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Photo by: joanneleon. August, 2013.
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This is a long, informative article by Peter Wallsten in WaPo.
Lawmakers say obstacles limited oversight of NSA’s telephone surveillance program
The administration argued Friday that lawmakers were fully informed of the surveillance program and voted to keep it in place as recently as 2011. Officials say they have taken unusual steps to make information available to Congress, and committee leaders say they have carefully examined the National Security Agency’s data collection.
[...]
Yet some other members of the intelligence and judiciary committees paint a different picture.
They describe regular classified briefings in which intelligence officials would not volunteer details if questions were not asked with absolute precision.
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Similar concerns have come from some Republicans, including Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, a key author of the law authorizing the bulk data surveillance who has in recent weeks become a critic. He said classified briefings for lawmakers were a “rope-a-dope operation” designed to silence “those who are on the trail of something that isn’t right” because rules restrict their ability to speak with other members and the public.
[...
Agency officials, meantime, aggressively court the committee, giving lawmakers a sense of being insiders in a clandestine world and at times treating them to a real-life version of the Spy Museum, former members said.
[Emphasis added]
And some of that article is probably based on what Rep. Amash said on Twitter. The reason that I'm calling attention to the story and these statements is that they are coming from Republicans who are calling out leaders in their own party. The Republicans control the House Intelligence Committee. That makes the statements much more surprising and relevant, IMHO.
Along the same lines, I'd like to include this TechDirt article again, by Jennifer Hoelzer, one of Sen. Wyden's key staffers on the issue of surveillance, because this was a really important piece. It also might be an indicator that more elected representatives and staff might be speaking out more about these claims that Congress was A-Okay with the NSA programs. Pres. Obama pushes the blame for a lot of things off on Congress and does it often, and a lot of the time they deserve it. It seems to be pretty effective too, if you accept the idea that their abysmal approval numbers in the poll might be at least in part a result of the way Obama calls them out for their obstruction and other things. But with the top secret surveillance, if it's true that the briefings and oversight were really kabuki, the strategy of blaming Congress for everything might have a different effect.
Jennifer Hoelzer's Insider's View Of The Administration's Response To NSA Surveillance Leaks
And, as I explained in an interview with Brian Beutler earlier this summer, that is just a fraction of the ways the Obama Administration and the Intelligence Communities ignored and even thwarted our attempts to consult the public on these surveillance programs before they were reauthorized. In fact, after the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in which Wyden attempted to close the FAA's Section 702 loophole, which another important Techdirt post this week explains, "gives the NSA 'authority' to run searches on Americans without any kind of warrant," I -- as Wyden’s spokesperson -- was specifically barred from explaining the Senator's opposition to the legislation to the reporters. In fact, the exact response I was allowed to give reporters was:
"We've been told by Senator Feinstein's staff that under the SSCI's Committee Rule 9.3, members and staff are prohibited from discussing the markup or describing the contents of the bill until the official committee report is released. The fact that they've already put out a press release does not lift this prohibition."
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I think it's hard for the American people to trust the President when his administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to silence critics and -- again -- treat oversight as a threat on par with al Qaeda. As another great Techdirt post this week -- US Releases Redacted Document Twice... With Different Redactions -- illustrates, many of the Intelligence Community's classification decisions seem to be based more on a desire to avoid criticism than clear national security interests. And as Senator Wyden said back in 2007, when then CIA Director Hayden (yes, the same guy who thinks we're all losers who can't get laid) attempted to undermine oversight over his agency by launching an investigation into the CIA's inspector general, "people who know that they're doing the right thing aren't afraid of oversight."
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In his book, Secrecy: The American Experience, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan included a quote from a 1960 report issued by the House Committee on Operations which I believe provides a far better response than anything I could write on my own:
Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society for a fully informed public is the basis of self government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than its people.
Show us the dishes.
THE N.S.A.’S DIRTY DISHES: OBAMA’S PRESS CONFERENCE
And, he added a little later, “probably what’s a fair criticism is my assumption that if we had checks and balances from the courts and Congress, that that traditional system of checks and balances would be enough to give people assurance that these programs were run properly. You know, that assumption I think proved to be undermined by what happened after the leaks.” Did he really assume that: that the public would think that if all three branches of government were on top of it, there could be no worry for civil liberties? Perhaps what Snowden did was to remind Obama that invisible checks and balances are not quite what the Founders had in mind. As it turned out, Obama said, “I think people have questions about this program.” We do. So show us the dishes; we’ll be able to tell if they’re dirty.
How We Lost Yemen
The United States used the Pakistan playbook on Yemen's terrorists. It didn't work.
All this raises a rather simple question: Why? Why, if the U.S. counterterrorism approach is working in Yemen, as Barack Obama's administration claims, is AQAP still growing? Why, after nearly four years of bombing raids, is the group capable of putting together the type of plot that leads to the United States shuttering embassies and missions from North Africa to the Persian Gulf?
The answer is simple, if rather disheartening: Faulty assumptions and a mistaken focus paired with a resilient, adaptive enemy have created a serious problem for the United States.
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In Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Qaeda was largely a group of Arabs in non-Arab countries. In Yemen, al Qaeda is made up mostly of Yemenis living in Yemen.
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The United States can target and kill someone as a terrorist, only to have Yemenis take up arms to defend him as a tribesman. In time, many of these men are drawn to al Qaeda not out of any shared sense of ideology, but rather out of a desire to get revenge on the country that killed their fellow tribesman.
How to Read Afghanistan
“The Taliban are over there — not far away,” the old man says in Pashto. “I would like to tell [the Americans] a story. In our country, we grow wheat and we have ants. There is no way we can stop the little ants from stealing the wheat. There are so many little ants it is almost impossible to stop them. I’ve told this story to help the Americans understand the situation in Afghanistan.”
The American sergeant, waiting, shifts uneasily. “He’s giving many examples,” the translator finally says. “The main point is that if you want to get the [Taliban] they are behind this road, behind this mountain.”
The video is about the perils of inaccurate translation, and indeed, the translator fails mightily. But it’s worth asking what the sergeant would have made of the story had it reached him. The Afghan is saying something crucial about the inseparability of insurgents from everyone else, and about the dangers of fighting in the weeds, where bullets can strike the wrong targets, like pesticides that kill the very crops they’re designed to protect. The story might not supply coordinates for an insurgent safe house, but it certainly helps an attentive listener understand what the world looks like to a villager in a contested part of the country
GOOD intelligence requires good reading; you can’t have one without the other. Paula Loyd understood this. Years earlier, in her anthropology honors thesis at Wellesley, she described how marginalized people — servants, slaves, women in male-dominated societies — quietly pushed back against the dominant social order. Drawing on the work of the Yale political scientist James C. Scott, she wrote that they tended to be “cautious about expressing their resistance openly when they perceive the power of the dominant group to be very strong.” But “when they are among their own, the peasants carry on an entirely different dialogue.” In such situations, she observed, people talk in “jokes, metaphors, folk tales, and codes,” artfully conveying meaning while preserving maximum deniability.
Prosecutors and F.B.I. Examine JPMorgan Over Losses
The employees — Javier Martin-Artajo, a manager who oversaw the trading strategy, and Julien Grout, a low-level trader in London — could face charges of falsifying bank records. A third trader, Bruno Iksil, is cooperating with the government. Some authorities have discussed having Mr. Iksil agree to a lesser charge, two people briefed on the matter said, though others have suggested that he escape all criminal liability.
Stiglitz.
The Wrong Lesson From Detroit’s Bankruptcy
When I was growing up in Gary, Ind., nearly a quarter of American workers were employed in the manufacturing sector. There were plenty of jobs at the time that paid well enough for a single breadwinner, working one job, to fulfill the American dream for his family of four. He could earn a living on the sweat of his brow, afford to send his children to college and even see them rise to the professional class.
Cities like Detroit and Gary thrived on that industry, not just in terms of the wealth that it produced but also in terms of strong communities, healthy tax bases and good infrastructure. From the stable foundation of Gary’s excellent public schools, influenced by the ideas of the progressive reformer John Dewey, I went on to Amherst College and then to M.I.T. for graduate school.
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At one level, one might shrug: companies die every day; new ones are born. That is part of the dynamics of capitalism. So, too, for cities. Maybe Detroit and cities like it are just in the wrong location for the goods and services that 21st-century America demands.
But such a diagnosis would be wrong, and it’s extremely important to recognize that Detroit’s demise is not simply an inevitable outcome of the market.
U.S. Mortgage Group Forced to Correct Initiative Stats
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the document sent today, asked members of the administration’s Mortgage Fraud Working Group to correct and update any public materials related to the results released in October of a year-long law enforcement initiative targeting fraud schemes aimed at vulnerable homeowners.
The FBI restated the number of people criminally charged to 107 from 530. Agencies were asked to correct victims’ total losses to $95 million from an estimated $1 billion, and the number of victims found to 17,185 from more than 73,000.
“This targeted approach resulted in the successful filing of many criminal and civil cases around the country, but regrettably, the statistics reported in October included cases that fell outside the specific parameters of the initiative,” the FBI, which co-chairs the mortgage group, said in the memo.
Egypt Tensions Soar as Army Encircles Pro-Morsi Sit-InsEgypt is again on the verge of political violence as military vows to crush encampments and Muslim Brotherhood calls for new marches
The streets of Cairo were again on edge Monday as dawn broke with expectations that encampments held by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi would face the wrath of the military council and its chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has repeatedly called for the sit-ins to be cleared.
Though clashes were not yet underway and the sit-ins remained peaceful, reports indicate that the military was following through with plans to circle the camps and was setting up check points in an effort to cut of supplies moving into the areas where they are being held.
However, the Associated Press reports the military's plan to fully "disperse" the camps has been postponed following details of the plan being leaked to the press:
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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