NSA Spying Started Early 2000

Bush and Cheney (photo: AP)

Bush-Cheney Began Illegal NSA Spying Way Before 9/11

By Ralph Lopez, Digital Journal

15 July 13

ontradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by Richard Nixon. Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at ameeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001, he and other QWest officials declined to participate. AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications records to an NSA database.

In 2007 the Denver Post reported:

"Nacchio suggested that the NSA sought phone, Internet and other customer records from Qwest in early 2001. When he refused to hand over the information, the agency retaliated by not granting lucrative contracts to the Denver-based company, he claimed."

Other sources corroborate the former CEO's allegations, which were made in the course of his legal defense against insider trading charges. Both Slate.com and National Journal have published reports in which sources are quoted which support the former CEO's claims.

Speaking on "FOX News Sunday" this weekend in defense of the Obama administration's NSA PRISM program, which has caused a national uproar over the sweeping intrusion by the government into American citizens' emails, live chats, and other electronic communications, Cheney said:

"Now, as everybody has been associated with the program said if we had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego, two hijackers, able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have been able to prevent 9/11,"

However, the presence of such powers in the hands of the present administration did not succeed in preventing the Boston Marathon attacks, even though the suspects were already well-known to the FBI, and one allegedly told law enforcement, while in the hospital, that they were able to "download plans for pressure cooker bombs from the Internet.

In the same interview on "Fox news Sunday" Cheney called NSA whistleblowerEdward Snowden a "traitor."

In 2004, an AT&T technician filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T for engaging in an illegal domestic-surveillance program at the behest of the government. The Bush administration accessed major routers owned by telecommunications companies, in cities such as San Francisco, to divert traffic onto NSA mirror sites in order to capture vast volumes of data.

The Bush-Cheney administration fought fiercely to pass legislation which granted telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for violating Americans' Fourth Amendment rights under the Constitution. The legislation was passed in 2008. UK Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that the unprecedented "retroactive" immunity would also give the Bush administration immunity as well, by preventing lawsuits from moving forward into the discovery phase, where wrongdoing was likely to be uncovered.

Nevertheless, political accountability activists continue to press for action against the Bush, and now the Obama, administrations for violations of the Constitution and settled law. On April 19th of this year a California attorney, Inder Comar, filed two lawsuits in the Northern District of California against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz for planning and waging a "war of aggression" against Iraq, in violation of laws set down at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. A radio interview of Comar can be heard on peace activist Cindy Sheehan's radio show HERE.

Founding Fathers Never Had Photo ID

The Voter ID Case Earmarked for the Supreme Court

By Peter Jackson, Associated Press

15 July 13

 
trial set to begin Monday on the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's voter identification law represents a major step toward a judicial ruling on whether the photo requirement should be enforced at polling places statewide or thrown out as unconstitutional.

Nine days are set aside for the trial in Harrisburg in Commonwealth Court. Civil libertarians challenging the law and state officials defending it say they expect the state Supreme Court will ultimately decide the case.

At issue is a voter ID law that would be one of the strictest in the nation if it is upheld but has never been enforced.

After legal jousting that reached the state Supreme Court, Judge Robert Simpson blocked enforcement in last year's presidential election and again in this year's municipal and judicial primary because of lingering concern that it could disenfranchise voters who lacked a valid photo ID.

The 2012 law was approved without any Democratic votes by the Legislature's Republican majority and signed by GOP Gov. Tom Corbett amid a bitterly contested White House race in which Democratic President Barack Obama ultimately carried Pennsylvania and was re-elected.

Critics derided the law as a cynical GOP effort to discourage voting by young adults, minorities, the elderly, poor and disabled from going to the polls. Republicans said most Pennsylvanians have driver's licenses to use as photo ID and claimed that the law would discourage voter fraud.

The judge's verdict may be reviewed by a Commonwealth Court panel before an inevitable appeal to the state Supreme Court by the losing side.

Plaintiffs in the case include the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters, the NAACP and the Philadelphia-based Homeless Advocacy Project.

A key issue in the trial will be the availability of alternative photo identification for people who lack a driver's license or other types of acceptable ID listed in the law. The Department of State has developed a special photo ID that is available free to voters who have run out of other options.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say fewer than 20,000 such IDs have been issued so far, but many more voters still lack valid credentials. State officials say they have made the special cards easily accessible and anyone who does not have valid identification must not want it.

House Dems Fight for NLRB Nominees

201 House Democrats Join Workers to Support NLRB Nominees

6COMMENTS

07/09/2013

Sean Savett

For 78 years, the National Labor Rights Board (NLRB) has safeguarded the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain to improve their wages, benefits and workplace environment. Next month, the NLRB’s power to protect more than 80 million private-sector workers could be further limited when the term of one of the current members is set to expire, leaving the board inoperable and without a quorum.

Frustrated by Republican attempts to prevent a vote on President Obama’s five nominees to the NLRB and a recent court decision challenging the validity of President Obama’s recess appointments, several members of Congress gathered with workers this morning to deliver a letter signed by 201 House Democrats to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The letter urged him to allow a vote and end attempts to shut down the board and strip it of its ability to enforce our country’s labor laws.

Reps. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) and Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) organized the event, and were accompanied by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Bill Foster (D-Ill.), who all spoke about the importance of a functioning NLRB to protect America's workers from workplace discrimination and unfair labor practices.

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Joining them at the podium were several working people, including Kathleen Von Eitzen, whose story illustrates the challenges of a non-functioning NLRB. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) sends us her story:

Kathleen Von Eitzen, a 55-year-old Panera baker who makes $21,000 a year, is unable to afford health insurance for her family. Even though her husband has had two heart attacks, she often has to choose between buying food or medicine. Desperate to earn a livable wage and prevent her house from falling into foreclosure, Von Eitzen led her co-workers as they organized to form a union with BCTGM. Unfortunately, Von Eitzen's boss resisted the workers' efforts to unionize and retaliated against employees through firing, loss of pay and bonuses and negative semi-annual evaluations for the workers involved.  

The franchise was found in court to have violated labor law and the Panera workers were to receive both back pay and front pay because of the company cutting hours. The NLRB also issued a judgment against the company for refusing to recognize the union under the National Labor Relations Act. However, Panera filed an appeal and the court is in legal limbo awaiting the Supreme Court decision and the confirmation of the NLRB members.

Meanwhile, Von Eitzen and her co-workers are working without a contract and in a hostile work environment, as the franchise continues to refuse to recognize their union.

"We have pride in our work," Von Eitzen said. "We believe what the company advertises that we are artisan bakers. They have based their commercials on us. Come respect us and let us achieve a livable wage." 

Heartbreaking stories like this will continue if the NLRB is not able to fulfill its mission. As Von Eitzen said this morning, “My husband needs his prescriptions. I would like to afford his medications. Please, Sen. McConnell, confirm these nominees.”

FDIC Insured Savings in Jeopardy

Think Your Money Is Safe in an Insured Bank Account? Think Again

Monday, 08 July 2013 10:05By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt Blog | News Analysis

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(Image via Shutterstock )A trend to shift responsibility for bank losses onto blameless depositors lets banks gamble away your money.

When Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on March 13, 2013, that the Cyprus deposit confiscation scheme would be the template for future European bank bailouts, the statement caused so much furor that he had to retract it. But the “bail in” of depositor funds is now being made official EU policy. On June 26, 2013, The New York Times reported that EU finance ministers have agreed on a plan that shifts the responsibility for bank losses from governments to bank investors, creditors and uninsured depositors.

Insured deposits (those under €100,000, or about $130,000) will allegedly be “fully protected.” But protected by whom? The national insurance funds designed to protect them are inadequate to cover another system-wide banking crisis, and the court of the European Free Trade Association ruled in the case of Iceland that the insurance funds were not intended to cover that sort of systemic collapse.

Shifting the burden of a major bank collapse from the blameless taxpayer to the blameless depositor is another case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the real perpetrators carry on with their risky, speculative banking schemes.

Shuffling the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Although the bail-in template did not hit the news until it was imposed on Cyprus in March 2013, it is a global model that goes back to a directive from the Financial Stability Board (an arm of the Bank for International Settlements) dated October 2011, endorsed at the G20 summit in December 2011. In 2009, the G20 nations agreed to be regulated by the Financial Stability Board; and bail-in policies have now been established for the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, among other countries. (See earlier articles here and here.)

The EU bail-in plan, which still needs the approval of the European Parliament, would allow European leaders to dodge something they evidently regret having signed, the agreement known as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who played a leading role in imposing the deposit confiscation plan on Cyprus, said on March 13 that “the aim is for the ESM never to have to be used.”

Passed with little publicity in January 2012, the ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s overseers demand. Two days before its ratification on July 1, 2012, the agreement was modified to make the permanent bailout fund cover the bailout of private banks. It was a bankers’ dream – a permanent, mandated bailout of private banks by governments.  But EU governments are now balking at that heavy commitment.

In Cyprus, the confiscation of depositor funds was not only approved but mandated by the EU, along with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF. They told the Cypriots that deposits below €100,000 in two major bankrupt banks would be subject to a 6.75 percent levy or “haircut,” while those over €100,000 would be hit with a 9.99 percent “fine.” When the Cyprus national legislature overwhelming rejected the levy, the insured deposits under €100,000 were spared; but it was at the expense of the uninsured deposits, which took a much larger hit, estimated at about 60 percent of the deposited funds.

The Elusive Promise of Deposit Insurance

While the insured depositors escaped in Cyprus, they might not fare so well in a bank collapse of the sort seen in 2008-09. As Anne Sibert, Professor of Economics at the University of London, observed in an April 2nd article on VOX:

Even though it wasn’t adopted, the extraordinary proposal that small depositors should lose a part of their savings – a proposal that had the approval of the Eurogroup, ECB and IMF policymakers – raises the question: Is there any credible protection for small-bank depositors in Europe?

She noted that members of the European Economic Area (EEA) – which includes the EU, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland – are required to set up deposit-insurance schemes covering most depositors up to €100,000, and that these schemes are supposed to be funded with premiums from the individual country’s banks.  But the enforceability of the EEA insurance mandate came into question when the Icelandic bank Icesave failed in 2008. The matter was taken to the court of the European Free Trade Association, which said that Iceland did not breach EEA directives on deposit guarantees by not compensating U.K. and Dutch depositors holding Icesave accounts. The reason: “The court accepted Iceland’s argument that the EU directive was never meant to deal with the collapse of an entire banking system.” Sibert comments:

[T]he precedents set in Cyprus and Iceland show that deposit insurance is only a legal commitment for small bank failures. In systemic crises, these are more political than legal commitments, so the solvency of the insuring government matters.

The EU can mandate that governments arrange for deposit insurance, but if funding is inadequate to cover a systemic collapse, taxpayers will again be on the hook; and if they are unwilling or unable to cover the losses (as occurred in Cyprus and Iceland), we’re back to the unprotected deposits and routine bank failures and bank runs of the 19^th century.

In the US, deposit insurance faces similar funding problems. As of June 30, 2011, the FDIC deposit insurance fund had a balance of only $3.9 billion to provide loss protection on $6.54 trillion of insured deposits. That means every $10,000 in deposits was protected by only $6 in reserves. The FDIC fund could borrow from the Treasury, but the Dodd-Frank Act (Section 716) now bans taxpayer bailouts of most speculative derivatives activities; and these would be the likely trigger of a 2008-style collapse.

Derivatives claims have “super-priority” in bankruptcy, meaning they take before all other claims. In the event of a major derivatives bust at JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America, both of which hold derivatives with notional values exceeding $70 trillion, the collateral is liable to be gone before either the FDIC or the other “secured” depositors (including state and local governments) get to the front of the line. (Seehere and here.)

Who Should Pay?

Who should bear the loss in the event of systemic collapse? The choices currently on the table are limited to taxpayers and bank creditors, including the largest class of creditor, the depositors. Imposing the losses on the profligate banks themselves would be more equitable, but if they have gambled away the money, they simply won’t have the funds. The rules need to be changed so that they cannot gamble the money away.

One possibility for achieving this is area-wide regulation. Sibert writes:

[I]t is unreasonable to expect the area as a whole to bail out a particular country’s banks unless it can also supervise that country’s banks. This is problematic for the EEA or even the EU, but it may be possible – at least in the Eurozone – when and if [a] single supervisory mechanism comes into being.

A single regulatory agency for all Eurozone banks is being negotiated; but even if it were agreed to, the US experience with the Dodd-Frank regulations imposed on US banks shows that regulation alone is inadequate to curb bank speculation and prevent systemic risk. In a July 2012 article in The New York Times titled “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” Gar Alperovitz observed:

With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses.  If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions.

The Nationalization Option

Nationalization of bankrupt, systemically-important banks is not a new idea. It was done very successfully, for example, in Norway and Sweden in the 1990s. But having the government clean up the books and then sell the bank back to the private sector is an inadequate solution. Economist Michael Hudson maintains:

Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. . . . Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies. 

Anne Sibert proposes another solution along those lines. Rather than imposing losses on either the taxpayers or the depositors, they could be absorbed by the central bank, which would have the power to simply write them off. As lender of last resort, the central bank (the ECB or the Federal Reserve) can create money with computer entries, without drawing it from elsewhere or paying it back to anyone.

That solution would allow the depositors to keep their deposits and would save the taxpayers from having to pay for a banking crisis they did not create. But there would remain the problem of “moral hazard” – the temptation of banks to take even greater risks when they know they can dodge responsibility for them. That problem could be avoided, however, by making the banks public utilities, mandated to operate in the public interest. And if they had been public utilities in the first place, the problems of bail-outs, bail-ins, and banking crises crises might have been averted altogether.

ELLEN BROWN  -  "Web of Debt"

NSA Wiretapping of Americans

Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman

The Guardian, Thursday 27 June 2013 11.20 EDT

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The internet metadata collection program was halted in 2011 for 'operational and resource reasons'. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.
The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.
According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".
Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.
The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the NSA was collecting the call records of millions of US Verizon customers under a Fisa court order that, it later emerged, is renewed every 90 days. Similar orders are in place for other phone carriers.
The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails. It also details the internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people inside the United States when sending emails – information which can reflect their physical location. It did not include the content of emails.
"The internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted," Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, said in a statement to the Guardian.
"The program was discontinued by the executive branch as the result of an interagency review," Turner continued. He would not elaborate further.
But while that specific program has ended, additional secret NSA documents seen by the Guardian show that some collection of Americans' online records continues today. In December 2012, for example, the NSA launched one new program allowing it to analyze communications with one end inside the US, leading to a doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters.

What your email metadata reveals

The Obama administration argues that its internal checks on NSA surveillance programs, as well as review by the Fisa court, protect Americans' privacy. Deputy attorney general James Cole defended the bulk collection of Americans' phone records as outside the scope of the fourth amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
"Toll records, phone records like this, that don't include any content, are not covered by the fourth amendment because people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in who they called and when they called," Cole testified to the House intelligence committee on June 18. "That's something you show to the phone company. That's something you show to many, many people within the phone company on a regular basis."
But email metadata is different. Customers' data bills do not itemize online activity by detailing the addresses a customer emailed or the IP addresses from which customer devices accessed the internet.
Internal government documents describe how revealing these email records are. One 2008 document, signed by the US defense secretary and attorney general, states that the collection and subsequent analysis included "the information appearing on the 'to,' 'from' or 'bcc' lines of a standard email or other electronic communication" from Americans.
In reality, it is hard to distinguish email metadata from email content. Distinctions that might make sense for telephone conversations and data about those conversations do not always hold for online communications.
"The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP [internet protocol] logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?" said Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.
"Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that's in many ways on par with reading your diary," Sanchez added.
The purpose of this internet metadata collection program is detailed in the full classified March 2009 draft report prepared by the NSA's inspector general (IG).
One function of this internet record collection is what is commonly referred to as "data mining", and which the NSA calls "contact chaining". The agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from the target", the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the online records of people who communicated with people who communicated with targeted individuals.
Contact chaining was considered off-limits inside the NSA before 9/11. In the 1990s, according to the draft IG report, the idea was nixed when the Justice Department "told NSA that the proposal fell within one of the Fisa definitions of electronic surveillance and, therefore, was not permissible when applied to metadata associated with presumed US persons".

How the US government came to collect Americans' email records

The collection of email metadata on Americans began in late 2001, under a top-secret NSA program started shortly after 9/11, according to the documents. Known as Stellar Wind, the program initially did not rely on the authority of any court – and initially restricted the NSA from analyzing records of emails between communicants wholly inside the US.
"NSA was authorized to acquire telephony and internet metadata for communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States," the draft report states.
George W Bush briefly "discontinued" that bulk internet metadata collection, involving Americans, after a dramatic rebellion in March 2004 by senior figures at the Justice Department and FBI, as the Washington Post first reported. One of the leaders of that rebellion was deputy attorney general James Comey, whom Barack Obama nominated last week to run the FBI.
But Comey's act of defiance did not end the IP metadata collection, the documents reveal. It simply brought it under a newly created legal framework.
As soon as the NSA lost the blessing under the president's directive for collecting bulk internet metadata, the NSA IG report reads, "DoJ [the Department of Justice] and NSA immediately began efforts to recreate this authority."
The DoJ quickly convinced the Fisa court to authorize ongoing bulk collection of email metadata records. On 14 July 2004, barely two months after Bush stopped the collection, Fisa court chief judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly legally blessed it under a new order – the first time the surveillance court exercised its authority over a two-and-a-half-year-old surveillance program.
Kollar-Kotelly's order "essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk internet metadata that it had under the PSP [Bush's program], except that it specified the datalinks from which NSA could collect, and it limited the number of people that could access the data".

How NSA gained more power to study Americans' online habits

The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze. Those restrictions are detailed in a legal memorandum written in a 27 November 2007, by assistant attorney general Kenneth Wainstein to his new boss, attorney general Michael Mukasey, who had taken office just a few weeks earlier.
The purpose of that memorandum was to advise Mukasey of the Pentagon's view that these restrictions were excessive, and to obtain permission for the NSA to expand its "contact chains" deeper into Americans' email records. The agency, the memo noted, already had "in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States".
But, Wainstein continued, "NSA's present practice is to 'stop' when a chain hits a telephone number or [internet] address believed to be used by a United States person."
Wainstein told Mukasey that giving NSA broader leeway to study Americans' online habits would give the surveillance agency, ironically, greater visibility into the online habits of foreigners – NSA's original mandate.
"NSA believes that it is over-identifying numbers and addresses that belong to United States persons and that modifying its practice to chain through all telephone numbers and addresses, including those reasonably believed to be used by a United States person," Wainstein wrote, "will yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States."
The procedures "would clarify that the National Security Agency (NSA) may analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", Wainstein wrote.
In October 2007, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, signed a set of "Supplemental Procedures" on internet metadata, including what it could do with Americans' data linked in its contact chains. Mukasey affixed his signature to the document in January 2008.
"NSA will continue to disseminate the results of its contact chaining and other analysis of communications metadata in accordance with current procedures governing the dissemination of information concerning US persons," the document states, without detailing the "current procedures".
It was this program that continued for more than two years into the Obama administration.
Turner, the director of national intelligence spokesman, did not respond to the Guardian's request for additional details of the metadata program or the reasons why it was stopped.
A senior administration official queried by the Washington Post denied that the Obama administration was "using this program" to "collect internet metadata in bulk", but added: "I'm not going to say we're not collecting any internet metadata."
 

Catch 22 of Surveillance State

Obama's One-Way Mirror Monday, 17 June 2013 11:56 By Shayana Kadidal, Truthout | Op-Ed

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American redaction. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) There is something very wrong with this picture: Today I am in a federal court arguing that the press and public have a right to have access to daily transcripts and court documents in the trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning; meanwhile, Verizon is under government orders to turn over people's calling records on a daily basis.
Similarly, next month, my colleague will argue in federal court that the government can't simply place American citizens on secret "kill lists" without due process; meanwhile, the National Security Agency can go to hand-picked FISA judges to get direct access to the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype and others.
We're on the wrong side of a one-way mirror: The government can see us through it, but from our side we can't see much of what it does in our name and with our tax dollars. Seven years into the self-styled "most transparent administration in history," our lives - and the news media's phone records - are as transparent as ever to the NSA, while the government is more opaque than ever.
We have become a nation in which massive surveillance of millions of citizens is deemed necessary to safeguard our democracy, while whistleblowers who uncover government wrongdoing are prosecuted as traitors. In this Orwellian world, the government has the right to know everything we are doing, but we do not have a right to know much of anything about what the government is doing.
This problem of one-way transparency is exemplified by how the government is dealing with the most important criminal trial involving leaks of classified information since the Pentagon Papers: the court-martial of Bradley Manning.
The government has refused to provide daily transcripts or audio tapes of the proceedings and media access to the briefs and court orders, making it nearly impossible for journalists to cover the trial accurately. In the pre-trial proceedings, the military judge went so far as to read her decisions out for hours at a time rather than provide transcripts. The situation is so bad that internet activists have raised almost $60,000 to pay for their own stenographer in the media room - and that will only pay for half the trial.
In ordinary criminal trials in federal courts, the media have access to daily transcripts against which they can check their notes of what happened in court; they have access to the parties' briefs so they can read them beforehand and make sense of what is being said; and the judges publish their orders so people can read and understand their legal decisions. In Manning's case, none of those things were made available by the government until, in a desperate attempt to fend off our lawsuit, they released several thousand pages of papers a week into the trial (so arbitrarily redacted that the judge's name was blacked out of all of her own orders).
The reason for these efforts to suppress the ability to cover the trial is simple: The administration wants to make an example out of Manning, and if the process were open, as our Constitution requires, his example would be an inspiring one and not the deterrent one the government wants.
As the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, openness enhances the accuracy and fairness of judicial proceedings. It is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic government and society. If our current lawsuit fails, Manning's trial will continue under conditions where journalists and the public will be unable as a practical matter to follow what is going on in the courtroom.
Having the public watching means that judges and prosecutors will carry out their duties diligently and fairly; but it also means that witnesses will be less likely to perjure themselves knowing that the whole world is watching, and in fact, that new witnesses may come out of the woodwork. In effect, the public serves as a fact-check on what is transpiring in the court. That can't happen if dozens of prosecution witnesses testify in secret, as is planned, or if the pretrial filings are only released with massive, arbitrary redactions - all of which is happening in Manning's case. This is precisely the kind of dangerous government secrecy that convinces people that leaks are essential for the preservation of our democracy.
 Author is Senior Attorney with the Guantanamo defense with CCR.

CWA Slams Democrats on NLRB

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In a recent appearance on The Ed Show, CWA President Larry Cohen offered all of us a way to talk about the importance of confirming all five nominees to the National Labor Relations Board.
"We elect a president by an overwhelming majority. And then his nominees can't get through? If they do get through, it's months or years later. There's never been obstruction like this. Republicans are playing extreme politics. Too many Democrats are playing by 20th century rules. The two don't work together. We need to step up. Democrats need to say enough is enough," he said in the interview.
Cohen said it's not just Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it's four or five Democrats in his caucus that are holding up real change. He said, "We need to stand up together and say to Democrats, 'Which side are you on? If you don't fight for the president's nominees now, in the next two months, you are of no use to us.' There are Democrats who have said to us, 'How will I get my funding for my next election?' We say to them, 'You're not going to get your votes for the next election. You're done.'"
Cohen added, "Democracy means we can run primaries, too. If they don't step up and have a 21st century democracy, where we can get up or down votes on the president's nominees, what use are they? It's not just the Republicans here. Democrats need to decide which side are they on. The Chamber of Commerce and corporate law firms that are rejoicing? They're rejoicing every day with new opportunities. Or are they on the side of the American people? That's what's at stake today."