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Marco Rubio Is Very Upset That President Obama Went to a Mosque

by ChesterSaylors7 Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, President Barack Obama visited a mosque for the first time as president, and offered perhaps the least controversial comment imaginable: “You’re part of America too,” he told his hosts. “You’re not Muslim or American; you’re Muslim and American.”

Sen. Marco Rubio was not impressed, telling voters in New Hampshire:

I’m tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president’s done. Always pitting people against each other. Always. Look at today—he gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s going to be discrimination in America of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam. And by the way, radical Islam poses a threat to Muslims themselves.

To be clear: America discriminates against Muslims.

In 2012, Wired reported that “the FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream” sic American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.” That investigative series on federal law enforcement’s prejudices against Muslims won a National Magazine Award. In 2011, the Associated Press reported on how the NYPD, with the help of the CIA, spied on America mosques and even infiltrated Muslim student associations. That series won a Pulitzer. Last week, Buzzfeed reported on the intense pressure applied by the federal government on Muslim immigrants who apply for citizenship. My colleague Kristina Rizga has reported on the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim bullying in schools. One of the candidates who beat Rubio last week literally proposed banning Muslims from entering the country; the other limited his ban to people from predominantly Muslim countries.

This is all pretty easy to find online, but in Rubio’s defense, the Internet is pretty spotty in New Hampshire.

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Marco Rubio Is Very Upset That President Obama Went to a Mosque

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Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

by FeliciaWalthall Posted on December 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, the news was full of reports about cities in which the murder rate had increased 30, 40, even 50 percent since 2014. Was it the fault of Ferguson, which prompted so much anti-police animus that cops started pulling back, afraid to do their jobs for fear of being the target of angry mobs and the evening news?

That’s a hard question to answer, but the first order of business is to figure out if the murder rate has really gone up in the first place. The FBI won’t have official figures for a long time (they’re still working on 2013), but a couple of months ago the Brennan Center took a crack at this and estimated that the murder rate for all of America’s largest cities was up 11 percent this year. That’s a lot less scary than 50 percent, but it’s still a pretty sizeable increase. Heather Mac Donald is unhappy that liberals are trying to downplay it:

Good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.

….Cops making arrests in urban areas are routinely surrounded by bystanders, who swear at them and interfere with the arrests. The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing—the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones.

….To acknowledge the Ferguson effect would be tantamount to acknowledging that police matter, especially when the family and other informal social controls break down. Trillions of dollars of welfare spending over the past 50 years failed to protect inner-city residents from rising predation. Only the policing revolution of the 1990s succeeded in curbing urban violence, saving thousands of lives. As the data show, that achievement is now in jeopardy.

First things first: no one thinks that “good policing” is responsible for the massive drop in violent crime over the past two decades. It may be part of the reason, but it’s certainly not the whole reason, or even the main reason. And pedestrian stops and broken windows are the subject of intense controversy. They’re the farthest thing from “proven” you can imagine. This is true whether or not you believe that gasoline lead played a role in the big crime drop of the 1990s. MacDonald is engaging in absurdities when she suggests otherwise.

Nor have “family and other informal social controls” broken down. Not in any way that affects the crime rate, anyway. The evidence against this hypothesis is overwhelming. It needs to die a decent death.

Finally, it’s worth noting that because the number of murders is relatively small, it’s not unusual to see fairly large annual changes. We won’t know for years whether the murder rate really went up 11 percent in 2015, but even if it did, it wouldn’t be that surprising. Between 1985 and 2012, the FBI recorded five years in which the murder rate in America’s largest cities increased or decreased by more than 10 percent.

That said, an 11 percent spike is still substantial. If it’s real and persistent, it deserves attention. No one should pretend that it’s just a “modest” increase or a “small blip.”

My recommendation: Both sides should cool it. Mac Donald is right to be concerned that this year’s increase could be bad news if it marks the beginning of a trend. We should keep a close eye on violent crime data—not just murder rates—over the next year or two. At the same time, liberals are right to be skeptical that the “Ferguson effect” is a long-term problem. Most likely, everyone will either adjust to it or forget about it by this time next year. And both sides should be concerned about finding the right policing balance in an era of ubiquitous cell phones and body cams.

Waiting too long to acknowledge a problem can sometimes be disastrous, but a few months is a pretty short time and murder is a pretty small sample set to draw any firm conclusions from. Everyone should calm down a bit and wait to see what the next year or two bring.

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Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

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Media Feeding Frenzy As Reporters Stampede Into San Bernardino Suspsects’ Apartment

by SolomonLazzarin Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday afternoon, cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, along with other photographers and reporters, gained access to the home of the couple suspected of carrying out the deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people and injured 21. The rampage, which occurred only two days prior, has since been the subject of an FBI investigation for possible terrorism.

It’s still unknown exactly how the journalists gained entry into the apartment (there remains some dispute around the role of the landlord on scene). Reporters could be seen going through children’s belongings, and even holding up a driver’s license that appeared to belong to a family member of one of the suspects. The scene became an instant breaking news item, of blockbuster proportions:

One of CNN’s own security analysts, Harry Houck, appeared appalled by what he was watching live on air, even as CNN continued to show more footage from inside the house. “I’m having chills down my spine what I’m seeing here. This apartment is clearly full of evidence.” Watch his reaction below:

CNN even chose to lead with a photo of what appears to be a crib from inside the house on the network’s homepage with this banner headline:

FBI sources tell CBS LA the site of the investigation at the house concluded yesterday.

Nonetheless, outrage was swift on social media:

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Media Feeding Frenzy As Reporters Stampede Into San Bernardino Suspsects’ Apartment

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The New, Ugly Surge in Violence and Threats Against Abortion Providers

by TrentLangston11 Posted on November 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Firefighters battle a blaze at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington September 4, 2015. KREM.com/AP Photo

Three people were shot dead and nine others were injured Friday at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, the first time since 2009 that anyone has been killed in an incident linked to activity at an abortion clinic. The attack comes amid an exponential increase in threats and violence against abortion providers since the release of a series of viral—and widely debunked—videos.

While police have not discussed the alleged motives of the suspect, who has been arrested, the attack began at the clinic. According to authorities, the gunman entered the facility Friday afternoon and began shooting. During an hours-long standoff, he exchanged fire with police, killing one officer.

Since the release of the Center for Medical Progress’ videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal issue, harassment, threats, and attacks against abortion providers, their staff, and facilities have surged dramatically across the country, according to new numbers from the National Abortion Federation.

The clinic attacked on Friday is part of the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains affiliate, which was featured in the Center for Medical Progress’ videos.

“Since the series of highly edited, misleading anti-abortion videos was released in July, we have seen an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats against abortion providers,” says Vicki Saporta, the president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, which has been tracking violence against providers since the 1970s.

“We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw” on Friday, she added.

The Federation is suing Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress for allegedly setting up a sham biomedical organization and misrepresenting their identities in order to gain access to and record a federation meeting.

Abortion providers have grappled with harassment and threats for years, but the tide of vitriol began rising dramatically in July, after the first video was released. Soon after that, an anonymous reader posted a message on Fox Nation’s website.

“I’ll pay ten large to whomever kills Dr. Deborah Nucatola. She should be summarily executed. I’ll do it myself if no one else does.” A month later, another physician, Dr. Savita Ginde, came home to find 50 people protesting outside her door. They left fliers around her neighborhood that said, “Savita Ginde Murders Children.”

Nucatola and Ginde both work for Planned Parenthood and were featured in videos surreptitiously recorded by the Center for Medical Progress. They are among a handful of abortion providers who have been catapulted into the public eye by the group and its public face, David Daleiden. But harassment has not been limited to the providers spotlighted in the series—the first video of which has received more than 3 million views on YouTube.

Clinics targeted

Violence against reproductive health clinics dates back to at least Roe v. Wade, when anti-abortion animus swelled in reaction to the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case. In 1982, an Illinois-based provider and his wife were kidnapped, and three clinics in Florida and Virginia were bombed in the same year. In 1984 there were more than 25 cases of bombings and arson attacks across the country.

Coordinated attacks reached a fever pitch in the early 1990s. Anti-abortion activists, led by Operation Rescue—a group whose president, Troy Newman, is also currently the secretary of the Center for Medical Progress—created large-scale human blockades in major cities across the United States. These protests prevented anyone from leaving or entering clinics, which led to hundreds of arrests by law enforcement.

Meanwhile, the number of violent incidents also increased, and in 1993 Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed in the parking lot of a clinic he worked at in Pensacola, Florida. Gunn had been the subject of wanted-style posters distributed by Operation Rescue. In 1994, an abortion doctor, a clinic escort, and two receptionists were killed in two separate incidents.

Congress enacted the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, making it a federal crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with abortion providers or those seeking their care. But in January 1998, an abortion clinic security guard was killed during a bombing at his workplace. And in October, abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was murdered in his home.

Two weeks after Dr. Slepian’s death, Attorney General Janet Reno created the Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, led by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and staffed by investigators from the FBI and other federal agencies. Violence plummeted in the years following the clinic access law and the creation of the task force. According to the FBI, in 2012 violations of the clinic access act made up only 2 percent of the bureau’s civil rights cases.

A new surge

But harassment, threats of violence, and attacks against clinics have gone up again following the release of the Center for Medical Progress’ videos in July, according to recent National Abortion Federation court filings. That month, incidents of harassment against Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold compared with June, and those numbers continued to rise through August.

In the four months following the release of the videos, there have been at least four suspected arsons that targeted abortion clinics, compared with just one in all of 2014 and none in 2013. There have been at least five cases of vandalism since August. In comparison, there were 12 total cases of clinic vandalism in all of 2014 and just five cases in 2013, according to federation figures.

In one of the recent vandalism cases, a young man entered a Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire and destroyed medical equipment, phones, and computers. This month, an unidentified person smashed the windows of Kentucky’s only full-time abortion provider, twice in three weeks.

Anne, the executive director of the clinic, who declined to give her last name for security reasons, told Insider Louisville that in its 20 years of operation, the clinic had never before been vandalized.

The deaths of three people at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday were the first slayings linked to an abortion clinic in six years. The last was in 2009, when the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church in Wichita, Kansas. Scott Roeder, who was found guilty of Tiller’s murder, said he shot the doctor because “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”

The FBI has also reported an increase in the number of attacks on reproductive health care facilities across the country since the videos were released in July. A spokesperson from the FBI was not immediately available for comment.

“It’s a concerning time,” says duVergne Gaines, director of the National Clinic Access Project.

The project, which is a program of the Feminist Majority Foundation, has trained clinic escorts and helped clinics increase security with surveillance cameras, alarm systems, bulletproof glass, and vests. When Gaines spoke with Mother Jones earlier this month, she said “the trifecta of efforts excoriating, and inspiring individuals to go out and target providers by demonizing them” leaves providers vulnerable, and that they were lucky no one had yet been hurt.

“But we fear that may be around the corner,” Gaines said at the time.

The violence is intended to silence providers and drive them away from their jobs, but officials from the National Abortion Federation and the National Clinic Access Project say women should feel safe going to clinics. Law enforcement agencies are aware of the issue, they added.

Indeed, the number of abortion providers decreased 38 percent between 1982 and 2000 and continues to decline today. According to research from an anti-abortion group, the number of surgical abortion clinics dropped to 582 in 2013, down from more than 2,000 clinics in the early 1990s. And in the last two years, surgical abortion clinics have been closing at a rate of 1.5 clinics every week.

And though it’s hard to pinpoint every cause for the decline, “stigma and fear of violence…are powerful barriers to abortion provision,” according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

For some abortion doctors, violence only deepens their resolve to provide abortion care. LeRoy Carhart quit doing surgery and opened his abortion practice in 1991 after a massive fire on his family’s 65-acre Nebraska farm. The day after the fire, Carhart said he received a letter that said the abortions made his property a target for the fire. No one was ever convicted.

The physician now operates a clinic in Nebraska and travels to Maryland each week to perform abortions. For security reasons, he says he avoids staying in the same hotel twice and tries to take different routes to work.

“After the fire, it totally changed everything. That’s when we decided to just do abortions full time,” Carhart said, “It was my way of getting back.”

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The New, Ugly Surge in Violence and Threats Against Abortion Providers

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

by HollisDjfrzp Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dante Atkins on the SAFE Act:

The bill requires the specific signatures of three high-ranking officials to personally approve refugees into the United States, a burden that both Republicans and the White House believe would all but cease the flow of refugees into the United States because it is believed that said officials would be too fearful of the career implications should one of the detainees turn out to become even a mere criminal, much less a terrorist.

I have to say, this bill has me confused. After looking into it, I wrote a post a couple of days ago suggesting that it was mostly symbolic. The vetting process didn’t change, it just needed to be documented and “certified” by the White House. Beyond that, some top officials would get half a dozen refugee approvals every day for their autopen to sign. Big deal. The only real effect would be a short pause while the certification was drafted and signed off.

Since then, though, every single story I’ve read about this bill describes it on a spectrum from “tightening” requirements to virtually shutting down the flow of refugees from Syria entirely. None of them ever provide any details, though. They talk about background checks, but the FBI already does background checks on refugees from Syria and Iraq. They talk about tougher procedures, but there are no new procedures in the bill. The actual vetting process itself is left up to the executive branch.

And yet, the White House is dead set against this bill, which it probably wouldn’t be if it was mostly just symbolic. So I remain puzzled. What’s the real deal with this bill? Is it really likely that, say, the Director of National Intelligence would simply refuse to ever sign off on a refugee approval? Hell, the DNI already signs off on hundreds of things with more potential for blowback than that.

I dunno. It’s all very strange.

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

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Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

by AlanStarling Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Louisiana voters will elect a new governor—Republican Sen. David Vitter or Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards. They’ll also celebrate the end of one of the strangest campaigns in recent history. It has included prostitutes, an alleged love child, a coffee-shop spying scandal, a low-speed foot chase, an IHOP affidavit, the FBI, Santa Claus, and a fake terrorism scare.

Edwards is leading in most polls by double digits in the deep-red state—a testament to the supreme unpopularity of the current Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, and to Vitter’s own shortcomings. In some ways, they’re not so different. The Democratic challenger is, like Vitter, anti-abortion and pro-gun, and he asked President Barack Obama to halve the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Louisiana. (The Pelican State has thus far accepted 14.)

But Edwards has also backed accepting federal money to expand Medicaid with no strings attached. (Vitter has said he would not take expansion “off the table” but did not want to create an incentive for people to stop working.) Democrats hoping for off-year electoral successes suffered a major blow when Obamacare critic Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky earlier in November. In Louisiana, they have a chance to quietly offset that loss and put a lot more folks on the Medicaid rolls. That’s a big deal.

But the race is memorable for less substantive reasons. These are all real things that have happened over the final month of the campaign:

One week before the October election—Saturday’s runoff vote between the top two October finishers was triggered because no candidate received majority support—a Louisiana blogger named Jason Berry published a video interview on his website, American Zombie, with a former prostitute who alleged that Vitter paid her $5,000 a month for three years, gave her jewelry, got her pregnant, and told her to get an abortion. The former prostitute, Wendy Ellis, told Berry she was coming forward because she was dying of lupus and wanted a clean conscience.
Berry would not reveal exactly how he found Ellis but admitted he’d gotten in touch with her through a professional political researcher.
On the eve of the first election, a private investigator employed by a law firm paid by the Vitter campaign was caught secretly filming a group of Edwards supporters, including Jefferson Parish sheriff Newell Normand, during a regular coffee meeting at the Royal Blend cafe in Old Metairie.
When a member of the group took a photo of the P.I., he fled on foot through a succession of vacant properties. The Edwards supporters pursued the P.I. through the neighborhood, and found him hiding behind an air-conditioning unit. He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.
The private investigator told sheriff deputies that he was not spying on the sheriff, but rather “on an assignment to conduct surveillance on a subject with a white beard.”
The “subject with a white beard” revealed himself to be a New Orleans lawyer and Edwards supporter named John Cummings, who told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “The stupid son of a bitch was supposed to find Santa Claus in the cafe; that’s the guy with the white beard.”
Cummings added, “You can tell David Vitter that he doesn’t get anything for Christmas. He’s been naughty.”
The deputies found a LexisNexis dossier inside the private investigator’s car about Berry, the American Zombie blogger who published the story about Vitter and his alleged love child.
Berry told reporters that he had seen the private investigator outside his own house two days earlier. “I don’t know whether it was incompetence, whether he’s like Inspector Clouseau, or whether the guy actually wanted me to see him, but it was pretty clear what was going on when I made eye contact with him and he smiled at me,” he told WWL-TV.
Unbeknownst to Vitter’s P.I., the opposition researcher who helped Berry track down Ellis was also at the Royal Blend. The investigator, Danny Denoux, told the Advocate that he had been retained by an anonymous businessman.
Edwards’ first ad of the runoff election, aired during a Louisiana State University football game, stated, “David Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots. Now, the choice is yours.”

Vitter told reporters he sent documents to the FBI and the local US Attorney’s office accusing Cummings (“the guy with the white beard”) of paying a witness to make false statements against him. (Cummings has denied this.)
The next day, Normand, the Jefferson Parish sheriff who chased Vitter’s P.I. through the streets of Metairie, held a press conference to announce that he had recovered video footage from the private investigator’s phone, depicting a 30-minute interview at an IHOP with an acquaintance of the prostitute. The investigator on the tape was attempting to persuade Ellis’ friend, an unidentified woman, to sign an affidavit discrediting Ellis’ claims. Norman read aloud several excerpts from the meeting. “I’d like you to say Jason Berry made payment to several witnesses,” the investigator told the woman. “If I could show then Jason Berry paying people off, that would kind of kill this story.” Normand told reporters he was going to turn the tapes over to the FBI. (Berry has denied paying sources for material.)
Vitter returned to the scene of the crime, holding a private meeting with donors at—of all places—the Royal Blend cafe in Metairie, where his P.I. had filmed Normand’s coffee meeting.
After Vitter took umbrage at the ad about the prostitutes during their debate, Edwards told Vitter, “If it’s a low blow, it’s only be­cause that’s where you live, senator—it’s 100 percent truthful”:

Citing “those extracurricular activities that you don’t want to admit to,” the Democrat continued, “You’re a liar and you’re a cheater and you’re a stealer and I don’t tolerate that.” (Vitter has denied being a liar and a stealer.)
Trailing in the polls by double digits, Vitter wrote an open letter to Obama warning him that a Syrian refugee who had resettled in Louisiana had gone “missing.” The Louisiana GOP picked up Vitter’s talking point and emailed supporters, “There is an unmonitored Syrian refugee who is walking around freely, and no one knows where he is.”
There was no missing Syrian refugee.
Normand, who can’t not comment about these things, told the Gambit that “somebody’s going to get killed” as a result of Vitter’s misinformation.

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Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

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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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New York Daily News Compares the NRA to Jihadists

by FinleyBernier Posted on November 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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In three words, the front page of Wednesday’s New York Daily News launched one of the boldest attacks on the National Rifle Association in recent memory.

The tabloid’s cover denounced “NRA’s Sick Jihad,” in characteristically huge typeface. The story inside accused the gun rights group of tacitly abetting the arming of terrorists by blocking a proposed bill that would make it more difficult for terror suspects to buy guns in the United States. The Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015, formally known as H.R. 1076, was introduced in February, and includes a ban on the “sale or distribution of firearms or explosives to any individual whom the Attorney General has determined to be engaged in terrorist activities.”

The earliest version of the legislation was originally introduced under President George W. Bush in 2007, but it has yet to be signed into law. According to the Daily News, more than 2,000 suspects on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist have been able to purchase weapons in the United States in the last 11 years.

The story begins, “The NRA—and their gun-loving Republican cohorts—are refusing once more to stop terrorists intent on getting armed in the U.S.A.”

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New York Daily News Compares the NRA to Jihadists

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WikiLeaks Releases What It Says Are the CIA Director’s Personal Emails

by MikkiDjrtbodb Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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WikiLeaks released its latest document dump on Wednesday afternoon: a collection of files allegedly taken from the personal email of CIA director John Brennan, whose AOL account was allegedly hacked by a teenager and his friends.

The most sensitive of the documents is a draft version of Brennan’s SF-86, the lengthy form that people must fill out when applying for a security clearance. The form requests years’ worth of employment and personal history, allowing government investigators to delve deep into the backgrounds of applicants—and providing foreign intelligence services or hackers with a treasure trove of potential information for blackmail. That threat is why members of Congress, security professionals, and others freaked out when millions of SF-86s were stolen in the hacks on the Office of Personnel Management, exposing the personal data of a vast number of government employees. Those records are now presumed to be in Chinese hands.

Brennan’s alleged form is now out in public, so his exposure may be even worse. The form released by WikiLeaks isn’t complete, but it does include the personal information of both Brennan and his wife.

The exposure also highlights the government’s ongoing problems with securing sensitive information and using it in unofficial channels. Such documents are supposed to be kept on secure government systems, but officials from Brennan to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former CIA director David Petraeus have run afoul of classification rules or used unsecured systems for sensitive data. Part of that may come down to aging, inefficient government computer systems that make using personal email attractive, but overclassification may also play a role. “It’s inevitable, because the classified systems are often cumbersome and lots of people have access to the classified e-mails or cables,” former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith told the Washington Post in August.

Other documents in the Brennan leak are much less interesting, including the 2007 draft of a memo on Iran that Brennan eventually published in 2008. The Department of Homeland Security says the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating the incident.

Source – 

WikiLeaks Releases What It Says Are the CIA Director’s Personal Emails

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Bernie Sanders Gave a Helluva Defense of Hillary’s Email Scandals at the Debate. There Are 32 Problems With It.

by RollandMacansh Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered one of the most enthusiastic applause lines of the first Democratic presidential debate when he came to Hillary Clinton’s defense over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. After CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Clinton about her upcoming testimony in front of Congress related to her emails, she offered the same answer she has repeatedly given in response.

“I’ve taken responsibility for it,” she said. “I did say it was a mistake.” She then employed her recent campaign strategy of linking the criticism of her email setup to the heavily politicized House Select Committee on Benghazi, which she described as “basically an arm of the Republican National Committee.”

But before everybody moved on, Sanders weighed in. “I think the secretary is right,” he said. “And that is, I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Clinton smiled and thanked him, and the crowd roared its approval.

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Bernie Sanders Gave a Helluva Defense of Hillary’s Email Scandals at the Debate. There Are 32 Problems With It.

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