Homeless in Arizona

Sacrifice a politician????

Arizona lawmakers - Get congressional OK before Syria action

Is Kyrsten Sinema now a big time supporter of the military industrial complex???

For those of you who don't remember Kyrsten Sinema when she was a member of the Arizona Legislator tried to flush Arizona's medical medical marijuana laws down the toilet by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Source

Arizona lawmakers to Obama: Get congressional OK before Syria action

By Dan Nowicki and Erin Kelly Gannett Washington Bureau Wed Aug 28, 2013 11:06 PM

Arizona Republicans on Capitol Hill are calling on President Barack Obama not to take military action against Syria without first obtaining congressional approval.

Sen. John McCain, a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday that the War Powers Act requires consultation with Congress and that he recommends that Obama take the time to reach out to lawmakers before initiating any military strikes, even though he may be legally able to attack without formal congressional permission.

McCain said that, earlier Wednesday, he spoke about Syria with Vice President Joe Biden.

“It would help him (Obama) enormously if he spends time with Congress and talks to Congress about it, and the American people,” McCain told The Arizona Republic after a meeting with the Arizona Small Business Association in Phoenix.

Obama reportedly is considering limited airstrikes against Syria for its military’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians and rebels.

However, Obama said Wednesday in an interview with PBS “NewsHour” that he was reviewing his options and had not made a decision.

Key lawmakers are expected to be briefed as early as today.

Reps. Trent Franks, Paul Gosar, Matt Salmon and David Schweikert, the four GOP members of Arizona’s House delegation, are among more than 100 members of Congress from both parties who have signed a letter urging Obama not to ignore them.

“If you deem that military action in Syria is necessary, Congress can reconvene at your request,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter. “We stand ready to come back into session, consider the facts before us, and share the burden of decisions made regarding U.S. involvement in the quickly escalating Syrian conflict.”

Members of Congress are in their home states for their five-week August recess and are not scheduled to reconvene until Sept. 9.

Taking military action against Syria without authorization from Congress “would violate the separation of powers clearly delineated in the Constitution,” the letter states.

“While the Founders wisely gave the Office of the President the authority to act in emergencies, they foresaw the need to ensure public debate — and the active engagement of Congress — prior to committing U.S. military assets,” the letter says.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Obama probably has the authority to act quickly if he believes “a timely strike is needed or would be advantageous” without asking Congress to reconvene. But if it appears the action could lead to broader involvement, the president “certainly would be wise to come and explain where he’s going,” he said.

“It’s not clear right now how far he wants to go, or if this is just a strike to blunt their ability to use chemical weapons,” Flake told The Republic. “Is it regime change? It seems kind of unclear about where he wants to go.”

During a question-and-answer session with the small-business group, McCain warned that the automatic defense budget cuts that took effect earlier this year as part of sequestration could hamper the military from carrying out an extended mission in Syria.

The “surgical strikes” that Obama may be contemplating probably could be done, but there could be problems if Syria turns into “a long engagement,” he said.

McCain called sequestration “the dumbest thing we ever did,” adding, “It’s the dumbest vote I ever cast.”

Obama is talking America into a war

Source

Obama is talking America into a war

By George F. Will, Published: August 28 E-mail the writer

Barack Obama’s foreign policy dream — cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by “smart diplomacy” — is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the perils of loquacity. He has a glutton’s, rather than a gourmet’s, appetite for his own rhetorical cuisine, and he has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.

Characterizing the 2011 Libyan project with weirdly passive syntax (“It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions”), he explained his sashay into Libya’s civil war as preemptive: “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

With characteristic self-satisfaction, Obama embraced the doctrine “R2P” — responsibility to protect civilians — and Libya looked like an opportunity for an inexpensive morality gesture using high explosives.

Last August, R2P reappeared when he startled his staff by offhandedly saying of Syria’s poison gas: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The interesting metric “whole bunch” made his principle mostly a loophole and advertised his reluctance to intervene, a reluctance more sensible than his words last week: Syria’s recidivism regarding gas is “going to require America’s attention and hopefully the entire international community’s attention.” Regarding that entirety: If “community” connotes substantial shared values and objectives, what community would encompass Denmark, Congo, Canada, North Korea, Portugal, Cuba, Norway, Iran, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Yemen?

Words, however, are so marvelously malleable in the Obama administration that the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “coup” (“a change in the government carried out violently or illegally”) somehow does not denote what happened in Egypt. Last week, an Obama spokesman said: “We have made the determination that making a decision about whether or not a coup occurred is not in the best interests of the United States.” So convinced is this White House of its own majesty and of the consequent magic of its words, it considers this a clever way of saying the law is a nuisance.

Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act forbids aid to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup” until the president determines that “a democratically elected government” has been restored. Secretary of State John Kerry was perhaps preparing to ignore this when he said something Egypt’s generals have not had the effrontery to claim — that the coup amounted to “restoring democracy.”

Perhaps Section 508 unwisely abridges presidential discretion in foreign policy, where presidents arguably deserve the almost unfettered discretion they, with increasing aggressiveness, assert everywhere. And perhaps if Obama were not compiling such a remarkable record of indifference to law, it would be sensible to ignore his ignoring of this one.

But remember Libya. Since the War Powers Resolution was passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973, presidents have at least taken care to act “consistent with” its limits on unilateral presidential war-making. Regarding Libya, however, Obama was unprecedentedly cavalier, even though he had ample time to act consistent with the Constitution by involving a supportive Congress. As Yale Law School’s Bruce Ackerman then argued:

“Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign.”

Obama is as dismissive of “red lines” he draws as he is of laws others enact. Last week, a State Department spokeswoman said his red line regarding chemical weapons was first crossed “a couple of months ago” and “the president took action” — presumably, announcing (non-lethal) aid to Syrian rebels — although “we’re not going to outline the inventory of what we did.”

The administration now would do well to do something that the head of it has an irresistible urge not to do: Stop talking.

If a fourth military intervention is coming, it will not be to decisively alter events, which we cannot do, in a nation vital to U.S. interests, which Syria is not. Rather, its purpose will be to rescue Obama from his words.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Why Syria's chemical weapons stockpile is safe from airstrikes

Source

Why Syria's chemical weapons stockpile is safe from airstrikes

By Carol J. Williams

August 29, 2013, 5:00 a.m.

Syrian President Bashar Assad wields command over the world's biggest stockpile of chemical weapons, international security experts say, and he is expected to emerge from any punitive Western airstrikes with his arsenal intact.

With an estimated 50 storage sites, many situated in or near urban centers, any attempt to destroy or degrade the Assad government's supply of poison gases and nerve agents would require a massive invasion of ground forces that no nation considered part of the emerging "coalition of the willing" would be likely to support.

Even if U.S. and allied intelligence have precisely located some of the stores of sarin, mustard or VX gas, analysts say, the likelihood of a successful airstrike is slim because of Assad's powerful air defenses and the risk of bombed chemical stores unleashing their deadly gases.

As the United States and other nations weigh the appropriate response to Assad's suspected use of chemical weapons in an attack last week that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians, Western military strategists have reportedly concluded there is no way to target the weapons of mass destruction with airstrikes. With no appetite in the United States or Europe for the scale of mission necessary to locate, capture and neutralize the Damascus government's chemical weapons, the punitive strikes are expected to be more symbolic than effective in preventing future use of WMD.

"If we were to go after the storage sites, our intel on this stuff, if our track record is any judge, is not perfect, to say the least," said Steven Bucci, a former Army Green Beret officer and senior Pentagon official now directing foreign policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. He alluded to the faulty reconnaissance on Saddam Hussein's purported caches of weapons of mass destruction that prompted the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

A more logical target for airstrikes would be chemical agent production facilities, where bombs or missiles would have a better chance of destroying the substances before they are weaponized, Bucci said.

"That said, what the heck does that do for you, considering that they have a bazillion tons of this stuff already?" he said, branding Syria "the superpower of chemical weapons."

Steven Weber, a UC Berkeley political science professor with expertise in international security and defense issues, describes the objective of taking out Syria's WMD as too daunting and dangerous.

"There is always a risk of unintended dispersal of chemical agents in a missile strike. To do that reasonably safely, you would have to know exactly what is stored at the site, where the people are in the area, what the winds are like. Otherwise you run the risk of creating toxic plumes that would kill people," Weber said. "And you probably can't get to all of them, so it may not make sense to bother taking out only some of them unless you can ensure that any collateral damage is really low."

With so many variables and unknowns, the odds of eliminating Assad's chemical weapons capability are minimal, says Raymond Zilinskas, director of chemical and biological weapons programs at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey.

Factoring the probability of detecting real weapons sites from decoys, acquiring the correct target, successfully launching the munitions and destroying the right contents probably drops the chances for a mission accomplished below 10%, the biotechnology expert estimates.

Charles P. Blair of the Federation of American Scientists this week posted to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a multimedia report on Syria's chemical weapons, their origins and incidents of suspected use. The Johns Hopkins University and George Mason University biodefense scholar also pointed out that Syria is one of only seven countries that hasn't signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention that outlaws production, possession and use of the weapons.

Making a preemptive strike on Assad's chemical arsenal, which Damascus has built up over 40 years, probably would backfire strategically "in this kind of highly propagandized, politicized war," warned Thomas H. Henriksen, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who studies insurgencies, rogue states and defense affairs. Any civilians killed by the inadvertent release of poison gas from the bombings would be displayed by the Syrian government as evidence of the perfidy of the United States and its allies, he said.

And striking aggressively to eliminate weapons to prevent their future use is a gamble that won't pay off if civilian casualties are inflicted, said Henriksen, a veteran author on U.S. foreign policy who also teaches at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University.

"Even if you think in the long term that it is a good thing to eliminate these weapons, if it blows up and lots of innocent people are killed, no one is going to think about what might have happened later," he said. "All anyone will care about is what has happened in the current time."

North Korea's Kim Jong Un executes ex-girlfriend???

Maybe Kim Jong Un is a mass murderer, but he is a rank amateur compared to American Emperors Bush and Obama who have murdered thousands and possibly millions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When it comes to murders that target specific individuals Kim Jong Un is a again a rank amateur compared the hundreds of people Obama has murdered with drones.

Source

North Korea's Kim reportedly has ex-girlfriend, 11 others executed

By Carol J. Williams

August 29, 2013, 3:09 p.m.

A North Korean firing squad last week executed a former girlfriend of leader Kim Jong Un and 11 other entertainers for allegedly violating laws banning pornography, a South Korean newspaper reported Thursday.

The report by Chosun Ilbo, an English-language newspaper of a Seoul media conglomerate, deemed the reported Aug. 20 executions a death blow to expectations that Kim would oversee a transition of his isolated and tyrannized people into a more open era.

Among the dozen performers shot to death while their families and former band members were forced to watch was Hyon Song Wol, a singer Kim reportedly courted a decade ago but was forced to abandon by his dictatorial father, Kim Jong Il.

Hyon was pictured by North Korean state television performing at a concert Aug. 8 in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, less than two weeks before her execution, Chosun Ilbo reported, posting a picture of the singer juxtaposed against one of Kim applauding at the concert.

The 12 members of the Unhasu Orchestra and the Wangjaesan Light Music Band were accused of violating anti-pornography laws by videotaping themselves having sex and selling copies of the tape to North Korean fans and in China.

The South Korean newspaper, which attributed reports of the executions to sources in China, said one also claimed that some of those arrested in the Aug. 17 crackdown were found to have Bibles in their possession. Like most communist countries, North Korea denounces religion as an undesirable foreign influence.

Hyon married a North Korean military officer after Kim's father forced their breakup, but reportedly continued to see the Pyongyang heir apparent even after her marriage, Chosun Ilbo said.

Kim, 30, is believed to have married Hyon's fellow band member, Ri Sol Ju, in the last year or so. Ri began showing up with Kim at cultural events in the capital a little more than a year ago, including at a female band concert in July 2012 that featured Western music, mini-skirted violinists and a parade of knock-off Disney characters. The gala raised speculation that Kim would relax longstanding constraints on artistic expression and social behavior imposed by his father and grandfather since North Korea's emergence as a separate state after World War II.

The performance that dispensed with the usual dour dress and state-mandated repertoire gave rise to "hopes that the young leader is more open to ideas from overseas, but that was apparently misreading," Chosun Ilbo concluded.

"Kim Jong Un has been viciously eliminating anyone who he deems a challenge to his authority," the newspaper said, quoting an unnamed source. The executions "show that he is fixated on consolidating his leadership."

Kim and his military and political hierarchies provoked new strain in relations with South Korea and the West this year by conducting a prohibited nuclear bomb test and proclaiming as invalid the 1953 armistice that halted fighting in the Korean War. The two sides never signed a peace treaty to formally end the conflict.

Is Obama lying about his "new" marijuana position???

Obama lied before when he said he wouldn't shake down people for medical marijuana, but he continue to send his DEA thugs to shake down medical marijuana users in California.

Source

Marijuana advocates cheer Obama administration stand

By Ari Bloomekatz

August 29, 2013, 1:30 p.m.

Marijuana advocates in California and elsewhere cheered the Obama administration's announcement Thursday that it would not interfere with new laws in Colorado and Washington state permitting recreational use of cannabis.

But the advocates cautioned there is still a ways to go before legalization.

Dale Gieringer, a leading marijuana advocate in California, said he is encouraged by the new U.S. Justice Department memo, but he notes he has been encouraged by past memos only to see federal enforcement increase. [Obama lied before about not shaking down medical marijuana users and sellers]

“There are some weasel words in this,” he said. "They’re not going to make a priority to do something, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it.” [Obama has given us the same lie before about medical marijuana]

The memo written by Deputy Atty. Gen. James M. Cole is a sharp turn from the last memo he wrote in 2011, in which he emphasized that commercial marijuana operations were not protected by their states’ laws.

The document released Thursday said prosecutors “should not consider the size or commercial nature of a marijuana operation alone” as a factor for enforcement. [translation - we won't shake down recreational users of marijuana - but we might if we feel like it]

“I hope the attorney general follows through with the spirit of their memo, but we’ll have to see,” Gieringer said.

But at least in writing, the Justice Department has now decided against seeking to block new state laws in Colorado and Washington that legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

They also said they will not bring federal prosecutions against dispensaries or businesses that sell small amounts of marijuana to adults. [Yea, we have heard that before - In Orange County, California they are trying to use RICA laws to seize an office building because one office was rented to a medical marijuana business]

A department official stressed, however, that marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and that U.S. prosecutors will continue to aggressively enforce the law against those who sell marijuana to minors or to criminal gangs that are involved in drug trafficking. [It's all how you define criminal gangs and drug trafficking - remember when Clinton said a BJ wasn't really sex - Emperor Obama will set the definition of criminal gangs and drug trafficking, and he could set it to include medical marijuana users or sellers]

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder described the Obama administration’s middle-ground approach to marijuana enforcement in a call to the governors of the two states.

Under the new guidance, a marijuana dispensary will not be targeted by federal prosecutors based on its size or its volume alone, an official said. [but it may be targeted for other reasons ]

This change could have an immediate effect in states where medical marijuana is legal under state law.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said Thursday's announcement will reverberate not only in Washington and Colorado, but also in California and New York, and in other countries as well.

In a phone interview from Jamaica, Nadelmann said that country is moving to legalize marijuana and that some officials had been expecting opposition from the U.S. But Nadelmann said he told them there was now a lot less to fear.

"With today's announcement, it reinforces what I was saying in a huge way," Nadelmann said. "I was expecting a yellow light, but this light looks a lot more greenish than I had expected."

"The White House is essentially saying proceed with caution," he said. [proceed with caution because Obama may change his mind, if he hasn't lied about his current position]

Nadelmann said the announcement is "significant for the growing number of the other states where the majority of the electorate favor legalizing marijuana and it has international implications" for countries like Jamaica and Uruguay.

As for California, Nadelmann said "there's more or less a consensus among key allies to try and put this on the ballot in 2016."

Missouri poised to enact measure nullifying federal gun laws

Gun Bill in Missouri Would Test Limits in Nullifying U.S. Law

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: August 28, 2013 738 Comments

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Unless a handful of wavering Democrats change their minds, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them here. A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.

Lawmakers are considering whether to override a veto of a gun bill by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri, who considered the bill unconstitutional.

The law amounts to the most far-reaching states’ rights endeavor in the country, the far edge of a growing movement known as “nullification” in which a state defies federal power.

The Missouri Republican Party thinks linking guns to nullification works well, said Matt Wills, the party’s director of communications, thanks in part to the push by President Obama for tougher gun laws. “It’s probably one of the best states’ rights issues that the country’s got going right now,” he said.

The measure was vetoed last month by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, as unconstitutional. But when the legislature gathers again on Sept. 11, it will seek to override his veto, even though most experts say the courts will strike down the measure. Nearly every Republican and a dozen Democrats appear likely to vote for the override.

Richard G. Callahan, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, is concerned. He cited a recent joint operation of federal, state and local law enforcement officials that led to 159 arrests and the seizing of 267 weapons, and noted that the measure “would have outlawed such operations, and would have made criminals out of the law enforcement officers.”

In a letter explaining his veto, Mr. Nixon said the federal government’s supremacy over the states’ “is as logically sound as it is legally well established.” He said that another provision of the measure, which makes it a crime to publish the name of any gun owner, violates the First Amendment and could make a crime out of local newspapers’ traditional publication of “photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer.”

But the votes for the measure were overwhelming. In the House, all but one of the 109 Republicans voted for the bill, joined by 11 Democrats. In the Senate, all 24 Republicans supported it, along with 2 Democrats. Overriding the governor’s veto would require 23 votes in the Senate and 109 in the House, where at least one Democrat would have to come on board.

The National Rifle Association, which has praised Mr. Nixon in the past for signing pro-gun legislation, has been silent about the new bill. Repeated calls to the organization were not returned.

Historically used by civil rights opponents, nullification has bloomed in recent years around a host of other issues, broadly including medical marijuana by liberals and the new health care law by conservatives.

State Representative T. J. McKenna, a Democrat from Festus, voted for the bill despite saying it was unconstitutional and raised a firestorm of protest against himself. “If you just Google my name, it’s all over the place about what a big coward I am,” he said with consternation, and “how big of a ‘craven’ I was. I had to look that up.”

The voters in his largely rural district have voiced overwhelming support for the bill, he said. “I can’t be Mr. Liberal, St. Louis wannabe,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Just go against all my constituents?”

As for the veto override vote, he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to vote yet.”

State Representative Doug Funderburk, a Republican from St. Peters and the author of the bill, said he expected to have more than enough votes when the veto override came up for consideration.

Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, who follows nullification efforts nationally, said that nearly two dozen states had passed medical marijuana laws in defiance of federal restrictions. Richard Cauchi, who tracks such health legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “Since January 2011, at least 23 states have considered bills seeking to nullify the health care law; as of mid-2013 only one state, North Dakota, had a signed law. Its language states, however, that the nullification provisions ‘likely are not authorized by the United States Constitution.’ ”

What distinguishes the Missouri gun measure from the marijuana initiatives is its attempt to actually block federal enforcement by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from cooperating with federal efforts. That crosses the constitutional line, said Robert A. Levy, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute’s board of directors — a state cannot frustrate the federal government’s attempts to enforce its laws.

Mr. Levy, whose organization has taken a leading role in fighting for gun rights, said, “With the exception of a few really radical self-proclaimed constitutional authorities, state nullification of federal law is not on the radar scope.”

Still, other states have passed gun laws that challenge federal power; a recent wave began with a Firearms Freedom Act in Montana that exempts from federal regulations guns manufactured there that have not left the state.

Gary Marbut, a gun rights advocate in Montana who wrote the Firearms Freedom Act, said that such laws were “a vehicle to challenge commerce clause power,” the constitutional provision that has historically granted broad authority to Washington to regulate activities that have an impact on interstate commerce. His measure has served as a model that is spreading to other states. Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down Montana’s law, calling it “pre-empted and invalid.”

A law passed this year in Kansas has also been compared to the Missouri law. But Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, disagreed, saying it had been drafted “very carefully to ensure that there would be no situation where a state official would be trying to arrest a federal official.”

In Missouri, State Representative Jacob Hummel, a St. Louis Democrat and the minority floor leader, said that he was working to get Democrats who voted for the bill to vote against overriding the veto. “I think some cooler heads will prevail in the end,” he said, “but we will see.”

Taking up legislative time to vote for unconstitutional bills that are destined to end up failing in the courts is “a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Mr. Hummel said, adding that more and more, the legislature passes largely symbolic resolutions directed at Congress.

“We’re elected to serve the citizens of the state of Missouri, at the state level,” he said. “We were not elected to tell the federal government what to do — that’s why we have Congressional elections.”

The lone Republican opponent of the bill in the House, State Representative Jay Barnes, said, “Our Constitution is not some cheap Chinese buffet where we get to pick the parts we like and ignore the rest.” He added, “Two centuries of constitutional jurisprudence shows that this bill is plainly unconstitutional, and I’m not going to violate my oath of office.”

Mr. Funderburk, the bill’s author, clearly disagrees. And, he said, Missouri is only the beginning. “I’ve got five different states that want a copy” of the bill, he said.

Source

Missouri poised to enact measure nullifying federal gun laws

Published August 29, 2013

FoxNews.com

The Republican-led Missouri Legislature is expected to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that would expand gun rights and make federal gun regulations unenforceable -- even as similar laws adopted in other states to buck federal gun rules face legal challenges.

Several of Nixon’s fellow Democrats told The Associated Press that they would vote to override his veto when lawmakers convene in September, even while agreeing with the governor that the bill couldn’t survive a court challenge. Many of them noted that in some parts of Missouri, a “no” vote on gun legislation could be career ending.

The legislation would make it a misdemeanor for federal agents to attempt to enforce any federal gun regulations that “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms.” The same criminal charges would apply to journalists who publish any identifying information about gun owners. The charge would be punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Nixon said the bill infringes on the U.S. Constitution by giving precedence to state law over federal laws and by limiting the First Amendment rights of media.

The legislation is one of the boldest measures yet in a recent national trend in which states are attempting to nullify federal laws. A recent Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on gun control, marijuana use, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver’s licenses. Relatively few of those go so far as to threaten criminal charges against federal authorities.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled against a series of laws enacted in Montana that attempt to declare that federal firearms regulations don't apply to guns made and kept in that state. Similar laws have been adopted in other states.

In the Montana case, the Justice Department successfully argued that the courts have already decided Congress can use its power to regulate interstate commerce to set standards on such items as guns.

The ruling has the potential to affect similar laws in several other states and leaves open the possibility of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The state of Montana has intervened in support of its law. The case also attracted the support of Utah, Alaska, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

In Missouri, gun rights legislation typically has received bipartisan support. In 2003, the Republican-led Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Bob Holden’s veto of legislation legalizing concealed guns with the help of more than two dozen Democrats. That same year, Democrats helped Republicans to override another Holden veto of a bill limiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

“We love our guns and we love hunting. It’s not worth the fight for me to vote against it,” said Rep. T.J. McKenna, D-Festus. But, he added, “the bill is completely unconstitutional, so the courts are going to have to throw it out.”

McKenna was among 11 House Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the Missouri gun legislation in May, by a 116-38 vote. The bill cleared the Senate 26-6, with two Democrats supporting it. A veto override needs a two-thirds majority in both chambers, or 109 votes in the House and 23 in the Senate.

Republicans hold 24 Senate seats. Although Republicans currently hold 109 House seats, they’re down at least one of their own. Rep. Jay Barnes was the only Republican to vote against the original bill and said he opposes a veto override.

“Our Constitution is not a Chinese buffet, which we like and do not like,” the Jefferson City attorney told the AP. “The First Amendment is part of the Constitution that we must uphold. … (And) the supremacy clause means that states cannot criminalize the activities of agents of the federal government.”

If the rest of the Republicans stick together, and none are absent, that means they will need at least one Democratic vote to override the veto.

But so far, at least three House Democrats McKenna, Keith English of Florissant and Ben Harris of Hillsboro said they would support a veto override, and Democratic Rep. Jeff Roorda of Barnhart said he was leaning toward it.

“Being a rural-area Democrat, if you don’t vote for any gun bill, it will kill you,” Harris said. “That’s what the Republicans want you to do is vote against it, because if you vote against it, they’ll send one mailer every week just blasting you about guns, and you’ll lose” re-election.

Four other Democrats who voted for the bill told the AP they were now undecided. At least one of the original Democratic “yes” votes Rep. Steve Hodges, of East Prairie said he would switch to a “no.”

This year’s vetoed gun bill is entitled the “Second Amendment Preservation Act” a label that some Democrats said makes it politically risky to oppose.

Democratic Rep. Ed Schieffer, who proclaims himself “100 percent pro-gun,” said he voted for the bill in May with an eye toward a potential 2014 state Senate campaign against Republican Rep. Jeanie Riddle, of Mokane, who also supported the bill. Schieffer, of Troy, said he is undecided whether to support a veto override.

“I personally believe that any higher court will probably rule this particular gun law unconstitutional on that, I probably agree that the governor’s right,” Schieffer said. “But I may end up still voting for the gun bill, because I don’t want to be on record for not supporting guns.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source

Missouri to nullify federal firearm laws while Obama offers new gun control measures

Published time: August 29, 2013 21:49

As the White House rolls out new plans meant to curb violent gun crime in America, residents in the state of Missouri may soon be able to bypass federal firearm laws.

United States Vice President Joe Biden announced additional steps on Thursday that the Obama administration will move forward with as part of a gun-control initiative ramped-up following last year’s mass shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school. At the same time, however, the Republican-controlled state legislature in Missouri is on the verge of defying both the governor and the US Constitution by pushing forward a bill that will prohibit local authorities from enacting federal gun laws.

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed Republican-authored legislation last month that would make it a misdemeanor for the feds to attempt to enforce any federal gun regulations that “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms.” Despite shutting down the bill, however, lawmakers are expected to override his veto in the coming days and let the measure go on the books.

If passed, the law will also force journalists who publish identifying information about gun owners to pay a $1,000 fine and spend a year in jail. Gov. Nixon said it could start a precedent that would erode some First Amendment rights for the media if his veto is rejected.

In a letter to the New York Times, Nixon said the bill would make it a crime for a local newspaper to publish “photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer.” According to some estimates, however, local lawmakers will likely make it impossible for the law to be vetoed anytime soon.

When the bill was originally passed in the State House, 108 of the 109 Republicans voted in favor of it, as did 11 Democrats. In the Senate, the Times reported, two-dozen Republicans and 2 Democrats signed on in support. In order for the veto to be rejected, the legislature will need 109 votes from the House and 23 from the Senate.

State Representative T. J. McKenna (D-Festus) told the Times he voted for the bill even though he doesn’t favor it because the repercussions could have been dastardly.

“If you just Google my name, it’s all over the place about what a big coward I am,” he told the paper. “I can’t be Mr. Liberal, St. Louis wannabe,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Just go against all my constituents?”

Speaking to Fox News, McKenna added that the bill would violate constitutional law and will likely be thrown out, even if the veto override receives enough votes.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is hoping he can advance reformed gun rules on a federal level that, if the Missouri legislature has its way, will be null and void in The Show-Me State—until, of course, a court intervenes and opines otherwise.

Months after the White House announced plans to reform laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting, Biden on Thursday said the administration is looking to tackle firearm crime by launching two new front lines in their war against guns. The vice president proposed a White House plan to stop letting military weapons be re-sold to people in the US or allied countries, as well as another that would close down a loophole that currently lets Americans who are ineligible to own a firearm bypass restrictions by registering weapons in the name of a corporation or trust.

"It's simple, it's straightforward, it's common sense," Biden said.

Obama unveils modest new restrictions on some guns

Source

Obama unveils modest new restrictions on some guns

By Josh Lederman Associated Press Thu Aug 29, 2013 10:41 PM

WASHINGTON — Months after gun control efforts crumbled in Congress, Vice President Joe Biden stood shoulder-to-shoulder Thursday with the attorney general and the top U.S. firearms official and declared the Obama administration would take two new steps to curb American gun violence.

But the narrow, modest scope of those steps served as pointed reminders that without congressional backing, President Barack Obama’s capacity to make a difference is severely inhibited.

Still, Biden renewed a pledge from him and the president to seek legislative fixes to keep guns from those who shouldn’t have them — a pledge with grim prospects for fulfillment amid the current climate on Capitol Hill.

“If Congress won’t act, we’ll fight for a new Congress,” Biden said in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. “It’s that simple. But we’re going to get this done.”

One new policy will bar military-grade weapons that the U.S. sells or donates to allies from being imported back into the U.S. by private entities. In the last eight years, the U.S. has approved 250,000 of those guns to come back to the U.S., the White House said, arguing that some end up on the streets. From now on, only museums and a few other entities like the government will be eligible to reimport military-grade firearms.

The ban will largely affect antiquated, World War II-era weapons that, while still deadly, rarely turn up at crime scenes, leaving some to question whether the new policy is much ado about nothing.

“Banning these rifles because of their use in quote-unquote crimes is like banning Model Ts because so many of them are being used as getaway cars in bank robberies,” said Ed Woods, a 47-year-old from the Chico area of Northern California.

Woods said he collects such guns because of their unique place in American history. He now wonders whether he’ll be prohibited from purchasing the type of M1 Garand rifle his father used during World War II. The U.S. later sold thousands of the vintage rifles to South Korea.

“Someday my kids will have something that possibly their grandfather, who they never had a chance to meet, is connected to,” Woods said in an interview.

Charles Heller, who lobbies for gun rights in Arizona on behalf of the Arizona Citizens Defense League, called the new regulation “another tempest in a teapot.”

“These (guns) are relics,” Heller said. “They are used in service-rifle competitions and kept in collections. They are bought by the exact people who aren’t going to do something wrong.”

The Obama administration is also proposing to close a loophole that it says allows felons and other ineligible gun purchasers to skirt the law by registering certain guns to a corporation or trust. The new rule would require people associated with those entities, like beneficiaries and trustees, to undergo the same type of fingerprint-based background checks before the corporation can register those guns.

Using the rule-making powers at his disposal, Obama can place that restriction only on guns regulated under the National Firearm Act, a 1934 law that only deals with the deadliest weapons, like machine guns and short-barreled shotguns. For the majority of weapons, there is no federal gun registration.

“It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it’s common sense,” Biden said of the measures he unveiled Thursday as he swore in Obama’s new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Todd Jones.

But Heller said gun buyers typically don’t set up trusts or corporations to avoid background checks. He said they are established to allow multiple people, often family members, to use or inherit a weapon legally.

ATF already conducts thorough checks on anyone purchasing that class of weapon, he said.

“This means absolutely nothing,” he said. “It’s a red herring meant to make people think they are doing something.”

The quick reproach from gun-control opponents, however, underscored that the same forces that thwarted gun control efforts in Congress have far from mellowed on the notion of stricter gun laws in the future.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., accused the president of governing only by executive action while failing to sufficiently enforce gun laws already on the books. And the National Rifle Association called on Obama to stop focusing his efforts on inhibiting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

“The Obama administration has once again completely missed the mark when it comes to stopping violent crime,” said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam.

But proponents of gun control called them important steps to keep military-grade weapons out of American communities and plug a deadly hole in the background check system.

“It’s time for Congress to stop dragging its feet and pass common-sense reforms that keep criminals and the dangerously mentally ill from illegally buying guns,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in a joint statement.

There are few signs the calculus in Congress has changed dramatically since April, when a package of measures including expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban flopped in the Senate despite intense advocacy by families of the 20 children and six adults gunned down in December in Newtown, Conn.

Republic reporter Alia Beard Rau contributed to this article.

Military has deep doubts about wisdom of striking Syria

U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria

Hey it's not about protecting American from bad guys, it's about Emperor Obama proving he is a real Emperor. Just like Emperor Bush!!!!

Remember wanna be Emperor John McCain singing "Bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boy's song "Barbara Ann". In addition to being a clone of Emperor Bush, President Obama is also a clone of John McCain

Source

U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria

By Ernesto Londoño, Published: August 29

The Obama administration’s plan to launch a military strike against Syria is being received with serious reservations by many in the U.S. military, which is coping with the scars of two lengthy wars and a rapidly contracting budget, according to current and former officers.

Having assumed for months that the United States was unlikely to intervene militarily in Syria, the Defense Department has been thrust onto a war footing that has made many in the armed services uneasy, according to interviews with more than a dozen military officers ranging from captains to a four-star general.

Former and current officers, many with the painful lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds, said the main reservations concern the potential unintended consequences of launching cruise missiles against Syria.

Some questioned the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggested that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to fundamentalist rebels, they said, the military objective of strikes on Assad’s military targets is at best ambiguous.

“There’s a broad naivete in the political class about America’s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve,” said retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the run-up to the Iraq war, noting that many of his contemporaries are alarmed by the plan.

New cycle of attacks?

Marine Lt. Col. Gordon Miller, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, warned this week of “potentially devastating consequences, including a fresh round of chemical weapons attacks and a military response by Israel.”

“If President [Bashar al-Assad] were to absorb the strikes and use chemical weapons again, this would be a significant blow to the United States’ credibility and it would be compelled to escalate the assault on Syria to achieve the original objectives,” Miller wrote in a commentary for the think tank.

A National Security Council spokeswoman said Thursday she would not discuss “internal deliberations.” White House officials reiterated Thursday that the administration is not contemplating a protracted military engagement.

Still, many in the military are skeptical. Getting drawn into the Syrian war, they fear, could distract the Pentagon in the midst of a vexing mission: its exit from Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are still being killed regularly. A young Army officer who is wrapping up a year-long tour there said soldiers were surprised to learn about the looming strike, calling the prospect “very dangerous.”

“I can’t believe the president is even considering it,” said the officer, who like most officers interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because military personnel are reluctant to criticize policymakers while military campaigns are being planned. “We have been fighting the last 10 years a counterinsurgency war. Syria has modern weaponry. We would have to retrain for a conventional war.”

Dempsey’s warning

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned in great detail about the risks and pitfalls of U.S. military intervention in Syria.

“As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome,” Dempsey wrote last month in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

Dempsey has not spoken publicly about the administration’s planned strike on Syria, and it is unclear to what extent his position shifted after last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack. Dempsey said this month in an interview with ABC News that the lessons of Iraq weigh heavily on his calculations regarding Syria.

“It has branded in me the idea that the use of military power must be part of an overall strategic solution that includes international partners and a whole of government,” he said in the Aug. 4 interview. “The application of force rarely produces and, in fact, maybe never produces the outcome we seek.”

The recently retired head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. James Mattis, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full-throated, very, very serious war,” said Mattis, who as Centcom chief oversaw planning for a range of U.S. military responses in Syria.

The potential consequences of a U.S. strike include a retaliatory attack by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — which supports Assad — on Israel, as well as cyberattacks on U.S. targets and infrastructure, U.S. military officials said.

“What is the political end state we’re trying to achieve?” said a retired senior officer involved in Middle East operational planning who said his concerns are widely shared by active-duty military leaders. “I don’t know what it is. We say it’s not regime change. If it’s punishment, there are other ways to punish.” The former senior officer said that those who are expressing alarm at the risks inherent in the plan “are not being heard other than in a pro-forma manner.”

President Obama said in a PBS interview on Wednesday that he is not contemplating a lengthy engagement, but instead “limited, tailored approaches.”

A retired Central Command officer said the administration’s plan would “gravely disappoint our allies and accomplish little other than to be seen as doing something.”

“It will be seen as a half measure by our allies in the Middle East,” the officer said. “Iran and Syria will portray it as proof that the U.S. is unwilling to defend its interests in the region.”

Still, some within the military, while apprehensive, support striking Syria. W. Andrew Terrill, a Middle East expert at the U.S. Army War College, said the limited history of the use of chemical weapons in the region suggests that a muted response from the West can be dangerous.

“There is a feeling as you look back that if you don’t stand up to chemical weapons, they’re going to take it as a green light and use them on a recurring basis,” he said.

An Army lieutenant colonel said the White House has only bad options but should resist the urge to abort the plan now.

“When a president draws a red line, for better or worse, it’s policy,” he said, referring to Obama’s declaration last year about Syria’s potential use of chemical weapons. “It cannot appear to be scared or tepid. Remember, with respect to policy choices concerning Syria, we are discussing degrees of bad and worse.”

NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks

NSA didn't hack into your personal ATT phone account, ATT voluntarily gave NSA all the data they have on you!!! Well after NSA gave them some cold hard cash!!!

Source

NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks

By Craig Timberg and Barton Gellman, Published: August 29

The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

Voluntary cooperation from the “backbone” providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June, under which American technology companies hand over customer data after receiving orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In briefing slides, the NSA described BLARNEY and three other corporate projects — OAKSTAR, FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW — under the heading of “passive” or “upstream” collection. They capture data as they move across fiber-optic cables and the gateways that direct global communications traffic.

The documents offer a rare view of a secret surveillance economy in which government officials set financial terms for programs capable of peering into the lives of almost anyone who uses a phone, computer or other device connected to the Internet.

Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.

“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”

Verizon, AT&T and other major telecommunications companies declined to comment for this article, although several industry officials noted that government surveillance laws explicitly call for companies to receive reasonable reimbursement for their costs.

Previous news reports have made clear that companies frequently seek such payments, but never before has their overall scale been disclosed.

The budget documents do not list individual companies, although they do break down spending among several NSA programs, listed by their code names.

There is no record in the documents obtained by The Post of money set aside to pay technology companies that provide information to the NSA’s PRISM program. That program is the source of 91 percent of the 250 million Internet communications collected through Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes PRISM and the upstream programs, according to an 2011 opinion and order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Several of the companies that provide information to PRISM, including Apple, Facebook and Google, say they take no payments from the government when they comply with national security requests. Others say they do take payments in some circumstances. The Guardian reported last week that the NSA had covered “millions of dollars” in costs that some technology companies incurred to comply with government demands for information.

Telecommunications companies generally do charge to comply with surveillance requests, which come from state, local and federal law enforcement officials as well as intelligence agencies.

Former telecommunications executive Paul Kouroupas, a security officer who worked at Global Crossing for 12 years, said that some companies welcome the revenue and enter into contracts in which the government makes higher payments than otherwise available to firms receiving re­imbursement for complying with surveillance orders.

These contractual payments, he said, could cover the cost of buying and installing new equipment, along with a reasonable profit. These voluntary agreements simplify the government’s access to surveillance, he said.

“It certainly lubricates the [surveillance] infrastructure,” Kouroupas said. He declined to say whether Global Crossing, which operated a fiber-optic network spanning several continents and was bought by Level 3 Communications in 2011, had such a contract. A spokesman for Level 3 Communications declined to comment.

In response to questions in 2012 from then-Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who was elected to the Senate in June, several telecommunications companies detailed their prices for surveillance services to law enforcement agencies under individual warrants and subpoenas. AT&T, for example, reported that it charges $325 to activate surveillance of an account and also a daily rate of $5 or $10, depending on the information gathered. For providing the numbers that have accessed cell towers, meanwhile, AT&T charged $75 per tower, the company said in a letter.

No payments have been previously disclosed for mass surveillance access to traffic flowing across a company’s infrastructure.

Lawyer Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents technology and telecommunications companies, said that surveillance efforts are expensive, requiring teams of attorneys to sift through requests and execute the ones deemed reasonable. Government agencies, meanwhile, sometimes balk at paying the full costs incurred by companies

“They lose a ton of money,” Gidari said. “And yet the government is still unsatisfied with it.”

The budget documents obtained by The Post list $65.96 million for BLARNEY, $94.74 million for FAIRVIEW, $46.04 million for STORMBREW and $9.41 million for OAKSTAR. It is unclear why the total of these four programs amounts to less than the overall budget of $278 million.

Among the possible costs covered by these amounts are “network and circuit leases, equipment hardware and software maintenance, secure network connectivity, and covert site leases,” the documents say. They also list in a separate line item $56.6 million in payments for “Foreign Partner Access,” although it is not clear whether these are for foreign companies, foreign governments or other foreign entities.

Some privacy advocates favor payments to companies when they comply with surveillance efforts because the costs can be a brake on overly broad requests by government officials. Invoices also can provide a paper trail to help expose the extent of spying.

But if the payments are too high, they may persuade companies to go beyond legal requirements in providing information, said Chris Soghoian, a technology expert with the American Civil Liberties Union who has studied government payments related to surveillance requests.

“I’m worried that the checks might grease the wheels a little bit,” he said.

Shamed into war?

Shamed into war?

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: August 29

Having leaked to the world, and thus to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a detailed briefing of the coming U.S. air attack on Syria — (1) the source (offshore warships and perhaps a bomber or two), (2) the weapon (cruise missiles), (3) the duration (two or three days), (4) the purpose (punishment, not “regime change”) — perhaps we should be publishing the exact time the bombs will fall, lest we disrupt dinner in Damascus.

So much for the element of surprise. Into his third year of dithering, two years after declaring Assad had to go, one year after drawing — then erasing — his own red line on chemical weapons, Barack Obama has been stirred to action.

Or more accurately, shamed into action. Which is the worst possible reason. A president doesn’t commit soldiers to a war for which he has zero enthusiasm. Nor does one go to war for demonstration purposes.

Want to send a message? Call Western Union. A Tomahawk missile is for killing. A serious instrument of war demands a serious purpose.

The purpose can be either punitive or strategic: either a spasm of conscience that will inflame our opponents yet leave not a trace, or a considered application of abundant American power to alter the strategic equation that is now heavily favoring our worst enemies in the heart of the Middle East.

There are risks to any attack. Blowback terror from Syria and its terrorist allies. Threatened retaliation by Iran or Hezbollah on Israel — that could lead to a guns-of-August regional conflagration. Moreover, a mere punitive pinprick after which Assad emerges from the smoke intact and emboldened would demonstrate nothing but U.S. weakness and ineffectiveness.

In 1998, after al-Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, Bill Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into empty tents in Afghanistan. That showed ’em.

It did. It showed terminal unseriousness. Al-Qaeda got the message. Two years later, the USS Cole. A year after that, 9/11.

Yet even Clinton gathered the wherewithal to launch a sustained air campaign against Serbia. That wasn’t a mere message. That was a military strategy designed to stop the Serbs from ravaging Kosovo. It succeeded.

If Obama is planning a message-sending three-day attack, preceded by leaks telling the Syrians to move their important military assets to safety, better that he do nothing. Why run the considerable risk if nothing important is changed?

The only defensible action would be an attack with a strategic purpose, a sustained campaign aimed at changing the balance of forces by removing the Syrian regime’s decisive military advantage — air power.

Of Assad’s 20 air bases, notes retired Gen. Jack Keane, six are primary. Attack them: the runways, the fighters, the helicopters, the fuel depots, the nearby command structures. Render them inoperable.

We don’t need to take down Syria’s air defense system, as we did in Libya. To disable air power, we can use standoff systems — cruise missiles fired from ships offshore and from aircraft loaded with long-range, smart munitions that need not overfly Syrian territory.

Depriving Assad of his total control of the air and making resupply from Iran and Russia far more difficult would alter the course of the war. That is a serious purpose.

Would the American people support it? They are justifiably war-weary and want no part of this conflict. And why should they? In three years, Obama has done nothing to prepare the country for such a serious engagement. Not one speech. No explanation of what’s at stake.

On the contrary. Last year Obama told us repeatedly that the tide of war is receding. This year, he grandly declared that the entire war on terror “must end.” If he wants Tomahawks to fly, he’d better have a good reason, tell it to the American people and get the support of their representatives in Congress, the way George W. Bush did for both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

It’s rather shameful that while the British prime minister recalled Parliament to debate possible airstrikes — late Thursday, Parliament actually voted down British participation — Obama has made not a gesture in that direction.

If you are going to do this, Mr. President, do it constitutionally. And seriously. This is not about you and your conscience. It’s about applying American power to do precisely what you now deny this is about — helping Assad go, as you told the world he must.

Otherwise, just send Assad a text message. You might incur a roaming charge, but it’s still cheaper than a three-day, highly telegraphed, perfectly useless demonstration strike.

Napolitano wants to create jobs program for cyber cops????

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Source

Napolitano urges successor to prepare for cyber attack

By Erin Kelly Gannett Washington Bureau Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:22 AM

WASHINGTON - Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that her successor must act quickly to prepare for a major cyber attack.

"Our country will, at some point, face a major cyber event that will have a serious effect on our lives, our economy, and the everyday functioning of our society," Napolitano warned during her farewell address at the National Press Club.

"While we have built systems, protections and a framework to identify attacks and intrusions, share information with the private sector and across government, and develop plans and capabilities to mitigate the damage, more must be done, and quickly," she said.

Napolitano, who was Arizona's governor before serving as homeland security secretary for the last four and a half years, is leaving to become head of the University of California system.

She said her successor, who has not yet been chosen, also may face more natural disasters. The Department of Homeland Security includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which brings aid to communities when there are hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other major disasters.

"You also will have to prepare for the increasing likelihood of more weather-related events of a more severe nature as a result of climate change, and continue to build the capacity to respond to potential disasters in far flung regions of the country occurring at the same time," Napolitano said in what she called "an open letter" to the next secretary.

She said her replacement will have to continue to lead the massive department through tough fiscal times, including the impact of the automatic budget cuts imposed on federal agencies by Congress.

The department, created a decade ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, includes FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications.

Napolitano said the job is stressful and she advised the next secretary that, "You will need a large bottle of Advil." But she also said the job is one of the most rewarding in Washington.

"What you do here matters to the lives of people all across our great nation, and your decisions affect them in direct, tangible ways," she said. "You make sure their families are safe from terrorist threats, that their local first responders have equipment and training and funding, and that when disaster strikes, people who have lost everything are given food, shelter, and hope."

She credited the department's 240,000 employees with helping her lead the agency through the swine flu pandemic, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, drug cartel violence along the Southwest border, and numerous terrorist plots and threats including the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon in April.

During Napolitano's tenure, the agency managed 325 federally declared disasters, including Hurricance Sandy, the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history.

"Looking back over the past four and a half years, I can say that if there is one take-away, one object lesson and core operating principle that I've learned and embraced as secretary, it is this: in a world of evolving threats, the key to our success is the ability to be flexible and agile, and adapt to changing circumstances on the ground -- whether that is across the globe, or here at home," Napolitano said.

Among her unfinished business is immigration reform.

Napolitano touted her department's efforts to strengthen border security and her policy to focus efforts on catching and deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records. She also defended a controversial program that stopped the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought here as children. That program, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, gives young immigrants who meet certain criteria a two-year provisional legal status to remain in the United States.

"In just its first year, over half-a-million individuals have requested deferred action, and after a thorough review of each of those cases, including a background check, 430,000 requests have already been approved, allowing these young people to continue to contribute to the country they call home," Napolitano said.

But she said a more permanent solution is needed for them and for all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

"DACA, of course, is no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform, which is the only way to face the longstanding problems with our immigration system," she said.

Contact Erin Kelly at ekelly@gannett.com

Obama should get Congress’ OK

Obama should get Congress’ OK

The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 29, 2013 7:56 PM

Even before the start of his second term, President Barack Obama made clear that he and Congress essentially had parted ways.

On virtually every significant domestic policy, be it health care, environmental enforcement, energy or social welfare, Obama is pursuing initiatives through the bureaucracy he controls rather than the balky, uncooperative legislative branch he does not.

An attack on Syria is not a matter of domestic policy.

And, like it or not, Obama owes it to the American people to make his case publicly before Congress as to why this nation’s best interests lie in going to war with Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime, however limited and temporary that war may be.

Consulting with Congress and securing a vote of affirmation from lawmakers may not be an experience at the top of Obama’s to-do list.

But George H.W. Bush likely did not relish the experience in 1991 prior to gaining congressional approval of the invasion of Kuwait.

And, likewise, George W. Bush in 2003 prior to his invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Obama can and should do as much.

Yes, history is full of examples of presidents acting unilaterally as commander in chief. But in virtually all latter-day cases — including President Bill Clinton’s bombing campaign to save Muslim refugees from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo — the chief executives made their choices based on an urgent need to act and with a reasonable expectation that the action could achieve its intended goal.

Obama needs to explain to Congress — and, in the process, the country — why committing U.S. troops and materiel to the Syrian civil war is in the nation’s best interest.

The administration’s rough outline of engagement — cruise missiles delivered over two or three days — does not inspire much confidence that the mission is intended to achieve anything other than fulfilling Obama’s Dec. 2, 2012, declaration that if Assad began exterminating his people with chemical weapons, “there will be consequences, and you will be held accountable.”

Even that declaration is rife with ambiguity. Also last year, Obama said Assad chemically mass-murdering his own people “would change my calculus.” He did not say to what.

The president needs to explain why a 2-year-old butchery that has claimed perhaps 100,000 Syrian lives now is different because the butcher is wielding a more menacing cleaver.

Further, he needs to explain what difference launching those cruise missiles will make, both in terms of American interests and Syrian lives.

Obama is frustrated with a Congress that he sees as paralyzed with partisan intransigence. In many respects, that frustration is understandable. Regarding the approaching Syrian conflict, much less so.

On Wednesday, 116 House members, including 18 Democrats, signed a letter “strongly” urging the president “to consult and receive authorization from Congress before ordering the use of U.S. military force in Syria.”

Obama, of all people, should not need to be reminded of the folly of ignoring contrarian voices before marching off headlong into foreign conflicts.

White House releases report on Syria chemical attack

I believe that attack was on the Branch Davidians who lived in the Mount Carmel Center which was burnt to the ground by the FBI and BATF attack in attempt to arrest their leader David Koresh on some trivial weapons charges.

Source

White House releases report on Syria chemical attack

By Aamer Madhani USA Today Fri Aug 30, 2013 11:49 AM

WASHINGTON--Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the U.S. has evidence the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, as the White House released a four-page report summarizing their case against the Bashar Assad regime.

Kerry said the administration is releasing an intelligence report today laying out their evidence. Proving this allegation is considered a threshold that the U.S. would use to justify a potential military strike on that country.

"I'm not asking you to take my word for it," Kerry said. "Read for yourselves the verdict reached by our intelligence community" that the government of Syria was responsible for the attack.

The intelligence community believes with "high confidence" that Assad government used chemical weapons in Damascus suburbs based on human sources as well as intercepts of conversations by senior Syrian officials, according to the report and Kerry.

With the release of the unclassified intelligence report and a telephone briefing for lawmakers on Thursday evening, the White House looked to bolster the case for taking action against Assad even as objections to a military strike continue to mount in the U.S. and with the nation's closest ally, Britain, to taking military action.

Obama was also given a bolt of international backing on Friday, when President François Hollande of France on Friday announced his support for international military action against the Syrian government.

On Thursday, the British parliament voted to reject taking military action in Syria, even the government published an intelligence document that detailed how it concluded the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical attacks on the outskirts of Damascus last week.

Obama still has not on announced whether he will take action for the Aug. 21 attack, which the U.S. government says killed 1,429, including more than 400 children.

"The primary question is no longer what do we know," Kerry said. "It is what are we in the world going to do about it?"

A war with Syria to save face

Source

A war with Syria to save face

Apparently the United States is going to go to war, at least sort of, with Syria.

That’s not because Syria has attacked the United States, because it hasn’t.

It’s not because the United States believes that it has strategic interests at stake in Syria’s civil war that warrant military intervention. If that were the case, we would have already taken action.

And it’s not really out of humanitarian concern with what’s going on in Syria’s civil war, although that will be the rhetorical cloak with which we don our military action. If we were truly acting out of humanitarian concern, we would have intervened tens of thousands of civilian deaths ago.

Instead, we are going to war with Syria because the President of the United States said that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would change his “calculus” regarding involvement and Syrian strongman Bashar Assad has apparently made such egregious use of them that it can no longer be ignored.

In other words, we are going to war with Syria to save face.

Supposedly, the United States now has to take action because if we don’t, our subsequent threats won’t be taken seriously by other powers.

It’s already too late for that. The reluctance of the Obama administration to take action even after the president’s red line was crossed is transparent and obvious to all. Unless the military action is large enough to result in Assad’s ouster, which doesn’t appear to be in the offing, the rest of the world will continue to significantly discount the Obama administration’s bluster.

The Middle East is on fire. The Syrian civil war is lapping over into Lebanon and Jordan. Egypt is wretched politically and economically.

The places where the United States has previously intervened militarily are hardly oases of stability. Afghanistan appears likely to revert to rule by local warlords. Renewed sectarian violence is breaking out in Iraq. Libya is a place where a U.S. ambassador was killed by jihadists and has become an arms depot for jihadists throughout the region.

The argument is made that the Arab Spring went bad and the Middle East is on fire because the Obama administration retreated from involvement in the multitude of conflicts going on there. Think through the implications of that claim.

According to this line of thinking, the United States should have sufficient troops stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to ensure relative peace and security in each country.

We should have picked which Syrian rebels to back and given them the firepower to knock off Assad. Although whether we should have supported the factions backed by Saudi Arabia or those supported by Turkey and Qatar, which are different, isn’t clear.

And the United States should have somehow bullied the Muslim Brotherhood to govern more inclusively in Egypt or the military not to engage in a coup.

A more grounded understanding of U.S. interests in the Middle East begins with accepting that we have no true allies in the region except for Israel.

Is the House of Saud our ally? Saudi Arabia promotes a radical strand of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the world. Wahhabism often spawns jihadist movements. Jihadi terrorism gets important financial support from Saudi sources.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most despotic regimes in the world, including religious intolerance and persecution. The principal difference between the House of Saud and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t really religious and certainty isn’t relative commitment to democratic capitalism. It’s that the Brotherhood doesn’t believe in hereditary monarchies. And that’s a fight the United States should get in the middle of?

We have no true allies. There is not even a semi-clear path to peace and stability in the region. And even if there were, there’s not much the United States could do to steer regional powers toward it.

It’s hard to see how a war to save face is a meaningful step in any right direction.

Praise MLK, then bomb Syria

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema supports bombing Syria

From this I suspect that Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema now supports Emperor Obama's suspected plan to bomb Syria.

"Reps. Ron Barber, Ed Pastor, Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema said they would wait for information from the White House before passing judgment"

I know the local Arizona anti-war folks have already sent out emails asking people to protest the suspect plan of Emperor Obama to bomb Syria. Why's isn't Kyrsten Sinema on that bandwagon???

I suspect Kyrsten Sinema now supports the military industrial complex because she is not denouncing President Obama's plan to bomb Syria.

Source

Arizona lawmakers unconvinced for motivation for Syria attack

By Rebekah L. Sanders and Erin Kelly The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 30, 2013 10:37 PM

As President Barack Obama’s administration attempted Friday to build a stronger case to Congress and the American public for “limited” U.S. military intervention in Syria, it was met with reluctance from some lawmakers, including members of Arizona’s delegation.

Arizona House members said they remained skeptical of the case for intervention without more detail from the White House. They continued to demand that the president seek approval from Congress before ordering a military strike.

Members on both sides of the aisle questioned whether Obama’s motive for intervening now, two years after the civil war began and an estimated 100,000 deaths later, is to “save face.” The president previously declared the use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line” that would require American action. The White House says it has evidence chemical weapons were used against civilians.

Obama said Friday that he was not considering “any open-ended commitment” and would not put “boots on the ground.”

Among Arizona’s representatives in Washington, only U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called for a more severe response than it appears the president is contemplating.

In a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., McCain called for military action that would “take out Assad’s air power, ballistic missiles, command and control, and other significant military targets” in an effort to “shift the balance of power on the battlefield” against Syrian President Bashar Assad and his forces.

The senators expressed concern that the Obama administration’s response to the alleged atrocity won’t “be equal to the gravity of the crime itself and the U.S. national-security interests at stake in Syria.”

“The purpose of military action in Syria should not be to help the president save face. It should not be merely cosmetic,” said McCain and Graham, who both sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

McCain was unavailable to speak with The Republic because he was in Los Angeles to appear on “The Tonight Show.”

The debate comes as U.S. officials announced Friday that hey are confident the Syrian regime deployed chemical weapons last week in opposition-controlled or contested areas near Damascus, killing more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of women and children.

In the strongest terms yet, Secretary of State John Kerry said the evidence is clear and there is no need to wait for U.N. investigators to finish evaluating the situation.

“Our concern is not just about some far-off land oceans away,” Kerry said from the Treaty Room at the State Department. “Our concern with the cause of the defenseless people of Syria is about choices that will directly affect our role in the world and our interests in the world. ...

“(W)e need to ask, ‘What is the risk of doing nothing?’ ”

Kerry said the administration is “mindful” of the public’s fear of repeating the experience of Iraq, when faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction led President George W. Bush to order attacks and launch the country into a decade of war.

“We will not repeat that moment,” Kerry said, noting that the White House had taken “unprecedented moves” to inform the public by releasing an unclassified report by American intelligence analysts on the chemical attacks in Syria.

But Arizona’s U.S. House members, who are home on recess until Sept. 9, said they wanted more information.

Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., who was briefed by White House staff Friday in a conference call with other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he remains “skeptical” about the call to intervene in Syria. Most House members have not received personal briefings.

“I repeat my call to President Obama to specifically detail his ultimate objectives and strategy for engaging further in the ongoing Syrian conflict,” Salmon said in a statement. “(The president should) clearly identify his goals and what he constitutes as victory in Syria before the United States moves forward with military intervention.”

Fellow Republican Rep. Paul Gosar took the strongest stance against intervention. Contrary to the administration’s argument, Gosar said, there is “no U.S. interest at stake.”

He called attention to Obama’s past opposition to military intervention in Iraq.

“President Obama should listen to Senator Obama, who understood no president could authorize unilateral military action without an actual and imminent threat to our country,” Gosar said in a statement.

Republican Rep. David Schweikert repeated the demand that the president seek congressional approval before moving forward. More than 100 lawmakers, including Arizona’s four GOP members, signed a letter underlining that demand.

Democrats said they, too, were skeptical, but took a more measured tone.

Reps. Ron Barber, Ed Pastor, Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema said they would wait for information from the White House before passing judgment.

“Nobody wants to rush into it,” Pastor said in an interview, arguing that the president should wait until Congress returns. “I don’t want to send a bunch of missiles over there and we end up in a worse situation than before.”

Pastor, a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he questions why the president wants to act now. “(Thousands of) people were killed by bullets and bombs and shrapnel, and that wasn’t enough for us to go in and do something,” he said. “The question I have for the administration is: ‘Is it a political reason? A saving-face reason? Is it a moral reason?’”

Kirkpatrick said, “It’s critical that Congress is closely consulted and the American people are properly informed.”

Republican Rep. Trent Franks, usually an outspoken voice on national-security issues and the Middle East, did not respond to a request for comment. Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva did not respond.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said through his press secretary that he was withholding comment until he received a briefing from the administration today.

Republic reporter Dan Nowicki contributed to this article.

Sinema visits Arizona troops in Afghanistan

Source

Sinema visits Arizona troops in Afghanistan

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Aug 31, 2013 10:51 PM

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., spent three days last week in Afghanistan as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation to visit troops and learn about the U.S. military drawdown.

The one-time anti-war protester said she wanted to personally thank the men and women in uniform for their sacrifices. She pledged to help veterans transition once they return home.

“Sometimes when troops are overseas working these incredibly long hours in a difficult situation, they’re not always hearing how much they’re appreciated,” Sinema said in an interview Friday after a multiple-leg journey back to Phoenix. “As you know, I did not support the United States’ engagement in Iraq and have long had concerns about Afghanistan. ... But I obviously have always been 100 percent supportive of our military.”

Over meals and at briefings at various bases and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Sinema said she met Arizona service members who, in some cases, were serving their sixth tour of duty.

One of five House lawmakers on the trip, Sinema was the only member not on the Armed Services or Homeland Security committees. But the freshman Democrat said she began lobbying to go to Afghanistan almost as soon as she was sworn in as a freshman this January. The arrangements were made by the Department of Defense and the State Department.

Sinema said the experience gave her additional perspective on the coalition forces’ role as advisers to the Afghan military and the country’s transition to local civilian control, expected to be completed by early 2014.

The trip brought to life debates on Capitol Hill, Sinema said: “Getting a PowerPoint briefing in Washington does not compare.”

One such issue was whether the U.S. should purchase Russian-built Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan forces instead of American-made Chinooks or Black Hawks. But Sinema said after talking with Afghan and U.S. staffers on the ground, she understood their argument that the Russian-made choppers are simpler to operate and maintain and more likely to be of lasting use to the Afghan National Security Force.

Sinema received criticism last year from Democratic and Republican opponents in the race for Arizona’s 9th Congressional District for her peace activism in the early 2000s. The district includes parts of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa and Chandler.

She countered by pointing to state legislation she worked on to help military families and noted that she has family members in the military, including brothers who are Marine Corps and Navy veterans. Military issues are sure to come up again in 2014, as one Republican running for her seat is Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot.

Sinema said Friday that she still remains wary of military action in some cases, including in Syria. She has called on the president to release more information about his objectives. But Sinema, who wrote her doctoral thesis on the Rwandan conflict and has studied humanitarian crises, said she has supported military intervention in some cases, such as in Sudan where she says it was clear genocide was occurring.

Sinema said she will support veterans issues in Congress. Her office said she has co-sponsored more than 40 veterans and military family bills, including legislation that would help eliminate the Department of Veterans Affairs’ administrative backlog.

Opponents of U.S. involvement in Syria arrested in Tempe

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema used to go to these demonstrations, but from the way she votes and acts it sounds like she has flipped sides and is now on the side of the military industrial complex.

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema also supports the police state and when she was an Arizona Legislator introduced a bill that would have flushed Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Source

Opponents of U.S. involvement in Syria arrested in Tempe

By Karen Schmidt The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Aug 31, 2013 10:27 PM

Three people protesting a possible U.S. intervention in the Syrian conflict were arrested Saturday night in Tempe, according to Tempe Police spokesman Greg Duarte.

Spokesman Mike Pooley said protesters were marching on Mill Avenue at around 8 p.m. when some were taken into custody. Charges, respectively, against the three protesters were: disorderly conduct, blocking a thoroughfare and disturbing a police horse, Pooley said.

"Right now we have several officers assisting us in trying to maintain a peaceful protest," Pooley said.

About 100 to 150 protesters marched, chanting "Hands off Syria." There were no reports of violence.

Layal Rabat, whose family is from Syria, was at the protest with her mother, aunt and uncle.

“We don’t want the United States to interfere with what’s happening in Syria and we don’t want to be led into another war," Rabat said. "The situation in Syria is very unclear.”

Rabat said protesters marched from Ash and University to Mill Avenue because it was a “heavily trafficked area” and “a good time to make people aware of the cause.”

"We have plenty of our own problems in the United States," protester Andrea Garcia said. "We don’t belong in any more foreign wars."

The local demonstration is one of many that have been held around the world and in the U.S. to protest possible U.S. intervention in Syria.

The Associated Press reported protests in London, Frankfurt, Germany and Jordan. Closer to home protests are planned in Boston and Houston, according to the AP. The latter city also is planning a protest in favor of the U.S. engaging in military action in Syria, according to the AP.

Manning seeks presidential pardon in leaks case

Source

Manning seeks presidential pardon in leaks case

By David Dishneau Associated Press Wed Sep 4, 2013 6:37 AM

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland — U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning is seeking a presidential pardon for leaking classified information that her lawyer says did not merit protection.

The Pvt. Manning Support Network released documents Wednesday that attorney David Coombs filed a day earlier with the U.S. Justice Department and the Department of the Army.

Manning, previously known as Bradley Manning, has declared her desire to live as a woman while serving a 35-year prison sentence.

In her petition for pardon and commutation of sentence, Manning writes: “The decisions I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in.”

Manning says she regrets if her actions caused harm.

The leaked material was given to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.

Jeff Flake a Libertarian? No Way!!!!!

Source

Flake, McCain criticize Obama over Syria delay

By Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Sep 3, 2013 10:11 PM

Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain on Tuesday criticized President Barack Obama for allowing Syria time to prepare for a U.S. attack as his administration seeks congressional approval for the military action.

During a more than three-hour hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the two Arizona Republicans questioned Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about plans for the military strike proposed Saturday by Obama. Flake and McCain both sit on the panel, which has primary jurisdiction over the resolution authorizing the use of military force sought by the president.

Flake noted that Obama did not seek congressional approval before taking military action in Libya in 2011 and, given the evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government has used chemical weapons against its own people, could have struck already in Syria, too.

Flake said Obama maintains he has the authority to take action against Syria with or without Congress and delaying an attack gives the Assad regime precious time to prepare.

“I think one would have to suspend disbelief to assume that we wouldn’t be better off attacking those targets right now, or a week ago, than waiting three weeks for Congress to take action,” Flake told Kerry.

Kerry responded that he “would far rather be playing our hand than his (Assad’s) at this point in time.”

U.S. military leaders have assured Obama that pausing while Congress debates the issue would not hurt the mission of degrading Assad’s chemical-weapons capabilities and could offer some advantages, such as giving Obama more time to explain the situation to the American public and work with international allies. He said the United States can adjust its military tactics to match any moves that Assad might make in the meantime.

“I think the president made a courageous decision to take the time to build the strength that makes America stronger by acting in unity with the United States Congress,” Kerry said.

In a more personal response to Flake, Kerry cited the Constitution, which in Article I gives Congress the power to declare war.

“It’s somewhat surprising to me that a member of Congress, particularly one on the Foreign Relations Committee, is going to question the president fulfilling the vision of the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution and divided power in foreign policy, to have the president come here and honor the original intent of the Founding Fathers in ways that do not do anything to detract from the mission itself,” Kerry told Flake.

Later in the hearing, McCain revisited the impact of the delay, mentioning a news report that said the Syrians already are hiding weapons and moving troops.

“When you tell the enemy you’re going to attack them, they’re obviously going to disperse and try to make it harder,” McCain told Kerry. “... It’s ridiculous to think that it’s not wise from a pure military standpoint not to warn the enemy that you’re going to attack.”

In an interview with The Arizona Republic after the hearing, Flake said he doesn’t buy the argument that Obama is following the Constitution, because he didn’t seek Congress’ approval prior to intervening in Libya. While the Syrians may not be able to move airfields and other fixed installations, they have time to take other steps such as redeploying assets into civilian neighborhoods, Flake said.

Overall, though, Flake said he agreed that the United States could lose credibility if it doesn’t back up Obama’s vow to respond to Assad’s crossing of the “red line” by using chemical weapons.

“Having said that, you can lose more credibility with a poorly structured response,” he said.

The hearing did yield one light moment: A Washington Post photographer captured an image of McCain playing poker on his iPhone during the Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

McCain later came clean on Twitter.

He tweeted: “Scandal! Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing — worst of all I lost!”

Drug agents secretly getting nearly instant access to AT&T files

Source

Drug agents secretly getting nearly instant access to AT&T files

By Gene Johnson and Eileen Sullivan Associated Press Tue Sep 3, 2013 9:23 AM

SEATTLE — For at least six years, federal drug and other agents have had near-immediate access to billions of phone-call records dating back decades in a collaboration with AT&T that officials have taken pains to keep secret, newly released documents show.

The program, called the Hemisphere Project, is paid for by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. It allows investigators armed with subpoenas to quickly mine the company’s vast database to help track down drug traffickers or other suspects who switch cellphones to avoid detection.

Details of the Hemisphere Project come amid a national debate about the federal government’s access to phone records, particularly the bulk collection of phone records for national-security purposes.

Hemisphere, however, takes a different approach from that of the National Security Agency, which maintains a database of call records handed over by phone companies as authorized by the USA Patriot Act.

“Subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations,” Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in an e-mail.

“The records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government. This program simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

The Associated Press independently obtained a series of slides detailing Hemisphere. They show the database includes not just records of AT&T customers, but of any call that passes through an AT&T switch.

The federal government pays the salaries of four AT&T employees who work in three federal anti-drug offices around the country to expedite subpoena requests, an Obama administration official told the AP on Monday.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he or she was not authorized to discuss the program, and said that two of the AT&T employees are based at the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area office in Atlanta, one at the HIDTA office in Houston, and one at the office in Los Angeles.

The Hemisphere database includes records that date back to 1987, the official said, but typical narcotics investigations focus on records no older than 18 months.

To keep the program secret, investigators who request searches of the database are instructed to “never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one of the slides noted.

Agents are told that when they obtain information through a Hemisphere program subpoena, they should “wall off” the program by filing a duplicative subpoena directly to the target’s phone company or by simply writing that the information was obtained through an AT&T subpoena.

It wasn’t immediately clear what percentage of U.S. calls are routed through AT&T switches and thus have records captured in Hemisphere. One slide says the program includes records “for a tremendous amount of international numbers that place calls through or roam on the AT&T network.”

“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said in an e-mail.

According to the slides, the program is useful for investigators trying to track down drug traffickers or other criminals who frequently change phones or use multiple phones. If agents become aware of a phone number previously used by a suspect, they can write an administrative subpoena, with no judicial oversight required, for records about that number.

Hemisphere analysts can track the number’s call history or other characteristics and compare it to the history and characteristics of phones still in use — thus winnowing down a list of possible current phone numbers for the suspect, along with their location.

“Hemisphere results can be returned via email within an hour of the subpoenaed request and include (call detail records) that are less than one hour old at the time of the search,” one slide said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the program raises several privacy concerns, including that if a query returns call records that are similar to, but not, those of the suspect, agents could be reviewing call records of people who haven’t done anything wrong.

“One of the points that occurred to me immediately is the very strong suspicion that there’s been very little judicial oversight of this program,” Rotenberg said. “The obvious question is: Who is determining whether these authorities have been properly used?”

Washington state peace activist Drew Hendricks provided the slides to the AP on Monday. He said he obtained them in response to a series of public-records requests he filed with West Coast police agencies, initially seeking information about a law-enforcement conference that had been held in Spokane, Wash.

In the Northwest, the DEA and Department of Homeland Security make most of the Hemisphere requests through administrative subpoenas, one slide noted. Since late last year, AT&T has also accepted requests by court orders from local police agencies in Washington state.

As of June, Hemisphere had processed 679 requests from the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. And since 2007, the Los Angeles Hemisphere program had processed more than 4,400 requests.

In connection with the controversy over the NSA’s sweeping up of call records, some lawmakers have suggested that phone companies store the records instead, and allow federal agents or analysts to request specific data when necessary.

“This way each query would require a specific government warrant before the FISA Court, and Americans would have more confidence that their privacy is being protected, while achieving the same national security results,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a July 31 statement.

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones

Source

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones

By Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman, Published: September 3 E-mail the writers

Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.

Although there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has forced a drone crash or interfered with flight operations, U.S. intelligence officials have closely tracked the group’s persistent efforts to develop a counterdrone strategy since 2010, the documents show.

Al-Qaeda commanders are hoping a technological breakthrough can curb the U.S. drone campaign, which has killed an estimated 3,000 people over the past decade. The airstrikes have forced ­al-Qaeda operatives and other militants to take extreme measures to limit their movements in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places. But the drone attacks have also taken a heavy toll on civilians, generating a bitter popular backlash against U.S. policies toward those countries.

Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor. The top-secret report, titled “Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” is a summary of dozens of intelligence assessments posted by U.S. spy agencies since 2006.

U.S. intelligence analysts noted in their assessments that information about drone operational systems is available in the public realm. But The Post is withholding some detailed portions of the classified material that could shed light on specific weaknesses of certain aircraft.

Under President Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, drones have revolutionized warfare and become a pillar of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism strategy, enabling the CIA and the military to track down enemies in some of the remotest parts of the planet. Drone strikes have left al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan scrambling to survive.

U.S. spy agencies have concluded that al-Qaeda faces “substantial” challenges in devising an effective way to attack drones, according to the top-secret report disclosed by Snowden. Still, U.S. officials and aviation experts acknowledge that unmanned aircraft have a weak spot: the satellite links and remote controls that enable pilots to fly them from thousands of miles away.

In July 2010, a U.S. spy agency intercepted electronic communications indicating that senior al-Qaeda leaders had distributed a “strategy guide” to operatives around the world advising them how “to anticipate and defeat” unmanned aircraft. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported that al-Qaeda was sponsoring simultaneous research projects to develop jammers to interfere with GPS signals and infrared tags that drone operators rely on to pinpoint missile targets.

Other projects in the works included the development of observation balloons and small radio-controlled aircraft, or hobby planes, which insurgents apparently saw as having potential for monitoring the flight patterns of U.S. drones, according to the report.

Al-Qaeda cell leaders in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan were “determining the practical application of technologies being developed for battlefield applications,” analysts from the DIA wrote. The analysts added that they believed al-Qaeda “cell leadership is tracking the progress of each project and can redirect components from one project to another.”

The technological vulnerabilities of drones are no secret. The U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board issued an unclassified report two years ago warning that “increasingly capable adversaries” in countries such as Afghanistan could threaten drone operations by inventing inexpensive countermeasures.

The board said insurgents might try to use “lasers and dazzlers” to render a drone ineffective by blinding its cameras and sensors. It also predicted that insurgents might use rudimentary acoustic receivers to detect drones and “simple jammer techniques” to interfere with navigation and communications.

Researchers have since proved that the threat is not just theoretical. Last year, a research team from the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated to the Department of Homeland Security that it was possible to commandeer a small civilian drone by “spoofing” its GPS signal with a ground transmitter and charting a different navigational course.

Trained engineers

Al-Qaeda has a long history of attracting trained engineers and others with a scientific background. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, holds a mechanical-engineering degree and is such an inveterate tinkerer that the CIA allowed him to fiddle around with new designs for a vacuum cleaner after he was captured a decade ago.

In 2010, the CIA noted in a secret report that al-Qaeda was placing special emphasis on the recruitment of technicians and that “the skills most in demand” included expertise in drones and missile technology. In July of that year, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, an al-Qaeda operations chief, told a jihadist Web site that the network did not need “ordinary fighters” and that it was looking instead for “specialist staff” to join the organization.

That same year, authorities in Turkey said they arrested an al-Qaeda member who was developing plans to shoot down small NATO surveillance drones in Afghanistan. The suspect, a 23-year-old mathematics student, was using software to conduct ballistics research for drone attacks, according to Turkish officials.

Al-Qaeda leaders have become increasingly open about their ­anti-drone efforts. In March, a new English-language online jihadist magazine called Azan published a story titled “The Drone Chain.” The article derided drone armaments as “evil missiles designed by the devils of the world” but reassured readers that jihadists had been working on “various technologies” to hack, manipulate and destroy unmanned aircraft.

At the same time, the magazine indicated that those efforts needed a boost, and it issued an emergency plea for scientific help: “Any opinions, thoughts, ideas and practical implementations to defeat this drone technology must be communicated to us as early as possible because these would aid greatly . . . against the crusader- zionist enemy.”

In the absence of a high-tech silver bullet, al-Qaeda affiliates around the world have taken to sharing hard-earned lessons about the importance of basic defensive measures.

Islamist extremists in North Africa this year distributed a photocopied tipsheet with 22 recommendations for avoiding drone strikes. Among the suggestions are several ideas for camouflage as well as dubious advice on using radio or microwave transmitters to “confuse the frequencies used to control the drone.”

The Associated Press in February found a copy of the tipsheet in Mali, left behind by Islamist fighters fleeing the city of Timbuktu. It was written by a jihadist in Yemen two years earlier and has circulated among al-Qaeda franchises since then.

‘GPS jamming capability’

In January 2011, U.S. intelligence agencies detected an unusual electronic signal emanating from near Miran Shah, a jihadist haven in North Waziristan, Pakistan. The DIA called the signal “the first observed test of a new terrorist GPS jamming capability.”

The test apparently did not pose a threat to military GPS frequencies or encrypted communications links. In addition, whoever was beaming the mysterious signal mistakenly thought that jamming ground-based GPS receivers would interfere with drones’ ability to aim missiles or munitions at fixed targets, according to the DIA report.

Despite such missteps, ­al-Qaeda has been undeterred. In a separate 2011 report, the DIA stated that affiliates in Miran Shah and the Pakistani city of Karachi were pursuing other “R&D projects,” including one effort to shoot down drones with portable shoulder-fired missiles, known as manpads.

Army intelligence analysts uncovered similar projects, including attempts to develop laser detectors that could give warning whenever a U.S. Predator drone was about to fire a laser-guided Hellfire missile, according to a summary of a classified Army report.

In 2011, the DIA concluded that an “al-Qaeda-affiliated research and development cell currently lacks the technical knowledge to successfully integrate and deploy a counterdrone strike system.” DIA analysts added, however, that if al-Qaeda engineers were to “overcome these substantial design challenges, we believe such a system probably would be highly disruptive for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

The Air Force and CIA rely heavily on Predator and Reaper drones to hunt for al-Qaeda targets and other insurgents in several countries. Both aircraft can stay aloft for more than 20 hours to conduct surveillance missions and can be armed with Hellfire missiles.

The drones are flown by remote control via satellite data links, usually by pilots and sensor operators stationed thousands of miles away at bases in the United States. Those satellite links are encrypted, which makes the connections extremely difficult to hack.

It is only slightly less of a challenge for al-Qaeda fighters to spot a high-flying drone with the naked eye. Predators and Reapers loiter at altitudes above 20,000 feet, and their powerful cameras focus on objects several miles over the horizon, so their presence is hard to detect.

The satellite links, however, are the Achilles’ heel of drone operations. “Lost link” incidents — triggered when a satellite moves out of range or a drone drops a signal — are relatively common. The connections are usually reestablished within seconds or minutes. The aircraft are programmed to fly in a loop pattern or return to their launching spot during prolonged disruptions.

On several occasions, however, lost links have led to crashes. In September, an Air Force Predator slammed into mountainous terrain along the Iraq-Turkey border after the satellite data links were lost and the drone crew could no longer communicate with the aircraft.

In December 2011, a stealth U.S. spy drone operated by the CIA crashed in Iranian territory. Iran said it downed the advanced RQ-170 drone in an “electronic ambush.” U.S. officials said they did not believe that the drone had been hacked or jammed. They said a technical malfunction was probably to blame.

Although the navigational satellite links are encrypted, other drone transmissions are sometimes left unprotected.

In 2009, the U.S. military discovered that Iraqi insurgents had hacked into video feeds from Predator and Shadow drones using off-the-shelf software. The drones had been transmitting full-motion video to U.S. troops on the ground, but the Air Force had not encrypted those data links, leaving them vulnerable.

Air Force officials acknowledged the flaw and said they would work to encrypt all video feeds from its fleet of Predator drones by 2014. In their classified assessments, U.S. intelligence agencies sought to play down the insurgents’ hacking handiwork. Although analysts were concerned about the interceptions of the video feeds, they said there was no sign that insurgents had been able to seize control of the drone itself.

“While the ability of insurgent forces to view unencrypted or to break into encrypted data streams has been a concern for some time, indications to date are that insurgents have not been able to wrest [drone] control from its mission control ground station,” a 2010 report concluded.

The report went on to suggest that allowing insurgents to intercept video feeds might actually have “a deterrent effect” by demonstrating the extent to which U.S. forces were able to watch their movements.

Growing unease

Still, summaries of the classified reports indicate a growing unease among U.S. agencies about al-Qaeda’s determination to find a way to neutralize drones.

“Al-Qaida Engineers in Pakistan Continue Development of Laser-Warning Systems in Effort To Counter UAV Strikes,” read the headline of one report in 2011, using the military acronym for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Beyond the threat that ­al-Qaeda might figure out how to hack or shoot down a drone, however, U.S. spy agencies worried that their drone campaign was becoming increasingly vulnerable to public opposition.

Intelligence analysts took careful note of al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray drone strikes as cowardly or immoral, beginning in January 2011 with a report titled “Al-Qa’ida Explores Manipulating Public Opinion to Curb CT Pressure.”

Analysts also questioned whether they were losing the rhetorical battle in the media, the courts and even among “citizens with legitimate social agendas.” One 2010 report predicted that drone operations “could be brought under increased scrutiny, perceived to be illegitimate, openly resisted or undermined.”

In response, intelligence agencies floated their own ideas to influence public perceptions. One unclassified report said the phrase “drone strike” should never be uttered, calling it “a loaded term.”

“Drones connote mindless automatons with no capability for independent thought or action,” the report said. “Strikes connote a first attack, which leaves the victim unable to respond. Other phrases employed to evoke an emotional response include ‘Kill List,’ ‘Hit Squads,’ ‘Robot Warfare,’ or ‘Aerial Assassins.’ ”

Instead, the report advised referring to “lethal UAV operations.” It also suggested “elevating the conversation” to more-abstract issues, such as the “Inherent Right of Self-Defense” and “Pre-emptive and Preventive Military Action.”

Greg Miller contributed to this report.

45 Enemies of Freedom

Source

45 ENEMIES OF FREEDOM

People who have been trying to control your life since reason was founded in 1968

From the August/September 2013 issue

In 2003, to celebrate 35 years of publishing a monthly magazine dedicated to Free Minds and Free Markets, reason named “35 Heroes of Freedom”—innovators, economists, singers, anti-communists, pornographers, professional athletes, and even the occasional politician who contributed to making the world a freer place since 1968.

These weren’t necessarily the 35 best human beings to span the globe. Richard Nixon, for example, was selected for encouraging “cynicism about government” through his rampant abuses of power. And, well, let’s say Dennis Rodman hasn’t aged particularly well. But the list reflected the happy, unpredictable cacophony that has helped liberate the world one novel or deregulation or electric guitar at a time.

Our 45th anniversary has come along at a darker time. The post-9/11 lurch toward unchecked law enforcement power has now become a permanent feature of our bipartisan consensus, with a Democratic president now ordering assassinations of American teenagers and with millions of Americans unaware that the feds are combing through their telecommunications. Keynesians in Washington responded to the financial crisis of 2008 by ushering in a lost decade of government spending, sluggish growth, and the worst employment numbers since Jimmy Carter was president. And after an initially promising Arab Spring, whole swaths of the Middle East seem poised for a long, sectarian, transnational war.

So it’s fitting that this time around we’re anointing reason’s 45 Enemies of Freedom. Again, these aren’t the worst human beings who bestrode the planet since 1968 (though Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden rank right down there). Some, like John McCain, are even genuine American heroes. What unites them is their active effort to control individuals rather than allow them free choice, to wield power recklessly rather than act on the recognition that the stuff inherently corrupts, and to popularize lies in a world that's desperate for truth.

You’ll see some familiar names there (we can’t quit you, Tricky Dick!) and some others that deserve to be more notorious. But in our otherwise alphabetical list we’ll start with the man who nearly everyone on our staff nominated, a figure who embodies so much that is wrong with public policy and the political conversation in these United States.

1. Michael Bloomberg

Here is how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg explained the importance of his widely derided 16-ounce limit on servings of sugar-sweetened beverages after a state judge overturned it last March: “We have a responsibility as human beings to do something, to save each other, to save the lives of ourselves, our families, our friends, and all of the rest of the people that live on God’s planet.” Bloomberg literally thinks he is saving the world one slightly smaller serving of soda at a time.

As grandiose as that may seem, it is consistent with Bloomberg’s view of government. A few years ago in a speech at the United Nations, he declared that “to halt the worldwide epidemic of non-communicable diseases, governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option,” which he described as “government’s highest duty.” On Bloomberg’s to-do list for government, apparently, defending us against our own unhealthy habits ranks above defending us against foreign invaders or marauding criminals.

Public health is not the only area where Bloomberg’s authoritarian tendencies are apparent. There is his enthusiasm for gun control, his illegal crackdown on pot smokers, and his unflagging defense of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, which portrays the Fourth Amendment as a gratuitous barrier to effective policing. But his determination to halt “epidemics” of risky behavior shows him at his most arrogantly ambitious.

Bloomberg has pursued that goal not only by meddling with people’s drink orders but by banning trans fats, pressuring food companies to reduce the salt content of their products, imposing heavy cigarette taxes, severely restricting the locations where people are allowed to smoke (even outdoors), mandating anti-smoking posters in stores that sell cigarettes (a policy that, like his big beverage ban, was rejected by the courts), and proposing a rule that would require merchants to hide tobacco products from people who might want to buy them.

The attitude driving Bloomberg’s crusade to “make healthy solutions the default social option” is reflected in another comment he made after his pint-sized pop prescription ran into legal trouble. “It was not a setback for me,” said the billionaire with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I watch my diet. This is not for me.” No, indeed. It is for those poor, benighted souls who think it is acceptable to drink a 20-ounce soda.

2. Idi Amin

The bombastic Ugandan dictator and self-appointed Conqueror of the British Empire lived in luxury during his 1970s rule while overseeing a unique brand of sadism that included mass killings, forced deportations, and torture.

3. Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Maricopa County, Arizona’s chief law enforcement officer is famous mostly for publicly degrading inmates: forcing them to live in a tent city, work on chain gangs, wear pink underwear. Meanwhile, his more serious transgressions receive far less attention. Arpaio has created citizen posses to track down and arrest illegal immigrants, overseen a jail staff that has violently abused inmates (resulting in the death of three prisoners and the paralysis of a fourth), and used law enforcement resources to harass and intimidate his political opponents.

4. Osama bin Laden

His desire to impose an Islamic caliphate marks the late terrorist as decidedly anti-liberty. But Osama bin Laden’s real crime against freedom was masterminding the murderous 9/11 terror attacks, which not only slaughtered nearly 3,000 people, but also inspired the U.S. government to react with overseas wars, the PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Transportation Security Administration. It is thanks in no small part to bin Laden that the United States is far less free.

5. Leonid Brezhnev

Give Brezhnev credit for this much: He made it a lot harder to imagine that communism would be exciting. If Stalin was the supervillain who made the Soviet Union an empire and Khrushchev was the Cold War confrontationist, Brezhnev was the bland figure who enforced a deadly conformity. An adept at bureaucratic warfare, Brezhnev consolidated his power over the course of the ’60s and ’70s as he spread his mixture of economic stagnation and banal totalitarianism throughout the eastern bloc.

6. Fidel Castro

His iron grip over Cuba lasted for more than 50 years of individual, physical, and social ruin. Though Castro formally stepped down as leader in 2008, he passed the reins of the police state to his brother and still serves as an elder statesman of the least free country in the Western Hemisphere.

7. Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney makes the list instead of George W. Bush or Barack Obama because the former vice president provided the intellectual and legal template that both presidents followed to curtail our freedoms. In the wake of 9/11, Cheney, a lifelong defender of executive branch power, pushed the Bush administration to increase secrecy, surveillance, and war. It’s the most lasting legacy in a four-decade career that includes intimate involvement in both Iraq wars, plus the conflicts in Afghanistan, Panama, and Somalia.

8. Hillary Clinton

“It takes a village,” Hillary Clinton famously wrote, and we’ve learned since that her meaning encompassed villages in Iraq and Afghanistan to house American troops, villages of taxpayers to fund her favored programs, and villages of snoops to staff a national security state. Those villages must be prudish, too, given Clinton’s longstanding fear of video-game sex. To Hillary’s credit, she does advocate Internet freedom for villages overseas. Too bad she doesn’t promote the same idea at home.

9. Paul Ehrlich

In 1968’s dystopian bestseller The Population Bomb, this biologist predicted that “hundreds of millions” would die in massive famines in the 1970s. Erlich lamented that it was technically and politically impossible to sterilize people through the water and food supplies, the antidote for which would be rationed by the government. Meanwhile, on a mostly voluntary basis, the global fertility rate has fallen by more than half since the 1960s. Freedom, and the economic growth it generates, turn out to be the best contraceptive.

10. Dianne Feinstein

Say Feinstein’s name in front of anybody who takes the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seriously and watch that person’s face curdle. The California senator’s federal assault weapons ban, which passed in 1994 and expired in 2004, failed to have any noticeable impact on crime rates. She didn’t allow such facts to keep her from using the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 to unsuccessfully attempt to reinstate the ban. Like the National Rifle Association, she also blames youth violence on video games and has threatened new regulations on that industry as well.

11. Daryl Gates

Inventor of the SWAT team and four-star general in America’s war on drugs, Gates is as responsible as any other law enforcement officer for the blunt, pseudo- military instrument our police forces have become. Thanks to significant incidences of wrong-door raids and dangerous prank calls that send SWAT teams to innocent families’ homes, Americans don’t even have to be doing drugs or breaking any laws to witness the fruits of Gates’ labor.

12. Newt Gingrich

Gingrich rose to fame as a politician, but he’s more like an annoying dinner-party guest: He’ll say anything to get attention. During the 2012 campaign, the former speaker of the House called fellow Republican Paul Ryan’s budget proposal a “radical” form of “right-wing social engineering”—but later said he’d vote for it. In 2005, he declared his support for an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, even going so far as to predict that it could be done in a way to “make most libertarians relatively happy.” By 2012, he was saying the mandate was “fundamentally wrong” and “unconstitutional.” Gingrich never truly stands for anything except himself.

13. Steven Hayne

For 20 years, Mississippi prosecutors looking for a way to put a friendly thumb on the scales of justice turned to Dr. Steven Hayne. A graduate of Brown Medical School, Hayne performed roughly 1,500 autopsies per year at the behest of prosecutors—1,175 more per year than is permitted by the National Association of Medical Examiners. The result? A lot of bad evidence and a lot of faulty convictions. Thanks to Radley Balko’s investigatory work in reason and elsewhere, Hayne is no longer performing autopsies in Mississippi. Sadly, the number of false convictions he contributed to is suspected to be in the hundreds.

14. Eric Hobsbawm

Until his death last year at the age of 95, British historian Eric Hobsbawm enjoyed the dubious honor of being perhaps the world’s most prominent academic apologist for communism. Asked in 1994 if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” if the result was the establishment of a Marxist society, the lifelong Communist Party member replied, “yes.”

15. J. Edgar Hoover

The FBI’s investigations into militias during the 1990s and Muslims in the 2000s trace their roots to the tenure of James Edgar Hoover. The agency’s longest-serving director, Hoover was famous for investigating groups that challenged the American government and its empire. He spied on and entrapped leftists, and he smeared and undermined civil rights leaders.

16. Jeffrey Immelt

In fairness, anyone who ran General Electric would probably make this list. Not because the blue-chip energy/media/whatever company is particularly evil, but because it’s particularly big, and as such it’s a natural poster boy for modern-day crony capitalism. GE has spent more than $200 million on lobbying already this young century. Immelt, head of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, reacted to the 2008 financial crisis by claiming, “The interaction between government and business will change forever.…The government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.” That’s exactly the problem.

17. Michael Jacobson

The most zealous of the foodie nanny-staters, Michael Jacobson is the guy who makes Mayor Bloomberg seem like a reasonable moderate. The Ralph Nader protégé co-founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest in 1971 to fight for fat taxes, ominous warning labels, and laws requiring that broadcasters give a minute advertising time to broccoli for each minute of Froot Loops. His group, he once said, “is proud about finding something wrong with practically everything.”

18. Ed Jagels

During the 1980s, Kern County (California) District Attorney Ed Jagels led the nation in prosecuting bogus Satanic child molestation cases. Without any physical evidence, Jagels, his prosecutors, and local police coached and cajoled children into accusing their parents and neighbors of sexual abuse that never actually happened. Years later, when witnesses recanted, Jagels called them liars. Eventually, 25 of his 26 Satanic molestation convictions were overturned.

19. Leon Kass

As the propounder of the idea of “the wisdom of repugnance,” philosopher Leon Kass holds that viscera trump reason. Kass opposed in vitro fertilization on the grounds that it was dehumanizing, but the more than 5 million IVF babies born since then have been quite human. As head of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, Kass sought to ban research on potentially lifesaving technologies such as human embryonic stem cells and cloning. He argues against using human ingenuity to liberate ourselves from the natural horrors of disease, disability, and death.

20. Ruhollah Khomeini

Leader of the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah, the ayatollah created the modern blueprint for an atavistic, Islamic revolution. As Iran’s supreme leader, Khomeini ordered the murder of his political opponents, waged a deadly war with Iraq, supported the sacking of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and offered a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie.

21. Henry Kissinger

As secretary of state and national security advisor under presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger embodied a ruthless, amoral vision of America’s place in the world. From the “secret” bombing of Cambodia to the “Christmas” bombing of North Vietnam, from his complicity in the coup that installed a repressive dictatorship in Chile to his green light for Indonesia’s bloody occupation of East Timor, Kissinger may not be the only answer to the question “Why do they hate us?”—but he’s a far larger part of the answer than any one man should be.

22. Naomi Klein

Before her 2007 book Shock Doctrine slandered all of modern libertarian thought as a scam dreamed up by the dictator-loving rich to screw over the poor, Klein had a noisy and altogether self-defeating career as an anti-branding activist. Her “No Logo” campaign and 2000 book, designed to ride the wave of anti-globalization to lead a revolt against advertising, instead became a go-to manual for marketers seeking to exploit the yearning for authenticity. Meanwhile, the anti-globalization movement died a richly deserved death.

23. Paul Krugman

The Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist is a reliable advocate of economic intervention and deficit spending, arguing that the problem with failed government stimulus programs to fight the recession of the ’00s was that they didn’t go far enough. Krugman’s low point in 2012 was recommending (only mostly in jest) that it would be a good thing if the government wasted huge sums of taxpayer money preparing for an alien invasion. Keep this man’s hands away from any rocks—he might try to break nearby windows to “stimulate” the economy.

24. Loki

The sneering (fictional) baddie in the 2012 superhero blockbuster, The Avengers, sticks to a familiar supervillain playbook: His aim is world domination, and he’s got a cosmic doohicky and an army of alien invaders to make it happen. But the justification he offers for his global power grab sounds more like a terrestrial dictator: “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity,” he tells a cowering crowd, “that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled.” Fortunately, like all supervillains, he was made to be defeated.

25. Jeffrey Loria

A successful New York art dealer (unlike you, he owns an original Picasso), Loria spent years pleading poverty to the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County so that they would pay for a fancy new stadium to house his professional baseball franchise, the Marlins. Locals finally agreed to cover what’s projected to be $2.4 billion in costs, only to discover that Loria had actually been turning large profits while fielding a mediocre, underpaid team. With his stadium safely finished, Loria promptly dismantled his club, which is now the worst in Major League Baseball.

26. Mao Tse-Tung

As the founder and leader of the People’s Republic of China, this Communist despot’s cruelly stupid collectivist policies killed at least 35 million Chinese citizens. He kept the hundreds of millions who managed to survive in impoverished bondage until his death in 1976.

27. John McCain

It is possible to be both an enemy of freedom and a genuine American hero. John McCain endured unbearable punishments and greatly boosted camp morale during his five-year Viet Cong prison stint, for which he deserves our gratitude. He has also been among the most consistently interventionist politicians in the United States Senate, agitating for never-ending “rogue-state rollback” while focusing his war at home on political speech and the healthy American trait he derides as “cynicism.” It’s fitting McCain would close out his career barking sporadic insults (like “wacko bird”) at a new generation of more libertarian legislators.

28. Jenny McCarthy

A second-string actress who has managed to stay in the limelight by promoting the bogus theory that vaccines cause autism, McCarthy traffics in pseudoscience and fear. Partly as a result of her widely publicized yet scientifically ignorant pronouncements, hundreds of thousands of fearful parents have needlessly endangered the health and lives of their children.

29. Robert McNamara

Did anyone fuse the roles of technocrat and destroyer more completely than Robert Strange McNamara? He was a functionary from Ford Motor Company when John F. Kennedy brought him in to run the Pentagon, and in that role he systematically escalated the Vietnam War as though the conflict were an assembly line. When he took over the World Bank in 1968, he continued to couple technocratic planning with mass destruction, sponsoring vast “development projects” whose most notable effect was to evict peasants from their land. Robert McNamara: the Organization Man as monster.

30. Newton Minow

The godfather of boob-tube nannying, Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963. There he was a key advocate for the regulation of television. In a 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, he famously described the era’s television programming as a “vast wasteland,” railed against the medium’s “mayhem, violence, sadism, murder,” and proposed that TV content should be strictly regulated in the name of the “public interest.”

31. Robert Moses

The most authoritarian city planner in New York history, Moses wielded eminent domain and many other government powers, unleashing his bulldozers and wrecking balls on the homes, businesses, and churches of as many as half a million powerless citizens, many of them black, brown, or poor.

32. Robert Mugabe

The racist, homophobic, and corrupt president of Zimbabwe has overseen record levels of inflation, destroying the purchasing power of citizens in a previously much more prosperous country. Forbidden from exiting the country with any assets, Zimbabweans have had to live under Mugabe’s brutal misrule for decades.

33. Richard Nixon

This American president launched the modern drug war, imposed wage and price controls, kept a pointless war going in Vietnam long after he knew it was hopeless, and imposed massive new bureaucracies on the American economy. Nixon’s vision of government in general had no clear limits, and his view of executive power helped him commit and collude in crimes that he thought were not crimes because he did them. Richard Nixon should be a cautionary tale for all future presidents, but all too often he serves as an example.

34. Henry Paulson

When the nation’s financial markets collapsed in the fall of 2008, Hank Paulson, secretary of the treasury for President George W. Bush, came in with guns blazing. In September of 2008, he proposed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), a scheme he falsely advertised as a way to remove “illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy.” Instead it became a justification for an endless series of bailouts, including of non-banks like General Motors. Even TARP’s biggest proponents acknowledge that the economy has underperformed the past five years.

35. Sean Penn

When not chewing the scenery in overrated Oscar-winning films, the multimillionaire brother of Christopher Penn spends much of his time acting as an apologist for authoritarians like the late Hugo Chavez and the still-breathing Fidel Castro. When Chavez died, Penn said: “the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” That’s one way of putting it.

36. Pol Pot

A French school flunkie turned peasant revolutionary, Pol Pot might have been the most efficient murderer in communism’s grisly history. It took the dictator and his Khmer Rouge less than four years to kill and centrally plan to death up to 3 million people—20 percent of the Cambodian population.

37. Vladimir Putin

While many were optimistic that Russia would manage to modernize after almost a century of Marxist misery, the former KGB agent and Russian president has vindicated skeptics of liberal progress while clamping down on free speech, mucking about in Russia’s “near abroad,” and supporting horrid governments such as the Assad regime in Syria.

38. Bruce Ratner

A real estate tycoon and serial beneficiary of eminent domain abuse, Ratner partnered with New York officials in 2001 to forcibly evict some 55 midtown businesses standing in the way of a new headquarters for the New York Times Company. A few years later in Brooklyn, Ratner and his government allies seized and razed dozens of homes and businesses in order to build a basketball arena for a team then owned by Ratner himself.

39. Diane Ravitch

A school reformer turned union flack, this New York University professor did an about-face after four decades as one of the nation’s most prominent charter advocates. Part of the right-wing think tank braintrust that hatched the initial policy proposals for vouchers, she now says “Vouchers are a con, intended to destroy public education.” She has been welcomed with open arms by defenders of the status quo.

40. John Rawls

The philosophical father of 20th century liberalism, Rawls’ seminal Theory of Justice (1971) has dominated moral and political philosophy for decades. His framing of “justice as fairness” and his notion that societies should be arranged to improve the lot of the least advantaged subtly underpin nearly all of our national policy debates, lending a justification to multitudinous extensions of state power. His longtime rival, the libertarian thinker Robert Nozick, offered an alternative based in property rights and personal liberty. Sadly, Rawls has been more influential.

If (bad) conservative screenwriters set out to create a smugly liberal, lens-hungry New York senator, they’d come up with Charles Schumer—and they’d be criticized for creating a strawman. But Schumer is, somehow, real. He crusades sneeringly against guns, drugs, breakfast cereal, cybercurrencies, and caffeinated powders while supporting security-state legislation and cozying up with crony capitalists on Wall Street.

42. Steven Seagal

Starring in 20 of the worst action flicks ever made, all with titles like Above the Law and Executive Decision, Seagal also produced several ludicrous environmental message-movies, including one that ends with his character giving a four-minute speech about how “the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for 50 years.” He has made two truly awful records and been serially accused of sexual harassment, but what separates Seagal from most Hollywood scumbags is that he has also actively participated in gross law enforcement abuse, including a raid in Arizona that damaged a man’s house and killed his puppy.

43. Lamar Smith

The Internet threatened to shut down in protest last year when Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that sought to grant movie studios and record labels unprecedented power to police copyright. Under SOPA, studios and labels would’ve had the power to block offending sites from showing up in Google search results, and the authority to tell service providers which sites their customers couldn’t visit. In an Orwellian twist, SOPA also would have empowered “content creators” to prevent Internet users from discussing—on Facebook and other social media sites—how to circumvent SOPA.

44. Aaron Sorkin

A virtual assembly line for fictional authority-worship, Sorkin is the dramatist of choice for progressive technocrats. In the worlds detailed in West Wing and The Newsroom, all of America’s problems could be solved if those dumb, undereducated conservatives and independents would listen to their incorruptible Ivy League betters. Sorkin longs for an imaginary golden age of American government that never existed. Bonus points for being just as misogynist as any of the archconservatives he loathes.

45. Elizabeth Warren

One of the left’s foremost academic activists, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat recently elected to the Senate, is a Harvard professor with a history of using shoddy scholarship to promote dubious public policies. She has exaggerated the prevalence of medical bankruptcy, argued that student loan rates should be set equal to bank loan rates, and pushed for controls on everything from credit cards to home loans. Warren’s life project amounts to an argument that most people are too stupid to know what to do with their money unless the government steps in to help.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

1) I have always suspected that the NSA can use it's supercomputers to crack PGP and other public key encrypted messages. But I suspected it took some effort to decrypt the messages. Is that still true??? Or it is now a trivial inexpensive task for NSA to read messages that are encrypted with PGP and other public key??

2) Just what are these "secret portals" or "hooks" that the NSA has created??? I suspect they are hooks that tell the encryption software used by HTTPS encryption to create encrypted data that is easily decrypted by NSA and other government agencies.

3) This shows that it is really not safe to put ANYTHING that you would like to keep secret from anybody, especially the government on the internet. Same goes for putting the data on telephone lines, radio waves or any public communication method.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

By Michael Winter USA Today Thu Sep 5, 2013 4:51 PM

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show.

In their clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes and have inserted secret portals into software with the help of technology companies, the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica reported Thursday.

The NSA has also maintained control over international encryption standards.

As the Times points out, encryption "guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world."

The NSA calls its decryption efforts the "price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

A 2010 memo describing an NSA briefing to British agents about the secret hacking said, "For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies. Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

The GCHQ is working to penetrate encrypted traffic on what it called the "big four" service providers ---Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, the Guardian said.

Who needs back up files when you have the NSA????

Don't think of it as the government flushing the Bill of Rights down the toilet!!!

Think of it as a free file backup service run by government goons!!!!

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

The article says the NSA has been getting makers of ICs or integrated circuits to put back doors into their products so the NSA can read or listen to your data before the chip encrypts it.

The article says the NSA is also working with software vendors like Microsoft getting them to put back doors in their software products, again so the NSA can grab the data before the software encrypts it.

Why did Obama go to Congress on Syria?

If you follow the US Congress voting records congressmen will routinely vote FOR bill A on pass 1 and then AGAINST bill A on pass 2, or vise versa. Of course their final vote is really the vote on how they feel, or which special interest group owns them.

This hypocrisy is mostly so they can lie or mislead ALL the voters into thinking they voted for their side of the issue.

When a congressman speaks to a pro-war group he will tell them he voted for a pro-war bill that he was responsible for passing.

When the same congressman speaks to an anti-war group he will tell them he voted against the same pro-war bill that he was responsible for passing. And he is not lying, because the first time the bill was around he did vote against it. Sure it's dishonest and deceiving but technically it's not lying.

Source

Posted on September 6, 2013 3:49 pm by Robert Robb

Why did Obama go to Congress on Syria?

No one seems to have a solid handle on why President Obama abruptly decided to ask Congress to approve a military attack on Syria. It apparently came as a surprise even to his closest aides and advisers, none of whom advocated or supported it.

Speculation on the right is uncharitable, suspicious and cynical. From that perspective, you have a president running roughshod over or ignoring Congress on an ever-growing number of issues: climate change, immigration, federal drug laws, delaying the Obamacare employer mandate. They aren’t buying that Obama suddenly developed a respect for the role of Congress in important matters or an interest in charting a common course.

So, they suspect a political trap. Obama, they think, wants congressional cover if he takes action and someone else to blame for his red line being crossed with impunity if Congress votes no.

The left is just befuddled and bit resentful that, rather than just take action, Obama has put congressional Democrats in a tough position of having to alienate much of their base if they support him.

Here’s my guess. I don’t think it was to set a political trap.

Obama seems clearly uncomfortable with what he thinks he has to do. He badly wants to ground any action he takes in something other than his inherent powers as president.

Obviously, given Russia and China’s veto power, the U.N. Security Council wasn’t going to authorize a military attack. After the British parliament said no, Obama wasn’t going to be able to develop a broad enough international coalition to assert that it was a substitute for U.N. sanction.

So, Congress was all that was left. Undoubtedly his own past statements about presidents not having the authority to do such things as bomb Syria without congressional authorization tugged at him as well.

In the end, Obama preferred the risks of going to Congress to the unease with doing it on his own.

Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying

Remember the bottom line is if you don't want cops reading your emails don't put them on the internet. If you don't want cops listening to your conversations don't have them on a telephone that is connect to any public networks, or any network that broadcasts the call on radio waves.

Sure that's an inconvenience and hard to do, but it's a lot easier then spending 5 or 10 years in prison for committing a victimless drug war crime.

Source

Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying

By Craig Timberg, Published: September 6 E-mail the writers

Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments, company officials said Friday.

The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that U.S. government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.

Google’s encryption initiative, initially approved last year, was accelerated in June as the tech giant struggled to guard its reputation as a reliable steward of user information amid controversy about the NSA’s PRISM program, first reported in The Washington Post and the Guardian that month. PRISM obtains data from American technology companies, including Google, under various legal authorities.

Encrypting information flowing among data centers will not make it impossible for intelligence agencies to snoop on individual users of Google services, nor will it have any effect on legal requirements that the company comply with court orders or valid national security requests for data. But company officials and independent security experts said that increasingly widespread use of encryption technology makes mass surveillance more difficult — whether conducted by governments or other sophisticated hackers.

“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, based in Mountain View, Calif. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Experts say that, aside from the U.S. government, sophisticated government hacking efforts emanate from China, Russia, Britain and Israel.

The NSA seeks to defeat encryption through a variety of means, including by obtaining encryption “keys” to decode communications, by using super-computers to break codes, and by influencing encryption standards to make them more vulnerable to outside attack, according to reports Thursday by the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica, based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

But those reports made clear that encryption — essentially converting data into what appears to be gibberish when intercepted by outsiders — complicates government surveillance efforts, requiring that resources be devoted to decoding or otherwise defeating the systems. [Unless their is a backdoor that allows the government to quickly decrypt your messages I suspect this is true. So the question is "Is there a backdoor"] Among the most common tactics, experts say, is to hack into individual computers or other devices used by people targeted for surveillance, making what amounts to an end run around coded communications.

Security experts say the time and energy required to defeat encryption forces surveillance efforts to be targeted more narrowly on the highest-priority targets — such as terrorism suspects — and limits the ability of governments to simply cast a net into the huge rivers of data flowing across the Internet.

“If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in . . . . Most of the people in my community are realistic about that,” said Christopher Soghoian, a computer security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.”

The NSA declined to comment for this article. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement Thursday saying: “Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.”

The U.S. intelligence community has been reeling since news reports based on Snowden’s documents began revealing remarkable new detail about how the government collects, analyzes and disseminates information — including, in some circumstances, the e-mails, video chats and phone communications of American citizens.

Many of the documents portray U.S. companies as pliant “Corporate Partners” or “Providers” of information. While telecommunications companies have generally declined to comment on their relationships with government surveillance, some technology companies have reacted with outrage at the depictions in the NSA documents released by Snowden. They have joined civil liberties groups in demanding more transparency and insisting that information is turned over to the government only when required by law, often in the form of a court order.

In June, Google and Microsoft asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow them greater latitude in reporting how much information they must turn over to the government. On Friday, Yahoo issued its first “government transparency report,” saying it had received 12,444 requests for data from the U.S. government this year, covering the accounts of 40,322 users.

Google has long been more aggressive than its peers within the U.S. technology industry in deploying encryption technology. It turned on encryption in its popular Gmail service in 2010, and since then has added similar protections for Google searches for most users.

Yet even as it encrypted much of the data flowing between Google and its users, the information traveling between its data centers offered rare points of vulnerability to potential intruders, especially government surveillance agencies, security officials said. User information — including copies of e-mails, search queries, videos and Web browsing history — typically is stored in several data centers that transmit information to each other on high-speed fiber-optic lines.

Several other companies, including Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, increasingly have begun using encryption for some of their services, though the quality varies by company. Communications between services — when an e-mail, for example, is sent from a user of Gmail to a user of Microsoft’s Outlook mail — are not generally encrypted, appearing to surveillance systems as what experts call “clear text.”

Google officials declined to provide details on the cost of its new encryption efforts, the numbers of data centers involved, or the exact technology used. Officials did say that it will be what experts call “end-to-end,” meaning that both the servers in the data centers and the information on the fiber-optic lines connecting them will be encrypted using “very strong” technology. The project is expected to be completed soon, months ahead of the original schedule.

Grosse echoed comments from other Google officials, saying that the company resists government surveillance and has never weakened its encryption systems to make snooping easier — as some companies reportedly have, according to the Snowden documents detailed by the Times and the Guardian on Thursday.

“This is a just a point of personal honor,” Grosse said. “It will not happen here.”

Security experts said news reports detailing the extent of NSA efforts to defeat encryption were startling. It was widely presumed that the agency was working to gain access to protected information, but the efforts were far more extensive than understood and reportedly contributed to the creation of vulnerabilities that other hackers, including foreign governments, could exploit.

Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptography expert, applauded Google’s move to harden its defenses against government surveillance, but said recent revelations make clear the many weaknesses of commonly used encryption technology, much of which dates back to the 1990s or earlier. He called for renewed efforts among companies and independent researchers to update systems — the hardware, the software and the algorithms.

“The idea that humans can communicate safely is something we should fight for,” Green said.

But he said he wasn’t sure that would happen: “A lot of people in the next week are going to say, this is too hard. Let’s forget about the NSA.”

Haylet Tsukayama contributed to this report.

Google argues for right to continue scanning Gmail

But is Google sleeping with the government and turning this information over to Uncle Sam, along with state, county and city cops???

Again if you don't want cops reading your email you shouldn't be using the internet to send it. If you don't want cops listening to you phone calls you shouldn't be using public networks that the police can monitor, or placing calls that use radio waves, such as cell phones.

Yes, it's a pain in the but to keep the government from spying on you, but it's a lot easier then doing 5 to 10 years in a Federal prison for a victimless drug war crime.

Source

Google argues for right to continue scanning Gmail

By Martha Mendoza Associated Press Thu Sep 5, 2013 9:48 AM

SAN JOSE, California — Google’s attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people’s Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and they are asking a U.S. judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice.

In court records filed in advance of a federal hearing scheduled for Thursday, Google argues that “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”

The class action lawsuit filed in May says Google “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages” in violation of California’s privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes. The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company’s terms.

Google has repeatedly described how it targets its advertising based on words that show up in Gmail messages. For example, the company says if someone has received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, then it might display an advertisement from a local camera store. Google says the process is fully automated, “and no humans read your email ...”

Privacy advocates have long questioned the practice.

“People believe, for better or worse, that their email is private correspondence, not subject to the eyes of a $180 billion corporation and its whims,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court

Legislation Seeks to Bar N.S.A. Tactic in Encryption

Source

Legislation Seeks to Bar N.S.A. Tactic in Encryption

By SCOTT SHANE and NICOLE PERLROTH

Published: September 6, 2013

After disclosures about the National Security Agency’s stealth campaign to counter Internet privacy protections, a congressman has proposed legislation that would prohibit the agency from installing “back doors” into encryption, the electronic scrambling that protects e-mail, online transactions and other communications.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is also a physicist, said Friday that he believed the N.S.A. was overreaching and could hurt American interests, including the reputations of American companies whose products the agency may have altered or influenced.

“We pay them to spy,” Mr. Holt said. “But if in the process they degrade the security of the encryption we all use, it’s a net national disservice.”

Mr. Holt, whose Surveillance State Repeal Act would eliminate much of the escalation in the government’s spying powers undertaken after the 2001 terrorist attacks, was responding to news reports about N.S.A. documents showing that the agency has spent billions of dollars over the last decade in an effort to defeat or bypass encryption. The reports, by The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian, were posted online on Thursday.

The agency has encouraged or coerced companies to install back doors in encryption software and hardware, worked to weaken international standards for encryption and employed custom-built supercomputers to break codes or find mathematical vulnerabilities to exploit, according to the documents, disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The documents show that N.S.A. cryptographers have made major progress in breaking the encryption in common use for everyday transactions on the Web, like Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, as well as the virtual private networks, or VPNs, that many businesses use for confidential communications among employees.

Intelligence officials say that many of their most important targets, including terrorist groups, use the same Webmail and other Internet services that many Americans use, so it is crucial to be able to penetrate the encryption that protects them. In an intense competition with other sophisticated cyberespionage services, including those of China and Russia, the N.S.A. cannot rule large parts of the Internet off limits, the officials argue.

A statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., criticized the reports, saying that it was “not news” that the N.S.A. works to break encryption, and that the articles would damage American intelligence collection.

The reports, the statement said, “reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity.”

“Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate,” it continued, “is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”

But if intelligence officials felt a sense of betrayal by the disclosures, Internet security experts felt a similar letdown — at the N.S.A. actions.

“There’s widespread disappointment,” said Dan Kaminsky, a prominent security researcher. “This has been the stuff of wild-eyed accusations for years. A lot of people are heartbroken to find out it’s not just wild-eyed accusations.”

Sascha Meinrath, the director of the Open Technology Institute, a research group in Washington, said the reports were “a startling indication that the U.S. has been a remarkably irresponsible steward of the Internet,” which he said the N.S.A. was trying to turn into “a massive platform for detailed, intrusive and unrestrained surveillance.”

Companies like Google and Facebook have been moving to new systems that, in principle, would make government eavesdropping more difficult. Google is in the process of encrypting all data that travels via fiber-optic lines between its data centers. The company speeded up the process in June after the initial N.S.A. disclosures, according to two people who were briefed on Google’s plans but were not authorized to speak publicly about them. The acceleration of the process was first reported Friday by The Washington Post.

For services like Gmail, once data reaches a user’s computer it has been encrypted. But as messages and other data like search queries travel internally among Google’s data centers they are not encrypted, largely because it is technically complicated and expensive to do.

Facebook announced last month that it would also transition to a novel encryption method, called perfect forward secrecy, that makes eavesdropping far more difficult.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington, said the quandary posed by the N.S.A.’s efforts against encryption began with its dual role: eavesdropping on foreign communications while protecting American communications.

“Invariably the two missions collide,” he said. “We don’t dispute that their ability to capture foreign intelligence is quite important. The question is whether their pursuit of that mission threatens to undermine the security and privacy of Internet communications.”

Mr. Rotenberg is a veteran of what were known as the “crypto wars” of the 1990s, when the N.S.A. proposed the Clipper Chip, a government back door that would be built into every encryption program.

That proposal was defeated by a diverse coalition of technology businesses and privacy advocates, including Mr. Rotenberg’s organization. But the documents make clear that the N.S.A. never gave up on the goal of being able to read everything and has made what memos call “breakthroughs” in recent years in its efforts.

A complicating factor is the role of the major American Internet companies, which have been the target of counterencryption efforts by both the N.S.A. and its closely allied British counterpart, GCHQ. One document describes “new access opportunities” in Google systems; the company said on Thursday that it had not given the agencies access and was aware of no breach of its security.

But the perception of an N.S.A. intrusion into the networks of major Internet companies, whether surreptitious or with the companies’ cooperation, could hurt business, especially in international markets.

“What buyer is going to purchase a product that has been deliberately made less secure?” asked Mr. Holt, the congressman. “Even if N.S.A. does it with the purest motive, it can ruin the reputations of billion-dollar companies.”

In addition, news that the N.S.A. is inserting vulnerabilities into widely used technologies could put American lawmakers and technology companies in a bind with regard to China.

Over the last two years, American lawmakers have accused two of China’s largest telecommunications companies, Huawei Technologies and ZTE, of doing something parallel to what the N.S.A. has done: planting back doors into their equipment to allow for eavesdropping by the Chinese government and military.

Both companies have denied collaborating with the Chinese government, but the allegations have eliminated the companies’ hopes for significant business growth in the United States. After an investigation last year, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that government agencies should be barred from doing business with Huawei and ZTE, and that American companies should avoid buying their equipment.

Some foreign governments and companies have also said that they would not rely on the Chinese companies’ equipment out of security concerns. Last year, Australia barred Huawei from bidding on contracts in Australia’s $38 billion national broadband network. And this year, as part of its effort to acquire Sprint Nextel, SoftBank of Japan pledged that it would not use Huawei equipment in Sprint’s cellphone network.

NSA can access most smartphone data

Report: NSA can access most smartphone data

By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press

Updated 12:53 pm, Sunday, September 8, 2013

BERLIN (AP) — The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine cited internal documents from the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists.

The data obtained this way includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information, Der Spiegel reported. The documents don't indicate that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of phone users but rather that these techniques are used to eavesdrop on specific individuals, the magazine said.

The article doesn't explain how the magazine obtained the documents, which are described as "secret." But one of its authors is Laura Poitras, an American filmmaker with close contacts to NSA leaker Edward Snowden who has published several articles about the NSA in Der Spiegel in recent weeks.

The documents outline how, starting in May 2009, intelligence agents were unable to access some information on BlackBerry phones for about a year after the Canadian manufacturer began using a new method to compress the data. After GCHQ cracked that problem, too, analysts celebrated their achievement with the word "Champagne," Der Spiegel reported.

The magazine printed several slides alleged to have come from an NSA presentation referencing the film "1984," based on George Orwell's book set in a totalitarian surveillance state. The slides — which show stills from the film, former Apple Inc. chairman Steve Jobs holding an iPhone, and iPhone buyers celebrating their purchase — are captioned: "Who knew in 1984...that this would be big brother...and the zombies would be paying customers?"

Snowden's revelations have sparked a heated debate in Germany about the country's cooperation with the United States in intelligence matters.

On Saturday, thousands of people in Berlin protested the NSA's alleged mass surveillance of Internet users. Many held placards with slogans such as "Stop watching us."

Separately, an incident in which a German police helicopter was used to photograph the roof of the American consulate in Frankfurt has caused a minor diplomatic incident between the two countries.

German magazine Focus reported Sunday that U.S. Ambassador John B. Emerson complained about the overflight, which German media reported was ordered by top officials after reports that the consulate housed a secret espionage site.

A U.S. embassy spokesman downplayed the story, saying "the helicopter incident was, naturally enough, the subject of embassy conversation with the Foreign Ministry, but no demarche or letter of complaint about the incident was sent to the German government."

___

Frank Jordans can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

Source

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: September 7 E-mail the writer

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.

“The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.”

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion.

The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Joel gave hypothetical examples of why the authority was needed, such as when the NSA learns of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects that a U.S. person may be a conspirator. Searching for communications to, from or about that person can help assess that person’s involvement and whether he is in touch with terrorists who are surveillance targets, he said. Officials would not say how many searches have been conducted.

The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole” that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.

“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”

Senior administration officials disagree. “If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year.

But — and this was the nub of the criticism — a warrant for each target would no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or “foreign powers.”

That is why it is important to require a warrant before searching for Americans’ data, Udall said. “Our founders laid out a roadmap where Americans’ privacy rights are protected before their communications are seized or searched — not after the fact,” he said in a statement to The Post.

Another change approved by Bates allows the agency to keep the e-mails of or concerning Americans for up to six years, with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Because the retention period begins “from the expiration date” of the one-year surveillance period, the court effectively added up to one year of shelf life for the e-mails collected at the beginning of the period.

Joel said that the change was intended to standardize retention periods across the agencies and that the more generous standard was “already in use” by another agency.

The NSA intercepts more than 250 million Internet communications each year under Section 702. Ninety-one percent are from U.S. Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. The rest come from “upstream” companies that route Internet traffic to, from and within the United States. The expanded search authority applies only to the downstream collection.

Barton Gellman contributed to this report.

Deferring Syria decision to Congress pure political masterstroke for the president

Source

Patterson: Deferring Syria decision to Congress pure political masterstroke for the president

Posted: Saturday, September 7, 2013 6:47 am

Commentary by Tom Patterson

President Obama’s decision to defer to Congress the decision about whether to slap around Syria was a pure political masterstroke.

It wasn’t his first choice. He’s ignored Congress and the Constitution many times before, so it was no surprise when he signaled his intention to make the decision himself whether or not to attack Syria as punishment for using chemical weapons.

But sometime after the specific plans had been made and while he was still dithering, it apparently dawned on him that he had painted himself into a corner. By exhibiting chronic weakness and failing to think ahead, he had created a lose-lose situation. Any decision he made now would have substantial negative consequences and be subject to withering criticism. Here was the opportunity for bipartisan sharing!

Think about this. Mankind has been thinking and writing about military strategy for some time now. I’m pretty sure no expert on the subject has ever advocated supplying your enemy with detailed descriptions of your plan of attack before you proceed. Yet our deep-thinker-in-chief has publicly disclosed the weapons of choice, the launching sources, the duration and the limited scope of the proposed assault. No spy could have hurt us worse.

How did we get here? It started with electing a president who assured us that some of the most murderous religious fanatics on the planet were really nice guys who would succumb to his charm offensive, like we had. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans and other inhabitants of the real world soon picked up on the fact that the President who couldn’t stop apologizing for his own country was soft and naive.

“Leading from behind” turned out to be a euphemism for indecision and weakness. When he declared a year ago that Syria would be crossing a “red line” if they deployed chemical weapons, they weren’t impressed. They went ahead.

So now, we’re in a position where, to preserve our honor, or Barack Obama’s honor or something, we’re contemplating attacking Syria because they used the wrong techniques to kill citizens. Our options are all bad.

We could follow the original Obama plan and carry out a limited attack, not a real attack, just enough to say we had done something. But the unintended consequences might be more than we bargained for.

Assad

It would bolster anti-American sentiment and would strengthen Syrian dictator Assad’s standing in the region. It very likely would set off a regional war with Israel taking the punishment. It wouldn’t even teach Syria “the lesson” about red lines nor likely deter others.

Another option, endorsed by John McCain among others, would be full military engagement with the goal of deposing the Assad regime. But even those pushing this path don’t seem sure what the endgame might be.

What could it possibly be? Al-Qaeda affiliated groups are already licking their chops, poised to take over if Assad goes down. Are we hoping to replicate our great outcomes in Afghanistan and Iraq? Do we want a regime change as beneficial as Egypt’s?

Unless somebody comes up with a different plan, there’s no reason to believe we wouldn’t be spending yet more blood and treasure to in a futile attempt to establish a “stabilizing presence” in the region.

The third option is to do nothing. Yes, it would send a message (again) that U.S. leadership is unserious and vacillating to our other enemies. Yes, it would be a personal embarrassment to Obama, although he has set up Congress to take the fall if that is what they decide.

Yet in the end, doing nothing may be the least bad option. It’s not isolationism to decline a war with no real mission, no plan and no national security interests at stake. We may even be worse off if the rebels did prevail.

The take-home message to Americans is that, while on an emotional high, we elected a president who openly doubted whether American values were worth defending and who has never developed to this day a coherent foreign policy to protect our interests. This is what we got.

It’s a potentially dangerous world out there.

Next time we need to choose more thoughtfully.

East Valley resident Tom Patterson is a retired physician and former state senator. He can be reached at pattersontomc@cox.net.

Has Kyrsten Sinema sold out to the military industrial complex????

While Kyrsten Sinema always has been a gun grabbing, tax and spend socialist she used to be on our side and against war.

I suspect Kyrsten Sinema has sold her soul to the military industrial complex and will vote to allow Emperor Obama to bomb Syria.

And for those of you who don't remember Kyrsten Sinema when she was a member of the Arizona Legislator tried to kill Arizona's medical marijuana law by passing a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Source

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, District 9: Undecided

In a statement last week, Sinema said, “I’m deeply troubled by reports concerning the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people. ... I intend to evaluate whether any proposed action will protect and advance American goals and interests once I have been briefed by national-security officials.” To contact Sinema, call her Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-9888 or her district office in Phoenix at 602-956-2285.

Sen. John McCain, a Republican, voted in support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s resolution authorizing the use of military force in Syria after it was amended to emphasize priority of changing the momentum in the Syrian civil war.

“That strategy must degrade the military capabilities of the Assad regime while upgrading the military capabilities of moderate Syrian opposition forces,” McCain said in a written statement. “These amendments would put the Congress on the record that this is the policy of the United States, as President Obama has assured me it is.”

To contact McCain, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-224-2235.

Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican, voted in support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s resolution authorizing the use of military force in Syria.

"As commander in chief, President Obama already has the authority to conduct a limited strike such as the one he has asked Congress to authorize. This president's reasons for coming to Congress in this instance were political, not constitutional,” Flake said. "I believe in a strong commander in chief who takes actions as warranted and stands by them, which is why I voted in favor of the resolution in committee. After reviewing both the classified and unclassified evidence, I am convinced that the Syrian regime did launch a chemical-weapons attack, and it is in our national interest that it faces the consequences."

To contact Flake, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-224-4521.

Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat, is undecided on U.S. military action in Syria.

"I'm very disturbed by the reports coming out of Syria about chemical weapons being used to kill civilians," she said. "But being on the Veterans Affairs Committee, I have seen what war has done to our soldiers coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Military action does not come without consequences."

To contact Kirkpatrick, call her Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-3361 or her district offices in Flagstaff and Casa Grande at 928-213-9977 and 520-316-0839.

Rep. Ron Barber, a Democrat, is undecided. Spokesman Mark Kimble said Barber will decide after Congress reconvenes next week, and there is debate on the House floor.

To contact Barber, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-2542 or his district offices in Tucson and Sierra Vista at 520-881-3588 and 520-459-3115.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat, is against U.S. military action in Syria. Grijalva wrote in a recent opinion piece that he believes diplomatic solutions should be pursued first.

To contact Grijalva, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-2435 or his district offices in Avondale and Somerton and Tucson at 623-536-3388 and 928-343-7933 and 520-622-6788.

Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican, is leaning against U.S. military action in Syria. "Unless something really changes my direction and information, I'm a no. Getting involved in a sectarian war is a lose-lose situation."

To contact Gosar, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-2315 or his district offices in Prescott and San Tan Valley at 928-445-1683 and 480-882-2697.

Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican, is against U.S. military action in Syria. "I know what my vote is going to be - and it's no. They haven't made a compelling case at all why this is in our national interest."

To contact Salmon, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-2635 or his district offices in Gilbert at 480-699-8239.

Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican, leans toward no. His spokeswoman Rachel Semmel said Schweikert "isn't convinced there is a US interest yet. If we become engaged with little direction from the President, what is our exit strategy?"

To contact Schweikert, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-2190 or his district office in Scottsdale at 480-946-2411.

Rep. Ed Pastor, a Democrat, is undecided. "I've received some calls and briefings but I haven't made up my mind yet. ... We're working on a decision and we'll have it by next week."

To contact Pastor, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-4065 or his district office in Phoenix at 602-256-0551.

Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican, did not return calls seeking comment. To contact Franks, call his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-4576 or his district office in Glendale at 623-776-7911.

Source

Poll: Congress opposing Syria strike

By Susan Page and John Kelly USA Today Mon Sep 9, 2013 7:29 AM

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama faces a daunting and uphill battle to win congressional authorization for a military strike on Syria, a USA Today Network survey of senators and representatives has found.

The comprehensive poll of Congress says that only a small fraction of the 533 lawmakers — 22 senators and 22 House members — are willing to say they will support the use of force in response to the reported use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. Far more overall — 19 senators and 130 House members — say they will oppose a resolution that would authorize military strikes. Two seats in the 435-member House are vacant.

The largest group of lawmakers remains undecided, including a majority of the Senate and the House. That could create an opportunity for the president to persuade them in a string of six interviews with TV network anchors today and a televised address to the nation Tuesday. The Senate could vote as early as Wednesday.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to images like the ones we’ve seen out of Syria,” Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday. “Failing to respond to this outrageous attack would increase the risk that chemical weapons could be used again; that they would fall into the hands of terrorists who might use them against us; and it would send a horrible signal to other nations that there would be no consequences for their use of these weapons. All of which would pose a serious threat to our national security.”

Congress isn’t convinced. In the survey:

Democrats haven’t fallen in line behind the president, at least not yet. Congressional Democrats are as likely to oppose the measure as support it, although most say they are undecided. At the moment, 28 Democrats support action; 28 oppose it.

Republicans who have made a decision overwhelmingly oppose Obama, by nearly 8-1. Sixteen Republicans support action; 121 oppose it.

In a majority of states, not a single member of Congress has gone on record endorsing the president’s request for authorization of a military strike. That includes a dozen states that Obama carried in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections: Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

“I think it’s an uphill slog from here,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the handful of Republicans who support the president, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.

He said the White House has “done an awful job” in explaining the reason for a strike and added, “It’s a confusing mess.”

On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he was horrified by images of the alleged chemical-weapons attack in Syria but warned that the strikes could destabilize the country or even increase the odds that opposition forces obtain chemical weapons.

“I don’t think we’re going to do anything to (Syrian President Bashar) Assad,” he said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said he has heard overwhelming opposition from his constituents. “And keep in mind, my district voted 77 percent for the president,” he said on CBS. “I think the president has work to do, but I think he can possibly get the votes. But he’s got to come before the Congress and the nation.”

On this issue, Obama hasn’t been able to count on the classic partisan divide that has defined the capital’s politics through his tenure. Some liberal Democrats have aligned with Republican libertarians to oppose a military strike. Some GOP hawks who typically oppose him (including Arizona Sen. John McCain, whom Obama beat in the race for the White House in 2008) argue for action.

Even African-Americans in Congress, who have been among Obama’s most reliable supporters on other issues, are resistant. Of 42 Black lawmakers, two are committed to voting “yes.”

A separate Washington Post count of congressional support Sunday reported different specific numbers but also found a tough road ahead for the president. In the Senate, the Post found 25 in favor, 17 opposed, 10 leaning no and 50 undecided; in the House, 25 in favor, 111 against, 116 leaning no and 181 undecided.

In the USA Today Network survey, journalists from USA Today and nearly 40 other Gannett-owned newspapers and television stations across the country reported on the views expressed by every senator and all but four members of the House, who couldn’t be reached.

Obama Tests Limits of Power in Syrian Conflict

The proposed strike is unlike anything that has come before — an attack inside the territory of a sovereign country, without its consent, without a self-defense rationale and without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council or even the participation of a multilateral treaty alliance like NATO, and for the purpose of punishing an alleged war crime that has already occurred rather than preventing an imminent disaster.

Obama Tests Limits of Power in Syrian Conflict

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: September 8, 2013 254 Comments

WASHINGTON — In asking Congress to authorize an attack on Syria over claims it used chemical weapons, President Obama has chosen to involve lawmakers in deciding whether to undertake a military intervention that in some respects resembles the limited types that many presidents — Ronald Reagan in Grenada, Bill Clinton in Kosovo and even Mr. Obama in Libya — have launched on their own.

President Obama’s strategy ensures that no matter what happens, the crisis is likely to create an important precedent.

On another level, the proposed strike is unlike anything that has come before — an attack inside the territory of a sovereign country, without its consent, without a self-defense rationale and without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council or even the participation of a multilateral treaty alliance like NATO, and for the purpose of punishing an alleged war crime that has already occurred rather than preventing an imminent disaster.

The contrasting moves, ceding more of a political role to Congress domestically while expanding national war powers on the international stage, underscore the complexity of Mr. Obama’s approach to the Syrian crisis. His administration pressed its case on Sunday, saying it had won Saudi backing for a strike, even as the Syrian president warned he would retaliate.

Mr. Obama’s strategy ensures that no matter what happens, the crisis is likely to create an important precedent in the often murky legal question of when presidents or nations may lawfully use military force.

Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, said the president believed a strike would be lawful, both in international law and domestic law, even if neither the Security Council nor Congress approved it. But the novel circumstances, she said, led Mr. Obama to seek Congressional concurrence to bolster its legitimacy.

The move is right, said Walter Dellinger, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Clinton administration, because the proposed attack is not “covered by any of the previous precedents for the unilateral use of executive power.”

“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t become another precedent,” Mr. Dellinger added. “But when the president is going beyond where any previous president has gone, it seems appropriate to determine whether Congress concurs.”

Disputes about whether and when a president or nation may launch an act of war can be hazy because courts generally do not issue definitive answers about such matters. Instead presidents, and countries, create precedents that over time can become generally accepted as a gloss on what written domestic laws and international treaties permit. Against that backdrop, many legal scholars say Mr. Obama is proposing to violate international law. But others contend that the question is ambiguous, and some suggest that the United States could establish a precedent creating new international law if it strikes.

The United States has used its armed forces abroad dozens of times without Security Council approval, but typically has invoked self-defense; when Mr. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, for example, he cited a need to protect Americans on the island along with the request of neighboring countries. The most notable precedent for the Syria crisis was Mr. Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo, but that was undertaken as part of NATO and in response to a time-urgent problem: stopping a massacre of civilians.

By contrast, the United States would carry out strikes on Syria largely alone, and to punish an offense that has already occurred. That crime, moreover, is defined by two treaties banning chemical weapons, only one of which Syria signed, that contain no enforcement provisions. Such a strike has never happened before.

Attempts to deal with the novelty of the crisis in international law have become entangled in the separate domestic law question of whether the president could order strikes on Syria without Congressional permission.

Seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Obama embraced a limited view of a president’s power to initiate war without Congress, telling The Boston Globe that “the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

But by the 2011 conflict in Libya he abandoned his campaign view of presidential war powers as too limited. While the NATO intervention was authorized for international law purposes by the Security Council, in domestic law Congress did not authorize Mr. Obama to participate. But Mr. Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel argued that it was lawful for him to unilaterally order American forces to bomb Libya because of national interests in preserving regional stability and in supporting the “credibility and effectiveness” of the Security Council.

In recent weeks, administration lawyers decided that it was within Mr. Obama’s constitutional authority to carry out a strike on Syria as well, even without permission from Congress or the Security Council, because of the “important national interests” of limiting regional instability and of enforcing the norm against using chemical weapons, Ms. Ruemmler said.

But even if he could act alone, that left the question of whether he should. The lack of a historical analogue and traditional factors that have justified such operations, she said, contributed to his decision to go to Congress.

“The president believed that it was important to enhance the legitimacy of any action that would be taken by the executive,” Ms. Ruemmler said, “to seek Congressional approval of that action and have it be seen, again as a matter of legitimacy both domestically and internationally, that there was a unified American response to the horrendous violation of the international norm against chemical weapons use.”

At a news conference last week, Mr. Obama argued that the United States should “get out of the habit” of having the president “stretch the boundaries of his authority as far as he can” while lawmakers “snipe” from the sidelines. But he also explained his decision in terms of very special circumstances: humanitarian interventions where there is no immediate pressure to act and the United Nations is blocked.

Jack Goldsmith, a head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, said the limited criteria cited by Mr. Obama mean his move might not apply to more traditional future interventions. The more important precedent, he said, may concern international law and what he portrayed as Mr. Obama’s dismissive attitude toward whether or not having permission from the Security Council should stop humanitarian interventions.

Mr. Obama has in recent days repeatedly portrayed the Security Council system as incapable of performing its function of “enforcing international norms and international law,” and as so paralyzed by the veto power wielded by Russia that it is instead acting as a “barrier” to that goal.

Mr. Goldsmith said that in the Kosovo campaign, the Clinton administration shied away from arguing that it was consistent with international law to carry out a military attack not authorized by the Security Council purely for humanitarian reasons. Its fear was that such a doctrine could be misused by other nations, loosening constraints on war.

In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Mr. Obama said all nations “must adhere to standards that govern the use of force.” But he also argued that humanitarian grounds justified military force and cited “the Balkans,” leaving ambiguous whether he meant Bosnia, which had some Security Council approval; Kosovo, which did not; or both.

Ms. Ruemmler said that while an attack on Syria “may not fit under a traditionally recognized legal basis under international law,” the administration believed that given the novel factors and circumstances, such an action would nevertheless be “justified and legitimate under international law” and so not prohibited.

Still, she acknowledged that it was “more controversial for the president to act alone in these circumstances” than for him to do so with Congressional backing.

Steven G. Bradbury, a head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, said it would be “politically difficult” to order strikes if Congress refused to approve them. But he predicted future presidents would not feel legally constrained to echo Mr. Obama’s request. “Every overseas situation, every set of exigent circumstances, is a little different, so I don’t really buy that it’s going to tie future presidents’ hands very much,” he said.

But Harold H. Bruff, a University of Colorado law professor who is one of the authors of a casebook on the separation of powers, argued that the episode would have enduring political ramifications. “I’m sure that Obama or some later president will argue later that they can still choose whether or not to go to Congress,” he said. “But it does raise the political cost of a future president not going to Congress because the precedent will be cited against him or her.”

Journalist Facing Prison Over a Link

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" to a document is a Federal crime???

"By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities ... are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it"

I guess that is just a cockamamie, convoluted, lame excuse to flush the First Amendment down the toilet by Obama's federal goons.

Source

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

The Reinvention of an Anti-War Activist

Kyrsten Sinema isn't an Anti-War Activist???

Kyrsten Sinema is also a gun grabber and wants to flush the Second Amendment down the toilet.

Source

The Reinvention of an Anti-War Activist

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 07.23.2012 - 10:00 AM

You wouldn’t normally expect Washington Democrats to spend much time fretting over a congressional primary in Arizona. But the three-way Democratic race between Kyrsten Sinema, Andrei Cherny, and David Schapira is getting a surprising amount of attention from national Democrats, the pro-Israel community and the political media.

Ten years ago, Sinema was one of those radical left-wing activists who donned pink tutus at anti-war rallies and organized with anti-Israel groups. Today, the 36-year-old is running for Congress as an AIPAC-supporting moderate who would have voted in favor of the Afghanistan intervention.

The problem? Some Democrats say her evolution doesn’t add up. For one, Sinema’s been involved with anti-Israel and anti-war groups much more recently than her campaign has acknowledged. And while she recently released a strongly-worded pro-Israel position paper [hmmm... an atheist, anti-war activist that supports war mongering Israel??], her latest comments on foreign policy issues have been dodgy and confusing. [I suspect that is very intentional, so she won't lose any votes from fence sitters who don't know if she is for or against something]

“Is she for or against killing bin Laden?” asked former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block. “Based on her record, you don’t know. You would think when you’re considering a member of Congress, you would know their positions on these issues.”

One Democratic Arizona state representative who has worked with Sinema said her views are impossible to decipher. [Again I suspect that is very intentional, so she won't lose any votes from fence sitters who don't know if she is for or against something]

“When she wanted to be an activist, she was anti-war, all these kinds of things that now she says she never was,” he said. “I don’t think she actually has a foreign policy core, I think she has a political core.” [hmmm so Kyrsten Sinema is now denying being an anti-war activist????]

According to the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, Sinema didn’t just dabble in radical circles; she helped organize and lead extreme anti-war groups that took anti-Israel positions on issues like the right of return and Israel’s self defense. Townhall’s Guy Benson reported that she was involved in anarchist riots that encouraged property destruction. [To be honest Sinema always has been a socialist like Drew Sullivan's Phoenix Anarchists, but I don't ever remember hearing about her at a Phoenix Anarchist event. ]

Sinema’s campaign disputed the claim that she was involved with anti-Israel activism, calling it a smear tactic by opponents.

“These weren’t anti-Israel groups. These were ‘Let’s not go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan groups,’” Sinema’s spokesman Rodd McLeod told me. He acknowledged that there may have been anti-Israel elements at some of the rallies she attended, but that this never represented her own view. “Frankly it’s sexist. She has to agree with the people she marches with, when she’s a 25-year-old grad student?”

That phrasing is slightly misleading, since Sinema’s involvement with radical and anti-Israel causes continued well beyond her mid-20s. Two years ago, Sinema was a featured speaker at an anti-war rally sponsored by Code Pink, the End the War Coalition, and Women in Black. She also sat on the board of the Progressive Democrats of America in 2006 and 2007, when she was entering her second term as an Arizona state representative. During that time, PDA issued a statement condemning the pro-Israel lobby and equating it with Palestinian terrorism.

“PDA opposes the powerful and dangerous lobbies that distort US foreign policy in the Middle East, much as we condemn those Palestinians guilty of waging and supporting terrorist war against Israeli civilians,” read the statement.

The organization also blamed Israeli policy for Palestinian terror attacks.

“[W]hile we condemn such terrorism, it remains our belief that the root cause of violence in Israel and Palestine is the Israeli occupation and intransigence, despite Israel’s trumpeted withdrawal from Gaza.”

When I raised this with McLeod, he said he wasn’t aware Sinema was ever a PDA board member and that the statement didn’t reflect her views. “She does not believe Israeli intransigence is the root cause of the conflict,” he said. “To conflate terrorism…with political activity is just absurd. She would never support that.”

Some of Sinema’s positions on national security are also unclear. In a May questionnaire requesting an endorsement from the PDA, Sinema wrote that she “led efforts opposing these wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] before they even started.” [So was Sinema always been a war monger, who hangs out with anti-war folks????]

That same month, she told The Hill newspaper that she would have voted to authorize the 2001 Afghanistan intervention if she had been in Congress at the time — and added that she also supports military intervention in Sudan and Somalia.

The campaign doesn’t believe this is a contradiction. “She makes a distinction between an invasion and occupation, and the use of military force,” McLeod explained.

Sinema also seems unfamiliar with some of the content in her staunchly pro-Israel position paper. The Jewish Journal’s Shmuel Rosner obtained private email conversations in which Sinema contradicted portions of the paper and seemed perplexed by what a “demilitarized” Palestinian state meant.

When I asked McLeod how much involvement Sinema had with the paper, he said she had done much of the work herself. “I did one edit on it, but she worked with members of the community on it.”

But in one of the emails cited by the Jewish Journal, Sinema claimed that her staff had written the paper, not her. [Yea, a typical lying politician. Blame your STAFF for any statements that make you look bad!!!!]

“You are right, staff writes position papers,” she wrote. “I will ask staff to edit and get an updated and accurate position uploaded to the website this week.”

Sinema refused to answer questions about her history when I called her on the phone. Instead, she said I would have to request an interview through her office.

“I assume you got this [cell phone] number from my opponents, and I’m sure they’re trying to spread some horrible stories about me,” she said,

When I got in touch with her spokesperson, McLeod, he said Sinema was busy and wouldn’t have time to talk to me directly.

Kyrsten Sinema isn't an atheist?????

Even though Sinema does not claim the atheist mantle, nontheist groups consider her one of their own.

It sure sounds like Kyrsten Sinema will say ANYTHING to get elected.

While Sinema's campaign was initially unavailable for comment after Tuesday's election, spokesman Justin Unga said Friday that Sinema does not consider herself a nonbeliever, adding that she prefers a "secular approach.''

Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona Democrat, To Replace Pete Stark As Sole Atheist In Congress

Religion News Service | By Kimberly Winston Posted: 11/08/2012 7:35 am EST Updated: 11/09/2012 4:46 pm EST

(RNS) Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., the only openly atheist member of Congress, lost his race for another term on Tuesday (Nov. 6).

But secularists will not remain unrepresented in the Capitol. Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, a former Arizona state senator who was raised Mormon and is a bisexual, has narrowly won her pitch for a House seat by 2,000 votes.

"We are sad to see Pete Stark go," said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, which gave Stark its Humanist of the Year award in 2008.

"He was a pioneer for us, and by being open about his lack of a belief in God we hope that he has opened the door for people like Kyrsten Sinema and others that will come after her."

While Sinema's campaign was initially unavailable for comment after Tuesday's election, spokesman Justin Unga said Friday that Sinema does not consider herself a nonbeliever, adding that she prefers a "secular approach.''

"Kyrsten believes the terms non-theist, atheist or nonbeliever are not befitting of her life's work or personal character,'' Unga said in email. "She does not identify as any of the above.''

Stark, who turns 80 this year, is the dean of the California congressional delegation and has served Fremont, a religiously diverse community near San Jose, since 1972. He "came out" as a nonbeliever in 2007, and went on to win two re-election bids. But this time he faced recent redistricting and a fellow Democratic challenger, Eric Salwell, almost 50 years his junior.

"I don't think his lack of belief in a god had anything to do with the results of this election," Speckhardt said. "The numbers were close."

But during the campaign, Salwell raised Stark's 2011 vote against reaffirming "In God We Trust" as the national motto, a vote in which he was joined by just eight other lawmakers. The outspoken Stark accused Salwell of taking bribes, an accusation which he eventually had to apologize for.

Still, Speckhardt said Stark's achievements for nontheists include his opposition to the war in Iraq and his support of health care reform and civil rights. He also worked for congressional recognition of Darwin Day and the National Day of Reason, which nontheists observe to promote science education and critical thinking.

"Humanism is not just a lack of belief in God, it is a positive, progressive philosophy," Speckhardt said. "So for us, he has done things every day."

Sinema, 36, has much in common with Stark ideologically. Having previously served as both an Arizona state senator and representative, she has a long record of supporting women's rights, marriage equality, gay rights and science education.

Even though Sinema does not claim the atheist mantle, nontheist groups consider her one of their own.

"This is a step forward in that she was able to run openly as a nontheist and it didn't seem to be an issue," said Lauren Anderson Youngblood, communications manager for the Secular Coalition for America, whose Arizona branch supported Sinema's election. "That is a great thing for the community, especially because with the loss of Pete Stark, we are left with a big hole."

Editor's note: The post has been updated to reflect input from the Sinema campaign about Sinema's beliefs. [And of course that probably seems to change on who she wants to vote for her. ]

PLEA endorses Sinema's congressional bid

Police officers LOVE Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema

Phoenix Law Enforcement Association endorses Sinema's congressional bid

I suspect the reason Kyrsten Sinema tried to flush Arizona's medical marijuana act down the toilet by interdicting a bill that would have slapped a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana was to keep her cop friends who give her lots of money happy.

Source

PLEA endorses Sinema's congressional bid

Posted: Jan 05, 2012 4:14 PM Updated: Jan 17, 2013 4:14 PM

By Phil Benson - email

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association on Thursday endorsed Democrat Kyrsten Sinema's run for Congress.

Sinema, of Phoenix, declared her candidacy Tuesday and resigned from the Arizona Senate to run for the U.S. House seat from Arizona's 9th Congressional District.

"As a state legislator, Kyrsten did more than just give lip service in support of law enforcement and police officers," said Levi Bolton, spokesperson for PLEA. "She stood by those words and voted on numerous occasions to support us." [See the police will tell you themselves that Kyrsten Sinema supports the police state. Her attempt to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana is the best example of that I can give you]

"Kyrsten's proven commitment to protecting those who protect our community will make her a strong and effective advocate for police and first responders in Congress," Bolton added.

The newly drawn 9th District includes much of central Maricopa County, taking in Tempe and parts of Phoenix and Mesa.

At least one other prominent Democrat may run for the seat. State Sen. David Schapira of Tempe has said he may run.

Republican U.S. Rep. Ben Quayle also lives in the district, but he may run instead in an adjacent district.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will pick a replacement to serve the rest of Sinema's Senate term.

Copyright 2012 KPHO. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Drive to curb size of public-employee pensions

Goldwater co-founder launches drive to curb size of public-employee pensions

Posted: Monday, September 9, 2013 2:45 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX — Saying he doesn't want a Detroit-like bankruptcy here, a GOP activist is hoping to get voters to curb the size of pensions for public employees.

The initiative drive launched by Roy Miller would limit the annual budget growth of city and county budgets until their existing pension funding is considered “adequate.”

Miller's conceded that, when it comes to pensions and predicting future costs, there can be a lot of wiggle room as future earnings are built on assumptions like what the stock market will do and where interest rates will go.

But the measure sets a floor of 80 percent of future obligations as what would be considered “adequate.” And with the state's largest retirement system several points below that — and years away from 80 percent — the initiative could cause an immediate hit to spending in virtually all counties and cities.

A separate provision of the initiative would totally wipe out any pension benefits for any elected official not already in office if and when it is approved.

State lawmakers just this past year approved sweeping curbs in what has been the most generous pension plan for the entire state, allowing politicians to retire at 80 percent of their highest salary after just 20 years. That plan also included guaranteed cost-of-living increases for retirees which has actually boosted payments to beyond what they were earning while in office.

The new law puts future elected officials into a “defined contribution” plan, much like a 401(k) offered by many companies. That ties retirement benefits to the actual earnings of the plan, versus some state-set guarantee.

Miller insisted even that is too generous.

“I believe that elected officials ought to be policymakers,” he said. “They ought to not be career positions.”

He said they should take time to serve the public ``and then go back into the real world.''

But Miller's initiative, like the changes approved by the Legislature, would not affect those already in office or retired. That's because it's illegal in Arizona to tinker with benefits already earned.

The issue of adequate funding for public employee pensions gained national attention when Detroit, unable to meet its bills, filed for bankruptcy protection. Among the allegations has been that the city's pension system was severely underfunded, leaving city taxpayers on the hook for future obligations.

Pension funds have taken a sharp hit since the recession, with managers finding they are unable to earn as much on their investments as they had a decade earlier. The stock market dropped and fixed-income investments were paying very little.

This applies particularly to “defined benefit” plans, the kind that most public employees have, where they are guaranteed a set pension based on salary and years of service.

The result is that the Arizona State Retirement System, the state's largest — and the one that serves counties, schools and most cities — was 75.7 percent funded as of June 2012.

ASRS spokesman David Cannella said numbers for the fiscal year that ended this past June are still being compiled. But he said funding should be closed to that, “maybe a little bit lower.”

Cannella said ASRS managers have done what they could to correct the problem by increasing the contribution rates that both employers and employees make. That currently stands at 11.54 percent each.

A decade ago, with the economy booming, it was just 2 percent, though it had been higher in some years before that.

But Cannella said that, even with an improving economy, he does not think the system will get to 80 percent until around 2021.

That would trigger the spending curbs in the initiative for each of the local governments with employees in the ASRS.

A few cities have their own retirement plans. And they could find themselves in worse shape.

In Tucson, for example, the latest publicly available figures put the system liabilities at $340 million above assets. That translates out to a funding ratio of less than 64 percent.

That funding has led to a separate initiative drive in Tucson to totally scrap that city's current defined benefit plan in favor of a defined contribution plan.

Miller has until July 3 to get the 172,809 valid signatures on petitions needed to put the issue on the 2014 ballot.

He said he has sufficient financial commitments to hire the necessary paid circulators to get to that point, though he would not identify sources. Miller said he would worry about the costs of a campaign if the measure qualifies for the ballot.

This isn't the only initiative push dealing with public employees by Miller, a co-founder of the conservative and anti-union Goldwater Institute.

He is spearheading a separate proposal to amend the Arizona Constitution to require all workers, public and private, to give annual approval before deductions could to be taken from their paychecks for political purposes. That includes not just supporting or opposing candidates but even lobbying at the Legislature.

Miller acknowledged that could curtail the political influence of unions.

Liar - Kerry’s claim that he opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq

Source

Kerry’s claim that he opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq

Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 09/10/2013

“You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given.”

— Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in an interview with MSNBC, Sept. 5, 2013

This is at least the second time since becoming secretary that Kerry has asserted that he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq while serving as a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. The first time the Kerry made this claim, during a student forum in Ethiopia, his statement mysteriously disappeared from the official State Department transcript.

But then he said it again, on television, also dragging Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel into the mix. So let’s take a trip back in time and see what Kerry actually said in 2003.

The Facts

When it comes to war, Kerry often takes a highly nuanced position. He voted against the congressional resolution authorizing force in the 1991 Gulf War, but voted for the 2002 resolution that supported military action against Iraq. Both votes turned out to be bad political bets.

When Kerry opposed the 1991 resolution, he complained that the George H.W. Bush administration had done too little to involve the rest of the world in its campaign to oust Iraq from Kuwait. But in 2002, he praised the coalition that had been formed for the first Gulf War, in part to complain that George W. Bush had thus far failed to secure the same level of cooperation.

When Kerry voted for the 2002 resolution, he warned he would not support war if Bush failed to win the support of the international community in the absence of an imminent threat. “Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the president is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies,” Kerry said.

But Kerry also said that the burden to avoid war was on the Iraqi leader: “Saddam Hussein has a choice: He can continue to defy the international community, or he can fulfill his longstanding obligations to disarm. He is the person who has brought the world to this brink of confrontation.”

Thus, as the war approached in early 2003, Kerry appeared generally supportive, though critical of the administration’s diplomatic efforts. He was listed in news reports as one of the Democratic presidential aspirants who backed an invasion, though some reporters noted the Hamlet quality of his remarks.

As the Los Angeles Times headlined one article in January of that year, “On Iraq, Kerry Appears Either Torn or Shrewd.” The newspaper noted that “virtually all of Kerry’s rivals for the 2004 Democratic nomination believe he is trying to straddle the issue by shifting his emphasis at different times and for different audiences.”

By the time of the March invasion, after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s United Nations presentation on Iraq’s alleged weapons, Kerry backed the attack, according to articles that appeared in the Boston Globe (and which were written by one of his current aides at the State Department).

“It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism,” Kerry said. “If so, the only exit strategy is victory. This is our common mission and the world’s cause. We’re in this together. We want to complete the mission while safeguarding our troops, avoiding innocent civilian casualties, disarming Saddam Hussein, and engaging the community of nations to rebuild Iraq,” he said.

Kerry criticized what he called “a failure of diplomacy of a massive order” but told gthe Globe that if he were president, he may not have been able to avoid war.

Similarly, Hagel — who later also emerged as a harsh critic of the administration’s handling of the war — voted for the 2002 resolution and also supported the invasion.

“This war is bigger than just killing Saddam Hussein,” Hagel told CBS News on March 21, 2003. “The fact is, as we have stated for 12 years, his regime has been in violation of the United Nations resolutions. His regime has possessed, or probably still does possess, weapons of mass destruction. So we shouldn’t personalize it. We should dismantle his regime, disarm his regime and work with the people of Iraq and in that region to give that country a new start, and hopefully that will be a start with democratic institutions and freedom for all people.”

A Kerry aide sent The Fact Checker a few clips of comments that Kerry made in 2004, as he was challenging Bush for the presidency, that that if he had been president and had access to the same intelligence that Bush had, he would not have gone to war in Iraq. But that’s not the same as claiming he opposed the decision to attack Iraq in 2003.

The Pinocchio Test

Many politicians have a tendency to look back at their past statements with rose-colored glasses. But given that Kerry has now twice in recent months made the claim that he opposed the war in Iraq, this is clearly not a case of a momentary slip-up.

For Kerry, the uncomfortable fact remains that he voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq, he believed the intelligence that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he said there was little choice but to launch an invasion to disarm him. Kerry may have been highly critical of Bush’s diplomatic efforts in advance of the invasion, but that is not the same thing as opposing the war when it started.

It’s time for the secretary to stop making this claim. In trying to make a distinction between his vote to authorize the war and his later dismay at how it turned out, Kerry earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Marijuana use on the rise among young adults, fiftysomethings

Marijuana use on the rise among young adults, fiftysomethings

By Emily Alpert

September 9, 2013, 5:21 p.m.

The growing popularity of marijuana has propelled a rise in drug use among Americans, including those in their 50s and 60s, a recently released national survey shows.

Marijuana remains the most common drug, and it increased in popularity from 2007 to 2012, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found. Rising marijuana use helped drive up drug use among young adults, more than a fifth of whom said they had used "illicit drugs" in the previous month. Almost 19% of adults ages 18 to 25 had recently used marijuana.

Drug use also rose among adults ages 50 to 64, the study found. The surge was especially strong among Americans in their late 50s, whose rates of illicit drug use grew from 1.9% up to 6.6% between 2002 and 2012. Researchers believe the increase is largely because baby boomers, who were more likely to use drugs than earlier generations, are aging into that group.

Marijuana use has increased as legalization wins more support from Americans, with a majority telling the Pew Research Center in a poll this year that the drug should be legal. Though marijuana use was on the rise, many other drugs have dwindled in use or stayed about the same: Cocaine was less common in 2012 than in 2006, when only 1% of Americans said they had used it in the last month. Less than 640,000 people said they had started using it in the last year, compared with 1 million new users a decade earlier.

Methamphetamine use fell slightly, while hallucinogens were used about as frequently as a decade earlier, the study showed. There was also little change in Americans using psychotherapeutic drugs for reasons other than those prescribed.

The new study also examined alcohol and tobacco use. Underage drinking fell between 2002 and 2012: Last year, less than a quarter of underage people said they drank alcohol in the last month, compared with 28.8% of underage people a decade earlier.

Smoking has also declined among teenagers, though a separate survey recently showed that electronic cigarettes had become increasingly popular with teens.

The annual survey includes about 70,000 teens and adults and is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Most of the questions are answered privately on a computer; in some instances an interviewer asks a question out loud and enters what the person says.

Man arrested for drunk horse riding

Source

Man's journey is cut short when suspected of riding horse drunk

By Mitchell Byars and Ashley Dean, Daily Camera

Posted: 09/10/2013 07:55:15 AM PDT

BOULDER — A 45-year-old Colorado Springs man is facing charges of drunken horseback riding, animal cruelty and the prohibited use of weapons after University of Colorado police on Monday interrupted what he claimed was a 600-mile journey from Larkspur to Bryce, Utah, to attend a wedding.

Police began receiving calls about Patrick Neal Schumacher's unusual journey around 2:14 p.m., according to CU police spokesman Ryan Huff.

Witnesses said the man later identified as Schumacher and his horse were seen wandering into traffic while riding north on Broadway. They also reported seeing the rider repeatedly hit the horse near Broadway and Baseline Road; police sad the man struck the horse hard enough that it reared up on its hind legs.

CU police found the would-be cowboy and his horse, Dillon, on University Hill near Broadway and College Avenue.

According to a campus police, Schumacher was slumped over to the right and forcing people off the sidewalks. Officers asked him to dismount and gave him a roadside sobriety test, which Schumacher failed, police said.

Schumacher also had a dog -- a pug named Bufford -- in a backpack, and officers found a small black powder pistol and beer in one of his saddlebags.

According to CU police, when officers asked Schumacher about striking the horse, he told them he was smacking flies off Dillon's head.

Schumacher was arrested on suspicion of charges of animal cruelty, prohibited use of weapons and reckless endangerment, all misdemeanors, as well as riding a horse while under the influence of alcohol, a traffic infraction.

CU police said Schumacher told officers that he was on his way to his brother's wedding, attempting an approximately 600-mile trek to Utah. Schumacher said he'd previously lost his driver's license, so he decided to make the journey by horseback, according to police.

As for Dillon and Bufford, the animals have been impounded with the help of the Boulder Police Department Animal Control Unit, Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, and the Humane Society of Boulder Valley.

Schumacher remained in custody at the Boulder County Jail on Monday night.

Your cellphone: private or not?

Your cellphone: private or not?

Sep. 9, 2013

by Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

Police uncovered Brima Wurie's drug dealing during a routine arrest in Boston six years ago, thanks in part to the frequent calls from "my house" arriving on his flip-top cellphone.

David Riley's participation in a San Diego gang shooting in 2009 was revealed after police stopped his Lexus for having expired tags, found weapons and eventually located incriminating photos and video on his smartphone.

Cellphones - owned by more than nine in 10 American adults - are at the center of a growing legal debate over privacy rights and technology, one that's probably headed to the Supreme Court in the coming months.

As the Wurie and Riley cases illustrate, your cellphone and the intimate information it contains can be used against you. At issue is whether police can search mobile devices upon arrest without first obtaining a warrant - and whether the data inside, from e-mail to the Internet, are fair game.

For the court, it's the latest in a string of Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases involving society's innovations - from the automobile in the past century to the current alphabet soup of DNA, GPS and mobile apps.

"Every generation has its new technologies that raise novel Fourth Amendment questions," says Orin Kerr, an expert on computer crime law at George Washington University Law School. "Technology changes the facts."

The facts about what police can do when making an arrest have been clear for 40 years: They can search the person being arrested and what's within reach, with an eye toward weapons or evidence that could be destroyed.

"It is settled law that a custodial arrest based on probable cause justifies a full search of an arrestee and any items found on him - including items such as wallets, calendars, address books, pagers and pocket diaries," the Obama administration argues in its petition asking the court to hear United States v. Wurie.

Cellphones and, increasingly, smartphones that mimic computers have clouded those facts. At least six federal or state appellate courts have ruled that they are fair game; at least three others have said search warrants are required.

In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has been asked to hear both the California and Massachusetts cases, which could help restore clarity in Fourth Amendment search and seizure law. The justices probably will decide this fall whether to hear one or both, and a decision is possible next spring.

'THE REAL CHALLENGE' FOR DECADES

In the Wurie case, the Obama administration urges the court to reverse a 1st Circuit appeals court decision against the police search.

"Over the last decade, cellphones have become ubiquitous in the United States," the Justice Department's petition says. "Inexpensive, disposable phones that are difficult to trace are particularly common in drug-trafficking conspiracies."

In Riley v. California, lawyers for the appealing defendant argue that cellphone searches without a warrant are unreasonable.

"A cellphone nowadays is a portal into our most sensitive information and the most private aspects of our lives," says Jeffrey Fisher, lead attorney for David Riley and co-director of Stanford University's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. "It's also a device that is the gateway to your office, health records, bank records."

Given the volume of lower court cases and split decisions, it's unlikely the Supreme Court can duck the issue, as several justices publicly wished they could do this year on same-sex marriage - an institution that Justice Samuel Alito noted was "newer than cellphones or the Internet."

In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts and some of his colleagues have said the clash between modern technology and privacy rights is likely to become a dominant legal issue in the future.

"I think that is going to be the real challenge for the next 50 years â?? how we do adopt old, established rules to new technology," Roberts said during an appearance at Rice University last year. "What does the Fourth Amendment mean when you can, through technology, literally see through walls with heat imaging? I mean, is that a search and a seizure?"

Such cases, Roberts said, "are difficult for us, frankly, because we're not all technologically expert."

CASE LAW IS 'CONFUSING'

The cases coming before the court for possible consideration have little in common beyond cellphones and criminal behavior.

In the Massachusetts case, police opened Wurie's flip-phone to get the number for the repeated incoming calls. The limited search led them to get a search warrant for his apartment, where they seized crack cocaine, marijuana, cash, a firearm and ammunition. Wurie was convicted and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

An appeals court panel reversed on two counts, ruling that the cellphone search violated Wurie's constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take the case, contending that "police have full authority not only to seize any object they find on an arrestee, but also to search its contents."

In the California case, a routine traffic stop led police to discover Riley's suspended license. They impounded his car, found two guns under the hood and arrested him for concealing weapons. Upon his arrest and again at the police station, they searched his Samsung smartphone, including text messages, photos and video.

Based on that evidence, Riley was convicted and sentenced to at least 15 years in prison; the conviction was upheld at the state appeals court, and the state Supreme Court refused to reconsider it.

Several experts agree with Fisher that the Riley appeal is more pertinent, both because of today's smartphone technology and the broader police searches that could reveal unrelated data. The Pew Research Center estimates that 56% of Americans have a smartphone, 31% seek medical information on their cellphones, and 29% use them for online banking.

"The Fourth Amendment must be sensitive to new technologies enabling police to easily obtain massive amounts of personal information that, at least as a practical matter, would previously have been inaccessible," Fisher argues in his petition.

What both sides agree on is that the high court should tackle the issue. In the Wurie case, judges on both sides of the ruling appealed for Supreme Court intervention.

"The differing standards which the courts have developed provide confusing and often contradictory guidance to law enforcement," said 1st Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sandra Lynch in her ruling.

FROM QUILL PENS TO E-MAIL

The history of Supreme Court cases on phone technology has been similarly confusing. In 1928, the court said wiretapping didn't require a warrant. By 1967, it said bugging a phone booth certainly did.

Decisions on Fourth Amendment cases also have gone back and forth. The 1969 case Chimel v. California and 1973's U.S. v. Robinson set the standard for what police could search upon an arrest. But in the past few years, courts from California to Texas to Florida have split over the issue of cellphones and digital content.

"The new frontier of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence continues to expand as technology advances," Matthew Orso, a North Carolina attorney, wrote in a 2010 paper on the subject. "This constant expansion creates difficulty for courts in applying decades-old case law to factual scenarios never before considered."

Not far behind the issue of cellphone searches is another legal conundrum: whether police can get the location of cellphone users from service providers without a warrant. Lower courts have split on that issue as well, making a Supreme Court showdown likely in the future.

Increasingly in recent years, the high court has been asked to take on issues so complex or newfangled as to stump the justices, who live in a marble palace of ivory paper and quill pens.

When the justices ruled unanimously this year that human genes cannot be patented, the depth of knowledge required about genetics prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to disassociate himself from parts of the opinion "going into fine details of molecular biology."

"I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief," Scalia said.

Computer technology poses other problems for the court. "E-mail is already old-fashioned," Justice Elena Kagan quipped last month, "and the court hasn't gotten to that yet."

A DIGITAL HARE, A LEGAL TORTOISE

Time doesn't stop for the courts to catch up with modern medicine or technological innovation.

"At every turn, as the digital age hare leaps forward, the constitutional jurisprudence lags, like a tortoise, far behind," says Charles MacLean, an assistant professor at Indiana Tech Law School who has written extensively on the issue. "Perhaps the most unfortunate flaw in the tortoise-hare analogy is that constitutional jurisprudence, unlike Aesop's tortoise, never quite seems to catch up."

MacLean has concluded that legislatures, not courts, should address issues of rapidly changing technology - or else, "the risk is that we defer our privacy limits to programmers and marketers."

When it comes to criminal law involving search and seizure, the court since 2001 has been asked to rule on cases involving thermal imaging, global positional systems (GPS) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA):

- In Kyllo v. United States, the court ruled 5-4 that police needed a search warrant to use a thermal imaging device that detected heat used to grow marijuana inside a home.

- In U.S. v. Jones, the court ruled unanimously that police could not attach a GPS device to a car without a warrant in order to monitor its movements. Perhaps the die was cast during oral arguments when Roberts confirmed that otherwise, even the justices' cars could be followed.

- In Maryland v. King, the court ruled 5-4 last year that police can swab the cheek of someone arrested for a serious offense to obtain DNA - which then can be matched against databases of unsolved crimes.

Scalia, who wrote the Kyllo and Jones decisions and frequently sides with defendants in Fourth Amendment cases, wrote a scathing dissent in the King case. He warned that in the future, "your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."

Some experts warn that if cellphones go the way of cheek swabs, the arrests that follow could lead to embarrassment or legal complications for otherwise law-abiding citizens.

If that happens, "any offense they can arrest you for, they can search the full contents of the phone," says Adam Gershowitz, a professor at William & Mary Law School and an expert on the subject. "I probably do six things that are illegal on my drive to work every day."

Officials misused U.S. surveillance program

NSA - You don't have any stinking 4th Amendment rights!!!

Docs: Officials misused U.S. surveillance program

Associated Press Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:46 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. government officials for nearly three years accessed data on thousands of domestic phone numbers they shouldn’t have and then misrepresented their actions to a secret spy court to reauthorize the government’s surveillance program, documents released Tuesday show.

The government’s explanation points to an enormous surveillance infrastructure with such incredible power that even the National Security Agency doesn’t fully know how to properly use it: Officials told a judge in 2009 that the system is so large and complicated that “there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding” of it.

The documents, which the Obama administration was compelled to release as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group, show that National Security Agency analysts routinely exceeded their mission to track only phone numbers with reasonable connections to terrorism.

Officials said that the complexity of the computer system — and a misunderstanding of the laws, court orders and internal policies controlling analysts’ actions — contributed to the abuses. There’s no evidence that the NSA intentionally used its surveillance powers to spy on Americans for political purposes, a fear of many critics who recall the FBI’s intrusive surveillance of civil rights leaders and protesters in the 1960s.

“The documents released today are a testament to the government’s strong commitment to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “As demonstrated in these documents, once compliance incidents were discovered in the telephony metadata collection program, additional checks, balances and safeguards were developed to help prevent future instances of noncompliance.”

The Obama administration had earlier conceded that its surveillance program scooped up more domestic phone calls and emails than Congress or a court authorized. But many details of the program’s abuse were not known until Tuesday.

In a sweeping violation of court-imposed surveillance rules that went on daily between 2006 and 2009, the documents show the NSA tapped the bulk telephone records and compared them with thousands of others without “reasonable, articulable suspicion,” the required legal standard.

The NSA told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court it misunderstood restrictions on accessing data once it was archived, but Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in a March 2009 order that such an interpretation of the court’s orders “strains credulity.” He was so fed up with the government’s overreaching that he threatened to shutter the surveillance program.

After discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records for nearly three years without “reasonable, articulate suspicion” that they were connected to terrorism, the judge said in a blistering opinion that he had “lost confidence” in officials’ ability to legally operate the program.

Walton noted, for instance, that just 1,935 phone numbers out of 17,835 on a list investigators were working with in early 2009 met the legal standard.

The judge ordered the NSA to conduct an “end-to-end” review of its processes and policies while also ordering closer monitoring of its activities.

Later in 2009, a Justice Department lawyer reported to the spy court a “likely violation” of NSA surveillance rules. The lawyer said that in some cases, it appeared the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone records by email to as many as 189 analysts, but only 53 were approved by the spy court to see them.

Walton wrote that he was “deeply troubled by the incidents,” which he said occurred just weeks after the NSA had performed a major review of its internal practices because of the initial problems reported earlier in the year.

The hundreds of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Obama administration has been facing mounting pressure to reveal more details about the government’s domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor released documents showing massive trawling of domestic data by the NSA.

The data included domestic telephone numbers, calling patterns and the agency’s collection of Americans’ Internet user names, IP addresses and other metadata swept up in surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The Obama administration’s decision to release the documents comes just two weeks after it declassified three secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions — including one in response to a separate EFF lawsuit in the federal court in Washington. In that October 2011 opinion, Judge John D. Bates said he was troubled by at least three incidents over three years where government officials admitted to mistaken collection of domestic data.

The NSA’s huge surveillance machine proved unwieldy even for the experts inside the agency. In a long report to the surveillance court in August 2009, the Obama administration blamed its mistakes on the complexity of the system and “a lack of shared understanding among the key stakeholders” about the scope of the surveillance.

Kyrsten Sinema still undecided about bombing Syria???

Looks like alleged anti-war activist and Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema is still undecided about bombing Syria.

I suspect Kyrsten Sinema wants to be see both as an anti-war activist who is against bombing Syria and a war monger who supports bombing Syria so she can grab both of their votes in the next election.

I suspect that Kyrsten Sinema will vote to give her hero Emperor Obama permission to bomb Syria. That's just my opinion. I don't have anything to back it up.

That differs from her former anti-war buddies who are all 100 percent against bombing Syria.

Source

Speech gets tepid response from Ariz.’s D.C. delegates

By Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Sep 10, 2013 10:33 PM

President Barack Obama’s high-stakes speech on Syria received a lukewarm response Tuesday from Arizona’s Washington delegation.

Supporters of his call for military intervention said Obama’s argument wasn’t forceful enough, and those skeptical of his plan said he failed to change their minds.

Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake agree with Obama on the need to use military force against Syria over its alleged use of chemical weapons, but they were underwhelmed by the president’s argument for strikes.

The two Arizona Republicans are skeptical of a proposal from Russian President Vladimir Putin that would allow Syrian President Bashar Assad to avoid a U.S. attack by surrendering his regime’s stockpile of chemical weapons to international authorities, but both said the president is right to pursue that option. Obama announced Tuesday that he had asked House and Senate leaders to postpone voting on a resolution to authorize military action until the Russian plan is explored.

“We appreciate the president speaking directly to the American people about the conflict in Syria,” McCain said in a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a fellow member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We regret, however, that he did not speak more forcefully about the need to increase our military assistance to moderate opposition forces in Syria, such as the Free Syrian Army. We also regret that he did not lay out a clearer plan to test the seriousness of the Russian and Syrian proposal to transfer the Assad regime’s chemical weapons to international custody.”

McCain and Graham called for the United States and its allies to introduce “a tough U.N. Security Council resolution that lays out what steps Syria would have to take to give up its chemical weapons, including making a full and accurate declaration of all of its chemical weapons and granting international monitors unfettered access to all sites in Syria that possess these weapons.” Serious consequences for Syria’s failure to comply also would have to be part of the deal, they said.

Flake, in an interview with The Arizona Republic, called the president’s speech anticlimactic given the fast-moving events of the past 48 hours. He agreed that evidence against Assad is compelling, but Flake said Obama’s separate appeals to the political right and left in his speech weren’t effective because the issue doesn’t clearly split along party lines.

Obama would have been better off launching a targeted strike against Syria in response to the alleged Aug. 21 chemical-weapons incident, which killed more than 1,000 men, women and children, and reporting to Congress later, Flake added. That way, Obama would not have had to convince war-weary Americans and lawmakers that the engagement would be limited.

“I think that a lot of people have made up their minds, and they’re skeptical that this would be a limited strike,” Flake said. “I think there’s a lot of skepticism, and the president correctly said that people view it through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s a tough thing to break out of.”

McCain and Flake both sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and on Sept. 4 voted in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Assad. However, public and congressional opinion has leaned strongly against U.S. action.

On Monday, the situation shifted again after Putin proposed that Syria relinquish its chemical-weapons stockpile, which Assad previously had refused to even publicly confirm possessing.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments,” Obama said during the 16-minute address he delivered to the nation from the East Room of the White House. “But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force.”

Meanwhile, McCain is working with a group of senators on an amendment to the resolution that cleared the Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the latest development is not just a stalling tactic. In a Tuesday appearance on “CBS This Morning,” McCain said the revisions “would require strict timelines and strict guidelines that would have to be met as part of the authorization for the president.”

Obama’s speech did little to sway members of Arizona’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives to support his call for intervention in Syria.

Republican Rep. Matt Salmon said he remained opposed to military action. “I do not believe (Obama’s) speech won over the Congress or the American people,” Salmon said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., following the president’s prime-time speech to the nation.

The president failed to explain why Syria poses an immediate threat to the U.S. and didn’t lay out a credible strategy, according to the Mesa congressman.

Salmon supports the diplomatic alternative that Obama has agreed to pursue, of negotiating for Syria to hand control of its chemical weapons to the United Nations. But Salmon said Obama is taking credit for an option that he “stumbled into” when Secretary of State John Kerry floated it hypothetically Monday.

Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Prescott said the speech showed Obama “just got bested at geopolitical chess.” The president asked to delay congressional votes to authorize military action, in Gosar’s estimation, because he saw he did not have enough support.

“(The president) has not changed my opposition to military action. He made no convincing argument that a military strike is in our nation's interest,” Gosar said.

The president has lost credibility on Syria, he said, and overall on foreign policy.

Republican Rep. David Schweikert has been skeptical of the president’s call for military strikes, as has Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who has called for international cooperation. Neither answered The Republic’s request for reaction to the speech.

Nor did Arizona’s members who have said they haven’t made up their minds on the president’s plan: Republican Rep. Trent Franks and Democrats Kyrsten Sinema, Ron Barber, Ann Kirkpatick and Ed Pastor.

Republic reporters Rebekah L. Sanders and Erin Kelly contributed to this article.

Colorado recalls dealt a serious blow to gun-control advocates

Kyrsten Sinema is a gun grabbing politician that needs to be recalled????

Source

The Colorado recalls dealt a serious blow to gun-control advocates. Here’s why.

By Sean Sullivan, Published: September 11 at 6:30 am

Something pretty remarkable happened in Colorado on Tuesday night. John Morse, the Democratic president of the state Senate, was recalled from office. So was Democratic state Sen. Angela Giron.

Taken together, the losses arguably represent the biggest defeat for gun-control advocates since the push for expanded background checks failed in the U.S. Senate earlier this year.

Morse and Giron appeared on ballots Tuesday in the culmination of a recall campaign that largely shaped up as a referendum on the state’s recently passed gun-control laws, for which both Morse and Giron voted. Out of state money poured in on both sides. On one end, the National Rifle Association dished out six figures. On the other, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did too.

It’s not every day that you see an incumbent recalled from office, let alone someone as high-profile as a state Senate president. The message the defeat of Morse and Giron sends to legislators all across the country is unmistakable: If you are thinking about pushing for new gun-control laws, you could face swift consequences.

“You could almost call it the bellwether state as far as what’s going to happen down the road as far as gun-control and Second Amendment rights,” Republican George Rivera, who will fill Giron’s seat, told The Fix late last month.

The particulars of Tuesday’s elections prompted some gun-control advocates to argue that the results shouldn’t be over-read. For one thing, voters didn’t receive mail ballots automatically, a substantial change of protocol in a state where the majority of voters cast their votes via mail. For another, the losses don’t mean Republicans will control the Senate; nor do they mean the gun laws that Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) signed into law will be repealed.

“This election does not reflect the will of Coloradans, a majority of whom strongly support background checks and opposed these recalls,” said Bloomberg in a statement distributed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the group he co-founded. “It was a reflection of a very small, carefully selected population of voters’ views on the legislature’s overall agenda this session.”

But it shouldn’t go overlooked that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the two districts where voters cast ballots (though Morse’s district is more of a swing district than Giron’s more Democratic-leaning territory). And the anti-recall side easily outraised the pro-recall interests. The Democratic losses are a reflection of the fact that enthusiasm was squarely on the opposite side of Morse and Giron.

“The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) is proud to have stood with the men and women in Colorado who sent a clear message that their Second Amendment rights are not for sale,” the NRA’s political arm said in a statement.

While the long-term significance of the election will assuredly be be debated, it’s hard to argue against the proposition that lawmakers in other states will have Colorado somewhere in their minds the next time a push to tighten gun laws begins ramping up.

In the larger debate over gun laws, Tuesday was another victory for the NRA and its allies, who earlier this year demonstrated the power they wield in the campaign to prevent the passage of tighter gun restrictions in Congress.

Two Colorado state legislators lost on Tuesday and two Republicans won the chance to replace them. But make no mistake, the effects could be felt well beyond the borders of the Centennial State.

Previous articles on the American War Machine.

More articles on the American War Machine.