Tag Archives: nsa

Here’s What Happens When You Challenge the CIA Through “Proper Channels”

by DoraOZLPgq Posted on July 5, 2014

Mother Jones

One of the standard criticisms of Edward Snowden is that he should have tried harder to air his concerns via proper channels. This is fairly laughable on its face, since even now the NSA insists that all its programs were legal and it continues to fight efforts to change them or release any information about them. Still, maybe Snowden should have tried. What harm could it have done?

Today, Greg Miller of the Washington Post tells us the story of Jeffrey Scudder, who worked in the CIA’s Historical Collections Division. This is a division explicitly set up to look for old documents that can be safely released to the public. Scudder discovered thousands of documents he thought should be released, and he worked diligently through channels to make this happen. When that ran into repeated roadblocks, he eventually decided to try to force the CIA’s hand—legally, openly—by filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act:

Scudder’s FOIA submissions fell into two categories: one seeking new digital copies of articles already designated for release and another aimed at articles yet to be cleared. He made spreadsheets that listed the titles of all 1,987 articles he wanted, he said, then had them scanned for classified content and got permission to take them home so he could assemble his FOIA request on personal time.

….Six months after submitting his request, Scudder was summoned to a meeting with Counterintelligence Center investigators and asked to surrender his personal computer. He was placed on administrative leave, instructed not to travel overseas and questioned by the FBI.

….On Nov. 27, 2012, a stream of black cars pulled up in front of Scudder’s home in Ashburn, Va., at 6 a.m. FBI agents seized every computer in the house, including a laptop his daughter had brought home from college for Thanksgiving. They took cellphones, storage devices, DVDs, a Nintendo Game Boy and a journal kept by his wife, a physical therapist in the Loudoun County Schools.

The search lasted nearly four hours, Scudder said. FBI agents followed his wife and daughters into their bedrooms as they got dressed, asking probing questions. “It was classic elicitation,” Scudder said. “How has Jeff been? Have you noticed any unexplained income? Cash? Mood changes?”

….Last summer, the board recommended that Scudder be fired. Around the same time, he was shown a spreadsheet outlining his possible pension packages with two figures — one large and one small — underlined. He agreed to retire.

So, um, yeah. Snowden should have tried harder to work through proper channels. What harm could it have done?

At this point, of course, I have to add the usual caveat that we have only Scudder’s side of this story. The CIA naturally declines to comment. This means it’s possible that Scudder really did do something wrong, but spun a self-serving version of his story for Miller’s benefit. We’ll never know for sure. Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t exactly a testimonial for aggressively trying to work through the proper channels, even if your goal is the relatively harmless one of releasing historical documents that pose no threats to operational security at all. By comparison, it’s pretty obvious that having his pension reduced would have been the least of Snowden’s worries.

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Here’s What Happens When You Challenge the CIA Through “Proper Channels”

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The White House Won’t Comment on Whether President Obama Uses Emoji

by GiseleMickey Posted on June 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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ABC News reports:

President Obama showed just how “hip” he was on Tuesday when he made a reference to emojis in a speech in Pittsburgh…”Now, to her credit, Malia, for example, wrote me a letter for Father’s Day, which obviously was a lot more important to me than if she had just texted a little emoji or whatever those things are.”

It’s unclear whether the president uses emojis himself, but with two teenager daughters in the White House, it’s likely that he’s come into contact with the popular animated characters sent via texts.

“President Barack Obama gave what was almost certainly the first public presidential statement on emoji,” Business Insider‘s Hunter Walker reports.

For the uninitiated, emoji are small digital images that originated in Japan. Approximately 250 new emoji are on their way. Last year, the Library of Congress added an emoji translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to its collections. Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) made Senate history in March when his campaign used an emoji in a press release. Emoji is also quite possibly the most impenetrable form of NSA-proof communication.

The White House did not immediately respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment on whether or not the president has ever dabbled in emoji.

(h/t Betsy Woodruff)

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The White House Won’t Comment on Whether President Obama Uses Emoji

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

by SalinaR35rp Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas—enshrined in the Bill of Rights—are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people’s government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

The Powers of a Police State Denied

America in its pre-constitutional days may seem eerily familiar even to casual readers of current events. We lived then under the control of a king. (Think now: the imperial presidency.) That king was a powerful, unitary executive who ruled at a distance. His goal was simple: to use his power over his American colonies to draw the maximum financial gain while suppressing any dissent that might endanger his control.

In those years, protest was dangerous. Speech could indeed make you the enemy of the government. Journalism could be a crime if you didn’t write in support of those in power. A citizen needed to watch what he said, for there were spies everywhere, including fellow colonists hoping for a few crumbs from the king’s table. Laws could be brutal and punishments swift as well as extra-judicial. In extreme cases, troops shot down those simply assembling to speak out.

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

by CorneliMeaux Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg is outraged that there continues to be no outrage over the endless IRS “scandal.” Most of his column is the usual collection of misleading innuendo, but there is one new item: the IRS’s claim that Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and thousands of her emails were lost. That does sound pretty fishy:

So now the IRS claims that a computer crash has irrevocably erased pertinent emails (an excuse I will remember when I am audited). National Review’s John Fund reports that the IRS’ manual says backups must exist. If emails — which exist on servers, clouds and elsewhere — can be destroyed this way, someone should tell the NSA that there’s a cheaper way to encrypt data.

Far be it from me to doubt the word of John Fund, but perhaps Goldberg should instead have read the Washington Post yesterday. The explanation for the crash, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to sound pretty plausible. Basically, the IRS keeps six months worth of email backups on tape, so when congressional investigators started asking for email records in mid-2013, backups were available only through late 2012. Lerner’s computer crashed in mid-2011, so everything prior to that was lost because it existed only in local files on her PC. The IRS has since tried to recover Lerner’s emails from the PCs of people she sent emails to, but that was only partially successful.

Nothing here sets off alarm bells to me. The key question, I think, is whether the IRS has contemporaneous documents showing that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and attempts to recover her hard drive failed. And they do. This is well before the scandal broke, so it would take a pretty Herculean brand of conspiracy theorizing to imagine that this was somehow related to the scandal. Either Lerner deliberately crashed her hard drive because she suspected her actions might prompt an investigation two years later, or else the IRS has faked a bunch of emails from 2011 between Lerner and the IT team trying to recover her hard drive.

There’s also, as Steve Benen points out, the fact that Congress is mostly concerned with Lerner’s behavior in the election year of 2012. If the IRS were involved in a cover-up, faking a hard drive crash that destroyed emails from 2010 and 2011 is a pretty incompetent way of doing it.

So, anyway, that’s where the outrage is. Most of us concluded long ago that regardless of whether IRS policies were correct, the evidence pretty strongly suggests that they were bipartisan, targeting political groups on both left and right. There’s just no scandal there. At most there’s bad judgment, and probably not even that. Likewise, Lerner’s hard drive crash might turn out to be a scandal, but so far it sure doesn’t look like one.

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

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House Committee Votes Unanimously to Rein In the NSA

by OttoHaigler Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s pretty hard to find non-depressing news out of Washington DC these days, but this genuinely qualifies:

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted 32-0 to approve an amended version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would require the National Security Agency to get case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before collecting the telephone or business records of a U.S. resident.

….The USA Freedom Act, introduced last October, would prohibit bulk collection under the business-records provision of the Patriot Act, the law cited by NSA and Department of Justice officials as giving them authority for the telephone records collection program exposed by leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The bill would also prohibit bulk collection targeting U.S. residents in parts of another statute, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA has used largely to target overseas communications. The bill would take the phone records database out of NSA control and leave the records with carriers.

Remarkably, support for this bill has stayed bipartisan despite the fact that President Obama supports it. And although it’s true that several provisions have been watered down a bit recently, the heart of the bill has stayed intact: a ban on bulk collection of phone records by the NSA. This is a pretty big deal, and it’s supported by Democrats, Republicans, and the president.

This represents the first time in decades that the national security establishment has been restrained in any significant way. And no matter what else you think of Edward Snowden, this never would have happened without him.

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House Committee Votes Unanimously to Rein In the NSA

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New Audio: Listen to Edward Snowden Defend Whistleblowers

by PVGAveryopduno Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Edward Snowden beamed into DC from Russia Wednesday afternoon to accept the Ridenhour Prize for “truth-telling,” speaking before a crowd at the National Press Club via a Google+ hangout. Snowden’s lawyer and his father sat at a table in the front row and accepted the award on his behalf.

“A year ago there was no way I could have imagined being here, being honored in this room,” Snowden said to open his remarks. “When I began this, I never expected to receive the level of support that I did from the public. Having seen what happened to the people that came before, specifically Thomas Drake, it was an intimidating thing.” Drake is a former high-level employee at the National Security Agency who was vigorously prosecuted after revealing waste and mismanagement at the agency. “I’d realized that the highest likelihood, the most likely outcome of returning this information to public hands would be that I would spend the rest of my life in prison,” Snowden said. “I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”

When asked what advice he would give to the next potential whistleblower who wants to expose wrongdoing in the intelligence community, Snowden said that there needed to be systematic changes; otherwise that whistleblower would be forced into exile like him. “Thomas Drake showed us that even if you’re a real classic whistleblower revealing waste, fraud, and abuse in a program… there’s a very good chance the FBI will kick in your door, pull you out of the shower naked at gunpoint in front of your family, and ruin your life,” he said. Instead, Snowden suggested that Congress needed to add safeguards to encourage people to come forward. “Work with Congress in advance to try to make sure that we have reformed laws,” he said, “that we have better protections, that all these shortcomings and failures in our oversight infrastructure are addressed so that the next time that we have an American whistleblower who has something that the public needs to know, they can go to their lawyer’s office instead of the airport. Right now I’m not sure they have a real alternative.”

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New Audio: Listen to Edward Snowden Defend Whistleblowers

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Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Punished in Washington

by JoshMealmaker Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

How the mighty have fallen. Once known as “Obama’s favorite general,” James Cartwright will soon don a prison uniform and, thanks to a plea deal, spend 13 months behind bars. Involved in setting up the earliest military cyberforce inside US Strategic Command, which he led from 2004 to 2007, Cartwright also played a role in launching the first cyberwar in history—the release of the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear program. A Justice Department investigation found that, in 2012, he leaked information on the development of that virus to David Sanger of the New York Times. The result: a front-page piece revealing its existence, and so the American cyber-campaign against Iran, to the American public. It was considered a serious breach of national security. On Thursday, the retired four-star general stood in front of a US district judge who told him that his “criminal act” was “a very serious one” and had been “committed by a national security expert who lost his moral compass.” It was a remarkable ending for a man who nearly reached the heights of Pentagon power, was almost appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had the president’s ear.

In fact, Gen. James Cartwright has not gone to jail and the above paragraph remains—as yet—a grim Washington fairy tale. There is indeed a Justice Department investigation open against the president’s “favorite general” (as Washington scribe to the stars Bob Woodward once labeled him) for the possible leaking of information on that virus to the New York Times, but that’s all. He remains quite active in private life, holding the Harold Brown Chair in Defense Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a consultant to ABC News, and on the board of Raytheon, among other things. He has suffered but a single penalty so far: he was stripped of his security clearance.

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Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Punished in Washington

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Wiretapping Advocate Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox

by BobbieStocks Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The internet is not pleased that Condoleezza Rice will be joining the board of the filesharing service Dropbox. A lot of the concern has to do with the fact that she’ll be helping Dropbox navigate “international expansion and privacy” issues. As Ars Technica notes, the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State isn’t exactly the kind of person you’d trust to defend your data from Uncle Sam: In 2003, she authorized NSA wiretaps of members of the United Nations Security Council at the behest of George W. Bush, and later defended them. Of course, to be fair, maybe having an insider like Rice onboard will allow Dropbox to push back against would-be government intrusions. Still, the news is likely to give a boost to Dropbox competitors that now market their cloud services, convincingly or not, as “NSA-proof.”

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Wiretapping Advocate Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox

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OkCupid’s CEO Donated to an Anti-Gay Campaign Once, Too

by CarmeloStanley Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, the online dating site OkCupid switched up its homepage for Mozilla Firefox users. Upon opening the site, a message appeared encouraging members to curb their use of Firefox because the company’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, allegedly opposes equality for gay couples—specifically, he donated $1000 to the campaign for the anti-gay Proposition 8 in 2008. “We’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together,” the message read. “If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal.” The company’s action went viral, and within a few days, Eich had resigned as CEO of Mozilla only weeks after taking up the post. On Thursday, OkCupid released a statement saying “We are pleased that OkCupid’s boycott has brought tremendous awareness to the critical matter of equal rights for all individuals and partnerships.”

But there’s a hitch: OkCupid’s co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan once donated to an anti-gay candidate. (Yagan is also CEO of Match.com.) Specifically, Yagan donated $500 to Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) in 2004, reports Uncrunched. During his time as congressman from 1997 to 2009, Cannon voted for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, against a ban on sexual-orientation based job discrimination, and for prohibition of gay adoptions.

He’s also voted for numerous anti-choice measures, earning a 0 percent rating from NARAL Pro Choice America. Among other measures, Cannon voted for laws prohibiting government from denying funds to medical facilities that withhold abortion information, stopping minors from crossing state lines to obtain an abortion, and banning family planning funding in US aid abroad. Cannon also earned a 7 percent rating from the ACLU for his poor civil rights voting record: He voted to amend FISA to allow warrant-less electronic surveillance, to allow NSA intelligence gathering without civil oversight, and to reauthorize the PATRIOT act.

Of course, it’s been a decade since Yagan’s donation to Cannon, and a decade or more since many of Cannon’s votes on gay rights. It’s possible that Cannon’s opinions have shifted, or maybe his votes were more politics than ideology; a tactic by the Mormon Rep. to satisfy his Utah constituency. It’s also quite possible that Yagan’s politics have changed since 2004: He donated to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps even Firefox’s Eich has rethought LGBT equality since his 2008 donation. But OkCupid didn’t include any such nuance in its take-down of Firefox. Combine that with the fact that the company helped force out one tech CEO for something its own CEO also did, and its action last week starts to look more like a PR stunt than an impassioned act of protest. (Mother Jones reached out to OkCupid for comment: We’ll update this post if we receive a response.)

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OkCupid’s CEO Donated to an Anti-Gay Campaign Once, Too

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The NSA’s Problems Go Beyond Just Its Phone Records Program

by DwainOquinn Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Eli Lake talks with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the NSA’s massive collection of phone records:

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper said the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community over its collection of phone records could have been avoided. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn’t have had the problem we had,” Clapper said.

“What did us in here, what worked against us was this shocking revelation,” he said, referring to the first disclosures from Snowden. If the program had been publicly introduced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, most Americans would probably have supported it. “I don’t think it would be of any greater concern to most Americans than fingerprints. Well people kind of accept that because they know about it. But had we been transparent about it and say here’s one more thing we have to do as citizens for the common good, just like we have to go to airports two hours early and take our shoes off, all the other things we do for the common good, this is one more thing.”

Two things. First, Clapper is quite possibly right. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congress might well have approved DNA testing of everybody in the country if George Bush had proposed it. Hell, they approved the invasion of Iraq.

Second, though, Clapper is also wrong. I think he is, anyway. It wasn’t Snowden’s “shocking revelation” about the phone records program that did so much damage to the NSA. After all, we’ve known about that in fuzzy terms since 2005 and in very specific terms since Leslie Cauley reported it in 2006:

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

This provoked a bit of controversy at the time, but it faded away pretty quickly. It’s true that Snowden provided documentary evidence that had been missing in the earlier reports, but he didn’t really change what we knew. The sad fact is that the mere knowledge that the NSA was collecting an enormous database of every call made in the United States simply didn’t bother people very much when it was first revealed.

No, what hurt the NSA was Snowden’s revelations about everything it was doing. If it had just been phone records, interest might have died out quickly, just as it did in 2006. But it was far more than that, and that’s what’s kept this alive. Clapper is kidding himself if he thinks otherwise.

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The NSA’s Problems Go Beyond Just Its Phone Records Program

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