Tag Archives: civil liberties

The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

by oliwia_konarzewska@o2.pl Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ever since she was a boy growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, Zoey Gearhart had “tendencies that were odd.” Raised as Robert Gearhart, she would identify with female characters in books and on TV, in video games and movies. She would also wear her mother’s fake nails, or make her own out of clay. “I was told to stop in no uncertain terms by my father,” she said. In 2007, at the age of 19, she decided to join the Navy. “I thought maybe joining the military would just help straighten me out,” she said. “Make me into a normal individual.”

At first, Gearhart tried to prove her machismo by applying and becoming accepted into the Navy SEALs program, the elite force that killed Osama bin Laden. “I used to be in incredible shape,” she said. She did preliminary training with the SEALs, but after an ex-fiancé pleaded with her not to continue on to BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition School) training, Gearhart decided to become a linguist instead. The first known transgender SEAL, Kristin Beck, first came out on her LinkedIn profile earlier this year and in her tell-all book, Warrior Princess. On the cover, she sports a long, bushy beard from the days she went by “Chris.”

While in the Navy, Gearhart kept her female identity a secret, hiding it from a Marine staff sergeant roommate whom she described as a “cave-dwelling dude-bro.” After her enlistment term expired in March, she decided not to reenlist so that she could begin her transition to womanhood in earnest. Had Beck or Gearhart revealed that they were trans while still in uniform, they would have received a medical or administrative discharge. Even after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2011, the military still officially forbids openly transgender people from serving. The end of DADT, Gearhart said, “is this landmark for the LGBT movement. But there’s that hanging T. Trans service was not even addressed.”

Transgender soldiers and sailors largely fly under the radar, but they are hardly uncommon. In a recent survey (PDF) by the Harvard Kennedy School’s LGBTQ Policy Journal, 20 percent of transgender people contacted said they had served in the military—that’s twice the rate of the general population. A 2011 study estimates there are nearly 700,000 transgender individuals (about three people per thousand) living in the United States. Meanwhile, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) is scheduled to release a report today, which draws from Department of Veterans Affairs data, showing that the number of veterans accepting treatment for transgender health issues has doubled in the past decade. (While viewing the full report requires a subscription, an abstract should be available online as of today.)

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The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

by torrie199 Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Since last June, when Edward Snowden tore the veil off the National Security Agency’s vast data dragnet, Americans have been flocking to ultrasecure email services in the hopes of keeping the government out of their private business. Use of the most popular email encryption software, PGP, tripled between June and July, while revenue for the data-encryption company Silent Circle has shot up 400 percent.

But even these services may not be able to protect your email from government prying. That fact came into stark relief last Thursday, when Lavabit, the secure email service used by Snowden, abruptly shut down. Lavabit’s 32-year-old founder, Ladar Levison, issued a statement saying he pulled the plug because he didn’t want to be “complicit in crimes against the American people.” He has since given up using email entirely, and he urges others to consider doing the same. “I would strongly recommend against entrusting your privacy to a company with physical ties to the United States,” he told Mother Jones. “I honestly don’t think it’s possible to provide a secure service in this country.”

Levison, who is reportedly under federal gag order, declined to elaborate (though he opined, based on his experience, that we’re a “whisper’s breath away” from becoming a society where all electronic communications are recorded and scrutinized by the government). But according to other industry insiders and cybersecurity experts, there’s good reason to be wary of transmitting sensitive information via email—even if your provider claims to have iron-clad safeguards.

Tech giants, such as the Microsoft subsidiary Hotmail, regularly hand over data to the government. In fact, in the last eight months of 2012 (the most recent period for which data is available), Hotmail, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provided law enforcement authorities with information on more than 64,000 users. And that doesn’t include responses to secret national security letters ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, or FISA.

Secure emails services, such as Lavabit, are supposed to guard against this kind of snooping (as well as hackers and phishers) by encrypting email messages—turning them into gibberish that can only be read by people who have a password, or “key.” Theoretically, in most cases, the email provider can’t even decipher the contents, much less government agencies. But even the most secure email systems don’t completely encrypt “metadata,” the bits of identifying information that accompany messages, such as the sender’s name and IP address; the subject line; and the date and time the message was sent. Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University, says the government can tell a lot about a person from these details. “If you can map out who someone has talked to, that’s almost as useful as knowing what they were talking about,” he explained, “especially if you’re trying to map out a criminal conspiracy or find out who leaked information from reporters.”

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

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"Relevance" Joins "Imminence" and "Is" in Pantheon of Meaningless Words

by ncf01r Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jeffrey Rosen says that the Obama administration’s white paper defending the NSA’s surveillance programs is “flimsy and weak”:

The White Paper, released on August 9, is surprisingly mostly in the lameness of its effort to justify what it calls “Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.” The core of the argument is an attempt to redefine the meaning of the word “relevance” beyond recognizing, just as the administration’s earlier, and equally flimsy, drone memos attempted to redefine the meaning of the word “imminence” in the context of responding to an imminent threat

….As the Electronic Privacy Information Center notes in a brief filed last week with the Supreme Court, both Congressional supporters and opponents of Section 215 explicitly interpreted the “relevance” language to limit bulk collection of data, not to permit it. On July 17, during a House judiciary committee hearing, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the author of section 215, said that Congress amended the law in 2006 to impose the relevance requirement in “an attempt to limit what the intelligence community could be able to get pursuant to Section 215.” And during the debate over the 2006 amendments, Sen. Ron Wyden and others stressed that the relevance standard would address “concerns about government ‘fishing expeditions.’”

There’s something that has never rung quite true to me about this. Congress knew all about the bulk collection of telephone records in 2006. It was big news. If they truly meant to rein it in, there was nothing stopping them from including clear language to that effect. So why didn’t they? Especially given that many (most? all?) of them knew perfectly well that the program was never halted?

Beyond that, I still don’t understand why NSA and the Obama administration are so resistant to reforming this program. After all, they don’t have to collect all the metadata. They could simply require the phone companies to keep it. Alternately, some other agency could collect it, and release it only if served with an individualized warrant. This would be inconvenient, but if NSA really does only 300 searches per year, as they claim, it wouldn’t be that inconvenient. Nor would it take too much time if the warrant procedures were set up efficiently. Either of these alternatives would reduce the fear that NSA can simply trawl through phone records whenever it wants, and would do so without seriously compromising its ability to conduct genuine investigations.

So why the reluctance to do something like this?

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"Relevance" Joins "Imminence" and "Is" in Pantheon of Meaningless Words

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ACLU Threatens Suit Over Kansas’ ‘Suspended’ Voter Registrations

by 4ko9dra Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is no stranger to immigration controversy. The Republican’s fingerprints can be found on all sorts of immigration laws around the country, including Arizona’s controversial SB 1070. He’s one of the key cogs in the national movement of immigration hardliners and as recently as April defended his use of the phrase “self-deportation” (a phrase even Newt Gingrich called “anti-human”).

Kobach’s support of another immigration-related voter registration law could land him in court. The ACLU said Tuesday that Kobach and the state of Kansas are violating the National Voter Registration Act by preventing people from registering to vote who haven’t proved to the state’s satisfaction that they’re US citizens. About 14,000 people — about a third of the people who’ve submittted registration forms in 2013 — are in “suspense,” meaning state elections officials can’t verify that the person is actually eligible to vote. In many cases this has to do with fact that proof-of-citizenship documents aren’t being transferred to Kansas election officials from Kansas DMVs—despite a $40 million system designed to streamline the process. The ACLU also says Kansas is failing to make its election forms widely available and is generally failing to uphold its responsibilities under federal election law.

The ACLU has threatened to sue the state of Kansas if it doesn’t address its concerns.

ACLU’s main beef is with Kansas’ requirement that first-time voters in the state provide proof of citizenship. Arizona enacted a similar requirement in 2004, but the US Supreme Court struck it down earlier this summer. The federal form requires registrants to check a box affirming their lawful right to vote under penalty of perjury. The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision written by arch liberal Justice Antonin Scalia, said that states had to accept the federal registration form unless it could convince the Election Assistance Commission (a federal body charged with making voting easier in the wake of the 2000 Florida elections debacle) to change the requirements.

Kobach, through his media office, wouldn’t answer questions about the ACLU’s allegations. But he did issue a statement:

“We are reviewing the letter submitted by the ACLU. However, the ACLU and other organizations on the Left have made clear from the start that they oppose proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting and that they will attempt to prevent the State of Kansas from ensuring that only citizens are registered to vote. This letter therefore comes as no surprise.”

Kobach added that the ACLU is misinterpreting the Supreme Court’s decision, and that the state of Kansas “takes the citizenship qualification seriously and will enforce it.”

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ACLU Threatens Suit Over Kansas’ ‘Suspended’ Voter Registrations

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Did Stop-and-Frisk Reduce Crime in New York City?

by SFGJrg Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jack Dunphy, a pseudonymous LAPD police officer, writes today about a judge’s decision to halt New York City’s “stop and frisk” program:

Today’s Fox Butterfield Award goes to the New York Times, whose story on the ruling includes this: “These stop-and-frisk episodes, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline . . .”

I do not endorse, nor should any police officer endorse, extra-constitutional means to achieve law-enforcement ends, no matter how noble. But in the Bronx, a week ago Sunday, an NYPD officer shot and killed 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse as he, Douse, was attempting to shoot some rival gang member. Would it not be preferable that the police had stopped and frisked Douse before his crime than shot him after?

….Liberals, especially those who would never dare set foot in the Bronx, can rejoice at Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, then watch the bodies begin to pile up.

Dunphy obviously thinks the Times is being ridiculous: Crime is going down because of stop-and-frisk, so it takes some serious chutzpah to suggest that this is a good reason to end it. It’s similar to liberal complaints about the Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act: How can you cite reduced voting discrimination as a reason that we no longer need the VRA when it’s the VRA itself that was responsible for reduced voting discrimination?

Now, as it happens, Judge Scheindlin didn’t ban stop-and-frisk. Pretty much every police department in the country does it in one form or another. She merely concluded that New York City had gone too far and turned it into de facto racial profiling. But Dunphy’s comment illustrates why evidence is so important here, and in particular why I think the lead-crime link is worth further study even if most environmental lead is already gone and there’s little chance of getting funding to clean up the rest.

If stop-and-frisk really is the reason crime has dropped so dramatically in the Bronx, then a judge would be justified in weighing this against the legal issues on the other side. Even decisions based on fundamental constitutional rights aren’t rendered in a vacuum. But if reductions in atmospheric lead are the primary reason for the drop in crime, then stop-and-frisk really has no justification at all, and the judge’s decision becomes an easy one. That’s why it’s worth getting a more definitive answer about this. Other cities have seen dramatic crime drops without expanding their stop-and-frisk programs as aggressively as New York, and it would sure be worthwhile to find out how and why that happened.

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Did Stop-and-Frisk Reduce Crime in New York City?

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DOJ to Stop Packing Prisons With Minor Drug Offenders

by ggkk2121333 Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Eric Holder is proposing a groundbreaking reform package to fix America’s increasingly overcrowded prisons, which includes doing away with mandatory minimums for certain nonviolent drug offenders, the Washington Post reports. The Justice Department also plans to reduce sentences for certain elderly prisoners, champion drug treatment programs as an alternative to prison, and bar prosecutors from listing quantities of drugs when charging minor drug offenders.

“This is a win for people concerned about overfederalization as well as overcriminalization—we just can’t keep making a federal case and a 10-year federal prison stay out of all these nonviolent drug offenders,” says Monica Pratt Raffanel, a spokesperson for Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). “States can handle drug offenders like these and, in many instances, give them better access to the treatment and supervision they need to turn their lives around.”

The way the law stands now, drug offenders caught with a certain amount of illegal drugs automatically face years in prison. A person arrested with one gram of LSD, for example, will face a 5-year mandatory minimum without parole, the same sentence doled out to Americans caught with 100 marijuana plants (see full chart below). Civil liberties advocates argue that these minimums are Draconian, expensive, and don’t give judges discretion to make sure the punishment fits the crime.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums

As the Post notes, under Holder’s new policy, mandatory minimums as they apply to specific quantities of drugs will no longer be used against offenders whose cases do not involve violence, a weapon, and selling to a minor, and they will also not be used against offenders that do not have a “significant criminal history” and ties to a “large-scale” criminal organization. A bill introduced by Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in March would codify Holder’s recommendations, giving judges the ability to hand out sentences lower than the current mandatory ones. As Molly Gill, government affairs counsel for FAMM explains, “DOJ policies change with administrations–what is really needed is a full-scale reassessment of this system by Congress, to fix this problem for good.”

Based on how Republicans have reacted to sentencing reform efforts in the past; it shouldn’t take long for conservative lawmakers to start spreading the word that the sky is falling. But as we reported last week, sentence reductions have already been retroactively applied to crack cocaine offenders—and the US Sentencing Commission has found the program to be a success. At least 7,300 prisoners sentenced under mandatory minimums have had their sentences reduced by an average of 29 months, saving taxpayers an estimated $530 million. Given that the Associated Press found that US federal prisons are 40 percent over capacity, advocates say reform can’t come soon enough.

To see how states have already been implementing sentencing reforms for crack cocaine offenders, check out the map below (unshaded parts mean that no data is available):

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DOJ to Stop Packing Prisons With Minor Drug Offenders

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Wyden: Obama’s NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don’t Go Far Enough

by t07c6o Posted on August 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Friday afternoon, President Obama held a press conference where he promised to bring increased transparency to the NSA’s digital surveillance programs. He announced a series of proposed reforms to the way the NSA collects data and to how the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) operates, along with plans to convene a group of “outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies.”

US Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been one of the biggest thorns in the administration’s side when it comes to raising questions about how mass surveillance programs threaten civil liberties. After the president’s remarks, he said that he was encouraged by Obama’s suggestions, several of which the Senator and others have been pushing to get for years.

The press conference came on the heels of the Guardian‘s latest scoop based on documents it obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Contrary to President Obama’s oft-repeated claim that Americans’ data is protected from warrantless bulk collection and analysis, the paper reported on Friday morning that the NSA can access US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant using a “secret backdoor into its vast databases.”

While Wyden said he appreciated Obama announcing his support for reforming the section of the Patriot Act that the government has secretly interpreted to justify gobbling up millions of Americans’ records, and praised his plan to make proceedings at the foreign intelligence court more adversarial, the senator pointed out areas where he thought the president didn’t go far enough.

“Notably absent from President Obama’s speech was any mention of closing the backdoor searches loophole that potentially allows for the warrantless searches of Americans’ phone calls and emails under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Wyden said, referring to the program most recently disclosed by the Guardian. “I am also concerned that the executive branch has not fully acknowledged the extent to which violations of the FISC orders and the spirit of the law have already had a significant impact on Americans’ privacy.”

While Obama said at the press conference that he had been pushing for reform all along, he maintained that Snowden was no “patriot,” even though he conceded the disclosures may have sped up the process. (The administration had revealed very little about NSA surveillance until Snowden’s leaks forced its hand.) In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Wyden criticized the administration for leaving the American public in the dark for so long.

“I feel very strongly, very strongly, that this debate should have begun long, long ago by government officials, by members of Congress and the White House rather than by a contractor,” Wyden said.

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Wyden: Obama’s NSA Proposals Are Nice, But They Don’t Go Far Enough

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Defense Attorneys Plan to Fight NSA Evidence in Drug Cases

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Can the DEA get secret tips based on NSA surveillance evidence and then invent new stories about where their evidence came from when the case comes to trial? Yes they can. But now that defense lawyers know about this, they’re going to try and do something about it:

Defense lawyers said that by hiding the existence of the information, the government is violating a defendant’s constitutional right to view potentially exculpatory evidence that suggests witness bias, entrapment or innocence.

“It certainly can’t be that the agents can make up a ‘parallel construction,’ a made-up tale, in court documents, testimony before the grand jury or a judge, without disclosure to a court,” said Jim Wyda, the federal public defender in Maryland, in an email. “This is going to result in a lot of litigation, for a long time.”

….David Patton, executive director of the Federal Defenders of New York said information about how an investigation began may be highly relevant in certain cases because it bears on the credibility of government witnesses.

“Informants lie. They lie a lot,” he said. “You can’t competently or fully challenge the basis for a stop or search if the government’s hiding information about the real reason for the stop and search.”

Presumably, Patton is suggesting that once investigators get an NSA tip, they can then go dig up an “informant” willing to recycle the tip, thus giving them probable cause for a warrant. But if the court knew the real source of the tip, jurors might be a little more skeptical of the informant.

Will this get anywhere? Hard to say, since the usual Catch-22 is at work here: How do you know whether to demand NSA evidence if you have no idea whether it was used in your case in the first place? Unfortunately, that’s never bothered the Supreme Court before, which happily tosses out cases when plaintiffs can’t prove they were the subjects of secret surveillance. But maybe this kind of case, which doesn’t involve terrorism or national security, will finally change their minds. Maybe.

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Defense Attorneys Plan to Fight NSA Evidence in Drug Cases

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The NSA Is Reading Every Email Sent To and From the United States

by munrhexaa Posted on August 8, 2013

Mother Jones

Charlie Savage reports today that the NSA doesn’t just monitor communications between Americans and terrorist suspects overseas. It monitors every communication sent overseas, searching for keywords linked to foreigners already under surveillance:

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

….To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

….The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.”

The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program.

The justification for this revolves around a close parsing of the word “target”: As long as no Americans are specifically targeted, NSA can trawl through our email as much as it wants. After all, the keywords it’s looking for may come from emails we send, but they’re targeted at foreigners:

The rule they ended up writing, which was secretly approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, says that the N.S.A. must ensure that one of the participants in any conversation that is acquired when it is searching for conversations about a targeted foreigner must be outside the United States, so that the surveillance is technically directed at the foreign end.

Maybe so. But if you send an email to a pal in Berlin, be careful. Mention the wrong name or talk about the wrong subject, and you could end up in the NSA’s dragnet.

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The NSA Is Reading Every Email Sent To and From the United States

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

by Guadalupe Williams Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Quantum Leap” was the name of a popular TV show from the early nineties about a quantum physicist who jumps through time inhabiting different bodies with each leap. It is also the name the US Special Operations Command’s DC-area branch gave to an unusual project investigating how to combat crime by exploiting social media. An unclassified document, dated September 2012 obtained by Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy News, reveals that this special ops division met with at least a dozen data mining companies in the last year in an effort to utilize sophisticated tech tools to the exploit the personal information Americans publicly post on the web. The US Special Operations Command now claims that the project has been disbanded—but the report describes QUANTUM LEAP as a success.

The goal of QUANTUM LEAP, according to the report, was to conduct multiple experiments over a period of six months to explore how open source applications could be used to combat a range of crimes, including human and drug trafficking and terrorism. The first experiment, assisting with a money laundering case, involved approximately 50 government and industry participants. “Overall the experiment was successful in identifying strategies and techniques for exploiting open sources of information, particularly social media,” the report notes.

The most heavily used tool in this experiment, according to the report, was Raptor X—which included a plugin called “Social Bubble” that allowed special ops to summon “data via the Twitter API to display Twitter users, their geographic location, posted Tweets and related metadata in the Raptor X geospatial display.” Other tools created by industry partners included one that could “index the internet…as well as collect large quantities of data from the deep web,” and another that performed “real time and automated analysis of publicly available data in all media channels, especially the social media, in many languages.” All in all, during the financial crime scenario alone, the the DC special ops divisions identified more than 200 open-source tools that could be useful.

“This report suggests that a lot can be accomplished…before even taking advantage of clandestine collection capabilities,” says Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “And the prominent role played by industry is striking. Private firms are the ones providing the tools and tactics to the military for data mining open sources.”

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, said in a statement that “We cannot confirm the validity of any of the information listed in the After Action Report. The only information we have received so far is the program is no longer in existence and the people who worked on the program are no longer there.”

But Aftergood notes that based on the report, “the initial results were promising. They produced useful leads. So either the initial results did not pan out, or else the subsequent work was moved elsewhere.”

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

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