A few days ago, a diary
was posted explaining that the US Inspector General had recently
endorsed the idea of the United States Post Office offering simple
banking services in addition to its normal mail delivery service.
While this idea might seem foreign to many Americans, in the past the
post office actually offered banking services for over 50 years. Per The New Republic, beginning in 1911:
"...the Postal Savings System allowed Americans to deposit
cash with certain branch post offices, at 2 percent interest. By 1947,
the system held deposits for over four million customers. Though
dismantled in 1967 (after banks offered higher interest rates and eroded
its market share), the post office continues to issue domestic and
international money orders, including $22.4 billion worth in 2011, as
well as prepaid debit cards through a deal with American Express."
Putting aside the sad fact that banks once offered 2% interest rates
(and you would now be lucky to get even half a percent), today post
offices could offer basic banking services such as check-cashing, saving
accounts, and even small-dollar loans similar to payday lenders, yet at
much lower interest rates which could potentially save low-income
Americans thousands of dollars per household per year.
The idea is so good that Senator Elizabeth Warren has now endorsed the idea.
In an op-ed for The Huffington Post,
Senator Warren explains that because of the exorbitant fees that payday
lenders charge, low-income Americans spend roughly 10% of their income
on things like checking cashing and short term loans, which is roughly
the same amount that the average American spends on food.
Having grown up in a low-income family myself, I've experienced far
too many times to recall when my single mother would go to one of these
payday lenders for a short-term loan just to keep the lights at home
from being shut off or to pay the rent and would quickly find herself in
a vicious cycle of more loans, fees, and high interest rates.
Fortunately in my adult life I haven't had to endure that same
hardship, but in today's world of stagnant wages and an increasing cost
of living, many Americans still turn to these payday lenders as they
struggle to stay in the middle class.
As Elizabeth Warren points out, this idea has been done in other
countries around the world and has been proven successful. Furthermore,
not only could it help millions of Americans but it could also prove
beneficial to the postal service's bottom line at a time when USPS -
which employs over half a million people - desperately needs it.
This idea could easily be adopted by the Postmaster General and begin without Congressional approval, but so far he has declined to endorse
the Inspector General's recommendation. But hopefully now with people
like Senator Warren endorsing the idea, public pressure will mount for
this idea to become a reality.
Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Facebook all participate in the NSA's Prism effort. Photograph: Pichi Chuang/Reuters
Tens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US
government authorities every six months as the result of secret court
orders, the tech giants disclosed for the first time on Monday.
As part of a transparency deal reached last week with the Justice Department, four of the tech firms that participate in the National Security Agency’s Prism effort,
which collects largely overseas internet communications, released more
information about the volume of data the US demands they provide than
they have ever previously been permitted to disclose.
But the
terms of the deal prevent the companies from itemising the collection,
beyond bands of thousands of data requests served on them by a secret
surveillance court. The companies must also delay by six months
disclosing information on the most recent requests – terms the Justice
Department negotiated to end a transparency lawsuit before the so-called
FISA court that was brought by the companies.
In announcing
the updated data figures, the companies appeared concerned by the lack
of precision over the depth of their compelled participation in
government surveillance.
“We still believe more transparency
is needed so everyone can better understand how surveillance laws work
and decide whether or not they serve the public interest,” said Google’s
legal director for law enforcement and information security, Richard
Salgado, in a post on the company’s official blog.
“Specifically,
we want to disclose the precise numbers and types of requests we
receive, as well as the number of users they affect in a timely way.”
In the most recent period for which data is available, January to June 2013 – a period ended by the beginning of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s landmark surveillance disclosures
– Google gave the government the internet metadata of up to 999
customer accounts, and the content of communications from between 9,000
and 9,999 customers.
Microsoft received fewer than 1,000
orders from the FISA court for communications content during the same
period, related to between 15,000 and 15,999 “accounts or individual
identifiers”.
The company, which owns the internet video
calling service Skype, also disclosed that it received fewer than 1,000
orders for metadata – which reveals communications patterns rather than
individual message content – related to fewer than 1,000 accounts or
identifiers.
Yahoo disclosed
that it gave the government communications content from between 30,000
and 30,999 accounts over the first six months of 2013, and fewer than
1,000 customer accounts that were subject to Fisa court orders for
metadata.
Facebook disclosed that during the first half of 2013,
it turned over content data from between 5000 and 5999 accounts – a
rise of about 1000 from the previous six month period – and customer
metadata associated with up to 999 accounts.
Microsoft,
Facebook and Yahoo also gave the FBI certain customer records – not
content – under a type of non-judicial subpoena called a national
security letter. Since disclosure of national security letters is not
subject to a six-month delay under last week’s deal, Microsoft revealed
that it received up to 999 such subpoenas between June and December
2013, affecting up to 999 user accounts. Facebook’s National Security
Letter total was the same.
Yahoo received up to 999 national
security letters during the same period, affecting 1,000 to 1,999
accounts. Google received the same total, and disclosed that since 2009,
national security letters have compelled the handover of customer
records from as many as 1999 accounts every six months. Last weekApple disclosed that between 1 January and 30 June 2013 it had received less than 250
national security orders – including national security letters and
other requests – relating to less than 250 accounts.
LinkedIn, the professional networking service, disclosed on Monday that it received the same total of generic “national security requests.”
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, posted on the company’s blog
that “only a fraction of a percent of users are affected by these
orders”, and argued that “we have not received the type of bulk data
requests that are commonly discussed publicly regarding telephone
records.”
But the disclosures only apply to data requests turned over to the NSA and FBI as the result of FISA court orders.
Documents
that Snowden disclosed to the Guardian, Washington Post and other
outlets show that the NSA also siphons communications and associated
data from information in transit across the global communications
infrastructure – without court orders, under authority claimed under a
seminal executive order known as executive order 12,333.
“Nothing
in today's report minimises the significance of efforts by Governments
to obtain customer information outside legal process,” Smith said,
affirming that the company remained concerned about reports of
clandestine government hacking and would continue to press for more
transparency from the US government and others. Google data shows a significant growth in
internet content collection from its products by the NSA. Photograph:
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The data from Google shows a significant growth in internet content
collection from its products by the NSA. In the first six months of
2009, the company gave the government data from up to 2,999 customer
accounts, a figure that grew to between 12,000 and 12,999 customer
accounts by the second half of 2012 before dipping to under 10,000
accounts in the first half of 2013.
But the data does not provide
any indication of what accounted for the rise, beyond the growth in
popularity of Google email and other internet products.
Similarly,
Microsoft revealed that it gave the US government content information
on more than 12,000 customer accounts in the second half of 2011, a
figure that grew to over 16,000 customer accounts in late 2012 before
dropping to more than 15,000 in the first six months of 2013.
Kevin
Bankston, the policy director for the Open Technology Institute in
Washington, said the amount of information the companies were able to
detail about their roles in US surveillance was “far less than what we
need for adequate accountability from the government”.
“Lumping
all of the different types of surveillance orders together into one
number, then adding obscurity on top of obscurity by requiring that
number to be reported in ranges of one thousand, is not enough to
educate the American public or reassure the international community that
the NSA is using its surveillance authorities responsibly," said
Bankston, who like Google’s Salgado advocated legislation permitting the
additional disclosure of “specific number of requests issued under
specific legal authorities and the number of people affected by each”.
Nate
Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said
the new information in the transparency reports was “a good first step”
but added that large questions remained. Cardozo said the national
security letters had all been “lumped together” and it was impossible to
see what legal framework had been used to compel the companies to hand
over information.
“It makes you question the government’s repeated assertions that it welcomes this debate,” he said.
Microsoft’s
Smith lamented that “despite the President's reform efforts and our
ability to publish more information, there has not yet been any public
commitment by either the US or other governments to renounce the
attempted hacking of internet companies.
“We believe the
constitution requires that our government seek information from American
companies within the rule of law. We'll therefore continue to press for
more on this point, in collaboration with others across our industry.”
•
An earlier version of this story stated in error that Google did not
disclose the number of national security letters it had received. This
has been corrected.
It was further revised to remove an unsubstantiated
description of Microsoft being a "major surveillance partner for the
US government".
President
Barack Obama while speaking about the government’s surveillance
practices during a news conference at the Department of Justice in
Washington, Jan. 17, 2014. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)
When considering the revolutionary history of the United States, most
would think of fighting for freedom, the enshrinement of basic human
and civil rights in a constitutional government of the people, by the
people and for the people.
But in his speech on reforms to the NSA and the United States'
intelligence gathering systems last week, President Obama had a creative
new addition to the legacy of the American Revolution: surveillance.
"At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee
borne out of the Sons of Liberty was established in Boston," said the
president. "And the group's members included Paul Revere. At night, they
would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British
were preparing raids against America's early Patriots."
Collecting the meta-data of billions of phone calls and 200 million
text messages a day, as well as gathering data through the government's
PRISM program and placing bugs in 100,000 computers all over the world
seems significantly more extensive than monitoring British troop
movement via horseback and candlestick - especially when you consider
that the data being collected is in large part that of the American
people, not a foreign enemy during war time. Such metadata information
would still be collected and stored in President Obama's "reformed" NSA.
The reforms proposed by the President's speech amount to nothing
short of a bouquet of roses for American intelligence agencies. The
changes detailed in the speech do almost nothing to actually rein in the
growing national surveillance state. Billions of phone calls by
Americans would still be collected and retained every single day - too
much information for even the NSA to wade through properly. We're
creating a massive database that could be used at basically any time to
determine peoples' associates and behaviors.
While no cause would be necessary to collect this information, the
president recommended requiring a court order for analysis of the
retained data. This court order is far from a warrant under the Fourth
Amendment, but is instead a rubber stamp from a secret court with a
tendency to never say no. Considering that the definition of terrorism
has sometimes included civil disobedience at demonstrations, the loose
standard for issuing a court order for retained data is not a strong
enough protection. Warrantless surveillance should be stopped
altogether, and metadata should only be collected and retained on an
individual basis by a court order under the Fourth Amendment, with a
standard of probable cause.
Then there's the continued question of national security letters.
And when "legal standards" do exist in the realm of government
spying, they prove very different than the constitutional measures
American citizens should be able to expect.
The president left the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
alone, despite its horrendous track record of authorizing a massive
spying operation on all of us. This secret court has
authorized wide-scale surveillance, issuing 35 opinions upholding
metadata collection and consistently granting secret warrant requests.
Rather than opening up the court, limiting its powers or changing the
method of judge selection (as of now, all FISA judges are handpicked by
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts), the president
instead suggested that Congress establish a panel of advocates to argue
in these secret courts on behalf of civil liberties and privacy. Again,
with no timetable or guarantee of Congressional action, it's unclear
whether or when this change would be enacted.
But even with a set of privacy and civil liberties advocates, these
secret courts operate on a corrupted base. What good is someone arguing
on behalf of privacy and civil liberties when the law allows for the
unlimited collection of metadata and wiretapping on Americans without
probable cause?
In and of itself, disappointment in the president's proposed reforms
isn't surprising - in some way it was expected, as the purpose of the
speech was most likely to take the pressure off the president to make
real change. What is shocking is that speech did not even
do that. Instead, it told all of us, both here and abroad, that massive,
Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic.
President Obama's assertion that our nation was formed as a result of
a heroic history of surveillance, and that such surveillance is among
the only things keeping us safe, is not only a
striking misappropriation of the facts, but a misleading scare tactic
clearly aimed at making Americans comfortable with the far-reaching
government spying he seems bent to protect. The American Revolution was
fought to prevent more than just taxes on tea. The British Empire's use
of general warrants - including "writs of assistance" that allowed
agents of the king to search and seize colonial property, including
letters and papers - was an abuse of power that the writers of our
Constitution specifically sought to address and protect against in the
newly formed government they had fought so hard for.
The American people should never accept the collection and retention
of millions of records by a government calling for our trust. Because,
as President Obama said himself, "History has too many examples
when that trust has been breached."
The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle
electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top
executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother
nourished is essential—and any interference with that flow is
unthinkable.
But interference isn’t unthinkable. And in fact, it may be doable.
Grassroots activists have begun to realize the potential to put the
NSA on the defensive in nearly a dozen states where the agency is known
to be running surveillance facilities, integral to its worldwide snoop
operations.
Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to
impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s
secretive outposts.
Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new bill in
the legislature—the Fourth Amendment Protection Act—is a statutory
nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the
south-central part of the state.
The bill throws down a challenge to the NSA, seeking to block all
state support for NSA activities violating the Fourth Amendment. For
instance, that could mean a cutoff of electricity or water or other
state-government services to the NSA site. And the measure also provides
for withholding other forms of support, such as research and
partnerships with state universities.
Here’s the crux of the bill: “It is the policy of this state to
refuse material support, participation, or assistance to any federal
agency which claims the power, or with any federal law, rule,
regulation, or order which purports to authorize, the collection of
electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not
based on a warrant that particularly describes the person, place, and
thing to be searched or seized.”
If the windup of that long sentence has a familiar ring, it should.
The final dozen words are almost identical to key phrases in the Fourth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In recent days, more than 15,000 people have signed a petition
expressing support for the legislation. Launched by RootsAction.org,
the petition is
addressed to the bill’s two sponsors in the Washington
legislature—Republican Rep. David Taylor, whose district includes the
NSA facility in Yakima, and Democrat Luis Moscoso from the Seattle area.
Meanwhile, a similar bill with
the same title has just been introduced in the Tennessee
legislature—taking aim at the NSA’s center based in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
That NSA facility is a doozy: with several hundred scientists and
computer specialists working to push supercomputers into new realms of
mega-surveillance capacities.
A new coalition, OffNow, is sharing information about model legislation. The group also points to known NSA locations in
other states including Utah (in Bluffdale), Texas (San Antonio),
Georgia (Augusta), Colorado (Aurora), Hawaii (Oahu) and West Virginia
(Sugar Grove), along with the NSA’s massive headquarters at Fort Meade
in Maryland. Grassroots action and legislative measures are also
stirring in several of those states.
One of the key organizations in such efforts is the Bill of Rights
Defense Committee, where legal fellow Matthew Kellegrew told me that
theOffNow coalition
“represents the discontent of average people with … business-as-usual
failure to rein in out-of-control domestic spying by the NSA and other
federal departments like the FBI. It is a direct, unambiguous response
to a direct, unambiguous threat to our civil liberties.”
In the process—working to counter the bipartisan surveillance-state
leadership coming from the likes of President Obama, House Speaker John
Boehner, the House Intelligence Committee’s chair Mike Rogers and the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair Dianne Feinstein—activists urging a
halt to state-level support for the NSA include people who disagree on
other matters but are determined to undermine the Big Brother
hierarchies of both parties.
“By working together to tackle the erosion of the Fourth Amendment
presented by bulk data collection,” Kellegrew said, “people from across
partisan divides are resurrecting the lost art of collaboration and in
the process, rehabilitating the possibility of a functional American
political dialogue denied to the people by dysfunction majority partisan
hackery.
From another vantage point, this is an emerging faceoff between
reliance on cynical violence and engagement in civic nonviolence.
Serving the warfare state and overall agendas for U.S. global
dominance to the benefit of corporate elites, the NSA persists in doing
violence to the Constitution’s civil-liberties amendments—chilling the
First, smashing the Fourth and end-running the Fifth.
Meanwhile, a nascent constellation of movements is striving to thwart
the surveillance state, the shadowy companion of perpetual war.
This is a struggle for power over what kind of future can be created for humanity.
I
t’s time to stop giving juice to Big Brother.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that the U.S. Treasury and Department of Justice will allow legal marijuana sellers
to conduct business with banks and credit unions. The DOJ will provide
operating guidelines to marijuana businesses and banks similar to those
provided to Colorado and Washington.
Banks will now be
able to deposit and withdraw money in and out of bank accounts, obtain
loans, build credit, and accept debit and credit cards payments.
Banks did deny
opening their doors to legal marijuana businesses for fear of being an
accessory to perceived illegal activities such as money laundering.
Having the DOJ’s blessing for such a relationship, banks can now rest
assured that they can hold legal marijuana money without fear of law
enforcement interaction. Holder said that barring legal marijuana
business from financial institutions causes the pot sellers grave
problems.
Operating on
cash-only basis creates issues for legal marijuana sellers. Marijuana
businesses usually have large amounts of cash on-hand and fear that they
are prime targets for robberies, forcing them to spend lots of money on
tighter security. Businesses also have a difficult time claiming their
money for federal tax purposes.In order to have their money accounted
for, owners must deliver thousands in hard currency to revenue offices.
Holder said allowing
legal marijuana businesses banking access would curtail any such
problems. It has certainly become an accounting headache for legal
marijuana business. He also noted that such issues cause concern for law
enforcement.
“There’s a public
safety component to this,” Holder said. “Huge amounts of cash –
substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for
it to be appropriately deposited – is something that would worry me just
from a law enforcement perspective.”
Legal marijuana is
still a budding industry, but it is appearing to be a quite prosperous
one. Legal marijuana proprietors in Colorado have enjoyed booming
business. In legal marijuana’s first week, sales in Colorado exceeded $5 million, and the state is expected to earn $70 million in tax revenue from legal marijuana this year.
Washington state
marijuana businesses will begin operations later this year with other
states, mainly on the west coast, wanting to follow suit and implement
their own recreational marijuana legislation. The legal marijuana
industry is likely to outpace last year’s revenue by over 60 percent, expecting $2.3 billion of sales for 2014. Josh is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. Follow him on Twitter @dnJdeli.
