EFF's List of Shame

Here is a list of US government "secrecy" actions that are mindless and counter-productive published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.

The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:

• Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.


• Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.


• Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.


• President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.


• CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”


• The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”


• Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office's budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.


• Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”


• NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government's own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.


• Government finally declassifies the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they appeared on the front page of the New York Times and were published by the House’s Armed Services Committee.


• Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood concludes after two years “An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information… has produced no known results to date.”


• President Obama accepts a transparency award…behind closed doors.


• Government attorneys insist in court they can censor a book which was already published and freely available online.


• Department of Justice refuses to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, a public law.


• U.S. refuses to release its legal justification for killing an American citizen abroad without a trial, despite announcing the killing in a press conference.


• U.S. won’t declassify legal opinion on 2001’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.


• National Archive announced it was working on declassifying “a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that should have been declassified a long time ago.”


• The CIA refused to declassify Open Source Works, “which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information” according to Steve Aftergood.


• Twenty-three year State Department veteran gets his security clearance revoked for linking to a WikiLeaks document on his blog.


• The ACLU sued asking the State Department to declassify 23 cables out of the more than 250,000 released by WikiLeaks. After more than a year, the government withheld 12 in their entirety. You can see the other 11, heavily redacted, next to the unredacted copies on the ACLU website.

The ACLU said it sued the State Department in part to show the "absurdity of the US secrecy regime."

Go to the original EFF posting to access the embedded links.

The Bush administration was blatant in its disregard for law and its disrespect for sensible security. The Obama regime is more devious. It gives the pretense of "concern" but its actions belie the truth. There is little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. They both believe in the "mushroom theory" of government: keep the people in the dark and feed them shit.

Higher Education in America

The government has decided that classroom professors are not getting "the message" across to students and have unleashed the police with batons to club and spear peacefully protesting students. This is a very important lesson about "power" in America:



More details from Berkleyside.

The top 0.01% control the politicians, the courts, and the police. So when students don't respect the right of the rich to plunder the middle class and impoverish the poor, then a little "school lesson" is needed with billy clubs to "beat some sense" into students.

Sadly, that is America. Land of the "free to be beaten up". Gone are the days of free speech and the right to assemble. These are they days when you need to buy your political rights just like the billionaires have so successfully done.

Update 2011nov13: Here is a bit from the student newspaper The Daily Californian:

For UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Barnard, the most disempowering moment of Wednesday night was not when he was repeatedly hit with a police baton, cracking one of his ribs. Instead, the most disturbing moment of his experience came afterward, when he says an officer told him he had “no rights.”

According to Barnard, who was arrested along 31 others as part of Wednesday night’s Occupy Cal demonstration, after he was handcuffed with a zip tie and taken into Sproul Hall, a police officer asked him for identifying information. Rather than immediately answering, Barnard said he asked the officer about his rights and when he would be allowed to speak to a lawyer. It was then that the officer told him he had no rights and, after Barnard disputed the statement, said he would be recorded as “uncooperative” on his police forms, according to Barnard.

“You didn’t have a voice,” Barnard said.

The experience described by Barnard and his fellow protesters’ violent treatment at the hands of the police — supported by video footage taken at the demonstration — has led to wide-spread condemnation of the police response. Critics ranging from campus student groups to members of the UC Berkeley faculty and even the national media have spoken out against the police officers’ use of force.

According to a campus-wide email sent by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other top campus administrators, the campus Police Review Board will investigate whether police used excessive force given the circumstances.

Go read the original news story to get all the details and the embedded links.

I love it when the official have "an official investigation". It is just a way to bury the item. These students were assaulted by the police. No policeman was arrested for assault. The "investigation" will find "extenuating circumstances" and the whole thing will be buried. That is how the elites make sure that nobody rocks the boat. You have no rights. Sure you have lots of "paper" rights, but money in America owns all the "rights". Until the people change that, the standard of living in the US will continue to decline and the government will continue on its path to banana republic.

Update2011nov14: Here is a bit from a well thought out analysis of the hypocrisy of the UC Berkeley authorities by Aaron Bady on his blog zunguzungu. It also has more video and some detailed comments and specifics. But the key point is this:

I feel a lot of déjà vu in reading about these events. According to the UC administration, who have offered a lot of empty words in support of Occupy Wall Street in past emails, it wasn’t the aims of the protesters they opposed but their tactics. As they go on to elaborate:

This decision is largely governed by practical, not philosophical, considerations. We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. Our intention in sending out our message early was to alert everyone that these activities would not be permitted. We regret that, in spite of forewarnings, we encountered a situation where, to uphold our policy, we were required to forcibly remove tents and arrest people.

Allow me to retort: what they really mean is that the University of California is not, in fact, governed by “a philosophy,” but by the reverse: an active refusal to require a philosophy in justifying its choices. That way he can write that “UC Berkeley as an institution shares many of the highest principles associated with the OWS movement,” but also actively work in opposition to people’s attempts to put those principles into practice. This is an arbitrary line in the sand, drawn by an administration that is unflinchingly willing to use whatever means necessary to maintain their ability to draw arbitrary lines. Your philosophy is not wanted here, they are saying; in the name of practical considerations — which they define — you will be governed by government. And so the fact that students are trying to “democratize the regents,” as a popular chant puts it, is exactly the threat. A sentence like this one:

We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control.

is just another way of saying that when “intransigent” individuals refuse to acknowledge the university’s authority, the administration won’t be able to exercise its authority, so it will therefore need to exercise its authority. This is exactly as tautological and contradictory a line of “reasoning” as it sounds, a rhetorical snake eating its own tail. To maintain hygiene, the students cannot use tents to keep themselves warm; to manage the space, students must be kept out; to address “conflict issues,” students had to be attacked; and to keep the students safe, they will be beaten.

The language falls apart at this point, because it’s not “philosophy” that’s driving any of this, but the question of who has the right to speak and be heard about what the university is for. Which is why the next paragraph truly descends into absurdity, the one where you realize you are not dealing with an educator, but with a university Ministry of Truth:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

What he describes — occupying space in a way that nonviolently prevents the police from doing what they want — is actually the very definition of “non-violent civil disobedience.” On the one hand, it is utterly non-violent: linking arms and holding on to each other as the police try to knock you apart is not “violent” but is precisely the opposite. It is the endurance of violence. And second, it is civil disobedience, again, precisely by definition. They were disobeying civil authorities, obeying the authority of their own consciences and solidarity instead

I want to skim past this sentence on to the next part, however which is in some ways the most remarkable part: he argues that the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” which deserves honor, is a tradition of obedience to civil authorities. He says that “we honor” those who do not obstruct the administration’s decisions, and that those who are “acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience” are, it turns out, those who obey authority.

This is not even ideology. This is simply nonsense. UCI professor Rei Terada has a great piece on what the administrator’s language might mean, but for me the important point to make is a much simpler one: they aren’t defending what they did — which would require admitting what they did — but only obfuscating it in language so bad that I can’t decide whether to call it vapid or actively dishonest. “Civil Disobedience” has always been, manifestly and unmistakably, a tradition of disobeying the civil authorities. I feel silly even needing to spell that out. And I feel embarrassed to work as an educator in the employ of anyone who would stand behind such specious stupidity. Linking arms and occupying the space between the police and their objective is a tactic used by just about every example of civil disobedience I can think of. It is, quite frankly the single best and most iconic example of the thing he says it is not. He is chewing up these words until they have become meaningless. Calling this language “Orwellian” is not hyperbole or exaggeration.

If he wants, Chancellor Birgeneau can approve of what the police did on Wednesday. If he wants to believe and argue that it is justifiable to try to break the bodies of students in hope of breaking their spirits, then let him believe it and argue it and then try to justify it. Let him tell us that when students put up tents on Sproul Plaza, the police will beat them until they take those tents down. Let him declare forthrightly that when students stand on grass at the wrong time and place — a time that is subject to the capricious and arbitrary decrees of the police and those who call them in — the administration believes its authority and responsibility is to beat them until they comply.

They have not said this. Birgeneau and his executive administrators are hiding behind meaningless language rather than talk openly and honestly about what everyone who was there or has seen those videos knows to be true: the UC will hurt you if you obstruct them or challenge their authority, even nonviolently. Free speech is a function of free thinking, and on the campus of free speech, Birgeneau should be free to say and think what he pleases, even if what he says is that those who do not obey will be beaten into submission. But let us hear him say that, if that’s what he believes. Let him admit and stand behind the decision he has made.

Self-Inflicted Helplessness

The political and monetary authorities have behaved wonderfully since the 2008 collapse. They are shown brilliantly the technique called learned helplessness. Or so the story goes.

In truth, the leaders have simply ignored their responsibility and their capability and are abetted by their enablers, the media. Here's a bit by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog pointing this out:

The Post Wrongly Tells Readers That Central Banks Can't Do More to Boost Growth

In an article about the IMF reversing its pro-austerity stance, the Post told readers:

"Central banks, which have already reduced interest rates to extremely low levels, have little remaining ability to boost economic activity."

This is not true. Central banks could explicitly target higher rates of inflation. This would lower real interest rates and reduce debt burdens. This policy has been advocated by many prominent economists, including Paul Krugman, Ken Rogoff, the former chief economist of the IMF, and Ben Bernanke when he was still a professor at Princeton.

I'm reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit and it really, really sad to realize that this same flailing about and impotence in the face of a crying need for action marked the 1930s as it does today. It simply means that tens of millions suffer because the "leaders" can't lead. Instead the leaders are fearful of "little voices" in their heads whispering about dreaded inflation or the need to appease some hidden actor requiring "confidence". Even in the 1930s there were a number of leading economists, Keynes being the preeminent example, who properly diagnosed the situation and gave political and monetary authorities the needed guidance. But then, as now, these "leaders" simply ignored the advice and played their hand as if the economy were a morality play requiring "excesses" to be punished by many, many years of suffering by the innocent, the unemployed workers with absolutely no responsibility for the crash.

NY Police Bring "Democracy" to America

The thugs in blue uniforms are trying to out-Mubarak of Egypt, out-Gadaffi of Libya, and out-Basshar al Assad of Syria. Apparently "the authorities" in NY like to put on these "show of force" by police as they beat up and pepper spray protesters. I'm guessing the US feels it can show the Middle East dictators "how it is done"...



The video is murky, but the only "disorderly conduct" and violence I see is from cops beating on protestors who are trying to stay out of the way of the batons and pepper spray. If this is supposed to be "street management" by a professional police force, this has to be the video of "how not to do it". Disgusting.

Notice how one of these cops in white (these are the "supervisors"!!!) gets both hands on his billy club so he can do some vicious imitation of a home run slugger on some poor demonstrator...



I guess if Mayor Bloomberg wants to help the demonstrators win in this struggle for democracy, he has taken one hell of a step forward. You don't "manage" crowd by this kind of violence. Instead, you add fury to protest and fuel even greater demonstrations. I have to put my head in my hands and weep because America shows itself incompetent at "managing democracy". Instead of turns loose goons and thugs to beat up people to suppress legitimate protest. That will set fire to the cause of Occupy Wall Street.

I sure looks to me that the "authorities" in the US are trying as hard as they can to re-create Mubarak and Tahrir Square in America. What they are achieving by their thuggish behaviour and their unwillingness to allow legitimate protest is a quickly mushrooming movement:



I notice that the media continues to downplay these demonstrations. A year ago, a crowd of 30 Tea Party demonstrators would get headline news in major media. On October 5th the crowds were big. The "official" estimates are 2,000 people, but you can see for yourself, there are many thousands. And still these demonstrations and their cause get only a passing mention in the news media.

Count the demonstrators for yourself. The number 2,000 is laughingly low...



This careful media management of an event into non-existence is what is "wonderful" about democracy in America... the political life is America is so well "stage managed" by the rich and powerful. The lessons the Middle East dictators have to learn from America is not to beat and kill demonstrators, but to pull a George Orwell 1984 and simply write the existence of demonstrators out of "reality". That is real democracy using the Washington approach. Quietly take money from big bankers and corporations and run the state for the top 1% while "managing the news" so that the bottom 99% never hear about their concerns and where any demonstrations become non-events.

Here is Michael Moore at the demo giving his two bits about what the movement means...

Corruption in the US Government

Americans love to claim that the rest of the world is corrupt with "crony capitalism" with "bribes" with "tyrannical petty bureaucrats" and corrupt police.

Guess what... the US is rife with corruption. Here's an excellent example:

The CIA Declares that Knowledge about "Global Warming" is Classified Intelligence

The American taxpayer foots the bill for the CIA, but when the CIA goes out and digs up information about "global warming", this is stamped "classified" and the taxpayers aren't allowed to see the results.

Just what about "global warming" is so dangerous that leaking anything about it to "America's enemies" would undermine the American republic? I don't see it.

Here are some bits from an article in Wired magazine:

CIA Says Global-Warming Intelligence Is ‘Classified’

Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it was creating a center to analyze the geopolitical ramifications of “phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources.”

But whatever work the Center on Climate Change and National Security has done remains secret.

In response to National Security Archive scholar Jeffrey Richelson’s Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA said all of its work is “classified.”

“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety,” (.pdf) Susan Viscuso, the agency’s information and privacy coordinator, wrote Richelson.

...

The CIA’s position, he said, means all “the center’s work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”

...

When the center was announced, the CIA said it would become “a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.”

President Barack Obama also promised a transparent administration, which he might not be living up to. For instance, in 2009, the Obama administration played the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that is still being negotiated across the globe.

What’s more, consider the 33-page report the White House issued Friday, “The Obama Administration’s Commitment to Open Government.” (pdf)

So much for promises about "transparency". So much for the sweet light of reason in government. I guess the spies think that information about CO2 levels is a national secret that can be manipulated by "America's enemies" despite the fact that it is public knowledge.

Just the Facts Ma'am

Here is a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Post blog that points out just who inside the Federal Reserve is working hard to sabotage the US economy: the private sector banks!

A segment on Morning Edition noted that 3 members of the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) opposed the plan to shift from shorter term debt to holding longer term bonds in an effort to drive down interest rates. It would have been worth mentioning that all 3 of the no votes came from the district bank presidents. The bank presidents are essentially appointed by the banks in the district.

The 5 bank presidents who are voting members of the FOMC split 3-2 against this measure. By contrast, the 5 Fed governors who were appointed through the political process (by both Presidents Bush and Obama) voted 5-0 in support further action.

This is a striking split between the FOMC members who essentially represent banks and the members who were appointed by democratically elected officials. It would have been worth mentioning this fact in this story. (The NYT and the Post commited the same sin.)

I guess the rich and powerful are nice and comfy with their wealth and their ability to strangle the economy for their own benefit. Why let the bottom 99% have a better life if this might inconvenience or threaten the ultra-rich?

The Real Dick Cheney

Here is the start of a great article by Robert Scheer in The Nation:

Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue. The deceit of Dick Cheney is indeed of Shakespearean proportions, as evidenced in his new memoir. For the former vice president, lying comes so easily that one must assume he takes the pursuit of truth to be nothing more than a reckless indulgence.

Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader.

Not to mention that bin Laden was killed in his hiding place in Pakistan, a nation that the Bush administration had befriended after 9/11 by lifting the sanctions previously imposed in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a program connected with the proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how and the sale of nuclear material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Pakistan joined with only two other nations, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in granting diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government that provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda as bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 attack. But instead of focusing on the source of the problem, Cheney led the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had ruthlessly hounded any Al Qaeda operatives who dared function in Iraq.

You don’t have to slog too deeply through Dick Cheney’s advertisement for himself to grasp not only the wicked cynicism of the man but also how shallow are his perceptions.

You really should read the whole article.

It was telling for me when in a recent interview Dick Cheney couldn't honestly answer the question: "if waterboarding is not torture, then you would not mind if a nation like Iran took an innocent American, claimed they were spying, and waterboarded them 'to get information' about the spying". Cheney never answered the question. Instead he wanted to draw invisible distinctions saying that waterboarding by Iran is torture, but waterboarding done by the US is not, it is only "enhanced interrogation".

Dick Cheney is the Adolf Eichmann of the Bush administration, i.e. a "bureaucrat" who blandly pursued evil and vicious policies while believing that he was serving "a higher purpose".

Institutions Die from the Head Down

Here is a bit from an article by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

In July, 2008, on the eve of the biggest financial crisis in memory, the European Central Bank did something both predictable and stupid: it raised interest rates. The move was predictable because the E.C.B.’s president, Jean-Claude Trichet, was an inflation hawk; he worried about rising oil and food prices and saw a rate hike as a way of tamping them down. But the move was also remarkably ill timed. The crisis was already under way, European economic growth had slowed to a crawl, and within a couple of months the global economy had collapsed, inflation had disappeared, and the E.C.B. was forced to slash interest rates, in an attempt to avert economic disaster. That July rate hike was like kicking the economy when it was down.

One might have thought that the E.C.B. would learn from the experience. No such luck. This year, Europe has been wrestling with high unemployment, slow growth, and a continuing debt crisis, with the economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the so-called PIIGS) struggling to avoid default. Given the situation, Trichet could have decided to keep interest rates where they were, as both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have done. Instead, the E.C.B. raised interest rates in April and, once more, in July. Again, as if on cue, European economic growth stalled and the continent’s debt crisis deepened, which has created problems for markets around the world.

...

To be fair, the E.C.B. isn’t alone in its paranoia about inflation. That bias reflects the preferences of many voters, whose hatred of inflation tends to be disproportionate to its real costs. (Cue Rick Perry saying that looser monetary policy would be “almost treasonous.”) Most studies of moderate inflation find that its costs are quite small, but a study of elections in thirteen European countries from the nineteen-sixties to the nineties found that voters were far more likely to toss out politicians when inflation rose than when unemployment did. Inflation hits everyone, after all, even those who have jobs, and it’s easier to get angry about expensive gasoline than about that raise you might have got if the economy were stronger.

I think the Peter Principle is alive and well and explains the heads of all big institutions. How else could the IMF end up with a rapist as their chief?

I think Obama is a good example of the Peter Principle in action. He was diligent, polite, caution so he won the big prize. People simply expected that if he were running for president he realized that required leadership skills and probably had them. We are all shocked to discover that Obama hasn't a clue about what it takes to be a real leader. In his own mind he is doing great things, but if you look around, the US is in a mess and like a car stuck in the mud, the engine is being pumped and wheels are spinning and a great roaring noise arises from time to time, but that car is going nowhere.

Obama's Claim of "Transparent" Government

In 2008 Barack Obama promised so many wonderful things he would do if elected. It is 2.5 years later and he has done precious little of what he promised.

Here's a post by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine that highlights Obama's failure at "transparency":

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

...

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished.

Go read the original to get the whole article and the embedded links.

The treatment of Ali Soufan is sleazy and criminal. So much for "constitutional lawyer" Obama and his promises about transparency. This demonstrates that Obama has no respect for the law or for democracy. He is just another "politician" like Bush and the rest of the Republicans and a majority of the Democrats. They give lip service to democracy, but ultimately they don't believe in government "of the people. by the people, and for the people". They believe in government of the bureaucracy, by the office-holders, and for the vested interests.

The Death of the "Live Free or Die" America

Funny. Americans claim to hate big government. They rage at Washington. They elect right wing conservative governors, and what happens. The state governments become "big brother" and crush the little people.

Here's an example from Gov. Swartzenegger's California:



I love the quote from the video at 1:40 where the state government tells him:

You can't live here. You can keep the land, but won't be allowed to live on it.

So much for "property rights". The above is a lot like the famous quote by Anatole France on the glory of French law:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

At 5:00 into the video, the real villain is named as Mike Antonovich, Republican head of the Board of Supervisors for Los Angeles county.

Why do Americans vote in right wing governors (and county supervisors) who trample on their rights? Why do Americans mouth a "love of freedom" and allow right wing governments to trample on their rights? Why don't Americans understand that a left wing government would actually protect their rights rather than the property rights of the rich and powerful?

Government by Stealth

The joke is that Obama came to power promising "transparency", but the behaviour of the Federal Reserve under him is anything but transparency. Only now do people know that the Fed created $1.2 trillion to support Wall Street banks. From an article on Huffington Post:

During the 2008 financial crisis, when the nation's banking system seemed on the verge of collapse, President George W. Bush authorized a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry. The U.S. Treasury implemented that program, known as TARP, in an effort to stave off economic catastrophe.

At the same time, and in the years that followed, the Federal Reserve was undertaking its own rescue operation, in the form of private, previously undisclosed loans to banks and other institutions -- lending as much as $1.2 trillion, nearly twice the amount of the Treasury bailout, according to a data analysis performed by Bloomberg News and published on Monday.

The scope of the Fed's private lending had previously only been guessed at, but figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Bloomberg News show that the nation's central banker issued loans to more than 300 institutions between August 2007 and April 2010, including over 100 loans of $1 billion or more.

While the Fed's loans likely helped to prevent a complete implosion of the global banking system, analysts say they fear the loans may have contributed to an atmosphere of complacency on Wall Street. Banks that received emergency cash infusions during the crisis may now believe the Fed will always be there to bail them out of trouble, the thinking goes.

Despite the pledge of "transparency", the Obama administration did not willingly release all these back room big dollar deals:

Given the extraordinary size of the loans, the public has a right to know what happened, said David Jones, an executive professor at the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University.

"It's completely valid at some point to say, 'Who did the borrowing?'" Jones told The Huffington Post. "It was appropriate, under this special set of circumstances, to divulge the information."

Among the largest borrowers were Bank of America, which borrowed $91.4 billion; Goldman Sachs, which was in debt for $69 billion; JPMorgan Chase, which borrowed $68.6 billion; Citigroup, which borrowed $99.5 billion and Morgan Stanley, the biggest borrower of all, to which the Fed loaned $107 billion.

In addition, the Fed issued sizable loans to a number of foreign banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, which borrowed $84.5 billion; Credit Suisse Group, which borrowed $60.8 billion and Germany's Deutsche Bank, to which the Fed lent $66 billion. Nearly half of the 30 largest borrowers were European firms, according to Bloomberg News.

Together with TARP, this represents $2 trillion to save the top 1%. Where was the money to save the bottom 90%. Obama simply turned his back. If this money had been used to create jobs $2 trillion would have created 100 million jobs paying $20,000. The official unemployed is only 14 million and only 25 million if you include the under-employed and discouraged. For 25 million, these funds represent an annual salary of $80,000 or 4 years of federal government sponsored work at $20,000. That would have saved the country. Something the $2 trillion didn't do!

Shame on Obama.

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

Understanding How 9/11 Happened

Here's an excellent video to explain the mysterious "non-cooperation" between CIA and FBI. This makes sense to me.



This is typical bureaucratic infighting and bureaucratic ass covering. The tragedy is that these guys are supposely sworn to protect the US, but their loyalty to their own careers/reputation and their bureaucracy, the CIA, is higher than their loyalty to their country. Sad.

What I find funny is that Obama, as a new leader from "the other party", had a chance to come in after George Bush and do a complete house cleaning. He didn't. He continued Bush's policy of bailouts for the banks, he continued Bush's "too big to fail" and refuse to re-implement the Glass-Steagall act, he failed to reverse Bush's war policy, he in fact doubled down on Bush's "nation building" in Afghanistan, he failed to close Guantanamo, he didn't bring charges against Bush administration hacks for lying to Americans about Iraq, he didn't restart the 9/11 commission with a new mandate to get at the truth... he didn't change course. Obama is just a "kinder gentler" version of George Bush. He ran as "change you can believe in" but he has delivered more George Bush.

Trying to Control the Uncontrollable

We all want to be safe. We all want "the authorities" to protect us. I'm as guilty as anybody else in hoping for a quick fix by "passing a law" to stop something.

There is a good reason why the founders of America set up a divided government and threw in lots of blocks to slow down a "rush to judgment". We are generally too simplistic in our thinking and don't understand the "unintended consequences" of our actions.

Here's an excellent example from Lenore Skenazy on her Free Range Kids blog. Here are the key bits:

SEX OFFENDER OR TEENAGE JERK? by Lenore Skenazy

Ever look at a map of the local sex offenders, the ones with little dots showing where the guys live who prey upon helpless little children? Well, as of this week, there are two dots that won’t come off until the guys die of old age — which could be quite a while.

Right now, they’re both 16.

The boys committed their crime at age 14. And just what was it?

Horseplay. Stupid, disgusting horseplay. According to NJ.com, the kids pulled down their pants and sat on two 12-year-olds’ faces for the simple reason that they “thought it was funny” and were trying to get their “friends to laugh.”

That’s how one of the teens explained himself to a Somerset County, N.J., judge back in 2008. (His friend headed off a trial by pleading guilty to the same act.)

The judge then considered what he had in front of him, and rather than think, “These punks could use some community service time and maybe a suspension from school — plus an in-person apology to the kids they sat on,” he thought, “These two are sex offenders.”

After all, what they had done was, technically, “criminal sexual contact” with intent to humiliate or degrade. And so sex offenders he ruled they were. That meant they were subject to Megan’s Law. In New Jersey, such offenders, even as young as 13, have to register for life.

This past week, the young men appealed their sentence and lost.

What does it mean to be on the sex offender list? First of all, the public knows where you live. Websites and newspapers can publish your photo. So can TV news. Parents can warn their kids never to go near you.

In many states, registered sex offenders have to live a certain distance from where kids congregate, be that a school, day care center, park or bus stop. So these young men may have to move to the sticks.

When they get a job (Good luck! Not many places are dying to hire registered sex offenders), they have to notify the authorities of where they’re working.

They also have to re-register four times a year, and if they miss an appointment, they can go to jail. In some communities, they have to turn their lights off on Halloween. In others, they have to answer the door saying, “I’m a registered sex offender.” All because of this stupid prank they pulled at age 14.

...

These guys are more like Dennis the Menace, which is why we have to change the criteria that land folks on the registry. These young men were never “predators.” And as the years go by, the idea that they pose a danger to children will become even more ridiculous. When you’re 20, 30, 40 — 80! — you don’t do the things you did as a 14-year-old trying to impress your buddies. Why is Megan’s Law blind to human nature?

If it were making kids safer, maybe we could overlook how obtuse it is. But a 2008 study found that, in New Jersey at least — where little Megan Kanka, for whom the law is named, was murdered — the law showed no effect in reducing the number of sexual re-offenses or reducing the number of victims.

It’s time to change the law and the registry. Otherwise, too many of the dots on a sex offender map will be victims, not criminals.

I have no solution (except maybe sunset conditions set on every law to get bad laws off the books without requiring politicians to stick their necks out).

Oh, I guess I have another solution: require politicians to consult with academic experts before they pass laws. Treat the "academic review" as just another layer of built-in hindrances to stop a rush to judgment or as another division of power to force "sober second judgment" before passing laws.

Ultimately there is no fix. There are things we can do for now until they don't work or we discover they have counter-productive side-effects. Sadly, life is an experiment and not a formula. We don't get to calculate the best strategy. We are forced to fiddle our way forward as best we can. This means dead-ends and retreats in the face of circumstances we didn't foresee.

Why Reasonable People Think Government is Brain Dead

Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have fled...

From the ACLU web site:

ACLU Sues State Department to Declassify Diplomatic Cables Already Revealed by WikiLeaks

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today sued the State Department over its insistence on keeping classified a set of diplomatic cables describing the government’s efforts abroad to avoid attention or accountability over its actions connected to the "War on Terror," despite the fact that the documents have already been released by WikiLeaks. On April 12, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for 23 embassy cables that were widely disseminated by news organizations in November 2010. The government has refused to respond to the request, prompting today's lawsuit.

"Our current secrecy regime has become completely untethered from reality. The government's insistence that information published throughout the world remains 'classified' is not only ridiculous – it's a legal fiction that has permitted government officials to evade liability for illegal conduct," said Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU National Security Project. "All too often, the government has employed secrecy not to protect the nation from harm, but to protect the powerful from embarrassment and accountability."

I can understand a government needing secrecy for state security, but why would any government insist on "secrecy" for any document published on the Internet? This is just bureaucratic madness. It delegitimizes the government to take such an idiotic stance.

Why Your Government Wants You Insecure and Afraid

Here is a bit from a good article by Robert X. Cringely on his blog I, Cringely:

Twenty years ago, when I was writing Accidental Empires, my book about the PC industry, I included near the beginning a little rant about how good engineers were incapable of lying, because their work relied on Terminal A being positive and not negative and if they lied about such things then nothing would ever work. That was before I learned much about data security, where apparently lying is part of the game. Well, based on recent events at RSA, Lockheed Martin, and other places, I think lying should not be part of the game.

Was there a break-in? Was data stolen? Was there an unencrypted database of SecureID seeds and serial numbers? All we can say at best is that we don’t really know. And in some quarters that is supposed to make us feel more secure because it means the bad guys are equally clueless. Except they aren’t, because they broke-in, they stole data, they knew what the data was good for while we — including SecureID customers it seems — are still mainly in the dark.

A lot of this is marketing — a combination of “we are invincible” and “be afraid, be very afraid.” But a lot of it is intended also to keep us locked-in to certain technologies. To this point most data security systems have been proprietary and secret. If an algorithm appears in public it escaped, was stolen, or reverse-engineered. Why should such architectural secrecy even be required if those 1024- or 2048-bit codes really would take a thousand years to crack? Isn’t the encryption, combined with a hard limit on login attempts, good enough?

Good question.

Alas, the answer is “no.” There are several reasons for this but the largest by far is that the U.S. government does not want us to have really secure networks. The government is more interested in snooping in on the rest of the world’s insecure networks. The U.S. consumer can take the occasional security hit, our spy chiefs rationalize, if it means our government can snoop global traffic.

This is National Security, remember, which means ethical and common sense rules are suspended without question.

RSA, Cisco, Microsoft and many other companies have allowed the U.S. government to breach their designs. Don’t blame the companies, though: if they didn’t play along in the U.S. they would go to jail. Build a really good 4096-bit AES key service and watch the Justice Department introduce themselves to you, too.

The feds are so comfortable in this ethically-challenged landscape in large part because they are also the largest single employer… on both sides. One in four U.S. hackers is an FBI informer, according to The Guardian. The FBI and Secret Service have used the threat of prison to create an army of informers among online criminals.

While security dudes tend to speak in terms of black or white hats, it seems to me that nearly all hats are in varying shades of gray.

Go read the rest of the article and learn something useful and discover you have a crystal ball into the future.

Here's Cringely's bottom line:

We’ve created a culture of self-perpetuating paranoia in military-industrial data security by building systems that are deliberately compromised then arguing that draconian measures are required to defend these holes we’ve made ourselves. This helps the unquestioned three-letter agencies maintain political power, doing little or nothing to increase national security, while at the same time compromising personal security for all of us.

There is no excuse for bad engineering.

I say "three cheers for Cringely for calling a spade a spade!"

The joke is that national governments have the deep pockets to keep their secrets secret. As Cringely points out, having "leaky" security is of benefit only to allow government to spy on individuals (at least the ones not technologically sophisticated enough to protect themselves). Be assured, organized crime and terrorist can afford the necessary level of security (even if Osama Bin Laden appears to have ignored the need of it in his Pakistani-protected hideout).

If You Want a Betterr Government

Then you need whistleblowers who can point out corruption and failings within government. But if you crack down hard on whistleblowers, you will get a corrupt government.

Here is a bit from Wired magazine on one NSA whistleblower:

Days before he was set to go on trial on charges that he illegally retained classified documents, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor count of exceeding authorized access to a computer.

Drake had been charged under the Espionage Act after he allegedly provided information about waste and mismanagement at the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2006 and 2007.

The former NSA linguist, who was set to go to trial next Monday, rejected two pleas offered by the government on Wednesday before finally agreeing to a third proposal, according to the Washington Post. He turned down an offer to plead guilty to the charge that he retained classified documents without authorization.

Drake, who left the NSA in 2008 and has been reduced to working at an Apple Store outside Washington, D.C. while he awaited trial, was facing a possible sentence of 35 years if convicted of the charges he was facing. He has long maintained that he never provided the Sun with classified information and also disputed that any documents investigators found at his home contained classified material.

Here's the real alarm signal. I've added the emphases:

The government’s decision to prosecute Drake and the resulting media attention has already led to more public disclosures about the NSA’s illegal surveillance program than the government likely wanted.

...

Drake’s revelations to the Baltimore Sun exposed the government’s waste and mismanagement of the programs.

Last year the government had dropped a criminal investigation of another whistle blower who helped expose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to the New York Times in 2004.

Go read the original article to get all the gory details about corruption and crime within government and how they are using "the Law" to suppress anybody who tries to point this out.

The Right Not to be Groped Goes Down in Flames

I'm no fan of the right wing fanatics in the US, but I was a fan of the Texas attempt to tell the US government that they should abide by the US Constitution's 4th Amendement which prohibits:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But under the "war on terror" (a war which by very definition can never end because there will always be some "terrorist" somewhere), the US government has told Texas it can have its law or it can have its airports, but it can't have both.

From the Texas Tribune:

A threat from the federal government to shut down Texas airports or cancel flights may have killed legislation by Tea Party conservatives in the Texas Capitol to prohibit federal Transportation Security Administration agents from conducting "invasive searches."

“I don’t cave in to heavy handed threats by the federal government,” said an angry Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the Senate sponsor of the bill, who ultimately withdrew the bill.

House Bill 1937, which was passed by the House earlier this month, would make it a misdemeanor offense for a federal security agent to “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly [touch] the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of the other person, including touching through clothing, or touching the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person.”

Two TSA officials visited Patrick at the Capitol earlier today to discuss the legislation. They warned him that the legislation “could close down all the airports in Texas,” he said. After their departure, U.S. Attorney John E. Murphy sent a letter to Speaker of the House Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst saying the bill would “conflict directly with federal law” and that if it became law, “TSA would likely be required to cancel any flight or series of flights for which it could not ensure the safety of passengers and crew” until the agency could seek a court order stopping the measure from being carried out.

It looks like Texans have chosen to keep their airports while giving up their freedoms. Chalk up another victory for Al Qaeda.

Dean Baker Notices an Incongruity

From Dean Bakers blog Beat the Press:

Why No Mention of Six-Figure Pensions at Age 50 at the IMF?

The Washington Post Outlook section has a column by former World Bank director Moises Naim calling for change at the IMF in the wake of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's resignation as a result of sexual assault charges. It is striking that the piece makes no mention of the bloated pensions received by IMF staff.

The IMF's pension structure allows many of its economists to be able to draw pensions in excess of $100,000 a year in their early fifties. It is remarkable that no major news outlet has ever mentioned these exorbitant pensions at a time when politicians across the country have been screaming about pensions for public employees that average less than $30,000 a year and generally require workers to wait until their 60s before they start receiving benefits.

The high pensions at the IMF might be seen as especially offensive since the institution has been pushing countries around the world to raise the retirement age for their Social Security systems and public sector employees. The IMF also has little basis for claiming that worsening benefits will prevent it from attracting good employees. Its current staff completely missed the housing bubbles in the United States and elsewhere, the largest asset bubbles in the history of the world, leading to enormous suffering for hundreds of millions of people. It would be difficult to imagine being able to assemble a less competent group of economists than the current crew.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

The IMF are typical of the high and mighty. They are really big on saying "do as I say, not as I do".