Tag: ek Politics

What is becoming clear is that tomorrow’s “big” State of the Union speech will be a vacuous exercise in gasbaggery.  Not that they aren’t all that way, but this one is so obvious that even the Beltway Bootlickers are compelled to notice it.

For Obama, Investing in Brighter Futures Remains a Tough Sell

By JOHN HARWOOD, The New York Times

JAN. 26, 2014

As aides draft their 2015 budget plan, their 2014 version shows this bottom line for Mr. Obama’s sixth year in office: Government investments in infrastructure, research and development, and education and training, at 3.3 percent of the nation’s economy, match the level from President George W. Bush’s sixth year in office.

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“It has not been possible to significantly shift the needle,” said Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who headed Mr. Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. “We should be raising those levels, and we’re not.

“I guess the good news,” Ms. Tyson added, “is that the share hasn’t been plummeting.”

Over the last half-century, though, it has plummeted. Spending on what the federal government classifies as investments peaked in 1968 at 6.6 percent of the economy, twice the current proportion.

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“We’ve been playing on a Reagan playing field – a cut-government, shrink-programs field – since 1981,” (Democratic Senator from New York) Mr. Schumer said in an interview. “It’s all turning around now.”

Yah think?  Really?

Oh, and I’d never use plummeted, plummeted.  How about ‘falling’ idiot?  Buy a damn Thesaurus you cheap bastard.

Considering that much of the operations against terrorists is a mere chimera designed to keep money flowing into the pockets of the grifters and con artists of the military industrial security state, it’s hard to look at the ‘zero option’ as a scary concept.

Afghanistan Exit Is Seen as Peril to Drone Mission

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times

JAN. 26, 2014

If Mr. Obama ultimately withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan, the C.I.A.’s drone bases in the country would have to be closed, according to administration officials, because it could no longer be protected.

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The C.I.A.’s drone bases in Afghanistan, including one in the eastern part of the country, allow operators to respond quickly to fresh intelligence. The proximity to Pakistan’s tribal areas also allows the Predator drones and their larger, faster cousin, the Reaper, to fly longer missions without having to return to base.

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Other allied countries are within the Reaper’s range – in the Persian Gulf, for example. But the distances would be too great to carry out drone operations effectively, officials said, and it is very unlikely that any of those nations would approve launching the diplomatically sensitive strikes missions from their soil.

This is bad news only if you think the indiscriminate remote bombing of wedding parties and shepherds and the first responders who come to identify the dead and tend the wounded is a good idea.

Norway’s curling team has wild pants for Winter Olympics

By Cindy Boren, Washington Post

January 22 at 9:03 am

Luckily, curling isn’t a sport with a lot of fast, violent movement.

The Norwegian curling team has outdone itself with its latest duds for next month’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. Norway’s team has become known for its pants and even has an unofficial Facebook page (The Norway Olympic Curling Team’s pants, natch, with well over 500,000 likes).

Encore, for the Norwegian Curlers and Their Pants

By MARY PILON, The New York Times

JAN. 21, 2014

The curlers have gotten used to people paying attention to their clothes. In 2010, at the Vancouver Games, where the Norwegians won a silver medal, they made a splash when they made the sheet of curling ice their runway, competing in pants of bright red, white and blue, the colors of their country’s flag.

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Representatives of Loudmouth, the company in Foster City, Calif., that made the pants, said orders out of London went up tenfold, and the company’s servers crashed.

“It was enough to cause a stir in the curling world,” said Tony D’Orazio, a curler in Rochester, N.Y., who started the fan page and has chronicled the team’s fashion for the last four years. “For them to do what they did in 2010, it was revolutionary to curling. It took the traditions of the sport and re-energized it for a new generation.”

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“These pants would be great to win in,” Vad Petersson said. “But they’d be terrible to lose in. We decided that when we wear them, we have to really try and win and go the whole way.”

Shell’s Arctic drilling set back by US court ruling

Terry Macalister, The Guardian

Thursday 23 January 2014 07.34 EST

Shell’s hopes of drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska this summer faced a serious setback when a US federal court ruled that the full range of environmental risks had not been assessed by the government.

The 9th circuit court of appeals ruled in favour of green groups and Native Alaskan tribes which want Shell and its partners to call off their exploration programme for fear of an oil spill.

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Greenpeace said the court case was a “massive blow to Shell’s Arctic ambitions” and capped a miserable first few weeks in office for Shell’s new boss.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, added: “The court decision means the USA interior department has to go back to the drawing board before it can reissue any new licence to Shell. This is a massive blow to Shell’s Arctic ambitions. Shell had already lost the case for Arctic drilling in the court of public opinion – today they have lost the case in a court of law as well.”

Judges say Arctic offshore lease sale was flawed

By Dan Joling, Associated Press

January 22, 2014

A federal appeals court Wednesday ruled in favor of environmental groups that claimed the federal government conducted a flawed environmental review before selling $2.7 billion in petroleum leases off Alaska’s northwest coast in 2008.

A three-member panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a split decision that the Minerals Management Service, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, prepared an environmental assessment for a sale in the Chukchi Sea based on minimal development – just 1 billion barrels of oil.

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“President Obama now has the chance to do right by the Arctic and the planet by keeping oil drilling out of the Chukchi Sea,” said Earthjustice attorney Eric Grafe, who represented the groups, in a prepared statement. “It makes no sense to open up the fragile, irreplaceable, and already melting Arctic Ocean to risky drilling for dirty oil that will only exacerbate climate change already wreaking havoc on the Arctic and elsewhere.

Federal court deals latest blow to Arctic oil drilling

By Joel Connelly, Seattle Post Intelligencer

Posted on January 22, 2014

The case was remanded back to U.S. District Judge Ralph Bestline in Alaska.  Bestline has already once before, in 2010, held up Arctic exploration because of flaws and inadequate evaluations of environmental risks.

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Shell launched its Chukchi drilling in the summer of 2012.  Just about everything that could go wrong DID go wrong.

Drilling ships were late in arriving from the “lower 48.”  The spill-containment barge, being prepared in Bellingham, failed its tests.  The drilling ship Noble Discoverer lost its moorings and nearly went ashore on Unalaska Island in the Aleutians.

Last but not least, the conical drilling ship Kulluk – which had been re-equipped at great cost – broke loose from its moorings and ran aground on New Year’s Eve on an island in the Gulf of Alaska.

Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, The New York Times

JAN. 23, 2014

The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

While a majority of the five-member board embraced that conclusion, two members dissented from the view that the program was illegal. But the panel was united in 10 other recommendations, including deleting raw phone records after three years instead of five and tightening access to search results.

The report also sheds light on the history of the once-secret bulk collection program. It contains the first official acknowledgment that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court produced no judicial opinion detailing its legal rationale for the program until last August, even though it had been issuing orders to phone companies for the records and to the N.S.A. for how it could handle them since May 2006.

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“It may have been a laudable goal for the executive branch to bring this program under the supervision” of the court, the report says. “Ultimately, however, that effort represents an unsustainable attempt to shoehorn a pre-existing surveillance program into the text of a statute with which it is not compatible.”

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The report also scrutinizes in detail a handful of investigations in which the program was used, finding “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

Still, in her dissent, Ms. Cook criticized judging the program’s worth based only on whether it had stopped an attack to date. It also has value as a tool that can allow investigators to “triage” threats and provide “peace of mind” if it uncovers no domestic links to a newly discovered terrorism suspect, she wrote.

NSA’s mass phone data collection is illegal, says government privacy board

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 23 January 2014 08.35 EST

The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch, is to issue a report on Thursday afternoon that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

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The PCLOB, which briefed Obama on its findings before his speech last week, reportedly recommends instead that the bulk collection ought to be ended outright, owing to its assessed lack of necessity and dubious legality.

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Two of the board members, Rachel L Brand and Elisebeth Collins Cook, both lawyers in the George W Bush-era Justice Department, dissented on the finding that the bulk phone data collection was illegal.

The three other members – chairman David Medine, retired federal judge Patricia Wald, and civil liberties advocate James X. Dempsey – rejected the government’s argument, reaffirmed for years by a secret surveillance court, that the mass phone records collection was justified under a section of the Patriot Act that permits the government to amass records “relevant” to a terrorism inquiry.

“The approach boils down to the proposition that essentially all telephone records are relevant to essentially all international terrorism investigations,” the three-member majority is reported to have found.

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The PCLOB is not finished with its assessment of NSA surveillance. It plans in the coming weeks to issue another report evaluating the NSA’s collection of bulk foreign Internet communications, which have included those with Americans “incidentally” collected.

Independent review board says NSA phone data program is illegal and should end

By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post

Thursday, January 23, 8:29 AM

“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

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(T)he board found that it is impossible that all the records collected – billions daily – could be relevant to a single investigation “without redefining that word in a manner that is circular, unlimited in scope.” Moreover, instead of compelling phone companies to turn over records already in their possession, the program requires them to furnish newly generated call data on a daily basis. “This is an approach lacking foundation in the statute,” the report said.

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The report concluded that the NSA collection raises “constitutional concerns” with regard to U.S. citizens’ rights of speech, association and privacy. “The connections revealed by the extensive database of telephone records gathered under the program will necessarily include relationships established among individuals and groups for political, religious, and other expressive purposes,” it said. “Compelled disclosure to the government of information revealing these associations can have a chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

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In its assessment of the program’s value, the board scrutinized 12 terrorism cases cited by the intelligence community that involved information obtained through the Section 215 program. Even in cases where the data related to contacts of a known terrorism suspect, in nearly all of them the benefits were minimal–“generally limited to corroborating information that was obtained independently by the FBI,” the report said.

The board rejected the contention made by officials from Obama on down that the program was necessary to address a gap arising from a failure to detect an al Qaeda terrorist in the United States, Khalid al-Mihdhar, prior to the 2001 attacks. Mihdhar was in phone contact with a safehouse in Yemen, and though the NSA had intercepted the calls, it did not realize at the time that Mihdhar was calling from San Diego.

“The failure to identify Mihdhar’s presence in the United States stemmed primarily from a lack of information sharing among federal agencies, not of a lack of surveillance capabilities,” the report said, noting that in early 2000 the CIA knew Mihdhar had a visa enabling him to enter the United States but did not advise the FBI or watchlist him. “…This was a failure to connect the dots, not a failure to connect enough dots.”

Second, the report said, the government need not have collected the entire nation’s calling records to identify the San Diego number from which Mihdhar made his calls. It asserted that the government could have used existing legal authorities to request from U.S. phone companies the records of any calls made to or from the Yemen number. “Doing so could have identified the San Diego number on the other end of the calls,” though, it noted, the speed of the carriers’ responses likely would vary.

The board also stated that the program played no role in disrupting the 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway. That case is often cited in discussions of the program’s utility.

“The Board believes that the Section 215 program has contributed only minimal value in combating terrorism beyond what the government already achieves through these and other alternative means,” the report said. “Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations.”

NSA’s Spying on Phone Calls Illegal: U.S. Privacy Board

By Margaret Talev and Chris Strohm, Bloomberg News

2014-01-23 13:55:31

The bombshell nature of the report’s central conclusion may explain why Obama, after meeting with the board on its planned recommendations weeks ago, decided to announce his proposals on Jan. 17. Obama defended U.S. electronic spying as a bulwark against terrorism. He proposed changing aspects of the phone metadata program, which may require Congress to sort out details such as whether the government, the phone companies or an unidentified third party should retain the data.

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Obama had deferred decisions regarding the NSA’s Internet data collection to Congress and a new panel expected to be appointed.

Members of the privacy board briefed Obama on their planned recommendations ahead of his Jan. 17 announcement. The recommendations from the bipartisan, independent agency housed in the executive branch also follows a December report by a separate, independent review panel appointed by the president.

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Obama said he would require judicial review of requests to query phone call databases and ordered the Justice Department and intelligence officials to devise a way to take storage of that data out of the government’s hands.

He left other steps to limit surveillance up to a divided Congress, meaning that other changes may be months away if they are adopted at all.

Obama gave Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials 60 days to develop a plan for storing bulk telephone records outside of government custody, one of the most contentious issues arising from Snowden’s disclosures.

Phone companies, such as Verizon and AT&T, have resisted being required to retain telephone metadata for the government because of the potential cost and legal exposure. An entity to take on that role doesn’t yet exist. The administration plans to deliver a proposal on data storage to Congress by the end of March.

US withholding Fisa court orders on NSA bulk collection of Americans’ data

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 21 January 2014 13.16 EST

US attorney Preet Bharara of the southern district of New York informed the ACLU in a Friday letter that the government would not turn over “certain other” records from a secret surveillance court, which are being “withheld in full” from a Freedom of Information Act suit the civil liberties group filed to shed light on bulk surveillance activities performed under the Patriot Act.

The decision to keep some of the records secret, in the thick of Edward Snowden’s revelations, has raised suspicions within the ACLU that the government continues to hide bulk surveillance activities from the public, despite US president Barack Obama’s Friday concession that controversial National Security Agency programs have “never been subject to vigorous public debate”.

In his letter, written on the day Obama gave a long-awaited speech on surveillance that pledged additional transparency, Bhahara said that Friday’s release will be the last disclosure under the terms of the ACLU’s lawsuit.

“As discussed by telephone this morning, the government in fact has processed all of the remaining FISC Orders responsive to the FOIA request in this case that relate to bulk collection, regardless of whether the order contains any additions and/or adjustments to the implementation procedures, minimization procedures, and/or reporting requirements set out in other FISC orders,” the US attorney wrote.

“The government cannot specify the total number of documents withheld in full from this final set of responsive documents because the number itself is classified.”

Alexander Abdo, an ACLU attorney, noted that the government’s bulk surveillance disclosures have yet to include, among other efforts, a reported CIA program to collect international money transfers in bulk, revealed in November by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“It appears that the government is concealing the existence of other bulk collection programs under the Patriot Act, such as the CIA’s reported collection of our financial records,” Abdo said.

“In other words, on the same day that President Obama recognized the need for a vigorous debate about bulk collection, the government appears to be hiding the ball. We can’t have the public debate that President Obama wants without the facts that his agencies are hiding.”

Reading the (weak) tea leaves it appears Obama has said all he intends to say about the illegal NSA spying in last Friday’s hectoring (and boring) lecture.

So what will Obama talk about in the State of the Union address next week.  The smart money says there will be two main themes he will attempt to conflate to confuse the country which has turned sharply against his Administration and the Democratic Party.

One theme is income inequality.  Well good for him except that it’s highly unlikely after 6 years of policy specifically designed to increase it he has any meaningful remedies to suggest (to say nothing of their political viability).

The other theme is the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership and that dear readers is a stone cold loser, not simply because it’s bad economic policy and a naked power grab by the Executive at the expense of Congress and the Courts, but the more voters learn about it the more they hate it and justifiably so.

And it’s not just here in the US.  The reason we don’t have an agreement today is that the vast majority of our proposed partners can see that it’s a terrible deal for them and the United States Trade Representative is arrogantly refusing to negotiate compromise, prefering instead threats, intimidation, and blackmail.

Obama: Give me fast track trade

By Amie Parnes, The Hill

01/21/14 06:00 AM EST

No House Democrats are co-sponsoring the bill, however, and Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.), the Ways and Means Committee ranking member, and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), the panel’s former chairman, have both criticized it. They said the legislation doesn’t give enough leverage and power to Congress during trade negotiations.

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The Democratic opposition makes it highly unlikely the trade promotion authority bill, in its current form at least, will go anywhere.

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Senior congressional aides expect trade to be a part of Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address, since the White House has made clear that the trade bill is a priority and the TPP trade pact is a core part of the administration’s overall jobs agenda, in terms of increasing exports and opening markets.

“This is a priority of the president’s,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week. “It’s part of a broad approach to expanding exports and, you know, creating more opportunities for our businesses to grow. And we’re going to continue to push for it.”

People Pressure Is Making Fast Tracking the TPP Politically Toxic

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Truthout

Tuesday, 21 January 2014 10:36

Leaks are sinking the TPP like the Titanic on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Ron Kirk, the former US Trade Rep said they were keeping it secret because the more people knew, the less they would like the TPP and it would become so unpopular it could never become law.

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This week, Wikileaks released the Environmental Chapter.  The bottom line – there is no enforcement to protect the environment. The TPP is worse than President George W. Bush’s trade deals.  Environmental groups are saying the TPP is unacceptable.

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When Fast Track was introduced there was a backlash, according to public reports, of angry Democrats. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) told Huffington Post: “I’m a little disappointed that something’s dropped that was never discussed with Democrats in the House. As I understand it, it wasn’t actually discussed with Democrats in the Senate.”

Five members of the Senate Finance Committee told US Trade Representative Mike Froman they will not support the Baucus Fast Track bill because Congress needs to be involved throughout the process not just in an up or down vote after it is completed.

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Baucus says he will not be holding a mark-up of the bill because of the divisions on the Finance Committee. Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) who will be taking Baucus’ place told Politico there was “broad frustration” with the lack of transparency. And. Majority Leader Reid said that he may not even bring the bill to the Senate Floor if it passes out of committee.

As bad as the senate sounds for the administration, the House is even worse.  Opposition has been building in recent months with Democrats and Republicans writing President Obama opposing Fast Track.

They could not find a Democratic co-sponsor and now Politico reports, that Speaker Boehner says he will not bring the bill to the floor for a vote unless 50 Democrats support it.

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The president’s TPA month is off to a bad start, so he has to make a big pitch in his upcoming State of the Union on January 28.  If he doesn’t, it is a sign he has given up and is distancing himself from defeat. He’s not only going to have to persuade almost every Republican to support him (that would be a first for his presidency), he’s going to have to convince every Democrat who has not taken a position, and change the minds of many who have already publicly said they oppose Fast Track.

The problem is Members of Congress know that if they get on the wrong side of corporate trade agreements, it will hurt them politically.

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Members of Congress have seen the research that shows 90% of Americans will see their income go down from the TPP while the wealthiest get wealthier.  Why would any Member of Congress want to sign on to something like that – especially in an election year.

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Under the Baucus-Camp Fast Track the president is also able to draft extensive implementing legislation to bring US law into compliance with the agreement. It is up to the president to decide what changes in laws or new laws are needed to comply with the TPP. Congress is not able to mark-up or amend the language of these bills.  And, these can be very significant laws.  For example, provisions like “Buy American” or “Buy Local” can be repealed as a restraint on trade. In all of these cases under Fast Track the president becomes the Congress and drafts legislation, totally destroying the checks and balances of the three branches of government.

Over at Naked Capialism a regular poster named Clive has done a translation from the original Japanese of a report by Fisco, “a financial analyst services provider” based in Japan.

It’s no longer publically available on their website but Clive thinks it’s merely been put behind a subscriber paywall.  There is a screen capture available from Excite if you happen to read Japanese, which I do not.

While I’ll not vouch for Clive’s translating abilities I think his analysis is spot on and I’m not the only one.  Joe Firestone (letsgetitdone from New Economic Perspectives) was also quite impressed and calls it a “very good post.”

Japan to US: You Can’t Railroad the Trans-Pacific Partnership

by Clive, Naked Capitalism

Posted on January 20, 2014

I would argue that Japan is ground-zero for TPP. Japan was a latecomer to the TPP party, the invitation being extended because without Japan, which is still after countless lost decades the world’s third biggest economy with a GDP almost 10 times the size of, for example, Malaysia. Without Japan, any resultant TPP would be a doughnut with a Japan-shaped hole in the middle.

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(W)hen, a fortnight after the official releases from the Singapore TPP negotiation round, off the record briefings started to appear I planned to translate these after the holiday season. Fisco is a financial analyst services provider in Japan and on the 24th December 2013 they put out a toughly worded assessment of where TPP was likely to go next in terms of Japan’s participation. The article didn’t cite official sources directly, but from my experience with the Japanese media, it was pretty obviously drawing on officials speaking off the record. In the US you typically get such articles prefaced by “Washington insiders say…”, “Obama aides report…” or “One source added that the president has…”. Here in the UK, the line “Sources close to the Prime Minister…” has become such a cliché for the Prime Minister’s press office that one wonders why journalists bother with the subterfuge. In Japan, readers don’t get their intelligence insulted with such banter. If a source is on the record, they are named. If it’s off the record, information simply is reported source-less.

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Diplomacy is just a nice word for cross-border politicking. And that is the nub of why, certainly as far as Japan is concerned and I’d venture too the other countries involved, the TPP talks are stalling. The deal is being worked on by politicians. These politicians have constituencies and need their constituents’ votes. Now, politicians the world over – and certainly Japan is no exception to this rule – can and do throw one set of voters under the bus if it means that another, larger, group of voters might provide support in return. TPP requires (or at least, the current US position requires) that Japanese agriculture takes a hit because the subsidies it receives are to be removed. To the LDP (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s party) in Tokyo, rural votes lost in Chiba prefecture because rice growers’ incomes drop might be made up for in Okinawa if the move of the resented US base there is expedited. Or at least if the crash-prone Osprey aircraft are removed. But who is Tokyo talking to at the TPP negotiations? The Office of the United States Trade Representative. What can Michael Froman bring to the table? Signed copies of Timothy Geithner’s memoirs?

This highlights a deeper malaise for the US. Due to its mismanagement of the South East Asia geopolitical arena, it doesn’t have much to offer either Japan or the other TPP countries. Japan would certainly appreciate some US muscle directed towards China over the Senkaku Islands territorial dispute. A bit of US help in dealing with North Korea wouldn’t go amiss either. Yet the US can deliver on none of these things. It certainly wouldn’t want to risk the overspill from any goading of China. And even lower impact offerings like the Okinawa base aren’t in the USTR’s gift.

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Even if the US had better goodies to offer Japan to sweeten the TPP pill it is asking it to swallow (and it’s a little short on tempting morsels in this regard) U.S. Trade Representative Froman is not in a position to offer them without State Department assistance.

All of which shows that the TPP is nothing more than a grubby political gambit. Economists like to dress up their theories in scientific costume, presenting them as somehow evidence-based and provable in a measurable, repeatable way. Yves has – literally and figuratively – written the book on this subject as it is covered in ECONNED.

Economists promoting the provisions of the TPP are caught in a bind. If the economic theory underpinning the TPP is self-evidently valid beyond all doubt, it doesn’t need to be “sold” to any of the participating countries. They’d only have to look at the unequivocal evidence of the merit and validity of the theory before making the logical decision to enact the TPP.

If the TPP is on the other hand merely the US government doing the bidding of one of its main vested interests and biggest group of political donors (the multinational corporations) and asking the respondent TPP countries in the Pacific Rim to go against their own vested interests (such as subsidised agricultural producers or State Owned Enterprises) then the US will have to buy off the politicians in those countries with some political favours. Only the State Department can really wheel and deal in those areas. The Office of the United States Trade Representative will need to call in the State Department to lubricate the negotiations – and in doing so dispel any notion this is anything to do with strategic economics.

The mask will slip and the true nature of the TPP will be revealed – which for me will always be that the TPP is only crass political payback by Obama for services rendered. Chief amongst those are the services supplied by the multinationals: significant campaign donations.

Obama Lectures Those Outraged by NSA Surveillance Programs in Speech Announcing Reforms

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Friday January 17, 2014 2:40 pm

The president delivered a speech on changes his administration would support to National Security Agency programs and policies, but what most stood out was not the announced reforms. It was how the speech focused on him and what he had done and how it seemed like he was lecturing Americans who have been outraged by what they have learned about massive government surveillance in the past six months.

President Barack Obama seemed deeply offended that anyone would think he had done an inadequate job or had enabled surveillance state policies.

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Like Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama took shots at journalists who had reported on documents released by Snowden, suggesting what had emerged over the past months consisted of “crude characterizations.” And, adding, “Fortunately, by focusing on facts and specifics rather than speculation and hypotheticals, this review process has given me – and hopefully the American people – some clear direction for change.”

Twenty minutes later, when Obama finally arrived at the part where he outlined the reforms he supports-what he was willing to support to placate civil liberties advocates while at the same time avoiding a “backlash from national security agencies,” Americans would have been forgiven for feeling their president had just scolded them for being concerned about government surveillance run amok. It was abundantly clear that Obama wished he did not have to be there at the Justice Department giving this speech.

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This reform was couched in extremely disingenuous statements about how the administration has declassified information. All documents declassified by the government since Snowden’s disclosures were not released because Obama voluntarily wanted to give the public access but because the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a lawsuit and a court was going to order the information to be released.

Obama NSA Speech: Pretty Words, No Real Change

By: Peter Van Buren, Firedog Lake

Saturday January 18, 2014 11:06 am

Bottom Line Up Front: The details of Obama’s most recent speech about “changes” to the NSA’s surveillance practices reveal that sadly little of substance will change. A few cosmetic touchups, some nice words, issues tossed into the pit of Congress to fade away in partisan rancor, and high hopes that the issue will slip away from the public eye as “fixed.” Not word one about how absent Edward Snowden’s historic disclosures the president would not even be offering this lip service, happy to allow the tumor of spying to continue to grow in secret as he had done for the last six years of his presidency.

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These are for all intents and purposes just throwaways. Obama knows as well as anyone that a hyper-partisan Congress, already divided on what if anything should be done with the NSA, heading into elections, will never act on these issues. Obama can take the high road and deflect any criticism from his progressive base by pointing a finger at Congress. Democrats can blame Republicans and vice-versa, so everyone wins in the calculus of Washington.

For the record, even Obama’s Congressional changes are limp. Having private companies instead of the NSA hold data for the NSA to search? What kind of practical change would result from that? A public advocate in the FISA court? A possible, but how many, what staff and resources, what actual role would they play, under what rules of disclosure by the government would they function? The adversarial judicial process that otherwise fuels our legal system, prosecutors and defense attorneys, rules to compel disclosure, cross examination and so forth would not exist as new FISA-only “advocate” rules are created in a pseudo-parallel system. And since the whole process would remain highly-classified, no one outside the government would ever know if such advocates indeed played any role in protecting our privacy.

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What was not even mentioned by Obama is sadly the largest category of all. The list could fill dozens of pages, but the use of National Security Letters without judicial oversight is one of the most significant omissions. In 2012 the FBI used 15,229 National Security Letters to gather information on Americans. In addition, not a word was mentioned about pulling back the NSA’s breaking into the Internet backbone, accessing the key Google, Yahoo, Microsoft servers, the NSA use of malware to spy on computers, the NSA’s exploitation of software bugs, the NSA’s efforts to weaken encryption that puts our data at risk to ease the burden on the Agency of decoding things, the use of offensive cyberattacks, indiscriminate gathering of data in general contrary to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against General Warrants and on and on and on and on, at least until the next revelations from Edward Snowden reveal even more NSA tricks being played on innocent Americans.

But the mother of all omissions from the Obama speech is this one: there is no proof that all of the spying and surveillance, at the sake of our basic Constitutional rights, has resulted in the purported aim of keeping us safe. The White House’s own review panel on NSA surveillance said they discovered no evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records thwarted any terrorist attacks.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

…

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

…

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the “The Sons of Liberty” was established in Boston. The group’s members included Paul Revere, and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America’s early Patriots.

First Impressions, Obama’s Speech

By: emptywheel

Friday January 17, 2014 12:16 pm

Obama used the example of Paul Revere as an example of the importance of intelligence over the life of “our country.” Of course, Paul Revere is actually a better example that, if the Brits had done metadata analysis akin to what he preserved today, we would still be eating Kidney pies under British rule.

Obama made no mention, at all, of NSA’s weakening encryption and hoarding zero days. None.

With the sole exception of consulting with Congress on how to resolve the Section 215 dragnet (something that will happen during next year’s PATRIOT Act Reauthorization if not before) these changes are all Executive Branch self-limitations. Even the role of a FISC advocate fell by the wayside. In other words, while Obama did call for some useful changes (limiting the gag order on NSLs, adding limits on the way back door searches can be used for criminal investigations), they’re all self-limitations that can’t be enforced or overseen.

At one point, Obama justified our dragnet by saying we have special responsibilities as the only Superpower. Now, China is getting big enough they might object to that whole claim. More importantly, it demonstrates the degree to which a presumption of exceptionalism underlies our entire approach to spying.

ps. Should you not get the admittedly obscure reference, Fall Out is the title of the last episode of The Prisoner.

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep

James Ball, The Guardian

Thursday 16 January 2014 13.55 EST

On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

…

In a statement to the Guardian, a spokeswoman for the NSA said any implication that the agency’s collection was “arbitrary and unconstrained is false”. The agency’s capabilities were directed only against “valid foreign intelligence targets” and were subject to stringent legal safeguards, she said.

…

Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile phone companies with operations in 25 countries including Britain, greeted the latest revelations with shock.

“It’s the first we’ve heard about it and naturally we’re shocked and surprised,” the group’s privacy officer and head of legal for privacy, security and content standards told Channel 4 News.

“What you’re describing sounds concerning to us because the regime that we are required to comply with is very clear and we will only disclose information to governments where we are legally compelled to do so, won’t go beyond the law and comply with due process.

“But what you’re describing is something that sounds as if that’s been circumvented. And for us as a business this is anathema because our whole business is founded on protecting privacy as a fundamental imperative.”

He said the company would be challenging the UK government over this. “From our perspective, the law is there to protect our customers and it doesn’t sound as if that is what is necessarily happening.”

Emphasis mine.  Obama speaks on his proposed changes to the NSA’s illegal and Unconstitutional universal wiretapping program tomorrow.  It’s highly unlikely he’ll propose any real reform, after all he’s unwilling to endorse even the limited changes suggested by his own task force who’s mission as you’ll recall is not to restore our Constitutional privacy protections, but the credibility of the NSA.

I think that ship has sailed boys.

White House Panel Refutes NSA Claims

Democracy Now

January 15, 2014

Members of the White House panel reviewing government surveillance have publicly rejected some of the National Security Agency’s key claims in justifying warrantless, mass spying. Appearing before a Senate hearing, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell and former national security aide Richard Clarke refuted assertions the bulk collection of phone data could have prevented 9/11.

“No Spy” Agreement Nears Collapse over U.S. Refusal to End Spying on Germany

The latest news about National Security Agency spying comes amidst reports talks between the United States and Germany on a no-spying agreement are near collapse. Tensions peaked between the two countries last year after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed U.S. surveillance of German citizens and officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. A German newspaper reports the negotiations are at a dead-end over a U.S. refusal to guarantee an end to spying on German politicians. Germany denies the claim and says the talks are ongoing.