How US Companies Help Set Up Repressive Regimes

Here is a bit from a post by Cory Doctorow on the BoingBoing blog:

Two thirds of the way through the talk, they broaden the context to talk about the role of American companies in the war waged against privacy and free speech -- SmartFilter (now an Intel subsidiary, and a company that has a long history of censoring Boing Boing) is providing support for Iran's censorship efforts, for example. They talked about how Blue Coat and Cisco produce tools that aren't just used to censor, but to spy (all censorware also acts as surveillance technology) and how the spying directly leads to murder and rape and torture.

Then, they talked about the relationship between corporate networks and human rights abuses. Iran, China, and Syria, they say, lack the resources to run their own censorship and surveillance R&D projects, and on their own, they don't present enough of a market to prompt Cisco to spend millions to develop such a thing. But when a big company like Boeing decides to pay Cisco millions and millions of dollars to develop censorware to help it spy on its employees, the world's repressive governments get their R&D subsidized, and Cisco gets a product it can sell to them.

They concluded by talking about how Western governments' insistence on "lawful interception" back-doors in network equipment means that all the off-the-shelf network gear is readymade for spying, so, again, the Syrian secret police and the Iranian telcoms spies don't need to order custom technology that lets them spy on their people, because an American law, CALEA, made it mandatory that this technology be included in all the gear sold in the USA.

Here is the video of the talk which Doctorow attended given by Tor technologists:



It is depressing that US politicians pass laws that set up the basis for the spyware and then US corporations do the multi-million dollar R&D to develop the spyware that is then deployed by repressive regimes worldwide (plus the US government and big US corporations). We live in a "big brother" world. Orwell thought he was writing a cautionary tale with his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was documenting the hellish future we now all live in.

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.

The Truth about Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole is the most insightful observers of the Middle East. Here is a bit from a post by him on his blog Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.

All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.

...

Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.

Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.

...

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.

...

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.

Sadly, when Obama took office he had a mandate to reject the Bush policies. He had campaigned against them. But he quietly adopted them as his own. He sponsored his own "surge" in Afghanistan. He increased the drone attacks. He kept the secret prisons and Guantanamo but did tone down the official "torture policy" of the US.

I think the post by Juan Cole should be taken to heart. It is an upbeat message for Americans. It is a clarion call to take back their country by rejecting the Republicans and Obama.

How the UK Learned from its US Master

The world is well aware of the crimes of George Bush with his secret prisons and torture regime. But with the fall of Gaddafi, the UK is now getting its chance to shuck and jive in the public limelight and offer up excuses and the necessary exculpations for its behaviour. From an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Sami al-Saadi is considering whether to sue the British government after he and his family were 'rendered' in an operation between MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence services

A Libyan Islamist has told how he and his family were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation MI6 hatched in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence services. The rendition occurred shortly before Tony Blair paid his first visit to the dictator.

Sami al-Saadi, his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six, were flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli, where they were taken straight to prison. Saadi was interrogated under torture while his family were held in a nearby cell.

"They handcuffed me and my wife on the plane, my kids and wife were crying all the way," he told the Guardian. "It was a very bad situation. My wife and children were held for two months, and psychologically punished. The Libyans told me that the British were very happy."

Saadi says he is now considering whether to sue the British government, making him the second Libyan rendition victim to threaten legal proceedings in less than a week.

The evidence that the family were victims of a British-led rendition operation is contained in a secret CIA document found in the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, in Tripoli last week.

In London, meanwhile, an official inquiry into Britain's role in torture and rendition since 9/11 says the government has provided information about the UK's role in the affair, and Whitehall sources defended intelligence agencies' actions by saying they were following "ministerially authorised government policy".

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British intelligence agencies ran their own rendition operation, as opposed to co-operating with those that were mounted by the CIA.

Go read the whole article.

Democracy only works if government is transparent. When governments have secret armies, especially secret torture chambers, carrying out crimes on "behalf of the people" for which the people do not agree and are horrified to discover, then you don't have a legitimate government. Apparently this simple truth hasn't yet registered on the US or UK governments. You can't run secret "wars" and commit "secret crimes" on behalf of a democratic people if you don't tell them what you are up to and get their permission.

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.

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.

Interesting Questions

In an article in The Daily Beast by Bob Graham, former senator from Florida has raised a number of issues and opened up questions that need to be answered:

On September 12, 2001, Americans learned that 15 of the 19 commercial-airplane hijackers of the previous day were Saudis. The thought that went through many minds was, What are the Saudis thinking? Were these 15 individual suicidal decisions, or does 9/11 represent a break in our mutually beneficial relationship stretching back to World War II?

From that date until today those questions have largely gone unanswered. Unanswered because the government of the United States has engaged in a sustained and effective campaign to keep the American public from knowing the truth. And we may ask: Why?

...

Why would the Saudis have given substantial assistance to at least two of the hijackers, and possibly all 19? The answer I have come to is survival—survival of the state and survival of the House of Saud. The Saudi regime in the late 1990s faced the prospect of a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution, when young revolutionaries toppled the shah. Osama bin Laden was ascending. He had achieved hero status—in his country of birth, Saudi Arabia, and across much of the Muslim world—for his work with the mujahedin in expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan. He had successfully bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. He had trained thousands of potential terrorists in his Afghan camps. And he was planning even greater attacks—this time within the United States itself.

But bin Laden recognized a deficiency: Most of those who would be spirited into the United States had never been there before and did not speak English. How could they survive and maintain anonymity while they completed the final planning, practiced and executed an enormously sophisticated attack? The Saudis, who were known to have a global network of agents to monitor their youth against the prospects of another Iran, could provide the support infrastructure to make this possible. The threat of civil unrest against the monarchy, led by al Qaeda, could be the leverage for access to this network.

An insight into how far the regime might go in defending and perpetuating the status quo occurred in May of this year at the Vienna meeting of the World Health Organization. Advancing its policy of avoiding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or biological, the United States offered a resolution that would have required all 193 members of the WHO to either declare they were smallpox-free or—as would be the case with the United States—to commit to the destruction of any smallpox pathogens held in laboratories or elsewhere within five years. Throughout history, smallpox has been a scourge of mankind, and the virus remains the only communicable human disease successfully erased from nature, a miracle of organization and determination. There is only one way it can reappear, and that is in a weaponized form from a nation or group bent on mass catastrophe and worldwide havoc. The results of any dissemination would automatically be classified as a crime against humanity. This resolution to destroy all samples was successfully filibustered by Iran. It is not surprising that a country which for more than a decade has sought to develop a nuclear capability would also be seeking a biological weapon. What was surprising was Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s staunchest opponents, declaring that it “strongly disagreed” with the United States' position.

Why would the kingdom abandon its most important ally to support a nation that for the past 30-plus years has been considered its archenemy? Could it be that Saudi Arabia is also developing biological weapons?

The most perplexing unanswered question remains: Why would the United States engage in a cover-up?

I would love to have some answers to the questions raised by Senator Graham. He was co-chair of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 or 'JIICATAS911" is the official name of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence into the activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks beginning in February 2002, with the final report released in December 2002.

It is hard to have confidence in a "transparent" government when fundamental questions like these go unanswered for ten long years. The go unanswered whether there is a Republican administration or a Democratic administration. Very strange.

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.

Vandals Didn't Just Take Down Rome

I detest self-appointed "guardians of the people" or "holders of truth" or "God's special ones" or any other idiotic claims to special grace that vandals and nihilists annoint themselves with.

Here is a sad story from Wired magazine of how hackers got into PBS and made a mess:

A hacker group unhappy with PBS Frontline’s hour-long documentary on WikiLeaks has hit back at the Public Broadcasting System by cracking its servers, posting thousands of stolen passwords, and adding a fake news story to a blog belonging to the august PBS Newshour.

On Sunday night, visitors to the Newshour website read the news that famed rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. The false story (Tupac died in 1996) was indexed by Google News, and spread rapidly through Facebook and Twitter, even after PBS pulled it down. “Again, our site has been hacked — please stay with us as we work on it,” read one of the Newshour’s several tweets responding to the incident Sunday.

The anonymous hacking group Lulzsec claimed credit for the attack in its Twitter feed, where it linked to several pages displaying information stolen in the hack. A calling card the intruders installed at pbs.org/lulz/ was still live by 2:00 a.m. EDT. The text read “All your base are belong to Lulzsec.” The title of the page was “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE!”

This reminds me of the Vandals that brought Roman civilization to an end. While there are many things to detest about Rome and its cruelties, the Dark Ages were a step down for humanity, not a step up. And helping to bring civilization low was not a badge of honour for the Vandals but a detestable, permanent stain on this tribe of destroyers. This hacker attack proves that the Vandals are still with us.

I support Bradley Manning and detest the US treatment of him. But I also detest this hacker group that feels it has a right to act as judge, jury, and executioner. You cannot have a civil society when elements within it decide to trash the place. I can understand wanting to break the control of the elites who control society and misuse power for their own benefit. But wrecking havoc is not a social agenda and it does nothing to advance the fundamental changes needed to make a better world.

The future is ours to shape. But we don't build a better future by trashing the world around us. A better future is achieved constructively, not destructively, by thoughtful action not infantile tantrums.

Sadly "revolutionaries" can't be bothered with the hard work of education and the slow change of turning one person at a time from the flawed current state toward a better future. But real work to improve the world is done by building, not destroying, by enlightening one mind at a time, not by defacating in your own house and playing with your own feces. My whole life has been spent being frustrated by "revolutionaries" who can't be bothered to do the hard work of changing society and instead fall in love with their own intellectual masturbation. Sad.

There are "Laws" and then There are "Laws"

Supposedly humanity pulled itself up from the swamp by forming law-based societies, i.e. collective living guided by public law. But the US has moved into a brave new world where "laws" aren't public, they are secret!


The full text of Senator Wyden's speech is available here.

In this video Oregon Senator Ron Wyden gives a very useful review of illegal activities by intelligence agencies of the US. Watch the first ten minutes to learn some important history.

I especially appreciate this bit from his speech at 11:30:

When laws are secretly reinterpreted behind closed doors by a small number of government officials and there is no public scrutiny and no public debate you are certainly more likely to end up with interpretations of the law that go well beyond the boundaries of what the American public are willing to accept.

And at 14:00:

I don't believe the law should ever be kept secret. Voters have a right and a need to know what the law says and what their government thinks the text of the law means. And that's essential so the American people can decide whether the law is appropriately written and they are in a position to ratify or reject the decisions their elected representatives make on their behalf.

Sadly, the US government has just passed the Patriot Act where the law is in fact not completely public and the public has no right to know how the government "interprets" the law. The people of the US are governed by a cabal that acts in secrecy!

Why is the above such a "big deal". Well, look at this bit from Washington's Blog:

The "National Security" Apparatus Has Been Hijacked to Serve the Needs of Big Business

As I noted yesterday:

Claims of "national security" are ... used to keep basic financial information - such as who got bailout money - secret. That might not bode for particularly warm and friendly treatment for someone persistently demanding the release of such information.

I gave the following two examples:

Reuters noted in January:

U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve's bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

And Business Week wrote on May 23, 2006:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations

Further evidence comes from the Department of Homeland Security's involvement in requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

But since the Obama government believes that citizens have no right to know what the laws say, nobody knows just how much "terrorism" laws are being used to protect fraud on Wall Street. And that is only one small example of the corruption possible when a government decides its own people have no right to know what are the laws that "govern" them.

It is Now Safe to Talk About the Vietnam War

Thank goodness! The American people can now legally find out how their government screwed them into fighting an unnecessary war that cost 58,220 American lives and 2.34 million Vietnamese lives.

From the Federation of American Scientist's blog Secrecy News:

The Pentagon Papers will be officially released in June at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, 40 years after Daniel Ellsberg famously leaked the documents in 1971. Steven Aftergood in Secrecy News reports:

The National Archives announced this week that it "has identified, inventoried, and prepared for public access the Vietnam Task Force study, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, informally known as 'the Pentagon Papers'." As a result, 3.7 cubic feet of previously restricted textual materials will be made officially available at the Nixon Library on June 13, the Archives said in a May 10 Federal Register notice.

While any release of historical records is welcome, the official "disclosure" of the Pentagon Papers is in fact a sign of disarray in the government secrecy system. The fact that portions of the half-century old Papers remained classified until this year is a reminder that classification policy today is often completely untethered from genuine national security concerns.

On March 28, 2011 the National Declassification Center announced “the great news that the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has declassified the information of interest to them” in the Papers, clearing the way for next month’s public release.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

The odd bit that puzzles me: how can you have a democracy, a form of government that requires a "informed electorate", if you stamp "secret" and "classified" on everything? I understand that some things need to be kept secret, but policy analysis that is trying to tell your country's leaders that their policy is misguided and wasting lives? You mark that as "secret"?

I remember so vividly that during the 1960s that the chuckleheads who had access to the media would get up and sternly lecture the public about the domino effect: if South Vietnam fell into the communist's hands, then the whole of southeast Asia would go communist and the next thing you know you would be fighting a communist invasion of San Diego. This was delivered in the manner of Moses coming down from the mountain top with the tables of "the Law". There was no debate in the media. How could there be? All the facts were stamped "secret" and "confidential"!

Obama Pulls a "I'm the Boss So You Shut Up" Routine

Obama sold himself in 2008 as the liberal alternative to the previous 8 years of Republican "stage managed" presidency where the people were allowed as props in photo ops, but were not allowed to have a voice, and certainly not a free press.

But in 2011 Obama shows himself to be a Bush Mini-Me with the same deep gutted desire to control the media and refuse to allow a free press. Here's an article from the San Francisco Chronicle that illustrates how Obama will ban any reporter who has the audacity to report a planned demonstration at a Democratic party fund raiser.

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci - who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times -shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

It is quite odd that the founders of the US felt it important enough to put the rights of a free press into the Constitution, but US presidents think they are above the law and can gag and control the media to ensure that only a "managed news" ever gets out. Crazy.

A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

Wired magazine has a fascinating article by Noah Shachtman on the anthrax killer in the autumn of 2001:

On August 18, 2008—after almost seven years, nearly 10,000 interviews, and millions of dollars spent developing a whole new form of microbial forensics—some of the FBI’s top brass filed into a dimly lit, flag-lined room in the bureau’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They were there to lay out the evidence proving who was responsible for the anthrax attacks that had terrified the nation in the fall of 2001.

It had been the most expensive, and arguably the toughest, case in FBI history, the assembled reporters were told. But the facts showed that Army biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for killing five people and sickening 17 others in those frightening weeks after 9/11. It was Ivins, they were now certain, who had mailed the anthrax-filled letters that exposed as many as 30,000 people to the lethal spores.

It is a fascinating story, and a very unsatisfying story because they really aren't that sure they caught the killer. Read the article. Fascinating stuff.

Bradley Manning, Victim of the National Surveillance State

Jack Balkin is a Yale professor of law who has written an interesting post entitled "Bradley Manning, Barack Obama and the National Surveillance State" on his blog Balkinization. There is much worth reading, but here is the key bit:

All of which brings me to Private Bradley Manning. The Obama Defense Department's treatment of Manning, a American citizen, has employed the sort of harsh techniques that candidate Obama and his supporters would have loudly decried if applied to Guantanamo Bay inmates or to another American citizen, Jose Padilla.

It's worth noting that if Private Manning were a prisoner of war, his treatment at the hands of the Obama Administration would violate the Geneva Conventions; indeed, if he were an non-uniformed enemy combatant, his treatment would probably violate Common Article III. Apparently, President Obama has gone Attorney General Alberto Gonzales one better. Not only must he believe that the protections of the Geneva Conventions are quaint, he must also think the same of the Bill of Rights, at least as applied to leakers--or at least, leakers whom the President and his associates did not authorize.

P.J. Crowley was fired for pointing out the obvious, that the treatment of Manning was counterproductive. He forgot to add, illegal and unconstitutional as well. By telling us the obvious, Crowley forced Obama to acknowledge the fact of the Defense Department's actions in public, and to report calmly to the press that that the DOD had informed him that everything is perfectly acceptable.

Of course, since the DOD is mistreating Manning, what exactly did he expect that they would tell him? This is a bit like President Bush asking John Yoo whether the United States is committing torture. Of course John Yoo is not going to tell you that you are committing torture; the very reason he is there is to tell you that everything is perfectly fine.

The American people did not vote for the "national security state". In fact, most don't realize that the nature of the country has changed over the last 10 years. They are too busy making ends meet during the Great Recession.

Most people have no idea what path is being trod by their country:

In July 2009, I explained that we were witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimation of the National Surveillance State, in which the President's power to detain, surveil, and punish at his discretion would be greatly expanded. In the treatment of Bradley Manning, we can see a glimmer of what this will mean in practice. Unless there is a public outcry, we have no guarantee that this exceptional incident will prove truly exceptional. After all, if a liberal Democratic President is willing to look the other way in this case, what can we expect of future presidents of either party?

Japanese Government Incompetence

Governments think they can lie to their people and get away with it. They think they can lie to the outside world and get away with it. Maybe in feudal times that was a successful strategy, but for well over 150 years that has been a recipe for a bigger scandal and a lot more problems. But governments persist in lying.

Here's the latest from Japan from the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Nuclear experts have thrown doubt on the accuracy of official information issued about the Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that it followed a pattern of secrecy and cover-ups employed in other nuclear accidents. "It's impossible to get any radiation readings," said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who has worked for the UK government and been commissioned to report on the accident for Greenpeace International.

"The actions of the Japanese government are completely contrary to their words. They have evacuated 180,000 people but say there is no radiation. They are certain to have readings but we are being told nothing." He said a radiation release was suspected "but at the moment it is impossible to know. It was the same at Chernobyl, where they said there was a bit of a problem and only later did the full extent emerge."

According to some reports, 17 helicopter crewmen helping in rescue efforts were contaminated with low-level radiation, but Japanese officials declined to comment.

The country's government has previously been accused of covering up nuclear accidents and hampering the development of alternative energy.

Governments must think people are idiots. That was the message of Philip J. Crowley when he was reported by a CBS news report as saying:

Chief State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley quit on Sunday after causing a stir by describing the military’s treatment of the suspected WikiLeaks leaker as “ridiculous” and “stupid,” pointed words that forced President Barack Obama to defend the detention as appropriate.

But of course Hilary Clinton fired him and Obama "officially" announced that Bradley Manning was "well treated according to acceptable standards". Yeah sure, if you think being in isolation for months, stripped naked, forced to undergo "suicide checks" that are pure humiliation and harrassment. Oh wait a second... I forgot... the US is a torture nation so in fact the treatment of Bradley Manning is in fact "standard procedure"!

Obama and "Transparent" Government

I accept that Obama is a heck of a lot better as a leader and as a human being than the slimy George Bush. But Obama sold himself to the American people as something better than what he really is. He sold himself as a liberal, but he is a centrist pragmatist. He sold himself as "change you can believe in" but delivered little real change. He sold himself as somebody who would fix the 2008 financial crisis and get America back to work, but he hasn't pushed any particular agenda of financial reform and Congress has given birth to a mouse. Also, Obama deliverd a stillborn "stimulus" package that was too small to get America out of 9% unemployment.

Here is the point of this post. Obama promised "transparent" government. But he has failed to deliver. Here is just one more example from Corey Doctorow at BoingBoing:

America fields "Son of ACTA" -- a new, sinister, secret copyright treaty

Knowledge Ecology International has published a leaked draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the latest secret, US-led treaty, this one targeting countries on the Pacific rim. The IP chapter of the agreement contains all the material that the US was forced to drop from ACTA, the last secret copyright treaty the States tried to sneak into the world. As with ACTA, the game plan for TPP will be to get a bunch of rich, powerful countries to sign on, and then use this as a benchmark for all treaties between those nations and the rest of the world.

Here's some of Michael Geist's analysis:

The U.S. plan is everything it wanted in ACTA but didn't get. For example, the digital lock rules are the U.S. DMCA, complete with exact same exceptions (no more, no less). The term of copyright matches the U.S. term of life of the author plus 70 years, beyond the Berne requirement and Canadian law. The ISP provisions including a copy of the U.S. notice-and-takedown system as well as provisions that go beyond U.S. law. In other words, the U.S. envisions using the TPP to export its copyright law to as many countries as possible while creating backdoor changes to its own domestic laws. Moreover, the chapter extends well beyond copyright, with patent provisions that would restrict countries' ability to restrict patentable subject matter.

The complete Feb 10, 2011 text of the US proposal for the TPP IPR chapter