Category: Corruption

We Now Get the Chance to See How Much Corruption Barack Obama will Tolerate in the State Security Apparatus

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We have know that the President tolerated it when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper blatantly and unashamedly lied to Congress, but this is a much bigger deal.

Dianne Feinstein* just took to the floor of the Senate and accused the CIA of obstructing a senate investigation and attempting to intimidate the Senate Intelligence Committee Staff:

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.

 In a bombshell statement on the floor of the US Senate, Feinstein, normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the US constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the crisis as a “defining moment” for political oversight of the US intelligence service.

 Her unprecedented public assault on the CIA represented an intensification of the row between the committee and the agency over a still-secret report on the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11.

 Feinstein, who said she was making her statement “reluctantly”, confirmed recent reports that CIA officials had been accused of monitoring computer networks used by Senate staff investigators. Going further than previously, she referred openly to recent attempts by the CIA to remove documents from the network detailing evidence of torture that would incriminate intelligence officers.

 She also alleged that anonymous CIA officials were effectively conducting a smear campaign in the media to discredit and “intimidate” Senate staff by suggesting they had hacked into the agency’s computers to obtain a separate, critical internal report on the detention and interrogation programme.

While it is tempting to focus on the obvious irony of Feinstein’s outrage in the face of her previous full throated support of intellligence excesses, as Edward Snowden does, this is a much bigger issue.

If what Feinstein alleges is true, and I am inclined to believe it because it is a statement against her normal interests, which is as a CIA fanboi, it lends credibility.

Going over her speech, here is what she presents:

  • The Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that all relevant documents be turned over to them so that they might be able to investigate the CIA’s torture program.
  • The CIA balked, and so the committee and then CIA Director Leon Panetta negotiated an arrangement whereby the staff would access these documents at a CIA secured facility.  Here is the relevant quote:

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

  • Unsurprisingly, the CIA provided the documents without any sort of index or any search facility, though one was later added at Senate requests
  • It was this computer system that the CIA searched, in contravention of their agreement.
  • The CIA also insisted on additional multiple level levels of review that were not a part of the agreement.
  • When the staff found something relevant, they would save it to disk at the securely located computer, or print it out.
  • The staff found that documents that they had flagged as important were disappearing.
  • The CIA denied this, then blamed the IT staffers, and finally claimed that this was ordered by the White House, who denied this, and ordered the CIA to cooperate, “The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.“
  • In 2010, the staff found a draft of the “Internal Panetta Review,” an internal review that Panetta commissioned by on torture that demolished the official CIA response to the (as yet unreleased) Senate report.  It specifically contradicted the official report in a number of ways, most notably:
    • The practices were far more brutal that officially revealed.
    • There was no meaningful intelligence derived from torture
  • Because of the importance of the document, it mirrored the Senate Committee conclusions, the staff printed it out for safe keeping, and placed it in the secure safe in the Senate Intelligence Committee Offices.  This was done in accordance with the document handling procedures agreed between the CIA and Intel Committee.
  • The CIA then disappeared the Panetta report from the Senate staffers computers.
  • The CIA has still refused to supply the Panetta Review to the Senate.
  • On January 15, 2014, “CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.”
    • Note that even if this does not qualify as obstructing a Congressional investigation (I think that it does), it is a violation of the law for the CIA to conduct surveillance in the US   If they needed to search the computers (assuming that Congressional immunity does not apply) they would have to go the the FBI. (Which they must have hated)
  • The CIA has refused to provide additional details on the scope of the search, which, “May also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”
  • The CIA’s Inspector General looked at the searches done by the CIA, and concluded that they needed to be investigated criminally, and made a referral to the DoJ.
  • In response, the acting general counsel of the CIA made a criminal referral of the Senate staffers to the DOJ.

Here is the money quote:

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

(emphasis mine)

While Feinstein does not mention the counsel’s name, it is public knowledge that the CIA’s acting general counsel is Robert Eatinger, who among other things, Authorized the Destruction of the CIA Torture Tapes Against the Instructions of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence.

The White House response is a a statement of, “Great Confidence,” in CIA director John Brennan.  So Obama wants to keep this guy.

As I have said before, the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I expect further stonewalling on the part of both the CIA and the Obama administration.

What should happen is that Eatinger should be placed on leave, and his security clearance should be suspended, but I imagine that he will continue to do damage to the Constitution of the United States, and then he will retire with a full pension.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.

Full speech follows:

Statement on Intel Committee’s CIA Detention, Interrogation Report

Washington—Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the committee’s study on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program:

“Over the past week, there have been numerous press articles written about the Intelligence Committee’s oversight review of the Detention and Interrogation Program of the CIA, specifically press attention has focused on the CIA’s intrusion and search of the Senate Select Committee’s computers as well as the committee’s acquisition of a certain internal CIA document known as the Panetta Review.

I rise today to set the record straight and to provide a full accounting of the facts and history.

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate Floor reluctantly. Since January 15, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA’s search of this committee’s network, I have been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter. However, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

The origin of this study: The CIA’s detention and interrogation program began operations in 2002, though it was not until September 2006, that Members of the Intelligence Committee, other than the Chairman and Vice Chairman, were briefed. In fact, we were briefed by then-CIA Director Hayden only hours before President Bush disclosed the program to the public.

A little more than a year later, on December 6, 2007, a New York Times article revealed the troubling fact that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of some of the CIA’s first interrogations using so-called “enhanced techniques.” We learned that this destruction was over the objections of President Bush’s White House Counsel and the Director of National Intelligence.

After we read about the tapes’ destruction in the newspapers, Director Hayden briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee. He assured us that this was not destruction of evidence, as detailed records of the interrogations existed on paper in the form of CIA operational cables describing the detention conditions and the day-to-day CIA interrogations.

The CIA director stated that these cables were “a more than adequate representation” of what would have been on the destroyed tapes. Director Hayden offered at that time, during Senator Jay Rockefeller’s chairmanship of the committee, to allow Members or staff to review these sensitive CIA operational cables given that the videotapes had been destroyed.

Chairman Rockefeller sent two of his committee staffers out to the CIA on nights and weekends to review thousands of these cables, which took many months. By the time the two staffers completed their review into the CIA’s early interrogations in early 2009, I had become chairman of the committee and President Obama had been sworn into office.

The resulting staff report was chilling. The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us. As result of the staff’s initial report, I proposed, and then-Vice Chairman Bond agreed, and the committee overwhelmingly approved, that the committee conduct an expansive and full review of CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

On March 5, 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to initiate a comprehensive review of the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program. Immediately, we sent a request for documents to all relevant executive branch agencies, chiefly among them the CIA.

The committee’s preference was for the CIA to turn over all responsive documents to the committee’s office, as had been done in previous committee investigations.

Director Panetta proposed an alternative arrangement: to provide literally millions of pages of operational cables, internal emails, memos, and other documents pursuant to the committee’s document requests at a secure location in Northern Virginia. We agreed, but insisted on several conditions and protections to ensure the integrity of this congressional investigation.

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

It was this computer network that, notwithstanding our agreement with Director Panetta, was searched by the CIA this past January, and once before which I will later describe.

In addition to demanding that the documents produced for the committee be reviewed at a CIA facility, the CIA also insisted on conducting a multi-layered review of every responsive document before providing the document to the committee. This was to ensure the CIA did not mistakenly provide documents unrelated to the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program or provide documents that the president could potentially claim to be covered by executive privilege.

While we viewed this as unnecessary and raised concerns that it would delay our investigation, the CIA hired a team of outside contractors—who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents—to read, multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced, before providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the committee’s oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process.

The CIA started making documents available electronically to the committee staff at the CIA leased facility in mid-2009. The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true “document dump” that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.

In order to piece together the story of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the committee staff did two things that will be important as I go on:

First, they asked the CIA to provide an electronic search tool so they could locate specific relevant documents for their search among the CIA-produced documents—just like you would use a search tool on the Internet to locate information.

Second, when the staff found a document that was particularly important or that might be referenced in our final report, they would often print it or make a copy of the file on their computer so they could easily find it again. There are thousands of such documents in the committee’s secure spaces at the CIA facility.

Now, prior removal of documents by CIA. In early 2010, the CIA was continuing to provide documents, and the committee staff was gaining familiarity with the information it had already received.

In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that [certain] documents that had been provided for the committee’s review were no longer accessible. Staff approached the CIA personnel at the offsite location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority. And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.

After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.

This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff, and in violation of our written agreements. Further, this type of behavior would not have been possible had the CIA allowed the committee to conduct the review of documents here in the Senate. In short, this was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset.

I went up to the White House to raise this issue with the then-White House Counsel, in May 2010. He recognized the severity of the situation, and the grave implications of Executive Branch personnel interfering with an official congressional investigation. The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.

On May 17, 2010, the CIA’s then-director of congressional affairs apologized on behalf of the CIA for removing the documents. And that, as far as I was concerned, put the incident aside.

This event was separate from the documents provided that were part of the “Internal Panetta Review,” which occurred later and which I will describe next.

At some point in 2010, committee staff searching the documents that had been made available found draft versions of what is now called the “Internal Panetta Review.”

We believe these documents were written by CIA personnel to summarize and analyze the materials that had been provided to the committee for its review. The Panetta review documents were no more highly classified than other information we had received for our investigation—in fact, the documents appeared to be based on the same information already provided to the committee.

What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing.

To be clear, the committee staff did not “hack” into CIA computers to obtain these documents as has been suggested in the press. The documents were identified using the search tool provided by the CIA to search the documents provided to the committee.

We have no way to determine who made the Internal Panetta Review documents available to the committee. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower.

In fact, we know that over the years—on multiple occasions—the staff have asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times, the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee. And while this is alarming, it is also important to note that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.

As I described earlier, as part of its standard process for reviewing records, the committee staff printed copies of the Internal Panetta Review and made electronic copies of the committee’s computers at the facility.

The staff did not rely on these Internal Panetta Review documents when drafting the final 6,300-page committee study. But it was significant that the Internal Panetta Review had documented at least some of the very same troubling matters already uncovered by the committee staff – which is not surprising, in that they were looking at the same information.

There is a claim in the press and elsewhere that the markings on these documents should have caused the staff to stop reading them and turn them over to the CIA. I reject that claim completely.

As with many other documents provided to the committee at the CIA facility, some of the Internal Panetta Review documents—some—contained markings indicating that they were “deliberative” and/or “privileged.” This was not especially noteworthy to staff. In fact, CIA has provided thousands of internal documents, to include CIA legal guidance and talking points prepared for the CIA director, some of which were marked as being deliberative or privileged.

Moreover, the CIA has officially provided such documents to the committee here in the Senate. In fact, the CIA’s official June 27, 2013, response to the committee study, which Director Brennan delivered to me personally, is labeled “Deliberative Process Privileged Document.”

We have discussed this with the Senate Legal Counsel who has confirmed that Congress does not recognize these claims of privilege when it comes to documents provided to Congress for our oversight duties.

These were documents provided by the executive branch pursuant to an authorized congressional oversight investigation. So we believe we had every right to review and keep the documents.

There are also claims in the press that the Internal Panetta Review documents, having been created in 2009 and 2010, were outside the date range of the committee’s document request or the terms of the committee study. This too is inaccurate.

The committee’s document requests were not limited in time. In fact, as I have previously announced, the committee study includes significant information on the May 2011 Osama bin Laden operation, which obviously postdated the detention and interrogation program.

At some time after the committee staff identified and reviewed the Internal Panetta Review documents, access to the vast majority of them was removed by the CIA. We believe this happened in 2010 but we have no way of knowing the specifics. Nor do we know why the documents were removed. The staff was focused on reviewing the tens of thousands of new documents that continued to arrive on a regular basis.

Our work continued until December 2012, when the Intelligence Committee approved a 6,300-page committee study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and sent the report to the executive branch for comment. The CIA provided its response to the study on June 27, 2013.

As CIA Director Brennan has stated, the CIA officially agrees with some of our study. But, as has been reported, the CIA disagrees and disputes important parts of it. And this is important: Some of these important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are clearly acknowledged in the CIA’s own Internal Panetta Review.

To say the least, this is puzzling. How can the CIA’s official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?

Now, after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee’s secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate Office Building.

And let me be clear about this: I mentioned earlier the exchange of letters that Senator Bond and I had with Director Panetta in 2009 over the handling of information for this review. The letters set out a process whereby the committee would provide specific CIA documents to CIA reviewers before bringing them back to our secure offices here on Capitol Hill.

The CIA review was designed specifically to make sure that committee documents available to all staff and members did not include certain kinds of information, most importantly the true names of non-supervisory CIA personnel and the names of specific countries in which the CIA operated detention sites.

We had agreed up front that our report didn’t need to include this information, and so we agreed to redact it from materials leaving the CIA’s facility.

Keeping with the spirit of the agreements, the portion of the Internal Panetta Review at the Hart Building in our safe has been redacted. It does not contain names of non-supervisory CIA personnel or information identifying detention site locations. In other words, our staff did just what the CIA personnel would have done had they reviewed the document.

There are several reasons why the draft summary of the Panetta Review was brought to our secure spaces at the Hart Building.

Let me list them:

The significance of the Internal Review given disparities between it and the June 2013 CIA response to the committee study. The Internal Panetta Review summary now at the secure committee office in the Hart Building is an especially significant document as it corroborates critical information in the committee’s 6,300-page Study that the CIA’s official response either objects to, denies, minimizes, or ignores.

Unlike the official response, these Panetta Review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings. That’s what makes them so significant and important to protect.

When the Internal Panetta Review documents disappeared from the committee’s computer system, this suggested once again that the CIA had removed documents already provided to the committee, in violation of CIA agreements and White House assurances that the CIA would cease such activities.

As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed information about its Detention and Interrogation Program, including its decision in 2005 to destroy interrogation videotapes over the objections of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence. Based on the information described above, there was a need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the committee’s own secure spaces.

Now, the Relocation of the Internal Panetta Review was lawful and handled in a manner consistent with its classification. No law prevents the relocation of a document in the committee’s possession from a CIA facility to secure committee offices on Capitol Hill. As I mentioned before, the document was handled and transported in a manner consistent with its classification, redacted appropriately, and it remains secured—with restricted access—in committee spaces.

In late 2013, I requested in writing that the CIA provide a final and complete version of the Internal Panetta Review to the committee, as opposed to the partial document the committee currently possesses.

In December, during an open committee hearing, Senator Mark Udall echoed this request. In early January 2014, the CIA informed the committee it would not provide the Internal Panetta Review to the committee, citing the deliberative nature of the document.

Shortly thereafter, on January 15, 2014, CIA Director Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.

According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the Internal Panetta Review. The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the Internal Review, or how we obtained it.

Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee’s computers. The CIA has still not asked the committee any questions about how the committee acquired the Panetta Review. In place of asking any questions, the CIA’s unauthorized search of the committee computers was followed by an allegation—which we have now seen repeated anonymously in the press—that the committee staff had somehow obtained the document through unauthorized or criminal means, perhaps to include hacking into the CIA’s computer network.

As I have described, this is not true. The document was made available to the staff at the offsite facility, and it was located using a CIA-provided search tool running a query of the information provided to the committee pursuant to its investigation.

Director Brennan stated that the CIA’s search had determined that the committee staff had copies of the Internal Panetta Review on the committee’s “staff shared drive” and had accessed them numerous times. He indicated at the meeting that he was going to order further “forensic” investigation of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.

Two days after the meeting, on January 17, I wrote a letter to Director Brennan objecting to any further CIA investigation due to the separation of powers constitutional issues that the search raised. I followed this with a second letter on January 23 to the director, asking 12 specific questions about the CIA’s actions—questions that the CIA has refused to answer.

Some of the questions in my letter related to the full scope of the CIA’s search of our computer network. Other questions related to who had authorized and conducted the search, and what legal basis the CIA claimed gave it authority to conduct the search. Again, the CIA has not provided answers to any of my questions.

My letter also laid out my concern about the legal and constitutional implications of the CIA’s actions. Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.

I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.

Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

Days after the meeting with Director Brennan, the CIA inspector general, David Buckley, learned of the CIA search and began an investigation into CIA’s activities. I have been informed that Mr. Buckley has referred the matter to the Department of Justice given the possibility of a criminal violation by CIA personnel.

Let me note: because the CIA has refused to answer the questions in my January 23 letter, and the CIA inspector general review is ongoing, I have limited information about exactly what the CIA did in conducting its search.

Weeks later, I was also told that after the inspector general referred the CIA’s activities to the Department of Justice, the acting general counsel of the CIA filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice concerning the committee staff’s actions. I have not been provided the specifics of these allegations or been told whether the department has initiated a criminal investigation based on the allegations of the CIA’s acting general counsel.

As I mentioned before, our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself. As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

Mr. President, let me say this. All Senators rely on their staff to be their eyes and ears and to carry out our duties. The staff members of the Intelligence Committee are dedicated professionals who are motivated to do what is best for our nation.

The staff members who have been working on this study and this report have devoted years of their lives to it—wading through the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed. They have worked long hours and produced a report unprecedented in its comprehensive attention to detail in the history of the Senate.

They are now being threatened with legal jeopardy, just as the final revisions to the report are being made so that parts of it can be declassified and released to the American people.

Mr. President, I felt that I needed to come to the floor today, to correct the public record and to give the American people the facts about what the dedicated committee staff have been working so hard for the last several years as part of the committee’s investigation.

I also want to reiterate to my colleagues my desire to have all updates to the committee report completed this month and approved for declassification. We’re not going to stop. I intend to move to have the findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report sent to the president for declassification and release to the American people. The White House has indicated publicly and to me personally that it supports declassification and release.

If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.

But Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Community. How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.

I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.”

This Takedown is Worthy of Matt Taibbi

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On The Baffler Alex Pareene systematically demolishes New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin’s dealings, and double dealings with, the finance industry:

The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.

 How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.

 Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCormicks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.

 Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.

 ………

 In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture:

DealBook caters to a high-level audience of C-Suite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.

The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible:

Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.

So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.

And then there is this delicious bit:

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

This is really a thing of beauty.

Read the whole thing.

I am adding Alex Pareene to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”

The Intercept, Pierre Omidyar, and His Connections to CIA Operations in the Ukraine

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There has a bit of a pissing contest between Mark Ames and Glenn Greenwald over the connections between the First Media news organization, and its subsidiary The Intercept magazine which employs Greenwald.

Part of this is that Greenwald and Ames have been involved in a long running pissing contest, which explains why Ames original article mentioned Greenwald prominently, even though his remit is surveillance, and not covert organic operations or the destabilization of disfavored governments by our state security apparatus.

Still, it raises some very valid points, and Greenwald’s response addressed none of the underlying facts.

It’s basically, Greenwald telling Ames that he’s ugly and that his mom dresses him funny, and that the publisher doesn’t matter.

This is not true generally, nor which is not true in this case, as Omidyar has a long history of intimate involvement with his media ventures, with The Intercept writer Jeremy Scahill saying that he is intimately involved with their messaging:

Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. This guy has a vision.

 With those two remarks, Scahill obliterates Greenwald’s claims of independence from his boss, publisher and sole quarter-of-a-billion-dollar backer.

 There is no universe, current or imagined, in which Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen or any other venture capitalist would be allowed within a billion miles of Pando’s internal messaging system. And there is no planet within that universe on which Thiel, Andreessen or any of our dozen or so venture backers would be given any privileged line to our reporters (if they have something to say they can send us a letter to the editor, like everyone else). I would hope all of the other “billionaire-backed” media organizations Greenwald cites in his post would say the same.

(emphasis original)

So this is not one of the Glennster’s greatest moments.

Of more significance is the fact that Marcy Wheeler (aka Emptywheel) who is covering the developments in the Ukraine for The Intercept, asked sometime before this article came out about information on intelligence ops masquerading as “civil society.  Quoting from Ames’ article:

Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:

“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”

These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.

And now Wheeler is saying that there is no “there” there. This is the bit I find most interesting:

B) The Kyiv Post reported that in 2012 (the year after New Citizen received this grant, and therefore presumably the year it got spent), Omidyar Network funded 36% of New Citizen’s budget, Pact, a non-profit funded in part by USAID funded 54% of it, and other funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy.

USAID is, of course, a US Government agency, and while it is nominally independent, it is largely directed by the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, thought technically a non governmental not-for-profit is funded entirely by a line item in the budget of ……… wait for it ……… USAID.

Or as the best-named-blog ever, Cats not War, observes:

Now, I say Wheeler knows more than she lets on because she apparently understands enough to link to the excellent Moon of Alabama blog, dedicated to chronicling the less visible manifestations of imperial power, when comparing the Ukrainian and Syrian cases. And be reminded that Ames dug this information up about Omidyar at Wheeler’s curiosity–viewing the Ukrainian fray, she clearly knew dirty tricks by their effects and felt compelled to ask about them in public. When Ames revealed that one such meddler was her boss, she employed a new skepticism about the existence of imperial meddling in Ukraine, writing, ‘I don’t see any evidence that [Omidyar’s] donations were explicitly intended to pay for regime change… unless you presume transparency and better governance equates to regime change.’ Soon down the text, Wheeler belittles Ames’ suggestions about Omidyar’s business operations by cueing ‘Hollywood villain music’ and asking what is wrong about Pact, Omidyar-funded NGO, promoting ‘women in leadership,’ a goal Pact offers up on its about page (clearly the only place to go when seeking to understand an institution’s true workings). The insinuation of conspiracism mimics Greenwald’s own, when he reduces Ames charges to the ‘laughable hyperbole that Omidyar is now the mastermind who has secretly engineered the Ukrainian uprising.’ To Greenwald I’d like to ask, But what if, like, the suggestion is not that Omidyar did anything alone, but that he belongs to a larger oligarchical-state network whose global investments make up that thing called imperialism? And to Wheeler I’d like to ask, But what if, like, an NGO doesn’t outright come out with goals of regime change because they are manifestations of soft imperialism, crucial supplements to the harder stuff that use a language of liberal abstractions to work towards goals more nefarious?

Which brings us to my explanation of imperialism. There are two primary parts of which to keep track. The first is its role in capitalism–an odd concept to propose because imperialism is capitalism insofar as capitalism could not persist without it. Here, we are talking about capital and, more specifically, finance. The second is its expansion, which happens through hard imperialism (military operations of varying types–bombings, drones, invasions, covert ops, and so on) and soft imperialism (NGOs and PsyOps), because sometimes the mid-sized and small states fail to cooperate. When describing these activities, I will move from country to country with examples, fully aware that imperial tactics are employed differently in accordance with the needs of given contexts, but hoping still to establish that imperialism has a reliable repertoire, that it is global in scale, and that there can be no doubt about its purpose where it is to be found.

Read the entire Cats, Not War post.  I cannot do if full justice.

Aviation Week Comes to the Right Decision While Ignoring the Obvious

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They have an editorial where they argue (Correctly IMNSHO) that the 50 year old U-2 is a superior reconnaissance platform to the Block 3 Global Hawk UAV:

With the presentation of the Obama administration’s fiscal 2015 budget request last week, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his decision in a battle that had been brewing for some time: U-2 (below) versus Global Hawk. With money as tight as it is, everyone knew it was becoming too expensive to have both options for high-altitude intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) missions.

It would be easy to portray this as a contest between modernity and nostalgia, pitting a cutting-edge unmanned system against a piloted Cold War relic—Hal the computer versus an aging jet jockey with a silk scarf. Indeed, when Hagel announced his decision, he said he is opting to phase out the “50-year-old U-2 in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk” beginning in 2016 (see page 30). But that comparison is not just an oversimplification, it is the wrong way to approach the question.

 Hagel was more forthright when he acknowledged this was “a close call.” It surely is. The operating costs of the two fleets, for example, have been about the same.

They note that the U-2 is cheaper to buy, more flexible in its operations, flies higher, and has a sophisticated ECM suite.

But their editorial ignores the elephant in the room.

The reason that the Air Force, and the Congress, are supporting the very expensive ($200 million a copy) and inferior solution is because of pork and post-retirement employment opportunities for retired officers at defense contractors.

We really need to move to something like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), to take the uniformed military out of the procurement equation.

Additionally, such an agency should have as its remit the analysis of subcontracting, to ensure that work is allocated on the basis of efficiency, and not in an attempt to spread work to politically significant Congressional districts.

Yes, the Consumer Financial Protection Board is Doing Things: For Profit Colllege Edition

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The CFPB has filed suit against ITT Technical alleging that it behaves more like a payday lender than an institute of learning.

It’s not just the CFPB, 32 state Attorneys General have filed suit as well, but the CFPB’s involvement makes it far less likely that other federal agencies, most notably the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, will attempt to preempt the investigation:

Honest, well-run for-profit colleges can be helpful to students who do not qualify for traditional schools. But the robber barons in the for-profit sector represent a menace that requires more federal oversight. They saddle students with crushing debt while furnishing them useless degrees – or no degrees at all. These schools have been known to push students who are eligible for low-cost, federal loans into ruinously priced private loans that have fewer consumer protections and that give borrowers who get in trouble little choice but to default. That in turn makes it difficult for them to find jobs, get credit or rent apartments. And because private student loans are difficult to escape through bankruptcy, the stricken borrower might never recover.

Attorneys general in 32 states are actively pursuing this problem . This week the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally got into the act. On Wednesday it filed suit against an Indiana-based for-profit chain, ITT Educational Services, Inc., which has tens of thousands of students enrolled online or at one of roughly 150 institutions in nearly 40 states. The bureau, which paints a damning portrait of the company’s policies, accuses the chain of practicing “predatory student lending.”

………

The suit makes the company look very much like a storefront payday lender that ropes borrowers into loans that they cannot repay, then hammers them with fees and interest. In this case, the bureau asserts that the company rushed students through the application process without giving them a chance to understand what was happening. In some cases “ students did not even know they had a private student loan until they started getting collection calls.” Moreover, it says: “ITT knew that most of its students would ultimately default on their private student loans; it projected a default rate for its students of 64 percent.”

I really hope that this results in meaningful change.

The for profit college industry is full of parasites and predators who make their money off of federally guaranteed loans.

Full CFPB release after break:

CFPB Sues For-Profit College Chain ITT For Predatory Lending

ITT Pushed Consumers into High-Cost Student Loans Likely to Fail

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed a lawsuit against ITT Educational Services, Inc., accusing the for-profit college chain of predatory student lending. The CFPB alleges that ITT exploited its students and pushed them into high-cost private student loans that were very likely to end in default. The CFPB is seeking restitution for victims, a civil fine, and an injunction against the company.

“ITT marketed itself as improving consumers’ lives but it was really just improving its bottom line,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We believe ITT used high-pressure tactics to push many consumers into expensive loans destined to default. Today’s action should serve as a warning to the for-profit college industry that we will be vigilant about protecting students against predatory lending tactics.”

Like the mortgage market in the lead-up to the financial crisis, the for-profit college industry may be experiencing misaligned incentives. These colleges benefit when students take out large amounts of loans, regardless of the students’ long-term success. The CFPB is concerned that some of these corporations may be employing practices to coax consumers into taking out more federal and private student loans. Today’s announcement is the Bureau’s first public enforcement action against a company in the for-profit college industry.

ITT Educational Services, Inc. is an Indiana-based for-profit provider of post-secondary technical education. Tens of thousands of students are enrolled online or at one of ITT’s roughly 150 institutions in nearly 40 states. ITT’s tuition costs are among the highest in the country in the for-profit industry. Earning an associate’s degree at ITT can cost more than $44,000. Bachelor’s degree programs can cost $88,000. That is significantly higher than the cost of similar degrees at a community college or a public four-year institution.

Most of ITT’s students borrow large sums to pay the high tuition costs and the majority of this money is borrowed from federal student loan programs. But private student loans also provide critical revenue for ITT. Because most ITT students’ federal aid does not cover the full cost of an ITT program, most students face a “tuition gap” requiring them to find other sources of funding.

The CFPB’s lawsuit alleges that ITT encouraged new students to enroll at ITT by providing them funding for this tuition gap with a zero-interest loan called “Temporary Credit.” This loan typically had to be paid in full at the end of the student’s first academic year. But ITT knew from the outset that many students would not be able to repay their Temporary Credit balances or fund their next year’s tuition gap.

The CFPB lawsuit alleges that between July 2011 and December 2011, ITT pushed its students into repaying their Temporary Credit and funding their second-year tuition gaps through high-cost private student loan programs. Students were left in the dark about the fact that taking out these high-cost loans would be required to continue their studies. However, ITT’s CEO revealed in investor calls that converting the temporary loans to long-term loans was the company’s “plan all along.”

Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the CFPB has the authority to take action against institutions engaging in unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. Specifically, in today’s lawsuit, the Bureau alleges the following conduct by ITT:

  • Pressured into predatory loans: ITT used its financial aid staff to rush students through an automated application process without affording them a fair opportunity to understand the loan obligations involved. In some cases, students did not even know they had a private student loan until they started getting collection calls. The loans were high-cost. For borrowers with credit scores under 600, for example, the costs of the private student loans included 10 percent origination fees and interest rates as high as 16.25 percent.
  • Credits not transferable: ITT was accredited by a national organization that accredits many for-profit schools, but the credits that students earned typically did not transfer to local community colleges or other nonprofit schools such as public or private colleges. ITT used the prospect of expulsion and the loss of the money already spent during the student’s first year to coerce students into taking out the private loans.
  • Misleading future job prospects: The Bureau believes that ITT’s representations led students to think that when they graduated they were likely to land good jobs and enough salary to repay their private student loans. In this way, ITT exploited student expectations while it knew that a majority of students would default.
  • Loans likely to fail: ITT knew that most of its students would ultimately default on their private student loans; it projected a default rate for its students of 64 percent. Defaulting on private student loans can have grave consequences for consumers. It can make it difficult to get any kind of loan for years and even affect a borrower’s job prospects. And, because private student loans are difficult to discharge in bankruptcy, the debt can be very difficult to recover from.

The complaint against ITT can be found at: http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201402_cfpb_complaint_ITT.pdf

The Bureau’s complaint is not a finding or ruling that the defendant has actually violated the law.
To assist student loan borrowers who may be in delinquency or default, the CFPB recently launched an updated version of the Repay Student Debt interactive tool.

The CFPB also recently finalized a rule allowing it to supervise certain nonbank servicers of federal and private student loans. The rule takes effect on March 1.

CFPB takes complaints about student loans. To submit a complaint, consumers can:

  • Go online at consumerfinance.gov/complaint
  • Call the toll-free phone number at 1-855-411-CFPB (2372) or TTY/TDD phone number at 1-855-729-CFPB (2372)
  • Fax the CFPB at 1-855-237-2392
  • Mail a letter to: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, P.O. Box 4503, Iowa City, Iowa 52244

###
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. For more information, visit consumerfinance.gov.

Turns out that Snowden Did Take it to His Superiors

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Yet another lie about Edward Snowden is disproved:

Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists.

 Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far.

 An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said its internal investigation, including interviews with co-workers, found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone.

 But in his written testimony, Mr. Snowden insisted that he had, adding that his efforts had elicited two types of responses. Some people, he said, responded with “well-meaning but hushed warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ ” for fear of retaliation like being investigated by the F.B.I. as a suspected leaker.

“Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations,” he wrote.

Other people, he said, told him to “let the issue be someone else’s problem.”

“Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns,” he continued, “no one at N.S.A. could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.”

Yes, “No evidence,” from the folks have been caught lying time and time again by Snowden’s revelations.

And the Snoden’s testimony about how an official complaint has never resulted in reforms rings quite true.

The entire history of the US government state security apparatus has been one of excess reigned in from outside sources.

Bitcoin Has Had a Disasterous Week

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We’ve just had 3rd Bitcoin exchange robbery in a week, the suspicious death of the CEO of another exchange, the discovery the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is actually a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, and Japan has decided not to regulate it as currency.

I know what you are wondering why is Japan deciding not to regulate Bitcoin a bad thing?

Well, because if it is not currency, then it is subject to the VAT (sales tax) and the capital gains tax:

The Japanese government officially said Friday that it doesn’t consider bitcoin to be a currency and has no plans at present to regulate it as a financial product.

As it tries to cope with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, the government said that the crypto-currency would be treated like other goods and services, with commercial sales of bitcoin itself and bitcoin-based transactions subject to sales tax. In addition, any gains on exchange rates will be taxed as well.

“Any bitcoin transactions are taxable when they fulfill requisitions stated by laws on income tax, corporate tax and consumption tax,” the government said in its statement, which came in response to questions over how bitcoins will be regulated.

At the same time, the statement ruled out treatment of bitcoin as a currency or a financial instrument.

“Bitcoin are neither Japanese nor foreign currencies and its trading is different from deals stated by Japan’s bank act as well as financial instruments and exchange act,” according to a document released by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t know if Bitcoin is done, but I think that a stake has been driven though the heart of the Randroid libertarian dream of completely unregulated and untraceable crypto currency.

Heh.

Well, this is Chilling

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Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander is touting, “unspecified ‘headway’ on what he termed ‘media leaks’” was forthcoming in the next several weeks, possibly to include “media leaks legislation.“

One wonders whether some skullduggery he has gotten my distinguished cousin* to back some sort of draconian equivalent to the awful Official Secrets Act that is in force in the UK.

This is a very bad idea.

It’s a bad idea because it shreds the Constitution, and it’s a bad idea because, as Dan Froomkin so aptly notes, “History has shown time and again that secrecy and bad decisions go hand in hand.”

It will make us less safe, not more safe.

*Dianne Feinstein, whoser grandfather, Sam Goldman, and my great-grandfather, Harry Goldman, were brothers.

Senate Votes Down Sexual Assault Accountability and the Army’s Top Sex Crime Prosecutor Relieved for Sex Crime

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On the same f%$#ing day as a filibuster killed sex crime prosecution reform in the Senate,  Lt. Col. Joseph “Jay” Morse, the top sex-crimes prosecutor in the US Army, was Asuspended for alleged sexual assault:

The top Army prosecutor for sexual assault cases has been suspended after a lawyer who worked for him recently reported he’d groped her and tried to kiss her at a sexual-assault legal conference more than two years ago.

………

Morse was removed from his job when the allegations came to light, one source said. To date, no charges have been filed in the case.

………

Sources told Stars and Stripes that the Army lawyer alleged that Morse attempted to kiss and grope her against her will. The alleged assault reportedly took place in a hotel room at a 2011 sexual assault legal conference attended by special victims prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., before he was appointed as chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program.

So long as those ratf%$#s in the Senate are unwilling to protect the troops from the corrupt elements in our officer corps, this crap will continue.

Looters Gotta Loot

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It’s not enough that schools get tax dollars, and get showered with funds from private “charities” dedicated to destroying public education, they want taxpayers to pay for their rent as well:

Eva Moskowitz said she would go to the president of the United States to help her students if she had to. For now, she’s stopping at Andrew Cuomo.

 Moskowitz, C.E.O. of Success Academy charter schools in New York City, helped organize a massive rally outside the state Capitol on Tuesday, where she said she was “delighted” to have the governor’s support.

 ………

 During the mayoral campaign, de Blasio threatened to charge charter schools rent and pledged that Moskowitz’s schools specifically would not enjoy the same treatment under his administration as they did under Michael Bloomberg’s. He fulfilled that promise last week when he overturned three Bloomberg administration approvals for co-locations, all Success Academy schools.

 “We never expected… I mean, I frankly thought the rhetoric of the mayor would change once he got into government,” Moskowitz said, responding to de Blasio’s decision to reverse the co-locations. “Campaigning is generally different, so I didn’t expect to be in this position. And we’re feeling very vulnerable.”

So, in addition to your getting taxpayer money, you want your basic overhead paid by the taxpayers as well, meaning that the schools are getting more funding than the regular public schools, which cover both their and your building costs.

And while we are at it, I would note that she pays herself a lot of money with taxpayer dollars:

The 990s for Success Academy are public record and located here, so see for yourself: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2012/205/298/2012-205298861-095c435d-9.pdf

 According to their 2012 tax filings, in 2011, Eva’s salary was $475,244.00 with an additional $12,459.00 in other compensation, totaling $487,703.00. The tax statement also says that was for providing “management and administrative supporting services to nine district charter schools…” Let me repeat, NINE SCHOOLS in 2011.

 By comparison, the pay the same year for NYC Schools Chancellor Walcott for managing 1,700 schools was $212,614.00. Let me repeat, ONE THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED SCHOOLS. Then there is US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who oversees the massive federal Department of Education and earns a base salary of $179,700.

 Eva’s salary is obscene. Charters want to be called public schools except when it’s more convenient to be labeled private, such as when asking for CEO salaries similar to private corporations, but their revenue is tax dollars –and for schools that pay no rent. If Eva wants a CEO salary similar to private enterprises, she should open up her own privately funded schools, not raid the public coffers.

See also here, where we discover that the “hero” of Waiting for Superman Geoffrey Canada pays himself over ½ million dollars a year.

Like I said, looters gotta loot.

H/t Atrios.

That’s Mighty White of You

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After much consideration, the CIA has admitted that it is supposed to follow the law:

The CIA has confirmed that it is obliged to follow a federal law barring the collection of financial information and hacking into government data networks.

 But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing – particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for “lawfully authorized” intelligence activities.

 The murky episode, arising from a public Senate hearing on intelligence last week, illustrates what observers call the frustrations inherent in getting even basic information about secret agencies into public view, a difficulty recently to the fore over whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance partners.

 Last Wednesday, in a brief exchange at the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked CIA director John Brennan if the agency is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a three-decade-old law intended to protect computer systems, like those of financial and government networks, from unauthorized access.

 Brennan demurred, citing the need to check on the legal complexities posed by Wyden’s question, and pledged to give the senator an answer within a week.

 The answer, agency spokesman Dean Boyd told the Guardian, is: “Yes, the statute applies to CIA.”

That was about a month ago.

Well, today, we discovered what this was all about.

It turns out that the CIA was spying on the Congressional investigation of ……… wait for it ……… the CIA:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

 The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

 The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

 ………

 The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

 Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a panel member, apparently was referring to the monitoring when he asked CIA Director John Brennan at a Jan. 29 hearing if provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no answer.”

 Brennan replied that he’d have to get back to Wyden after looking into “what the act actually calls for and it’s applicability to CIA’s authorities.”

 The law makes it a criminal act for someone to intentionally access a computer without authorization or to go beyond what they’re allowed to access.

You know, even if they did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this was a conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional investigation, so go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

What’s more, it appears that Barack Obama knew of, and thus at least tacitly approved the CIA spying on Congress:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

 ………

Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

 “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

 Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.

 “In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s potentially very serious.”

(emphasis mine)

Not even Richard Nixon had the stones to use government agencies spy on the Congressional committees that were investigate him.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever.™

Your Daily Dose of Ukraine Related Incompetence and Hypocrisy

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It turns out that one of the first acts of the new parliament in the “no-bigotry, ethnocentrism, or fascist parties here” Ukraine was to rescind the status of the Russian language one of the official languages of the Ukraine: (and note how this was buried at paragraph 5 of the story)

Officials in Moscow continued Tuesday to express displeasure with events in Ukraine, if not as harshly as the day before. One bill that flew through the Rada on Monday downgraded the status of Russian as an official language, which struck critics as an unnecessary and incendiary move and which opened Ukraine’s new authorities to stinging criticism from their larger neighbor.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, tweeted Tuesday, “We want to curtail the influence of radicals and nationalists who are trying to play first fiddle in Ukraine.”

Note that this story was from February 25, 4 days before Russia sent troops.

Do you think that there is any connection?

As Ted Rall pithily observes that, “Millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language.”

BTW, the person who seems to be deepest in our shenanigans in the Ukraine, you know, things like funding the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party the Pravyi Sektor militia, that would be Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who is literally in bed with the Neocons.

I mean it.  She is married to Robert Kagan, who is not just a Neocon, but is pretty the much the ur-Neocon, having co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which has called for:

  • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein (1999)
  • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, because he was behind 9/11 (2001)
  • Called for American hegemony across the world
  • Repeatedly called for preemptive military strikes
  • Permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia
  • Hostilities with China

Yeah, he founded the group that more than any other organization put us in Iraq.

And his reward for this? 

Why, he is on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

How do these folks, and here I am referring to both the Neocons like Kagan and Nuland, and Liberal Interventionists like the Samantha Powers, continue to maintain influence in our foreign policy?

Why is an an uninterrupted record of failure, misery, and the death of innocents considered an endorsement for greater responsibilities in Washington, DC?

It’s like promoting the guy who designed the Edsel to run the company.

And NPR, they Suck Too

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They put a holocaust revisionist who calls for genocide of the gays, and they neglect to mention these facts to their listeners:

National Public Radio’s Michel Martin did a segment on Uganda’s growing crackdown on its gay population, and decided to interview Holocaust-revisionist hate-group leader Scott Lively, who is truly one of the most horrific religious right extremists in America.

How did NPR’s Michel Martin describe Lively to her audience? Simply as “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.”

That’s it.

No mention of the fact that Lively was labeled a Holocaust revisionist by HateWatch for his “thoroughly-discredited” 1995 tome, “The Pink Swastika,” which tried to argue that gays were the really force behind the Holocaust.

No mention of Lively’s organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, that was officially-designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He was extensively involved in Uganda’s proposed “Kill the Gays” bill, and the now just passed “Jail the Gays” bill.

You don’t just call him “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.” At the very least you call him a controversial anti-gay activist, unless you are so cowed by the Talibaptists that you should quit journalism and take up knitting.

Why to Tell PBS to Go Cheney Themselves on Pledge Month, Part DCLXXI & DCLXXII

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They throw some highbrow opera and such, and then they pursue the political agenda of right wing industrialists:

Last month, Pando’s “Wolf of Sesame Street” investigation broke the news that one of PBS’s flagship outlets had inked a secret deal with anti-pension billionaire John Arnold. That deal, which was not explicitly disclosed to viewers, was designed to broadcast anti-pension programming on public television stations throughout the country.
The story spotlighted how ideological billionaires and powerful corporations are increasingly – and stealthily – attempting to launder their political agendas through the trusted public-television brand, potentially in violation of PBS’s own rules.

Now, as part of our continuing investigation into who funds public television, Pando has learned that a new campaign is being launched against another major PBS station, once again over the issue of billionaire influence.

The campaign, sponsored by the environmental group Forecast the Facts, aims to remove one of the most influential and politically active fossil fuel magnates from the board of the PBS station that provides science-related programming to outlets across the US.

The campaign’s target is David Koch, who serves on the board and the Science Visiting Council of Boston’s WGBH. These are particularly powerful posts for the conservative financier — one of the infamous Koch brothers — because, like the Arnold-infiltrated WNET in New York, the Boston station produces many of the national PBS network’s programming. In fact, according to its own website, WGBH is “PBS’s single largest producer of Web and TV content.” That includes PBS’s iconic science show, NOVA.

And if you read further, you see that WGBH violated PBS guidelines repeatedly to appease the right wing billionaire.

It really sucks.

Another Way that Michelle Rhee is Destroying America

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Do you know what improves performance on tests, particularly those that do not require much in the way original thought?

If you are thinking cramming data you might be right, but this is not how Michelle Rhee is using her jihad against to hurt our children.

Have you ever had a strong cup of coffee to get on the bubble for a test? How about amphetamines? The military has used them for years to maintain focus for fatigued soldiers

How about Ritalin?

Ritalin, like other stimulants will improve performance in the short term, so it is no surprise that aggressive testing incentivizes schools to put children on stimulants:

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

………

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion,“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising. But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

………

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

How do ADHD diagnoses help schools at risk of losing their funding? First, Hinshaw notes, for kids who do have ADHD, it should improve their performance in school, including their test scores. Second, it may help kids who are disruptive in class settle down, which could improve scores for the whole class. Finally, in many areas, the test scores of student with ADHD diagnoses aren’t counted. So even it if it doesn’t help the child, it might help the school.

The researchers missed the point that I made, that giving your kids uppers will help with their tests, even if they suffer from strokes or sudden heart failure at age 14, it’s no skin off of the nose of Michelle Rhee and her ilk, if they hit their numbers, they win, and if they don’t they convert the “failing” to hedge fund backed charter schools, and they still win because they have a future career as a well remunerated executive at an “educational foundation”.

Quote of the Day on the Ukraine

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Courtesy of Ian Welsh:

I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions.  Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action.  You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame.  (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this.  But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)

He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine’s government has been 5 billion dollars.

By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California’s population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.

So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.

And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.

And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.

Why the NSA is a Bigger Danger to Our Way of Life than is Al-Qaeda

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We already have a part of our state security apparatus with a history of blackmail for their own benefit, specifically Hoover’s FBI, and now we discover that the NSA has collaborated with their British counterparts to intercept webcam pictures from millions of people:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

 GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

 In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

 Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

If you don’t think this sort of stuff cannot be used against you, what happens if they decide that they to shut you up, and your little is stupid enough to sext their boy friend.

Something like 10% of the millions of documents are images of body parts that could get an FCC sanction.

And you wonder why former counter-terrorism Czar Richard Clarke is worrying that NSA actions might presage the establishment of a police state:

Revelations about NSA monitoring activities over the last year show the potential for a police state mechanism, according to the former U.S. cybersecurity czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire consequences.

 At the 2014 Cloud Security Alliance Summit, unofficial RSA Conference opener Richard Clarke, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based Good Harbor Consulting LLC, spoke to a packed audience. The former cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama discussed his involvement in the December 2013 report reviewing the data collection and monitoring capabilities at the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 Clarke said that the reaction to leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has perhaps been overblown, because he described the employees at the three-letter agencies as “incredibly intelligent people” who are focused on combating terrorism and punishing violations of human rights. As part of the review process, Clarke and his group were given what he called carte blanche security clearances to review all of the agencies’ intelligence-gathering capabilities.

 Those employees are not currently listening to random phone calls and reading email, Clarke said, but that doesn’t mean U.S. citizens should ignore the agencies’ growing capabilities.

 “In terms of collecting intelligence, they are very good. Far better than you could imagine,” Clarke said. “But they have created, with the growth of technologies, the potential for a police state.”

 Clarke said such concerns are hardly new, pointing to the government committee headed by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s. Church warned at the time that the technologies at intelligence agencies were developing at such an alarming rate that, if they were all turned on, the U.S. would never be able to turn them off, effectively creating a permanent police state in which the entire popular would be under constant surveillance.

 Though such warnings seem dire, Clarke noted that the seemingly endless scope of current government surveillance activities stemmed largely from a lack of strict guidance from policy makers. He said a major aspect of the report to the White House was simply prompting the questions that were previously unasked: What are our intelligence agencies collecting? What should they be collecting? If we should be collecting data, how do we safeguard it? If we’re collecting data, how do we stay consistent with U.S. traditions of privacy and government oversight?

This is also why security expert Bruce Schneier is suggesting that the National Security Agency be broken up:

The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.

Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions.

The organization is out of control, and its actions do not properly serve our security needs, and it increasingly sees its mission as simply expanding its reach and power.

Somewhere Out There, J. Edgar Hoover is Laughing

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Last night, Rachel Maddow had an update on the suspicious shooting of unarmed Ibragim Todashev in his own apartment while questioning him about his relationship with alleged Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The FBI is still sitting on their report.

They are still forbidding the coroner from releasing his report.

They have detained, deported, or otherwise excluded everyone who knew Todashev, as Maddow details below.

The FBI is clearly engaged in an aggressive coverup, and the only thing that I can think of that they would feel necessary to cover up was that the Tsarnaev brothers were a part of a botched anti-terrorism sting that went very, very bad.

I guess that I am wearing my tinfoil hat today.

Best Comment Ever on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable Merger, With Taiwanese News Video

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Telco Maven, and fellow medieval recreation afficianado, Harold Feld, gives us the best comment ever on the merger:

OH MY GOD!! YOU COMCAST PEOPLE HAVE NO LIMITS! YOU’RE LIKE SOME GIANT, COAX-TENTACLED CTHULHU-BEAST THAT KEEPS PROMISING TO DEVOUR US ALL BETWEEN 8 A.M. AND NOON BUT DOESN’T ACTUALLY GET AROUND TO DEVOURING US UNTIL AFTER 3 P.M. BECAUSE YOU GOT ‘STUCK IN TRAFFIC’ AND A PREVIOUS DEVOURING RAN LONGER THAN EXPECTED . . . .

Not only that, he raises one of the famous (infamous?) Taiwanese CGI news animations.

Mr. Feld, you are a f%$#ing genius.

Why Do I See the NSA Behind This Sh%$?

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The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a way to speed up encrypted connections that works by removing the encryption for part of the journey. Rather unsurprisingly it looks like a way allow the NSA, FBI, etc. to crawl up your ass into your encrypted data:

A draft put forward at the Internet Engineering Task Force has drawn the ire of prominent privacy activist Lauren Weinstein as “one of the most alarming Internet proposals” he’s ever seen.

The document that’s upset Weinstein is this one, out of the HTTPBis Working Group and posted as an Internet Draft on 14 February 2014.

 Entitled Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0, the standard proposes a mechanism by which an upstream provider – say an ISP – could get permission to snoop on decrypt user traffic for the purposes of caching.

 Using proxies to cache traffic in the service provider network is unremarkable and uncontroversial: it’s been normal practice for a long time. The end user benefit is better performance; the service provider benefit is a reduction in traffic over their upstream transit network links.

 From that point of view, encryption is a pain in the neck: the service provider can’t see into the encrypted traffic, which reduces the effectiveness of its caching strategy.

 The Internet Draft has this to say:

“To distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “https” URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “http” URIs resource, the draft proposes to ‘register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2 to transport “http” URIs resources: h2clr.’”

In essence, to try and protect their ability to cache, the authors of the standard propose that providers seek their customers’ permission to decrypt their traffic (solely for the purposes of offering a better customer experience, naturally).

 For some reason, Weinstein finds this proposal outrageous: “The proposal expects Internet users to provide ‘informed consent’ that they ‘trust’ intermediate sites (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to decode their encrypted data, process it in some manner for ‘presumably’ innocent purposes, re-encrypt it, then pass the re-encrypted data along to its original destination,” he writes.

Considering that AT&T proposed this, and that AT&T’s record vis a vis illegal surveillance is pretty horrific, I do not see this as a positive proposal.