J. G. Sandom ~ Author

404 — Social media exec attacked in S.F. for being "glasshole" is more about income inequality than privacy

The recent incident in SF, when a social media consultant was attacked in a Haight Ashbury bar for being a "glasshole" and allegedly violating people's privacy rights using her Google glasses, and this story about folks attacking Google buses are less about technology, and more about the growing disgust people feel about income inequality and the 1%. Providing Google employees with a convenient commute means rents in these neighborhoods are increasing drastically, and locals don't like being outbid and pushed out by twenty-something engineers -- especially when they act like glassholes.

Woman: I was attacked in S.F. over Google Glass

By Kurtis Alexander

In what may be the latest backlash against San Francisco’s tech industry, a woman was reportedly taunted and robbed this weekend in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for donning Google Glass — the cutting-edge eyewear seen as a revolution in either cool convenience or geeky creepiness.

According to friends and the victim’s Facebook page, Sarah Slocum, a tech writer and business consultant, was in a Haight Street bar Friday night demonstrating how the new device works when someone tore it off her face and ran off with it.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin introduces Google Glass at the company’s annual developer conference last month.

One person with the assailant told Slocum that her and her tech-type friends were “destroying the city,” Slocum says. She pursued the attacker — who eventually relinquished the Google Glass, Slocum explained. But another person with the assailant took her purse, cell phone and wallet during the pursuit.

Slocum filed a report with police, she says, but officials on Monday said they were not aware of the incident.

Over the past year, the tech industry has been the target of several protests, perhaps most famously the “Google Bus” blockades. Demonstrators complain that high-paid tech workers are flooding working-class neighborhoods and driving up living costs while destroying local diversity.

Google Glass, basically a small, head-mounted computer with a screen and camera, is still in its development phase and not available to the public at large. However, a limited number of insiders and researchers have been given access to the device.

Anticipating that the gadget would draw public ire, Google published an etiquette guide for Glass users earlier this month in an effort to stem concerns about privacy and anti-social behavior.

404 — Officials tapped by Obama Admin. to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership received multimillion-dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and B of A BECAUSE they moved to public policy jobs that help the banks

This fascinating article from the Republic Report reveals how the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which the Obama Administration is trying to ram down our throats (in virtual secrecy), empowers multi-nationals to skirt domestic courts and local laws. Notably, the TPP allows corporations to go after governments before foreign tribunals to demand compensations for tobacco, prescription drug and environment protections that they claim would undermine their expected future profits. Coincidence? I think not. Turns out officials tapped by the Obama Administration to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations have received multimillion dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and Bank of America, bonuses that are only paid BECAUSE they leave their financial services jobs and take jobs forging public policy! Yep. In a perverse incentive motive system, many large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy award bonuses and other incentive pay to executives if they take jobs within the government. CitiGroup, for instance, provides an executive contract that awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, the Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust, and Northrop Grumman are among the other firms that offer financial rewards upon retirement for government service.

We have become almost as much a plutocracy as our former Cold War nemesis, Russia. Tech, Big Oil and Wall Street oligarchs, combined with the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower tried to warn us against) collude (in spirit, if not in actual boardrooms) to keep the people's power in check via libertarian deregulation, union-busting, Citizens United (and other activist SCOTUS rulings), privatization of the Intelligence Community (IC), the opiate of digital media that pushes the idolatry of money & all things celebrity to distract us, and our collective fear of terrorism (hence our perpetual war footing). This is what my forthcoming novel, 404, is all about—not just how IP tech is invading our lives, but how this invasion is a metaphor for the larger invasion. HAL2, in my book, is what Mike Lofgren calls the Deep State. Wake up, America! Our country is being stolen from us in plain sight.

Stefan M. Selig, poster child of the plutocracy we've become!

Obama Admin’s TPP Trade Officials Received Hefty Bonuses From Big Banks

BY LEE FANG

 

Officials tapped by the Obama administration to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations have received multimillion dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and Bank of America, financial disclosures obtained by Republic Report show.

Stefan Selig, a Bank of America investment banker nominated to become the Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce, received more than $9 million in bonus pay as he was nominated to join the administration in November. The bonus pay came in addition to the $5.1 million in incentive pay awarded to Selig last year.

Michael Froman, the current U.S. Trade Representative, received over $4 million as part of multiple exit payments when he left CitiGroup to join the Obama administration. Froman told Senate Finance Committee members last summer that he donated approximately 75 percent of the $2.25 million bonus he received for his work in 2008 to charity. CitiGroup also gave Froman a $2 million payment in connection to his holdings in two investment funds, which was awarded â€œin recognition of [Froman's] service to Citi in various capacities since 1999.”

Many large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy award bonuses and other incentive pay to executives if they take jobs within the government. CitiGroup, for instance, provides an executive contract that awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, the Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust, and Northrop Grumman are among the other firms that offer financial rewards upon retirement for government service.

Froman joined the administration in 2009. Selig is currently awaiting Senate confirmation before he can take his post, which collaborates with the trade officials to support the TPP.

The controversial TPP trade deal has rankled activists for containing provisions that would newly empower corporations to sue governments in ad hoc arbitration tribunals to demand compensation from governments for laws and regulations they claim undermine their business interests. Leaked TPP negotiation documents show the Obama administration is seeking to prevent foreign governments from issuing a broad variety of financial rules designed to stem another bank crisis.

A leaked text of the TPP’s investment chapter shows that the pact would include the controversial investor-state dispute resolution system. A fact-sheet provided by Public Citizen explains how multi-national corporations may use the TPP deal to skirt domestic courts and local laws. The arrangement would allows corporations to go after governments before foreign tribunals to demand compensations for tobacco, prescription drug and environment protections that they claim would undermine their expected future profits. Last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that trade agreements such as the TPP provide “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place with the cameras rolling and the lights on.”

Others have raised similar alarm.

“Not only do US treaties mandate that all forms of finance move across borders freely and without delay, but deals such as the TPP would allow private investors to directly file claims against governments that regulate them, as opposed to a WTO-like system where nation states (ie the regulators) decide whether claims are brought,” notes Boston University associate professor Kevin Gallagher.

404 — In a first for Spain, a woman is convicted of inciting terror over Twitter

This story from The New York Times profiles a woman from Spain who was recently convicted of inciting terror because of what she tweeted. Of course, it's not a $500K fine and years in jail for "jailbreaking" your phone; i.e. opening up the phone you've already paid for and adding another mobile carrier. That's right. Terroristic threats are one thing. You kind of figure if you threaten someone's life, even online, there may be grave consequences. But, in this county these days, the laws are so skewed to help corporate American that you can't even pick your carrier after buying a phone unless you want to face a half million dollar fine and jail time! So, Spain, in contrast, doesn't seem that bad.

Alba González Camacho, 21, posted messages calling for politicians to be killed.

In a First for Spain, a Woman Is Convicted of Inciting Terror Over Twitter

By RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — The line between youthful rebelliousness and something more dangerous is not always clear. But in her angry musings on Twitter, Alba González Camacho, 21, who describes herself as a “very normal girl,” sailed across it. After she posted messages calling for a far-left terrorist organization to return to arms and kill politicians, Spain’s national court convicted her of inciting terrorism using a social media network.

It was the first verdict of its kind involving Twitter posts in Spain, and the case has touched on issues of where precisely the cultural, political and legal red lines lie in a country that not long ago lived under both the grip of Fascist dictatorship and the threat of leftist terrorism.

The case is also one of a recent handful that have pushed social media into courtrooms worldwide and raised issues of the limits of speech in the ether of the Internet. In January, two people received prison sentences in Britain for posting threatening messages against a feminist campaigner. The same month, a federal judge in the United States sentenced a man to 16 months in prison for threatening on Twitter to kill President Obama.

Ms. González Camacho, a student in southern Spain, says she is unaffiliated with any political organization. But she had invoked a group known as the Grapo, which killed more than 80 people, mostly in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Spain was returning to democracy after the lengthy Franco dictatorship. Although the Grapo never officially disbanded, security officials here consider it to have long lost its operative capability.

The group’s dormancy did not matter to the judge, who accepted the prosecution’s argument, which said that Ms. González Camacho had posted “messages with an ideological content that was highly radicalized and violent,” violating an article in the Spanish Constitution that prohibits any apology for or glorification of terrorism.

One of the messages called for the murder of the conservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. “I promise to tattoo myself with the face of the person who shoots Rajoy in the neck,” she wrote. Another singled out Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, the justice minister, comparing him to a Nazi.

Eduardo Serra, a former Spanish defense minister, said that while far-left groups like the Grapo no longer presented any threat to Spanish society, “Terrorism is terrorism, and it just can’t be glorified.”

With no past criminal record, Ms. González Camacho was sentenced to one year in prison but will avoid jail time under a plea bargain.

She is studying to become a social worker in Jaén, in southern Spain, and declined to be interviewed, saying the case had brought her and her family enough trouble. But in an email exchange, she said that the intention of her Twitter posts was to fight “a system in which a minority lives on the back of the death, misery and exploitation of a majority,” in a country where the euro crisis has sown widespread economic despair.

“The truth is that I’m a very normal girl, who has never landed herself in any kind of problem,” Ms. González Camacho said by email. “But if I tell you everything that I’m fed up with, I would never stop.”

“I never imagined something like that could happen to me because you find a lot of nonsense on the Internet, including worse than mine,” she wrote about her conviction. “But it seems that here that the prosecution is only for those from one side — the Fascists can say whatever they want, and nothing will ever happen to them.”

Her lawyer, Miguel Angel Gómez García, suggested the case showed the “thin barrier” between freedom of expression and antiterrorism rules, and that Ms. González Camacho had been made a scapegoat.”

The case comes as the conservative Rajoy government is eyeing other restrictions on public protests, including the political use of the Internet, having agreed in November to a controversial draft bill that would make it a criminal offense to use the Internet to organize any violent protest action. Esther Giménez-Salinas, a professor on the criminal law faculty of Esade, a Spanish university, said that there had been few legal cases against apologies for Nazism by far-right groups. In terms of freedom of expression, she said, there is a problem “if only specific opinions are forbidden.”

Most of the terrorism Spain has experienced has in fact come from separatist or far-left groups, though the country suffered a litany of human rights abuses under the Fascist Franco dictatorship that ended in 1975. A group of Islamists were convicted in connection with the country’s worst bombing attack, which killed 191 people in 2004 at the Atocha train station in Madrid.

The last victim of the far-left Grapo, whose full name is the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, was a businesswoman, killed in 2006 during a botched kidnapping attempt. The group’s historical leader died in 2001, and three years later 24 Grapo members were convicted in a high-profile case led by Judge Baltasar Garzón.

The case against Ms. González Camacho has generated some sympathy here on social networks and helped swell the number of her followers on Twitter to more than 14,000. One of them noted that her one-year prison sentence was as severe as that meted out in 1983 to Pío Moa, a writer and former member of the Grapo, for taking part in the kidnapping of a local politician.

Though the prosecution noted that she had used photos relating to the Grapo as the background picture on her Twitter account, she has also switched at times to other pictures, including that of Che Guevara. Most recently, her account showed the wartime photograph of Soviet soldiers hoisting their flag in Berlin after defeating Nazi Germany.

Carlos Sáiz Díaz, who heads the criminal law practice of Gómez-Acebo & Pombo, said that the case showed that “the national court wants to send a message to society that from now on abuses will be punished if committed through social networks.” The problem, he added, is that “legislators are always a step behind the new technology.”

“We’re moving on unclear ground,” he said, “which runs against the principle of legal certainty.”

404 — Your iPhone and Mac are in danger of being hacked due to major bug in Apple SSL

Using a public WiFi can be hazardous to your privacy . . . especially if you have an iPhone or Mac, according to this story from The Guardian.

Hackers may be able to access iPhone users' networks by sharing the same public wifi service.

Apple mobile devices at risk of hacking, firm says

Flaw in iOS software for phones, tablets and music players could allow protected emails to be intercepted, with Macs also at risk

A major flaw in Apple software for mobile devices could allow hackers to intercept email and other communications that are meant to be encrypted, the company has said, and experts say Mac computers are even more exposed.

If attackers have access to a mobile user's network, such as by sharing the same unsecured wireless service offered by a restaurant, they could see or alter exchanges between the user and protected sites such as Gmail and Facebook. Governments with access to telecom carrier data could do the same.

"It's as bad as you could imagine, that's all I can say," said Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green.

Apple did not say when or how it learned of the flaw in the way iOS handles sessions in what are known as secure sockets layer or transport layer security, nor did it say whether the flaw was being exploited.

But a statement on its support website on Friday was blunt: The software "failed to validate the authenticity of the connection".

Apple released software patches and an update for the current version of iOS for iPhone4 and later, 5th-generation iPod touches, and iPad 2 and later.

Without the fix, a hacker could impersonate a protected site and sit in the middle as email or financial data went between the user and the real site, Green said.

After analysing the patch, several security researchers said the same flaw existed in current versions of Mac OSX, running Apple laptop and desktop computers. No patch is available yet for that operating system, though one is expected soon.

Because spies and hackers will also be studying the patch, they could develop programs to take advantage of the flaw within days or even hours.

The issue was a "fundamental bug in Apple's SSL implementation", said Dmitri Alperovich, chief technology officer at the security firm CrowdStrike. Adam Langley, a senior engineer at Google, agreed with CrowdStrike that OS X was at risk.

Apple did not reply to requests for comment. The flaw appears to be in how well-understood protocols were implemented, an embarrassing lapse for a company of Apple's stature and technical prowess.

The company was recently stung by leaked intelligence documents claiming that authorities had a 100% success rate in breaking into iPhones.

404 — Edward Snowden writes about what freedom means to him

There are many writers in this piece from The Guardian who speak eloquently about freedom. Here is what Shami CHakrabarti and Ed Snowden have to say:

Edward Snowden, Shami Chakrabarti and Julian Barnes. Below: Esther Freud, Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard.

On Liberty: Edward Snowden and top writers on what freedom means to them

As the campaining group turns 80, Shami Chakrabarti, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Julian Barnes and others reflect on liberty

Edward Snowden, Shami Chakrabarti, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, Rosie Boycott,Tom Stoppard and others

Shami Chakrabarti

Writers have always been a big part of Liberty. Since our very beginnings, as the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) in 1934, they've played a key role in our battle to protect civil liberties and promote human rights in Britain. HG Wells, Vera Brittain, EM Forster, AA Milne, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are just a few of the authors who supported Liberty in the early years – and perhaps it's not surprising that those who write feel a special affinity with Liberty's values and ideals. Now on Monday we will celebrate 80 years of "the fight that is never done".

Orwell's observations on the power of language "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" is something that Liberty has witnessed throughout its history – "extraordinary rendition" wasn't sweet singing, but a chilling euphemism for kidnap and torture during the "war on terror". "Waterboarding" was never a seaside sport. Governments have twisted words to sanitise abomination and obscure outrage. But literature can sometimes change minds and behaviour more convincingly than the most forceful examples of political polemic or even legislation.

Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty.

Edward Snowden

Today, an ordinary person can't pick up the phone, email a friend or order a book without comprehensive records of their activities being created, archived, and analysed by people with the authority to put you in jail or worse. I know: I sat at that desk. I typed in the names.

When we know we're being watched, we impose restraints on our behaviour – even clearly innocent activities – just as surely as if we were ordered to do so. The mass surveillance systems of today, systems that pre-emptively automate the indiscriminate seizure of private records, constitute a sort of surveillance time-machine – a machine that simply cannot operate without violating our liberty on the broadest scale. And it permits governments to go back and scrutinise every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever spoken to, and derive suspicion from an innocent life. Even a well-intentioned mistake can turn a life upside down.

To preserve our free societies, we have to defend not just against distant enemies, but against dangerous policies at home. If we allow scarce resources to be squandered on surveillance programmes that violate the very rights they purport to defend, we haven't protected our liberty at all: we have paid to lose it.

Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor and whistleblower.

404 — How the White House continues to lie and dissemble as it responds to citizens via WhiteHouse.gov

I finally received an email back from the White House (via WhiteHouse.gov) about the Administration's position vis-a-vis the IC. Once again, the President disappoints. The statement is full of inacurracies and misleading statements. See for yourself, with my comments (in red):

Thank you for writing.  I have heard from many Americans about our country’s intelligence operations, and I appreciate your perspective. In recent decades, emerging threats from terrorist groups and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction have placed new and complicated demands on our intelligence agencies—and they have risen to the task. [See how he positions it against the hysteria-inducing threat of WMDs. He sounds like George W. before the roll-up to the war in Iraq, whereby he justified the invasion of that nation . . . and then we discovered that there were no WMDs] Because of their efforts, multiple attacks have been prevented since September 11, 2001.  Innocent lives have been saved. [Well, since my letter was about warrantless mass surveillance under 215, this is not the case. We really don't have any cases where that program prevented an attack. None.] Moreover, the men and women who carry out our intelligence programs consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. [Do said protocols include lying to our representatives in Congress, as DNS Clapper did? Furthermore, we have seen again and again how the NSA has violated protocols set up by the relatively lax FISC . . . even when FISC reprimanded the agency.]  But to say that our intelligence community follows the law is not to suggest that I am complacent about the potential impact of these programs. [Again, this is misleading. I and many others do not believe the NSA has followed the law, and neither has the FISC . . . or they wouldn't have reprimanded them on several occasions. The same can be said re the CIA, which was busted for conducting torture (which is against the law) . . . and then Obama went on to give all the perpetrators of said torture immunity from prosecution. Finally, following the letter of the law is one thing. It is quite another thing when the programs he supports, such as the warrantless mass surveillance of 215, contravenes the 4th Amendment. In other words, the Administration may think what they're doing is legal (although many don't), but it certainly violates our Constitutional rights.]  Our history shows that the United States is not immune to the abuse of surveillance, and in an era when great leaps in technology put fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do, we have a special obligation to ask tough questions about what we should do. [The reality is that, until whistleblower Ed Snowden revealed to the world what the NSA was and still is doing, the Administration didn't feel any particular "obligation" to ask tough questions. The "tough questions" were imposed upon them.] That is why I began an extended review of our intelligence operations in 2013.  I created an outside review group to make recommendations for reform [most of whose recommendations he summarily ignored], and I consulted foreign partners [such as the Germans, who are still reeling from the knowledge we've been spying on them, including bugging the Chancelor's phone and setting up spying stations within our embassies overseas, in direct contradiction to local laws and international agreements], privacy advocates, industry leaders, and other key stakeholders on how we can move forward.  And coming out of our review, my Administration made a series of concrete and substantial reforms. I approved a new Presidential directive to ensure our intelligence activities better take our alliances, our trade and investment relationships, and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties into account. [marginally, at best.] We announced reforms to provide greater transparency to surveillance activities and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of American citizens. [But the Administration has elected NOT to prosecute DNS Clapper after he lied to our representatives in Congress, thereby showing (as he did by summarily pardoning all those in the CIA who conducted torture) that senior Administration officials are above the law!] I decided that we will take the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas.  And I ordered a transition that will end the program to collect bulk telephone metadata as it exists today ["as it exists today", which is basically meaningless as it will change tomorrow, virtually by definition. He certainly didn't stop it altogether. He's just trying to shunt it off to the private sector, as if a profit-based company is going to be any better.], and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the Government holding this data. I recognize there are additional issues that require further debate—and I welcome that debate.  But the reforms I announced this year should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, [sorry, but for all the reasons cited above, they just don't] and I am ready to work with Congress on ways to meet our security needs while upholding the civil liberties of every American. [Many, if not most in Congress are now supporting the USA Freedom Act but we still don't know if the President will . . . although, based on what he's said and done so far, probably not.] Thank you, again, for writing.  To learn more about these issues, visit www.WhiteHouse.gov. Sincerely [I am sure he is sincere in his mendacity and dissembling], Barack Obama

 

404 — NSA figures out how to leverage private telephonies, but the question is whom can they monitor and when

Technically, the government can now work through private telephonies to do their snooping, but they have yet to determine the hard part: when do you snoop? Is it all the time, in violation of our 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure? Or, is it when there is real suspicion of a crime, and after first getting approval from a FISC judge?

NSA explores options for relinquishing vast telephone record database

By Ellen Nakashima

The National Security Agency has been exploring options for relinquishing its massive database of telephone records that include searching across phone companies’ data for numbers linked to those of suspected terrorists, and having the firms search daily against a watch list of suspect numbers, according to people briefed on the deliberations.

The agency was expected to deliver to the White House this week some proposals for storing the data outside of government hands — a goal President Obama announced in January to ease concerns about potential NSA abuse of its vast store of records about Americans’ phone calls.

“At the end of the day, this is going to be a policy decision, with legal implementation,” NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett said in a recent interview, noting that the agency does not make policy or law. “But what we’re doing, along with the [FBI], is advising on the parameters that would make the program valuable.”

Ledgett’s predecessor, John C. Inglis, last year spelled out four requirements to Congress for any new storage system: privacy protections, depth, breadth and agility. Ledgett added a fifth: value to the FBI.

“This program,” he said, “has to be useful to the FBI.” The NSA collects data on phone calls, but not actual call content, in an effort to find clues to terrorist plots and networks.

Earlier this month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence solicited ideas from industry to achieve, among other things, “near-simultaneous real-time access” to data across several providers. Obama asked the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop options by March 28.

The technology exists to carry out searches across several data systems linked in some fashion, industry and government officials say. That includes the ability to search beyond the first set of query results to retrieve the numbers of people who were in contact with those in the first set.

“The technologists at NSA who try to figure out how to do that say that it can be done,” said one former U.S. official, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “It’s computationally difficult,” the official said. “But it’s doable.”

The House Intelligence Committee considered the option last year, and some members were comfortable with such searches as long as one phone company didn’t get information about a number from another phone company that it didn’t already have, an aide said. The Senate Intelligence Committee rejected the approach.

There also are policy and legal questions, including who would do the searching and what legal standard should be met before queries of the records are made.

“We’re not looking for a solution that is technically more efficient or more agile” than the current system, the former official said. “We’re looking for a solution that gives the public more confidence that the data will not be abused.”

The watch list option would involve the NSA providing suspect numbers to the phone companies to run against their databases. But the option would lack historic depth. Right now, the NSA holds records for five years. Some phone companies hold data for less time, and those with flat-rate plans often do not keep toll records for billing purposes.

There would be no historical cache that might yield a link to a terrorist network. But, officials said, an NSA analysis has shown that more than 75 percent of the cases where such data were useful involved records no older than two years.

The challenge, officials say, is to craft a solution that enables discovery of links to an overseas number of a suspected terrorist — to find out whether the person using that number has ever made a call to, or been called by a number in, the United States. Typically, phone companies cannot easily search for records of non-subscribers. Doing so would take considerable time, industry officials say.

However, by pre-sorting the data so that they can be searched by the calling number and the called number, queries can be conducted faster, said Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, a computer science professor at the California Institute of Technology. From a technological perspective, he said, “my general impression is all of that would be a piece of cake for an organization with the type of resources that the NSA has.”

Any alternative to the NSA database must resolve more fundamental concerns, reform advocates say. Data queries must be linked to a specific investigation, and Congress should ban the bulk collection or analysis of data of Americans who are not part of an investigation, said Harley Geiger, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Some congressional supporters of the program say they think a compromise can be achieved even if it means accepting, for instance, that the phone companies may hold the data in some cases for no more than 18 months.

“When you’re facing losing something, 18 months is better than nothing, and can still reveal important potential links to suspected terrorists,” said one congressional aide, who was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly. The aide was referring to the prospect that Congress will not renew the legal authority underpinning the program when it expires next year.

404 — Rand Paul: The NSA is still violating our rights, despite what James Clapper says

This is one of those rare moments when I actually agree with libertarian Rand Paul. Check out this opinion piece in The Guardian. But, as you read it, let's not forget: When he runs for President in 2016, should he win, we'd have to accept the whole Rand Paul package . . . including:

• votes against the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities;
• Paul's weird ideas about the 'folly' of the Civil Rights Act;
• Support for military tribunals of terrorism suspects and Guantanamo;
• Paul's support for unfettered access to guns;
• Paul's role as a 'life at conception' polemicist, and the fact that he's unconditionally against abortion even in cases of rape or incest (preferring to let a pregnant woman with life-threatening complications die in order for that pregnancy to be carried to term.

Shows you how even the most wrong-headed politician can be right once in a while.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies in the House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on 29 October 2013.

Rand Paul: The NSA is still violating our rights, despite what James Clapper says

Clapper thinks if the NSA had informed us they were monitoring every American, that would somehow make it OK. It doesn't.

Rand Paul

Director of Intelligence James Clapper now says the National Security Agency (NSA)should have been more open about the fact that they were spying on all Americans.

I'm glad he said this. But there is no excuse for lying in the first place.

When Senator Ron Wyden (a Democrat from Oregon) asked Director Clapper during an intelligence hearing in March of last year if the NSA was collecting the data of millions of Americans, the director lied under oath and denied the charge.

When new revelations disproved this last June, Clapper then said the NSA had to keep the metadata collection program a secret for national security purposes.

Now says Clapper:

"Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11 – which is the genesis of the 215 program – and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it's going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn't have had the problem we had."

The United States needs intelligence gathering, the ability to obtain and keep secrets, spying on foreign powers and genuine threats and all the other tools nations use to protect their security. No one is disputing this.

But Clapper is being somewhat disingenuous here. Part of the reason our government does some things behind Americans' backs is not for security, but because certain activities, if known, would outrage the public.

Spying on every American certainly falls into this category. I also believe it is blatantly unconstitutional, and bringing these activities to light would immediately spark debates the NSA would rather not hear.

The notion that if the NSA had informed us they were monitoring every American would somehow make it OK, does not make it OK. Explaining why you are violating the Fourth Amendment does not invalidate the Fourth Amendment.

Americans are as upset at the act itself, not the mere knowledge of it. A cheating spouse can be upfront about his affairs from the beginning, but nobody thinks such behavior is right. The purpose of being forthright about wrongdoing is usually repentance. I do not get the sense from Clapper that he thinks his agency did anything wrong.

Americans have a right to know when their rights are being violated, but that's where my agreement with Director Clapper, or at least agreement with his latest statement, ends.

The Fourth Amendment states that warrants issued must be specific to a person, place or task and this provision of the Bill of Rights exists explicitly to guard against the notion of a general warrant, where government can plunder through anyone's privacy at will.

The NSA's metadata collection program is a general warrant for the modern age, reflecting the same kind of tyranny our nation's founders fought a revolution to make sure would never happen again.

It shouldn't happen again, and I will keep fighting to protect the US constitution I took an oath to uphold.

It's time to trash the NSA's mass surveillance of Americans, for good.

404 — Human Rights Watch says deadly drone strike in Yemen failed to comply with Obama’s rules to protect civilians

Despite claims by the Administration that in a recent drone strike in Yemen only militants were killed, Human Rights Watch concludes "some, if not all those killed and wounded (in the targeted wedding procession) were civilians.” Now, one might argue that such casualties are the unfortunate cost of war against a nefarious terrorist enemy, but that's a different issue. Misrepresenting the truth â€” as Clapper did when he lied before our representatives in Congress â€” because you're afraid of looking bad, or because you want to ensure a program continues is another matter altogether. We can't have an honest debate about these issues unless the government treats us like grown-ups and tells us the truth.

Deadly drone strike in Yemen failed to comply with Obama’s rules to protect civilians

By Greg Miller

A U.S. drone strike in December that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians, according to an investigation by a human rights organization released Thursday.

The report by Human Rights Watch concluded that the strike, which was carried out by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, targeted a line of vehicles that were part of a wedding procession, and that evidence indicates “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.”

The findings contradict assertions by U.S. officials that only militants were killed in the operation, although the report acknowledged that members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, may have been among the dead.

Overall, Human Rights Watch “found that the operations did not comply with the targeted killing policies that President Obama outlined” in a speech in May, the report said, citing in particular Obama’s requirement of “near-certainty” that no civilians would be harmed.

The report represents the most detailed independent examination to date of a strike that has focused attention on the administration’s struggles to tighten the rules for targeted killing, provide more information about such operations to the public and gradually shift full control of the drone campaign from the CIA to the Pentagon.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on the report or the Dec. 12 strike but said the United States takes “extraordinary care” in its counter­terrorism operations to avoid civilian casualties and noted that Yemeni officials described the targets as “dangerous senior al-Qaeda militants.”

The investigation by Human Rights Watch, a group that has been consistently critical of the targeted killing program, concluded that the attack killed 12 men, ages 20 to 65, and wounded 15 others, citing accounts from survivors, relatives of the dead, local officials and news media reports.

The attack targeted a convoy of 11 vehicles traveling from the site of a wedding near the city of Rad’a to the groom’s village, according to the report, which said that the bride was among a small number of female travelers and that “shrapnel grazed the bride under one eye, and blew her trousseau to pieces.”

Investigators said they spoke with senior Yemeni officials including President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, as well as U.S. officials in Washington. The report also includes photos of metal shards identified as shrapnel from four Hellfire missiles that were fired.

U.S. officials have said that the main target of the strike was Shawqi Ali Ahmed al-Badani, an alleged al-Qaeda operative accused of leading a plot that prompted the United States to close dozens of diplomatic facilities in the Middle East last year.

Neither Badani’s name nor that of any other senior al-Qaeda operative appears on a list of those killed or wounded that is included in the report. But Letta Tayler, the lead investigator for Human Rights Watch, said she could not rule out that some of those killed were associated with al-Qaeda.

Accounts from Yemeni officials “have shifted over time,” according to the report, which described a meeting in Rad’a two days after the strike in which a senior Yemeni military officer and the governor of the province publicly apologized and called the attack a “mistake.”

Participants in that meeting told Human Rights Watch that Yemeni officials distributed cash totaling about $159,000 as well as 101 Kalashnikov assault rifles to relatives of those killed or wounded, payments described in the report as “a tribal gesture of apology.” [NOTE: Really? So, you apologize to the friends and relatives of so-called al-Qaeda terrorists by giving them guns. Way to apologize. ED]

Although the CIA also operates armed drones in Yemen, U.S. officials have said that the Dec. 12 strike was carried out by the JSOC. Obama’s plan to shift the operation to the Pentagon has drawn opposition on Capitol Hill, where senior lawmakers — including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — have questioned whether the military can match the CIA’s effectiveness and avoid civilian casualties.

Because of the high casualty count and number of vehicles involved, the U.S. military launched an internal investigation of the December strike. U.S. officials briefed on that investigation said it supports the U.S. contention that the targets were al-Qaeda militants, but they declined to elaborate. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment.

Human Rights Watch said its efforts to get access to the military’s findings or other U.S. information on the attack were rebuffed. “The U.S. government has provided no information as to its legal basis for attacking the wedding procession,” the report said.

404 — AT&T's very first transparency report reveals that more than 94% of govt. requests were warrantless

AT&T's first transparency report (after the government finally gave them permission to publish them) reveals that the vast majority—more than 94%—of government requests came without a warrant, let alone probable cause. This, despite the fact that when it comes to revealing location data, the carrier says a warrant is "almost always required to obtain real-time location information."

AT&T's First Transparency Report Reveals Warrantless Demands for Customer Data

By Matthew Cagle, Volunteer Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

This was originally posted by the ACLU of Northern California.

In the wake of our shareholder advocacy, AT&T has now joined Verizon and released its first transparency report. AT&T's report shows how federal, state, and local governments have requested large volumes of customer information, typically without a warrant. While we welcome AT&T's move, the American public remains in the dark about a lot of what's happening behind the scenes. Greater transparency is still needed from AT&T and the federal government. 

Here's a breakdown of the many demands AT&T received in 2013. As we have long suspected, the vast majority of these demands lacked a warrant:

• AT&T received 301,816 demands related to criminal and civil litigation. Only 16,685 of these demands included a warrant based on probable cause.

• AT&T received 223,659 subpoenas for customer information. This is significantly more than the 164,184 subpoenas Verizon received during the same period.

• AT&T received 37,839 demands for location information. At least 21,000 of these demands lacked a warrant. AT&T's full report says a warrant is "almost always required to obtain real-time location information."

• AT&T also received 1,034 demands for "cell tower searches" last year, some of them compelling the company to identify the numbers of all phones that connected to a specific cell tower during a given period of time. Cell tower information is ripe for misuse—we know of at least one instance where a cell tower request was made for all phones within the vicinity of a planned labor protest.

AT&T also included information on national security requests (though, not the complete story):

• AT&T reported receiving between 2,000 and 3,000 National Security Letters (NSLs) from the federal government for customer information including name, address, length of service, and toll billing records. NSLs do not require prior approval from courts and the government has been criticized for misusing them. 4,000 to 4,999 AT&T customers were affected by NSLs last year. Note:Verizon has not yet revealed how many customers were affected by the NSLs it received.

• AT&T also released information about federal government demands for customer content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), demands that may result in government access to the telephone and Internet communications of US citizens and persons abroad. For the first six months of 2013, AT&T received 0-999 requests for content that ultimately affected 35,000-35,999 customers. In fact, more AT&T customers were affected by FISA content requests in the first half of 2013 than the combined number of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft customers affected by the same sort of requests during that period.

• Unfortunately, the report omits important information on the metadata that the government reportedly obtains from AT&T under the call records program (currently being challenged by the ACLU in federal court). Phone metadata includes the phone numbers of parties to a conversation, a call's duration, and device identifiers—information that can paint a very detailed picture of private lives. We know that the government justifies its access to phone metadata with a section of the FISA law, yet AT&T's report states that only 0-999 customers were affected by such "non-content" requests. On its own, this lack of detail misleads the millions of AT&T customers whose phone metadata may be subject to these demands.

In addition to a clearer explanation of national security requests, we hope that AT&T's future reports will also address the following shortcomings: 

• The current report does not include the number of customers or individuals affected by all of the government demands. The company claims that it is "difficult" to tally this information.

• The report does not describe statistics on how often AT&T complies with demands.

• This report includes very limited information about demands from foreign governments.

AT&T's transparency report, limited in what it reveals, also highlights just how essential it is for privacy laws to be updated in both the national security and law enforcement contexts. Technology has advanced exponentially and our privacy laws are still in the digital dark ages, enabling the government to engage in a largely unsupervised shopping spree of the personal data held by AT&T and other companies. This is why you should tell your member of Congress to support the USA Freedom Act and an update to the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. We also urge AT&T to play a larger role by pushing for greater transparency, including far more detail in its future reports, and advocating for stronger privacy protections.