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Six Embarrassing Things Republicans Said About Cybersecurity Last Night

by Melodee5461 Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Huge hacks, Internet-savvy terrorists, and controversial legislation has made cybersecurity big news this year, but candidates from both parties barely mentioned the topic until Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Las Vegas. That’s when Republican candidates finally addressed cybersecurity and Internet privacy at length, but the results weren’t always pretty. Here are some of the lowlights:

1. Candidates demand encryption “backdoors.” Again: “There is a big problem. It’s called encryption,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who delivered the night’s sharpest attack on encrypted Internet tools that allegedly help terrorists evade US law enforcement and intelligence services. Kasich, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former New York Gov. George Pataki, called for “backdoors,” or methods of decrypting message that would allow the government a way to read them. It was the latest episode in a debate that’s grown louder since the shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California; there have been claims that both sets of attackers used encrypted messages to evade detection, though none of those claims have been proven. Nevertheless, key members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have said they’re working on a bill mandating backdoors in the wake of the attacks.

But encryption is also a vital part of the Internet’s basic infrastructure, and millions of people now use encrypted apps and programs to protect the privacy of their emails and messages. And giving the government access to encryption means allowing anyone else, including criminals, hackers, and foreign governments, access into those messages as well, according to cryptography experts.

2. Santorum thinks metadata isn’t personal information: Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was one of several candidates who wanted to undo the USA Freedom Act, the law passed in May that ended the National Security Agency’s ability to engage in a mass collection of the phone records of Americans. Santorum brushed the law aside, arguing the program didn’t impinge on people’s privacy. “This metadata collection is not collecting people’s phone calls, their voices, they’re not collecting information that’s personal,” he said at the undercard debate.

The first part is true, but the second isn’t even close. Metadata includes phone numbers, location data, call times, and other information that intelligence agencies use to create create extensive, detailed profiles of a target—or anyone else.

3. Donald Trump doesn’t understand how the Internet works: Trump again called for shutting down at least parts of the Internet to try and stop ISIS from using online tools to recruit and plan attacks. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” he said. Whether or not that’s possible—and it’s probably not, given that many people in Syria rely on satellite connections after years of war—it would likely be horrible for Syrians and Iraqis, whose countries’ communications’ infrastructures have been heavily damaged by war. Many Syrians rely on Internet connections to maintain contact with family and the outside world, and human rights activists rely on the web to document atrocities by the Assad regime and ISIS.

4. Fiorina comes up short on the tech test: Fiorina is trying to cast herself as the field’s technology expert thanks to her years leading Hewlett-Packard, one of the country’s biggest tech companies. “A lifetime of politics is not necessarily the right kind of experience anymore. It matters that you understand technology,” she told the conservative website Breitbart in a pre-debate interview on Tuesday. But her evidence of tech-savvy during the debate was nothing more than a story about helping the NSA in the days after 9/11 by sending them a large shipment of servers. Fiorina’s other big suggestion was to ask the private sector for help in improving cybersecurity, something that already routinely happens.

Fiorina also seemed clueless about the state of cybersecurity laws during the Breitbart interview. She claimed the Obama administration had ignored critical legislation that would let private companies share information on cyberattacks with the government. But at the same time the Republicans were debating on stage on Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) was wedging that same legislation, which Congress debated for months, into the trillion-dollar spending deal approved later that night.

5. Bush cheers China’s hacking of journalists: The Washington Post reported on Monday that when China stole millions of US government personnel records, it also got the information of journalists who had applied for government credentials—and Jeb Bush seemed pretty happy about it. “Maybe that’s the only part that’s good news, so you guys can get a feel for what it’s like now to see this type of attack,” said the former Florida governor, breaking briefly into an awkward half-smile.

6. Lindsay Graham says to get a flip phone: “This is why I own a flip phone, you don’t have to worry about all this stuff,” Graham quipped. Actually, your flip phone, in addition to being terrible, would still leave its records all over your cell carrier’s network for the government to access. Please do not listen to this awful advice. Also, Lindsey Graham now has an iPhone.

To be fair, cybersecurity also prompted the night’s most substantive exchange. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio attacked Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz along with others who voted for the USA Freedom Act, which prevents the NSA from accessing or collecting records in bulk without a ruling from a federal judge. It’s proponents say the Act protects Americans from unconstitutional surveillance while making intelligence more effective, because investigators must target specific data and not drown in huge amounts of records. Both men hit back hard supporting the case for NSA reform. Cruz defended the law—and its national security benefits—so well that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Senate’s most outspoken privacy advocate, backed him up in a press release issued during the debate.

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Six Embarrassing Things Republicans Said About Cybersecurity Last Night

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America’s Most Useless Surveillance Program Is Finally (Almost) Over

by KimDunleazdkq Posted on November 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, the National Security Agency will have to shut down one of its controversial mass surveillance programs: the unlimited collection of the phone records of millions of Americans, known as bulk metadata collection.

That program allowed the NSA to collect information about citizens’ phone calls, including whom they were calling, when and where they made calls, and how long those calls lasted. While metadata collection doesn’t include what was said during those calls, the information can allow intelligence analysts to build up extensive profiles of an individual’s pattern of life. The New York Times first reported on the bulk metadata program, which was created under the Patriot Act, in late 2005, but it didn’t attract truly widespread outrage—or reform—until details of the program appeared in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. A federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the program to stop in a ruling issued later that year, but that didn’t happen until Congress passed a law this May that outlawed the bulk metadata program as of November 29. Under the new law, phone companies must now keep such records themselves, and intelligence agencies must seek permission from a federal judge to access specific data.

To its supporters, the program was a critical counterterrorism tool. “There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots…Taking the program off the table, from my perspective, is absolutely not the right thing to do,” said former NSA director Keith Alexander to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013. Michael Hayden, another former NSA chief, and former attorney general Michael Mukasey said in a joint op-ed that the reform law was “exquisitely crafted to hobble the gathering of electronic intelligence.” After the terrorist attacks in Paris two weeks ago, there was even a failed last-ditch effort to restart the bulk phone records program.

But privacy advocates say the record tells a different story. “That program hasn’t prevented or even contributed to preventing a single attack in the nearly 15 years that it’s been in operation,” says Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Think tank reports on the program have backed her up. “There does not appear to be a case in which…bulk phone records played an important role in stopping a terrorist attack,” wrote Marshall Erwin in a January 2014 report from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. His counterparts at the nonpartisan but liberal-leaning New America Foundation found the same thing in a study that was released in the same month as Erwin’s report. “Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism,” wrote national security journalist Peter Bergen and three others in the New America study.

The government hasn’t provided much more compelling evidence. The study from New America noted that President Barack Obama once claimed bulk surveillance had stopped at least 50 terrorist plots, but Alexander eventually admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was actually only one such case, in which a San Diego cab driver had attempted to send money to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. Richard Leon, the federal judge who ruled the bulk metadata program illegal in 2013, wrote that there was an “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics.”

Late last year, a trio of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee—Oregon’s Ron Wyden, Colorado’s Mark Udall, and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich—filed a brief in support of a lawsuit against bulk surveillance, saying they had “reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans.”

In fact, say privacy advocates, bulk surveillance can actually hurt intelligence rather than strengthen it. “Part of the problem is that the analysts were drowning in data,” Goitein says, citing the 9/11 Commission Report as evidence. “There was too much information, and the threats got lost in the noise. So more surveillance isn’t the answer.”

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America’s Most Useless Surveillance Program Is Finally (Almost) Over

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The Woman Who Created "Transparent" Wants You to "Borrow White Male Privilege"

by SonjaBaynes Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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FOR TV WRITER and director Jill Soloway, making good television was never enough. “I used to go on pitch meetings and say, ‘I want to write something that’s never been written before, something that’s going to change the world,'” she said at a recent panel. After attracting attention with zany theater experiments, the Chicago-born writer was plucked to work on shows like HBO’s Six Feet Under and Showtime’s United States of Tara.

But her breakthrough arrived when Amazon bought her series, Transparent. Equal parts comedy and melancholy drama, the show follows the three Pfefferman children, who are stumbling to find their truest selves as their father (played by Jeffrey Tambor) transitions into a woman named Maura. Transparent’s much anticipated second season will premiere in December to a more trans-aware culture, one that has largely embraced Caitlyn Jenner and witnessed the hiring of the White House’s first transgender employee. Soloway, 50, deserves some props for this momentum. In 2015, Transparent took home two Golden Globes and five Emmys, including one for directing. But for Soloway, whose own father, or “moppa,” came out as transgender at the age of 75, “to feel like it’s for a larger cause is the most exciting part of all of this.”

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The Woman Who Created "Transparent" Wants You to "Borrow White Male Privilege"

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How the Paris Attacks Could Lead to More Government Snooping on Americans

by BookerAtchison Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Syrian refugees aren’t the only ones feeling the backlash from the Paris attacks: Privacy advocates are worried that last week’s terrorist assault has created a climate that threatens digital privacy in the United States and elsewhere.

The horrific attacks led to calls for the US government to roll back surveillance reform and digital privacy protections enacted following leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Some politicians, including presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and Republican members of Congress, argue that the United States currently lacks the tools to keep tabs on terrorists when they use phones or online communications. That echoes the argument FBI director James Comey has made for months: Terrorists are “going dark,” he says, and the FBI and other agencies are losing the ability to track them. But privacy rights advocates fear this post-Paris push threatens to undermine important reforms, with little evidence that the proposed changes would prevent attacks.

“It’s predictable but a bit sickening,” says Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “These attacks were just heartbreaking, and people are understandably anxious for their government to do more to protect them. But what we’re seeing is that some officials and policymakers are really exploiting…people’s grief and fear to promote expansions of power that they know full well would not have prevented the terrorist attacks.”

Here’s what lawmakers and politicians have proposed:

Encrypted communications: Law enforcement officials, led by Comey, have claimed for months that ISIS operatives are using encrypted communications—including popular messaging services such as WhatsApp and Telegram—to make themselves virtually invisible to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “Encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place,” he said during a speech in Oct. 2014, warning that the use of impenetrable encryption might make it more likely that a terrorist attack would succeed. Comey and others, including CIA Director John Brennan, sounded the encryption alarm again after the Paris attacks. But it turned out the attackers were likely using plain old text messages, which are unencrypted, to communicate.

Comey proposes that tech companies build “backdoors” into their encryption so police or intelligence agencies can read messages. But tech companies and encryption experts say any hole in the encryption can be used by anyone, from the FBI to cybercriminals to foreign governments. “You can’t have a backdoor in the software, because you can’t have a backdoor that’s only for the good guys,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook last month. A lobbying group representing Apple, Google, and other major tech firms also came out against backdoors on Thursday. “After a horrific tragedy like the Paris attacks, we naturally search for solutions: weakening encryption is not a solution,” Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, said to Reuters.

Amie Stepanovich, the US policy manager for the digital privacy group Access, points out that intelligence agencies reportedly have ways to break into individual devices, rather than weakening encryption used by millions of internet users. “In Europe, a lot of intelligence and law enforcement agencies believe that they can hack into user devices if they need to get information,” she says. “We have to take those into account when we’re talking about proposals that would impact the safety and security of everybody who uses encryption.”

The White House said last month that it wouldn’t push for a law forcing tech companies to build backdoors into their products, but Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on Tuesday that he would hold hearings on backdoors and start working on a law requiring them.

CALEA: A related, if somewhat more obscure issue, is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. The law requires phone systems, internet providers, and internet calling services to be tappable so the police can access them with warrants. Other forms of internet communications and messaging have been exempted from the law thus far. But that could soon change.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested on Tuesday at a House hearing that Congress could update the law to include internet services after Rep. Joe Baron (R-Texas) asked what could be done to give the government more power to shut down websites or networks potentially used by terrorists. His testimony was based in part on another false rumor that the Paris attackers used PlayStation 4 game consoles to secretly communicate with each other. “They’re using the internet in an extremely offensive, inappropriate way against us, and we ought to be able to make it, at a minimum, much more difficult and hopefully absolutely shut it down,” Barton said at the hearing.

Stepanovich and other privacy advocates contend that changing CALEA is simply another way of requiring backdoors, but perhaps on a much larger scale that would permit the government to shut down full websites or social media networks.

NSA reform: Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in June, a law that barred the NSA from sucking up the user records—or “metadata”—of phone calls en masse. Under the new law, phone companies will keep the data and the government will have to seek permission from a judge to get specific records. Privacy groups and pro-reform members of Congress considered the end of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection the “most significant win for privacy rights in a decade,” in the words of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). But with only nine days to go until the program ends, some lawmakers are trying to bring it back.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of the Senate’s most hardline hawks, introduced a bill on Tuesday to delay the termination of the metadata program for more than a year. “We should allow the intelligence community to do their job and provide them with the tools they need to keep us safe,” he said in a statement. Some GOP presidential candidates are joining the chorus, pushing to undo surveillance reform. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) backs Cotton’s bill, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also wants to reinstate bulk collection.

Privacy advocates say encryption and surveillance reform have no connection to how the Paris attacks were able to be planned, and that weakening privacy protections would be unlikely to stop future attacks. “There really is no way to see rolling back USA Freedom as a potential solution against any sort of future attacks similar to what we recently saw in Paris and Beirut,” Stepanovich says. They also point out that the reforms were broadly popular in the wake of the Snowden leaks and the increased attention on government surveillance. “It’s important to remember that when those reforms passed, they passed overwhelmingly and they were supported by a large subset of the population,” says Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Privacy advocates note that the odds of increased surveillance measures are high in the aftermath of any attack. “In the past that’s been a successful strategy, so I certainly take it seriously,” says Goitein of the Brennan Center. Stepanovich cites the Patriot Act as a cautionary tale: “You have these reactionary responses from people who really want to do something, and they’re trying to figure out what they can do quickly. We saw in the wake of 9/11 that lawmakers are able to use that to elbow through expanded authorities and provisions.”

Singh Guliani cautioned that if updated policies are needed, so is more extensive debate about which ones to adopt: “It’s important that we make sure that whatever policy we’re pursuing is based on facts, based on reasoned debate, based on public input—not based on just the moment.”

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How the Paris Attacks Could Lead to More Government Snooping on Americans

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

by RainaGlasfurd Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today’s government intelligence overreach.

Mother Jones: You seem to have a thing for brothers—particularly for younger brothers in the shadow of their more prominent older brothers. As it happens, you yourself have a successful older brother—former child actor and Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Stephen Talbot. Do you see yourself in Allen Dulles or in Bobby Kennedy?

David Talbot: No one has pointed that particular analogy out before. But definitely it’s there. I had a very close relationship and still do with my older brother. We both went into progressive media work, and live in the same city still, San Francisco, and have worked together off and on over the years. So I guess I have a feel for what that chemistry is like between brothers.

MJ: Given that Allen Dulles isn’t exactly a household name these days, did you feel the need to inject your book with extra drama?

DT: No, because I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself. Dulles is not a household name anymore. He was at the time, though, particularly as part of this two-brother team. He was on the cover of all the magazines. For a spy, he was kind of a glory hog.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.

MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles’ childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?

DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles’s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They’ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him “the Shark.” His favorite word was whether you were “useful” to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There’s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles’s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

MJ: I’m interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?

DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It’s this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don’t make sense in today’s ruthless world.

MJ: And do you see echoes of the apparatus that Dulles created in some of the debates today over spying on allies and collection of cellphone records?

DT: Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

MJ: Let’s talk about that. For 500 pages of the book you lay out Dulles’s acquisition and use and abuse of power in and out of the CIA. And then at the end you take a deep dive back into some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy ideas that you explored in Brothers. It’s not an uncontroversial subject. Did you worry that including that might color the reaction to the rest of the book?

DT: Yeah, you always worry, because unfortunately this climate has been created over the years that discourages and intimidates scholars and journalists and investigators from looking into these dark corners in American life that should be examined. Poll after poll for the last 50 years has shown that most American people don’t accept the official version. The only people who do are the media establishment and the political establishment, at least in public.

To me it’s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. “Why didn’t you, with your investigative resources, try to get to the bottom of it?” You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, “Well, I thought it would ruin my career.”

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there’s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn’t have acted on its own.

During the Kennedy period, there was a sense that he’d broken from the Cold War hegemony and that he was putting the country at risk, and that he was a young, untested president. He was maybe cowardly. He was physically not fit. So they just felt, for the good of the nation, that as painful as it probably was to do, he had to be removed. That’s what I think the consensus finally was about him. And Dulles would have been the person, as the executor of this kind of security wing of the American establishment, who would have been given this job.

MJ: Given that exploring these theories has been perceived as a career-killer, did you not have those same fears yourself?

DT: If you have fears at 63 after a career in journalism like I have, taking the risks I have, then you don’t belong in journalism. That’s what journalism should be all about: taking risks and asking the questions that no one else is.

MJ: Alright, last question for you. Connection cuts out. MJ calls DT back.

DT: Aaron? There you are. They’re fucking with us again! The NSA!

MJ: The NSA, of course. Okay, so: When the Devil’s Chessboard movie comes out, who should play Allen Dulles?

DT: Laughs. That’s a very good question. In fact, the book is being read widely in Hollywood now, and I have no idea. But there have been some interesting suggestions. One is William Hurt, who kind of looks like him now in his older age. You know, to tell you the truth, we’ll see if Hollywood will be willing to take this on. Brothers had a long and winding road in Hollywood. And it was about to go many different times and then the plug was pulled on it. I still think this is kind of a verboten subject in Hollywood, particularly the Kennedy stuff. But, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see if they’re braver with this one.

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

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Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote

by Burton6385 Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Alabama, you need a driver’s license or other form of photo ID to vote. But getting that ID just got a lot harder, especially in the state’s majority-black counties.

Due to budget cuts, Alabama is closing 31 satellite DMVs across the state. The biggest impact will be in rural, largely black counties that voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Alabama Media Group columnist John Archibald put it this way:

Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting…

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

Archibald predicted the move would invite a Justice Department investigation, as did his fellow columnist, Kyle Whitmire:

But put these two things together—Voter ID and 29 counties without a place where you can get one—and Voter ID becomes what the Democrats always said it was.

A civil rights lawsuit isn’t a probability. It’s a certainty.

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Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote

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Baltimore Just Proposed a Settlement With Freddie Gray’s Family

by ShanelParas8 Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Six months after Freddie Gray died from a spinal injury suffered after an alleged “rough ride” in the back of a police van, the city of Baltimore has tentatively agreed to settle with Gray’s family for $6.4 million. From the Times:

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a statement that the settlement with the family of Freddie Gray would be sent to the Baltimore Board of Estimates for a vote on Wednesday…

“The proposed settlement agreement going before the Board of Estimates should not be interpreted as a judgment on the guilt or innocence of the officers facing trial,” Ms. Rawlings-Blake said. The proposed settlement will be paid as $2.8 million in the current fiscal year and $3.6 million in the year beginning in July of 2016.

Six Baltimore police officers are currently being tried on criminal charges relating to Gray’s death, which sparked massive national protests in April.

The proposed settlement is close in amount to the $5.9 million agreement reached in July between New York City and the family of Eric Garner, who also died at the hands of the police, and eclipses the total $5.7 million that Baltimore has paid in all 102 alleged police misconduct cases since 2011, according to the Baltimore Sun.

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Baltimore Just Proposed a Settlement With Freddie Gray’s Family

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Judges Give NSA More Time to Suck Up Your Data

by AEDUlrikewv Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, on Friday tossed out an injunction over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of American’s phone records, but left open the question of whether the program itself is legal.

From Politico:

The three appeals court judges assigned to the case splintered, with each writing a separate opinion. But they overturned a key ruling from December 2013 that critics of the NSA program had used to advance their claims that the collection of information on billions of calls made and received by Americans was illegal.

That ruling, issued by Judge Richard Leon in Washington, sent shockwaves across the legal landscape because it was the first in which a federal court judge sided with critics who questioned the legality of sweeping up data on vast numbers of phone calls–nearly all of them completely unrelated to terrorism.

The new decision Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did not kill the lawsuit brought by conservative gadfly Larry Klayman. The appeals court voted, 2-1, to allow the lawsuit to proceed in the district court, but the judges left doubts about whether the case will ever succeed.

In June, Congress phased out the NSA’s controversial program with the passing of the USA Freedom Act. The new law forced the NSA to obtain private phone records for counterterrorism investigations on a case-by-case basis through a court order. After the law mandated a six-month transition program for the new program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA could continue its existing bulk collection program through November.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also filed an injunction to block the program, arguing that the surveillance court should not have reinstated the program after a federal appeals court in New York found it to be illegal.

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Judges Give NSA More Time to Suck Up Your Data

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Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon

by JerryBourchier Posted on August 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones obtained more than 450 police department requests for armored tactical vehicles from the Pentagon. Did your police force request one? Browse all of them here.

One year ago this week, hundreds of camouflaged officers in Ferguson, Missouri bore down on residents protesting the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.

Riot cops, their faces sometimes concealed by gas masks, fired off tear gas canisters, and as they stood on top of hulking, mine-resistant vehicles, they appeared to train their assault rifles on the crowds. On some nights, they greeted demonstrators with a storm of rubber bullets.

Images of this chaos provoked a furious debate over the billions of federal dollars that have helped local police forces amass combat style weapons, trucks, and armor. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), echoing concerns from across the political spectrum, fumed that “lawful, peaceful protesters did not deserve to be treated like enemy combatants.”

Law enforcement agencies responded by stoking old fears. No community, they argued, not even the smallest one, is safe from worst-case scenarios like mass shootings, hostage situations, or terrorist attacks. The use of this military equipment has resulted in “substantial positive impact on public safety and officer safety,” Jim Bueermann, the president of the Police Foundation, a research group, said in a 2014 Senate hearing on police militarization. He cited hostage situations, rescue missions, and heavy-duty shootouts where the vehicles had come in useful.

But in private, police justify these same programs in radically different ways.

Mother Jones obtained more than 450 local requests, filed over two years, for what may be the most iconic piece of equipment in the debate over militarizing local police: the mine resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP.* And an analysis of these documents reveals that in justifying their requests, very few sheriffs and police chiefs cite active shooters, hostage situations, or terrorism, as police advocates do in public.

Instead, the single most common reason agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs. Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.

By contrast, out of the total 465 requests, only 8 percent mention the possibility of a barricaded gunman. For hostage situations, the number is 7 percent, for active shooters, 6 percent. Only a handful mentioned downed officers or the possibility of terrorism.

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Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon

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This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time

by ErnestGross86 Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Eric Wyatt was looking forward to his upcoming release from Georgia’s Douglas County Jail one day in March last year. With past convictions for thefts, traffic offenses, and a probation violation, he had an insider’s knowledge of the criminal-justice system; so when the day came, he was more than a little surprised when the authorities, instead of setting him free, escorted him over to Ben Hill County, where he was served with an old arrest warrant for borrowing a truck and failing to return it on time. Wyatt was very familiar with this theft charge: He had already been arrested, roughly three years earlier, for the crime. In fact, he had already served 179 days in jail in Clayton County as punishment for it. Obviously, somebody had made a mistake.

But no one was treating it like a mistake. When Wyatt appeared before a Ben Hill County magistrate three days later, he was denied bond. According to Wyatt’s sworn affidavit, he was called out of his cell the following day to meet with a lawyer from the public defender’s office and fill out an application saying that he couldn’t afford counsel and was thereby eligible for free criminal representation. Wyatt said that when he tried to talk about the gross mix-up, the public defender stopped him cold: “I am not going to be your attorney,” he said. The whole encounter lasted five minutes.

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This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time

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