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."

Unions and Progressives Must Take Initiative Against Corps

(illustration: Shutdownthecorporations.org)

Less Reaction, More Action

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

11 May 13

 love Wisconsin, and the fighting spirit of the people who live here. As Ed Schultz said during a show in Madison, "It's called the Badger State because you fight like hell." But the one thing that's been paralyzing us here in the Deep North more than anything else isn't the cold, but the reactive nature of the left. When Wisconsinites showed up by the hundreds of thousands in spite of the achingly cold weather in the Winter of 2011 to stand up for workers, both Scott Walker and his corporate puppet masters hid in the shadows, terrified of what the people would do in large numbers. Since the unsuccessful recall attempt, the movement, somewhat deflated, has likewise remained in the shadows, terrified of what Walker, a gerrymandered GOP legislature, and the well-heeled corporate power circle running the show will do next.

Occupy Wall Street experienced something similar. At the peak of the movement's power and influence in the Fall of 2011, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD backed downfrom a threat to evict the thousands occupying Zuccotti Park for alleged "cleaning." Occupiers took up brooms and mops, cleaned the park themselves, and vowed to clean up the mess on Wall Street rather than leave the space they occupied. Though we had our victory that night, eventually the police would move in during the cover of night,sequester credentialed journalists into an obfuscated corner, and forcibly arrest over 200 nonviolent protesters after rousing them from their sleep. Municipalities soon followed suit all over the country, and the movement lost its central organizing spaces. Since then, we've largely been reacting to politicians, their corporate owners, and their horrific actions with our protests, while they plug their ears and pretend not to hear us.

Now imagine if, instead of angrily reacting to the horrible things these corporations and their bought and paid-for congressmen do to us on a daily basis, we started taking radical action that made them angrily react to us on a daily basis. When we go from reacting to acting, our power grows exponentially and all the entrenched powers can do is huddle under a table in fear of the awe-inspiring populist wave crashing upon them.

Students in NYC are occupying Cooper Union demanding their education remain free. Fast food workers have been on strike in St. Louis, demanding their employers treat them like human beings and pay them a living wage. Students and teachers alike are in the streets of Chicago, protesting the closing of the schools that define their communities and a corrupt mayor who's lying to them. Students in Philadelphia walked out in protest of budget cuts that are cheapening their education. A massive student-led movementspanning over 400 campuses is actively pressuring university administrations to divest their school endowments from the fossil fuel industry, with recent success at the Rhode Island School of Design. And in Madison, Wisconsin, students occupied their chancellor's office demanding the school cut their contract with a food vendor known for willfully abusing its employees.

Activists in Baltimore are celebrating the anniversary of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign by marching all the way to Washington to protest the cruel, intertwined systems of mass incarceration, police brutality and private prisons. The weekend after, a group of long-term unemployed activists are marching 150 miles from Philadelphia all the way to DC to go after the corporate lobbyists and special interests that have taken our government hostage. On May 25, people in over 30 countries are participating in the March Against Monsanto, shining light on the corporation that's poisoned food supplies and bribed politicians to keep quiet about their crimes.

Documentarians like Crystal Zevon of Searching for Occupy and Vicky Bruce and Karin Hayes of We're Not Broke are capturing this powerful movement on camera and sharing it on the big screen. Livestreamers are bringing it to our screens in real-time. Citizen journalists like Dustin Slaughter, Allison Kilkenny, and Steve Horn give us second-by-second updates of our movement's progress on social media. The tacticians of our movement like Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center for Media and Democracy are assembling and distributing new knowledge that enriches our words and provides sustenance for our arguments. Bold and fearless elected officials like Elizabeth Warrenand Bernie Sanders are crafting the policies that will be the bedrock of the new society we dream of and fight for.

The politicians, the corporations and the media they own want us to believe we're all alone, that the movement is dead, that there's no hope, that all we can do is helplessly scream at our screens and buy more crap to make us feel better about the horrible ways of the world. What they desperately don't want is for the fed-up populace to take their anger to the streets and demand radical change.

It's time to make them react to us for a change. 

Too Big To Grease the GOP

How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News

10 May 13

n a surprise move, the eight Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday blocked a floor vote on President Obama's nominee, Gina McCarthy, as EPA Administrator. In doing so the Republican senators broke their earlier promisadditione to move McCarthy's nomination if she answered an unprecedented 1079 written questions, a quest she completed. Political observers assume the Republican roadblock is meant to derail or delay the implementation of a new EPA rule, promised by President Obama to finally regulate carbon pollution. The Republican ranking member, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, orchestrated the double cross. Vitter is an unabashed mouthpiece for the petroleum industry and record breaking receptacle for petrodollars having received $1.2 million in oil company largesse during his public service career. With cash gushers of oily money cascading down their open gullets, the Republican leadership's mercenary devotion to Big Oil shouldn't shock us. However, the boldness of the party's most recent assault on the public interest might cause us to ponder how GOP's honchos' knee jerk slavishness to petroleum interest has infected its rank and file.

The perversity of the modern conservative mind is displayed in two studies published last week. Those studies illustrate the extent to which the right wing has become the ideological sock puppet of Big Oil and the GOP's army of right wing Christian fundamentalists oil industry foot soldiers. A peer reviewed National Academy of Sciences report shows that the label "energy efficient" on a product actually makes it less likely that self-identified conservatives will purchase that product. Why? Because morally twisted right wing orthodoxy has taken the "conserve" out of conservatism. Craven hatred of all things environmental has made the labels "clean," "green" or "efficient" pariah among GOP acolytes. Conversely, dirty energy is patriotic and even "blessed."

Big Oil's Orwellian skill at employing the rhetoric of patriotism and emblazoning its enterprises with stars and stripes, has stitched the notion that conservation is synonymous with "anti-American" into the fabric of GOP talking points. In 2006, President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer answered a press query about whether President Bush believed in fuel efficiency standards for automobiles saying, "That's a big 'No.'" The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country... Conservation alone is not the answer."

After a decade of this brand of oily claptrap from the industry's political toadies and its talking heads on Fox News and hate radio, many conservative Americans now embrace the farcical presumption that buying and burning gas is a patriotic act. In 2008, as the oil industry raked in record profits by raking Americans with record prices at the pump, the party of the petro plutocrats proudly adopted Big Oil's rallying cry as its mantra "Drill, Baby, Drill."

By the way, Fleischer's use of the term "blessed" to describe unconscionable profligacy and immoral waste reflect another GOP orthodoxy -- the notion that God wants us to burn oil. A second study published this week by University of Pittsburgh Professor David Barker and Professor David Bearce of the University of Colorado found that a fundamentalist Christian belief in biblical End Times is a significant motivating factor behind Republican voter resistance to curbing climate change. According to Bearce and Barker, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans say they believe in the End Times. "Since the world is going to end at a predestined time anyhow," their logic goes, "it would be heretical to curb our destructive appetites under the delusion that we can do anything about pushing back God's ordained date."

Anointing rapacious behavior with religious gloss is an old strategy for both right wing conservatives and the extraction industry. When a House Oversight Committee summoned Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of Interior, James Watt, to explain his caper to sell off American's public lands, waters and mineral rights to oil, mining and timber companies at what the General Accounting Office called "fire sale prices," Watt, a former mining and oil company lawyer, retorted, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Embracing his party line, along with its hook and sinker, Watt explained that environmentalism was a plot to "weaken America" and dismissed environmentalists as a "left wing cult which seeks to bring down the kind of government I believe in."

Watt was an early proponent of Dominion Theology, the authoritarian Christian heresy that cites cherry-picked phrases from the book of Genesis to advocate man's duty to subdue nature. His carbon industry alliances and Apocalyptical Christianity inspired Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets to his pals. His disciple and former employee, Gale Norton, another energy industry lawyer and lobbyists, would continue the chicanery when she succeeded Watt as Interior Secretary during George W. Bush's administration. As Shakespeare observed, "The devil can quote Scripture to serve his own purposes."

In reality, there is nothing patriotic, moral or religious about Big Oil. A storied history of perfidy and greed has distinguished these companies among the most treasonous and piratical of all American business enterprises. Halliburton's decision to relocate to the Cayman Islands after fattening itself on $9 billion worth of inherently crooked no-bid, cost-plus contracts during the Iraq War is only one of many examples of their shaky loyalty to our country. Before it vaulted onto the bandwagon of patriotism, Texaco flew not "Old Glory" but the "Jolly Roger" over its Houston headquarters, proudly adopting the pirate flag as the emblem of a pirate industry.

The threats from global climate change and ocean acidification are only the tip of a melting iceberg. Not satiated with simply destroying the planet, the oil industry's relentless greed has eroded American's economic independence, imperiled our national security, and ruined our global economic leadership and moral authority.

America's national security is rooted in a strong economy at home. As Republican oilman T. Boone Pickens has acknowledged, our deadly addiction to oil is the principal drag on American capitalism. Our nation is borrowing a billion dollars a day to purchase a billion dollars of foreign oil, much of it from nations that don't share our values or that are outright hostile to our interests.

Our oil jones has us funding both sides of the war against terror! Big Oil has embroiled us in foreign wars supporting petty dictators who despise democracy and who are hated by their own people. The export of $700 billion dollars annually of American wealth has beggared our nation, which, a few short decades ago, owned half the wealth on Earth.

Add to these cataclysmic numbers, the $100 billion annual military cost of protecting oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, trillions spent on various oil wars over the past decade, billions more in economic injury from oil spills in Valdez, the Gulf of Mexico and in American rivers from the Hudson to the Kalamazoo to the Yellowstone, the massive damage done to the coast of Louisiana from local drilling companies which aggravated New Orleans' destruction by Katrina, not to mention the hundreds of billions annually in externalized health care costs from illnesses caused by the oil industry.

If the oil industry had to pay the true costs of bringing its product to market, gas prices would be upwards of $12 per gallon at the pump, according to economist Amory Lovins, and most Americans would be running to buy electric cars.

With low cost disruptive technologies like cheap, fast and efficient electric vehicles, and solar and wind technologies poised to displace Big Oil, the industry is using its hold on the Republican Party to permanently embed itself in our economy while subverting science, American democracy, free market capitalism and our sacred belief in an ethical God.

 

Crooked Congress on Steroids

Senator Orrin Hatch's top aid briefed investors on legislation on the hill that led to huge profits. (photo: Getty Images)

Investors Get 'Political Intel' Directly 

Congress

By Jia Lynn Yang, Tom Hamburger and Dina ElBoghdady, The Washington Post

07 May 13

n the same morning a congressional staffer told investors in a private call that odds were improving for a government decision that would help medical insurers, trading spiked in a major health-care company.

The private call, arranged by a consulting firm called Capitol Street, took place the morning of March 18. At 11:05 a.m., a certain form of speculative trading in Humana, the health insurer, jumped. That day, there was nearly 10 times as much volume as any day in the previous two weeks.

There is no evidence that the trades were in response to the Capitol Hill phone call with a top aide for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). But the conference call reveals the extent to which a direct pipeline of valuable political insight exists between Capitol Hill and Wall Street, one that ordinary Americans and investors do not enjoy.

"Political intelligence" firms - companies that sell their analysis of federal actions to investors - have drawn much of the scrutiny from lawmakers and investigators worried about potential insider trading. Last month, federal regulators issued subpoenas to the law firm Greenberg Traurig and an analyst at the brokerage firm Height Securities in connection with another spike in trading that occurred after information was shared about the government's health-care decision.

But it is not just boutique firms and lobbyists offering political intelligence. Congress itself has become a source of sophisticated political analysis for investors, for whom every nugget of exclusive information can translate to millions of dollars in profit.

Ipsita Smolinski, managing director of Capitol Street, said she has asked other Senate staffers to participate in similar calls, though she declined to estimate how many had done so, or how often. She viewed the calls as innocuous.

"I wouldn't expect anyone on a call - any staffer - to say anything they would not say to a researcher, a student, an investor or a reporter," said Smolinski, adding that she routinely records such calls as part of an ongoing "commitment to transparency."

She called it "highly unlikely" that her clients would have moved the market. Smolinski described the participants in the call with Hatch's office as institutional investors, such as pension systems, mutual funds and hedge funds. Of interest was how the Obama administration would set rates paid to health insurers that participate in Medicare. She said the half-hour call took place in the morning but could not confirm the precise time.

Hatch spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier denied that the call had anything to do with the spike in trading or that the staff member revealed confidential information.

"No one working for Senator Hatch had any advance knowledge of this [Medicare] announcement - period," said Ferrier, who argued that the staff member, Stephanie Carlton, actually made the wrong prediction on the call about the administration's action.

According to an audio recording of the call obtained by The Washington Post, Carlton, a longtime health-care policy aide for Hatch, spoke cautiously, offering technical details and often attributing her facts to public information.

At one point, Capitol Street's Smolinski pressed Carlton to be specific with her insight. Smolinski asked her to quantify her "crystal ball" regarding the administration's decision.

"I think I would have moved from, say, if I were assigning probabilities 0 to 100 percent, I would have said 5 to 10 percent likelihood . . . a month ago," Carlton said. "I would move it up to maybe 30, 35 percent probability that they change it."

She added that she was "definitely more optimistic," though there remained at least one roadblock.

Based on some different factors, though, if they were ever to change the Medicare policy, "this would be the year to do it," Carlton said.

Carlton left Hatch's staff last week for a job in the private sector, a move that Hatch's office said was a long-standing plan. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.

Information in Washington is both highly valuable and extremely fluid. Every day there are lobbyists, congressional staffers and reporters trying to figure out what happened behind some closed-door meeting, which senator is about to switch position on a major piece of legislation and whether a regulator is going to greenlight or block a big merger.

This has given rise to a booming business in researchers claiming to offer political intelligence that could give investors an edge in their trading.

Stan Brand, a Washington lawyer specializing in congressional ethics, said he is hearing increasingly about Hill staffers being called to participate in financial industry and investor briefings like the one hosted by Capitol Street.

"It was not common until very recently," said Brand, former counsel to the House of Representatives who now handles criminal defense and ethics cases involving public officials. "I think the financial meltdown and the ensuing interest in regulation of the markets and how they are impacted by Washington has made this a more recurrent issue."

Ferrier said Hatch was aware that his staff gets requests to do briefings from a wide variety of individuals and organizations, including investors. "What information they share is the same information that Senator Hatch shares in an open and transparent way with his constituents," she said.

From Brand's perspective, virtually no limits on speaking exist for congressional staffers, provided there is no remuneration of gifts provided to the public official. Could a Senate staffer impart insider information and be prosecuted? "I think that would be a tough row to hoe," he said.

Insider-trading laws dictate that information that's "material" and not public has to be treated with the utmost care. The Stock Act, passed last year, makes explicit that members of Congress, their staff members and government officials must treat certain information as confidential.

Yet there is a whole gray area of information - call it analysis - that is not easy to judge. Lobbyists with close ties to former colleagues on the Hill, or congressional staffers themselves, can sometimes offer their best sense of what is happening in Washington, offering to investors a composite of what they are hearing from various sources.

Basing predictions on many little data points, none of which are material, is a permissible practice often referred to as the "mosaic theory" in industry parlance, said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School.

"But as a matter of ethical policy, you should have a Caesar's-wife approach," said Coffee, who specializes in securities law and white-collar crime. "Stay above suspicion and do not participate in discussions with investors who are clearly seeking to profit from your information."

A few weeks after the call with Hatch's staffer, the administration announced it would raise rates for insurers participating in Medicare, instead of cutting them as previously proposed.

Investors who purchased the options on March 18 could have made a return of five times on their investment or more, said Laura Robinson, a managing director at Navigant Economics in Washington, an economic and financial consulting firm.

The data on the unusual spike in the trading of certain options on Humana's stock were supplied to The Washington Post by Tradeworx, a quantitative trading firm.

Hatch's office denied that there was any connection.

"To say that a staffer who got it wrong contributed to a spike in the market is like saying that because the sky is blue and a train went through Washington, the reason the train went through Washington is because the sky is blue," Ferrier said. 

The US Surveillance State

The American surveillance state is growing. (photo: Alamy)

Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?

By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

he real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he meansnot that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

 

Two Explosions, Two Different Responses

TWO EXPLOSIONS, TWO RESPONSES
op-ed by Dr. Marty Nathan
Friday, May 3, 2013, Daily Hampshire Gazette

NORTHAMPTON, MA --- Two days separated the explosions at the Boston
Marathon and West Texas. On April 15, two homemade bombs went off in
Copley Square, killing three people and wounding more than 180. On April
17 a mushroom cloud rose over the West Fertilizer factory, killing 15
people, wounding over 200, destroying 60 houses and evacuating a community.

The responses? 

After the tragedy in Boston, President Obama offered his
prayers and said "any responsible individuals, any responsible groups
will feel the full weight of justice." Thousands of police, state
troopers and FBI swarmed over the Boston area to track down the Tsarnaev
brothers, killing the older brother and capturing the younger, who is
now in federal prison. Despite the fact that the Tsarnaevs were refugees
from the former Soviet Union and their case had nothing to do with the
present immigration debate, Republicans threaten to block the pending
immigration compromise as a result of their actions. There has been a
spate of anti-Muslim acts of violence nationally and every day the
national airwaves, cyberspace and newspapers are filled with further
attack details, speculation about motives and proposals to prevent
further such acts of terrorism.
 

          The carnage of West, Texas, slipped quietly off those same pages and
          airwaves. President Obama offered only his prayers, not the full weight of justice.
          No discussion on the front page of the New York Times of catching the
          (corporate) criminals, no SWAT teams or house-to-house searches, no blaming
          Government officials for dropping the investigative ball that would have
          prevented this horror. And yet, it certainly could have been prevented.

(In the Asian building collapse, the Owner was arrested, and his property seized. -Ed.)

According to Reuters, the West Fertilizer Plant was the site of improper
storage of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate. This is 1,350 times the amount that would require a facility to self-report its stockpile to
the Department of Homeland Security. Ammonium nitrate is a fertilizer
used around the world, and is safe if handled properly. However, it is
highly explosive when ignited, as it was by Timothy McVeigh in the
Oklahoma City bombing.

In fact, West Fertilizer had not been fully inspected by any agency
since 2006, when a neighbor complained to the Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality about a strong ammonia smell coming from the
plant. That same year the EPA fined the company $2,300 for failing to
update a risk management Plan.

The explosion resulted from a workplace catastrophe and the main agency
responsible for protecting the workers there (and thereby the
community), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, should
have identified and removed the risk. But when was the last OSHA
inspection? According to the Christian Science Monitor, in 1985, more
than 25 years ago, multiple "serious" violations of federal';; safety
requirements were detected, for which the company paid a grand total of
$30 in fines.

Why the yawning disparity between the two responses? The deaths,
injuries and destruction of West Fertilizer are a Corporate crime. Our
government and our media have different standards for individual and 
Corporate crimes.

In 2010, 4,500 men and women died in the workplace, more than the number
of U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War. Another 50,000 workers
die annually from chronic diseases contracted in the workplace. Yet the
only agency that protects them --- us --- has always been understaffed,
so that a plant like West Fertilizer can expect to be inspected by OSHA
only once every 67 years. The 2,200 inspectors at both federal and state
level cover 7.5 million workplaces employing more than 130 million
workers. That's one inspector for every 58,000 workers. And the fines,
if ever paid, are a pittance.

Now, enter the federal Sequester. The agency will have to cut its $565
million budget by 8.2 percent, which the White House predicted would
mean 1,200 fewer workplace Inspections.

The Boston Marathon bombing made every one of us think hard about our
own security. But West, Texas, reminds us real security is a complex and
expensive process that results from government investment in
environmental and workplace safety and health, access to necessities for
all our people, particularly the most vulnerable, and ensuring that
there are not different standards of justice for different types of
deadly and preventable violence.

I will be joining Northampton (Massachusetts) City councilors, students, educators,
workers and advocates for the poor on the steps of Northampton City Hall
May 17 at 3:45 p.m. to demand a "Budget for All." We need comprehensive
security for our communities.

Marty Nathan, M.D., of Northampton, MA, is assistant professor of
medicine at Tufts University in Boston, and a family practitioner at
Baystate Brightwood Health Center in Springfield, MA