo’s family was outraged police secretly followed his nephew to collect DNA for new tests. Attorney Elaine Sharp said the family also believes there is still reasonable doubt he killed the Strangler’s last supposed victim.

NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 17 July 2013 15.19 EDT

The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

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A document published last month by the Guardian detailing the history of the NSA’s post-9/11 bulk surveillance on telephone and internet data refer to one- or two-hop analysis performed by NSA. The document, provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, does not explicitly mention three-hop analysis, nor does it clearly suggest that such analysis occurs.

Wednesday’s hearing was the second major public congressional hearing about the NSA’s surveillance activities since the Guardian and the Washington Post disclosed some of them in early June. Unlike the previous hearing on June 18 before the House intelligence committee, members of the House judiciary committee aggressively questioned senior officials from the NSA, FBI, Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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One senior member of the panel, congressman James Sensenbrenner, the author of the 2001 Patriot Act, warned the officials that unless they rein in the scope of their surveillance on Americans’ phone records, “There are not the votes in the House of Representatives” to renew the provision after its 2015 expiration.

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(S)everal members of the committee, of both parties, said they were concerned not merely about the analysis of the phone records but about NSA’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone data in the first place, without an individual suspicion of connections to terrorism.

“The statute says ‘collection’,” congressman Jerrold Nadler told Cole. “You’re trying to confuse us by talking use.”

Congressman Ted Poe, a judge, said: “I hope as we move forward as a Congress we rein in the idea that it’s OK to bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security.”

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Congressman Spencer Bachus said he “was not aware at all” of the extent of the surveillance, since the NSA programs were primarily briefed to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren revealed that an annual report provided to Congress by the government about the phone-records collection, something cited by intelligence officials as an example of their disclosures to Congress, is “less than a single page and not more than eight sentences”.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, challenged Litt’s contention that the Fisa court was “not a rubber stamp” by way of a baseball analogy. Jeffries noted that some of the greatest hitters in baseball history – the Cardinals’ Stan Musial, the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, the Tigers’ Ty Cobb and the Yankees’ Babe Ruth – did not hit more than four balls safely per 10 times at bat, for career batting averages ranging from Musial’s .331 to Cobb’s .366.

He then noted that the Fisa court approves over 99% of government requests for surveillance – which would give the government a lifetime batting average of .999 – saying: “But you’ve taken the position that the Fisa court is an independent check.”

Pavlik, was a Soviet youth praised by the Soviet press as a martyr. His story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family. His story was a subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies. The cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children.

Experts: Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work

By Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor, McClatchy

Posted on Tuesday, July 9, 2013

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

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Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

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But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

“There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on detecting terrorists.

“Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy.

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When asked about the ineffectiveness of behavior profiling, (Gene) Barlow (a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive) said the policy “does not mandate” that employees report behavior indicators.

“It simply educates employees about basic activities or behavior that might suggest a person is up to improper activity,” he said.

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But research and other programs that rely on profiling show it remains unproven, could make employees more resistant to reporting violations and might lead to spurious allegations.

The Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have spent tens of millions of dollars on an array of research projects. Yet after several decades, they still haven’t developed a list of behaviors they can use to definitively identify the tiny fraction of workers who might some day violate national security laws.

“We are back to the needle-in-a-haystack problem,” said Fienberg, the Carnegie Mellon professor.

“We have not found any silver bullets,” said Deanna Caputo, principal behavioral psychologist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat efforts for U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”

…

But some current and former U.S. officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because security officials are granted access to information outside their usual purview.

These current and former U.S. officials and experts also ridiculed as overly zealous and simplistic the idea of using reports of suspicious behavior to predict potential insider threats. It takes years for professional spy-hunters to learn their craft, and relying on the observations of inexperienced people could lead to baseless and discriminatory investigations, they said.

“Anyone is an amateur looking at behavior here,” said Thomas Fingar, a former State Department intelligence chief who chaired the National Intelligence Council, which prepares top-secret intelligence analyses for the president, from 2005 to 2008.

…

Eric Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.”

“The answer to it is not to have a Stasi-like response,” said Feldman, referring to the feared secret police of communist East Germany. “You’ve removed that firewall between employees seeking help and the threat that any employee who seeks help could be immediately retaliated against by this insider threat office.”

Who says I don’t ever post good news?

NSA scandal delivers record numbers of internet users to DuckDuckGo

Charles Arthur, The Guardian

Wednesday 10 July 2013 12.25 EDT

(Y)ou’ve probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. … You won’t find it offered as an alternative default search engine on any browser, on desktop or mobile. Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.

But this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. It doesn’t use cookies or store data about its users’ IP addresses, doesn’t offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default. (Google provides an encrypted connection for logged-in users, but not automatically for non-logged in users.) If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.

…

(H)e (Gabriel Weinberg) noticed growing amounts of junk sites in Google results – pushed there by experts who had gamed the giant’s algorithms. He decided that by hooking into web services such as Wikipedia, Yelp and Qype, he could get focused answers cheaply. By using a combination of those services and crowdsourced links, he built the site’s first search index.

Of the privacy angle, he says: “I kind of backed into that.” It wasn’t a political decision, but a personal one. “It’s hard to define my politics. I take every issue seriously and come to my own conclusion. I don’t really feel like I belong to any political party in the US … I guess I’m more on the liberal side.”

The reason he decided not to store search data was because it reveals so much about us. In 2005, AOL accidentally released details of searches made by 650,000 of its users via Google; reporters from the New York Times were able to use the information to identify one of the users: a 62-year-old woman in Georgia. Nowadays Google would also have your IP address (indicating your ISP and perhaps precise location) and, if you were logged in, all your previous search history. If you logged in to use Google on your mobile, it would have your location history too.

Having decided that searching is intimately personal, he deduced that governments would want to get hold of search data. “I looked at the search fiascos such as the AOL data release, and decided that government requests were real and would be inevitable, and that search engines and content companies would be handing over that data [to government] in increasing amounts.”

Search data, he says, “is arguably the most personal data people are entering into anything. You’re typing in your problems, your desires. It’s not the same as things you post publicly on a social network.”

So why does Google store it? “It’s a myth that Google needs to store all this data about you. Almost all the money they make on search is based on what you type into the search box. Nothing more. They need to track you for their other services – Gmail, YouTube – because those are hard to monetise, and that’s why you get ads following around the internet all the time.” (Google owns DoubleClick, the largest display ad supplier online.)

I’ve made DuckDuckGo the default search on all my browsers and find it gives better answers than Google because it doesn’t just keep recycling the same results you’ve already seen.  Also, you can use any other search engine anytime (if DuckDuckGo runs out of results it gives you the choice of continuing your search on Google, Bing, and Yahoo).

Tiny Utah-based ISP makes a name for itself by rebuffing government snoops

Rory Carroll, The Guardian

Tuesday 9 July 2013 11.49 EDT

Xmission, Utah’s first independent and oldest internet service provider, has spent the past 15 years resolutely shielding customers’ privacy from government snoops in a way that larger rivals appear to have not.

The company, a comparative midget with just 30,000 subscribers, cited the Fourth Amendment in rebuffing warrantless requests from local, state and federal authorities, showing it was possible to resist official pressure.

“I would tell them I didn’t need to respond if they didn’t have a warrant, that (to do so) wouldn’t be constitutional,” the founder and chief executive, Pete Ashdown, said in an interview at his Salt Lake City headquarters.

Since 1998 he rejected dozens of law enforcement requests, including Department of Justice subpoenas, on the grounds they violated the US constitution and state law. “I would tell them, please send us a warrant, and then they’d just drop it.”

Ashdown, 46, assented just once, on his lawyer’s advice, to a 2010 FBI request backed by a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

…

The Electronic Freedom Foundation called it a model for the industry. “XMission’s transparency report is one of the most transparent we’ve seen,” said Nate Cardozo, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based advocacy group.

…

Utah is an unlikely home for an internet privacy champion. The state’s conservative politicians cheered the Bush-era Patriot Act and welcomed the NSA’s new 1m sq ft data centre at Bluffdale, outside Salt Lake City.

Ashdown, who toured the facility with a group of local data centre operators, said he had not received NSA information requests but saw irony in it siting its data behemoth in his backyard.

(h/t Diane Sweet @ Crooks & Liars)

It seems to me his only crime was not being a member of “the club” and not having $1.7 million in his pocket at the end of the auction (which is by law open to anyone).

He was soon able to raise it (after he became notorious, but too late to keep him from being convicted) and this has always struck me as a far more effective form of environmental activism than wasting your money on an ineffective institutional activist organization who’s real goal is cushy K Street offices for their over-paid lobbyists.

Your tax dollars at work.

Problem-plagued missile defense system fails in $214-million test

By W.J. Hennigan. Los Angeles Times

July 5, 2013, 5:28 p.m.

The failure of the $214-million test Friday involved a ground-based defense system, designed by Boeing Co., to defend the U.S. from long-range ballistic missile attacks.

The Missile Defense Agency now has a testing record of eight hits out of 16 intercept attempts with the “hit-to-kill” warheads. The last successful intercept occurred in December 2008.

…

It’s a significant blow for the ground-based system of 30 interceptors in Alaska and California, which the Government Accountability Office estimated would cost taxpayers $40 billion from 1996 to 2017.

Despite the poor track record, the Pentagon plans to add 14 missile interceptors in Alaska to counter North Korea, which has issued threats since it tested an underground nuclear device and launched a small satellite. The Pentagon expects cost of the expansion to be $1 billion

F-35 fighter jet struggles to take off

By W.J. Hennigan and Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

June 12, 2013

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.

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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.

…

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.

F-22 program produces few planes, soaring costs

By Ralph Vartabedian and W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

June 16, 2013

When the U.S. sought to assure Asian allies that it would defend them against potential aggression by North Korea this spring, the Pentagon deployed its top-of-the-line jet fighter, the F-22 Raptor.

But only two of the jets were sent screaming through the skies south of Seoul.

That token show of American force was a stark reminder that the U.S. may have few F-22s to spare. Alarmed by soaring costs, the Defense Department shut down production last year after spending $67.3 billion on just 188 planes – leaving the Air Force to rely mainly on its fleet of 30-year-old conventional fighters.

“People around the world aren’t dumb,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita). “They see what we have. They recognize that our forces have been severely depleted.”

Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-22 is the most lethal fighter jet in the world. But it has also become a symbol of a broken procurement process that’s failing to deliver advanced weapons systems on time, on budget and in sufficient quantities.

The F-22 was originally intended to replace all of the Air Force’s F-15 combat jets that date back to the early 1970s. But today those F-15s still represent the bulk of a so-called air superiority fleet – the jets that are supposed to outgun enemy aircraft and gain control of the sky.

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The early cancellation led directly to a new advanced warplane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that Lockheed also produces. Today, that nearly $400-billion system is headed in the same direction as the F-22, falling behind schedule, encountering serious software problems and suffering sharp cost growth.

…

On the day after Lockheed won, Rice declined to say that it was the better product and cited Lockheed’s superior management plan for the program.

In a recent interview, Rice conceded that the F-22 was not necessarily the better plane, saying, “There were some reasons to think that the YF-23 might be a better plane for the Air Force.”

…

The early termination of the F-22 has left the nation with a weaker deterrence to potential enemies, said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org. China is building two stealth fighters, one of them able to operate off aircraft carriers, and seems able to build more than 188 aircraft, he said. “You’d have to be worried.”

Feel safer?  Still confident we can nuke Iran into oblivion?

This is what your elites have produced.  A house of cards.

The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Wednesday 10 July 2013 07.24 EDT

Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions (“Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hawaii facility?” – “Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?” – “Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?”) and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques (“Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation” – “Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks”).

Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over “what is journalism?” with this answer: you fill up articles on topics you don’t know the first thing about with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of “just asking questions”. You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy without bothering even to ask them about it first, all while hiding from your readers the fact that they have repeatedly and in great detail addressed the very “questions” you’re posing.

But shoddy journalism from the Washington Post is far too common to be worth noting. What was far worse was that Pincus’ wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods.

As I documented in an email I sent to Pincus early yesterday morning – one that I instantly posted online and then publicized on Twitter – the article contains three glaring factual errors: 1) Pincus stated that I wrote an article about Poitras “for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog” (I never wrote anything for that blog in my life; the article he referenced was written for Salon); 2) Pincus claimed Assange “previewed” my first NSA scoop in a Democracy Now interview a week earlier by referencing the bulk collection of telephone calls (Assange was expressly talking about a widely reported Bush program from 8 years earlier, not the FISA court order under Obama I reported); 3) Pincus strongly implied that Snowden had worked for the NSA for less than 3 months by the time he showed up in Hong Kong with thousands of documents when, in fact, he had worked at the NSA continuously for 4 years. See the email I sent Pincus for the conclusive evidence of those factual falsehoods and the other distortions peddled by the Post.

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The lengths to which some media outlets in this case have gone to assist the US government in trying to criminalize the journalism we’ve done has been remarkably revealing. But the willingness of the Post to aid in this effort by spewing falsehood-based innuendo, which they then permit to remain hour after hour even while knowing it’s false, is a reminder of how ill-advised it is to trust what you read in that establishment venue, and is a vibrant illustration of the reasons such organizations are held in such low esteem.

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The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple spoke to Pincus about all of this, and Pincus’ comments have to be read to be believed. He says a correction “is in the works.” Wemple’s analysis of his Post colleague’s journalistic practices is, by itself, well worth reading.

Pincus responds to Greenwald blast

By Erik Wemple, Washington Post

Published: July 10, 2013 at 8:25 am

Pincus also cited “close connections” between Greenwald (and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who also got a piece of the leak stories) and Assange/WikiLeaks. Here’s an example of those connections, via Pincus: “On April 10, 2012, Greenwald wrote for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials.”

That claim was among the many that prompted Greenwald to go public with his concerns about the column. Greenwald: “I have no idea what you’re talking about here, and neither do you. I never wrote anything ‘for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog.’ How you decided to pull that fact out of thin air is a genuine mystery. The April 10, 2012, article of mine you seem to be referencing – about the serial border harassment of the filmmaker Laura Poitras – was written for Salon, where I was a Contributing Writer and daily columnist. Neither it, nor anything else I’ve ever written, was written ‘for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog.’ ”

Pincus now concedes Greenwald’s point. A correction on the point is in the works, he said. As for the rest of the piece, Pincus said it’s “argumentative.”

Maybe so. The suggestion that Greenwald and WikiLeaks are somehow collaborators, however, is a rather dramatic allegation. Absent the claim that Greenwald penned a column especially for WikiLeaks, what’s left of Pincus’s case that there are “close connections” between the journalist and advocacy group? Asked about that, Pincus pointed, again, to the WikiLeaks Web site. Specifically, this page, which directs the public to various experts on matters related to WikiLeaks. It’s divided into various subsections: “WikiLeaks,” for example; “Julian Assange,” “Freedom of the Press.” Under each section, it provides the names and contact information for folks who know about the topics. Greenwald is among them.

The page stipulates that none of the listed people are WikiLeaks officials: “These commentators do not represent WikiLeaks; they are listed because they are knowledgeable about the topics.”

Is Greenwald’s inclusion on such a directory evidence of “close connections” between him and Assange/WikiLeaks? If you need more, said Pincus, consider that Greenwald has written “a lot” about Assange and has “appeared with him.” His story also reported that a nonprofit in which Greenwald and Poitras are founding members strives to assist whistleblowers, “including WikiLeaks.”

The doctrine of “close connections” drew a fiery response from Greenwald, who insisted he’s never “appeared” anywhere with Assange: “I’ve never met Julian Assange in my life,” Greenwald told the Erik Wemple Blog. “I’ve certainly expressed support for WikiLeaks, am on the board of a group that raised money for them, and have communicated with him very periodically via e-mail. I would not describe that as anything approaching ‘close connections,’ but in the scheme of Pincus’s factual errors, that’s low on the list.”

In his brief column, Pincus managed to generate other flashpoints with Greenwald. For instance, he alleged that Assange, in a May 29 interview, “previewed the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents that landed a week later. Speaking from Ecuador’s embassy in London, Assange described how NSA had been collecting ‘all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years. . . . Those calling records already [are] entered into the national security complex.’ ”

Given that interview, Pincus asked whether Assange knew “ahead of time” about the Greenwald story regarding the NSA’s collection of Verizon phone records.

No way, said Greenwald: “The sentence you quoted from Assange’s May 29 interview about the collection of phone records was preceded by this: ‘The National Security Agency – and this has come out in one court case after another – was involved in a project called Stellar Wind to collect all the calling records of the United States.’ Stellar Wind, as you rather amazingly do not know, is the code name for the 2001-2007 Bush NSA spying program. As part of that program, the NSA (as you also rather amazingly did not know) engaged in the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.”

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Pincus is not the first to raise questions about the conduct of Snowden and the journalists that he tapped for his leaks. That said, he insisted he’s not poking at potential wrongdoing by the media. His focus is on Snowden. “Why did he go to Booz Allen? Why did he go to these journalists?” asked Pincus. “What interests me is, did he do this on his own or did someone else tell him to do it?”

The Erik Wemple Blog supports questions. Questions about politicians, celebrities, dogs, journalists – the whole lot. At some point, however, facts and findings about Greenwald & Co. are going to have to catch up with these various curiosities. As we’ve stated before, the public knows more about how these particular leaks dripped from source to recipient than we do about the average national security story, thanks to the disclosures of the reporters involved. Thus far, those disclosures have spelled out a set of captivating, though hardly scandalous, interactions between Snowden and his leakees.

U.S. Allies Violate Int. Law Pursuing Snowden

The Real News

July 7, 13

Well, you saw what happened on Tuesday. He wasn’t even on this plane. It was the presidential plane of Bolivia with the president on it. And in spite of the fact that this caused a major controversy between and conflict between the European countries and Latin America, and, of course, the U.S. and Latin America, they–France, Spain, and Portugal, and possibly other countries–grounded his plane. They forced him to turn back and go to Austria. They wouldn’t let him pass French or Spanish or Portuguese airspace.

So this was a very serious offense. I mean, you know, obviously it’s not as bad as killing somebody or something like that, but in the diplomatic world these conventions are rarely, rarely violated. It was like last year when the U.K. threatened to invade the Ecuadorian embassy. That was something that hadn’t been done for 50 or 100 years. I mean, you know, even the Nazis, you know, respected embassies when people were sheltered there in most cases. You know. So this is something that’s just not done. And the same is true about this event. This is something that just isn’t done. A president’s plane, which has diplomatic immunity, is not turned away, especially on the mere suspicion, which turned out to be false, that somebody the United States was looking for was on the plane. And this isn’t Osama bin Laden on the plane, either; this is somebody’s who’s just wanted for–well, for a crime that probably half the world doesn’t even consider a crime.

Obama’s Secrecy Makes Bush Look Mild

The Real News

July 9, 2013

100 million phone records of Verizon based on (a) secret SIS court order (are) being given to NSA each and every day, that’s the equivalent of a general warrant, which is a total violation of the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution or even in the enabling act legislation, as broad as it is, gave that kind of license to the government in secret to turn over the records of millions and millions about tens of millions of innocent people, in this case, tens of millions of US citizens, US persons. So those who are attacking him (Snowden) are attacking him as the messenger.

They don’t want to deal with the actual message, because it would raise the most troubling of questions. I would reverse and say, what if the same revelations had come out under the Bush administration. Well, in part they did in 2005 ended 2006, and all kinds of people on the left were wanting to do hang Bush out to dry, up to and including calls for impeachment because he was, violating the oath that he talks, the special oath that he took to, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Those same voices are quite muted if not silent and submissive in the face of this unprecedented institutionaliz(ation) of the secrecy regime, which is not only been accepted lock, stock, and barrel by the Obama administration but has been greatly expanded. So there are those voices that you’re referring to simply do not want to deal with the message and want to continue to focus on the person who brought the message. It’s classic politics of personal destruction. It’s classic ad hominem attacks. It’s classic rejection because you don’t have to deal with the extraordinarily uncomfortable truth that you actually have a secrecy Pres. who’s actually making Bush look rather mild by comparison.

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON, The New York Times

Published: July 3, 2013

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” – supervisor – “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

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Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States – about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the criminal division’s fraud section of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Completa en Español

Shorter report in English

Diversion of Bolivian Plane Angers Latin American Leaders

By WILLIAM NEUMAN, RICK GLADSTONE and MELISSA EDDY, The New York Times

Published: July 3, 2013

Latin American leaders immediately called for an emergency meeting of the Union of South American Nations, which was expected to take place on Thursday. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president of Argentina, said the episode had “vestiges of a colonialism that we thought was completely overcome,” adding that it was a humiliating act that affected all of South America. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador said in a post on Twitter that the situation was “EXTREMELY serious” and called it an “affront to all America,” referring to Latin America.

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“Yesterday was one of the most shameful pages in the political history of some countries in Europe,” Mr. García Linera said in La Paz on Wednesday.

For many in the region, the episode was a throwback to the colonial era, when European countries held sway over a weak Latin America. Many also blamed the United States, insisting that the Obama administration had instructed its European allies to stop Mr. Morales’s plane on the suspicion that it carried Mr. Snowden, who is wanted on charges of violating espionage laws for divulging secrets about American surveillance programs.

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“At the moment there is nothing we can do but wait for permission for a flyover,” said Mr. Morales, speaking through a translator. “Spain is now consulting with the U.S.A. whether the plane can fly over Spanish airspace.” The president, his staff and four pilots were forced to spend the night in the airport’s V.I.P. area. Mr. Morales referred to his unscheduled stop in Vienna as “being held hostage.”