Category: Evil

It’s Only Metadata, Right?

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As David Cole observes, “We Kill People Based on Metadata:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

(Emphasis Mine)

The “signature strikes” that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.

The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.

Our Friends in the Ukraine are Hiring Blackwater

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Guess what? In addition to advising the current government in Kiev, it appears that we have lent them mercenaries from the firm formerly known as Blackwater:

Soldiers from a private US security company with a record of alleged atrocities in Iraq are supporting Ukraine‘s security forces in the volatile east of the country, the German newspaper Bild reported Sunday.

The report, citing Germany‘s federal intelligence agency BND, said 400 of the heavily-armed men employed by the group formerly known as Blackwater were deployed in the vicinity of Lugansk where pro-Russian separatists are seeking self-rule.

The BND declined to comment on the report, while the security company – now known as Academi – dismissed similar reports in March.

Bild reported that according to a BND assessment, US intelligence services had knowledge of the covert involvement of the private soldiers in Ukraine. BND representatives relayed the information to Germany‘s federal chancellory on April 29, Bild said.

Academi was known as Blackwater during its time as key security services contractor to the US government in the war it led to oust Iraq‘s president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

It was later implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians and arms smuggling in Iraq.

This is nucking futs.

I can think of no more inflammatory news than having the most notorious mercenary organization in the real world providing “security consultants” for a government that is already being viewed with suspicion by much of the eastern half of the country.

I think that we have learned that the EU and US don’t care about the Ukraine as much as they want to just f%$# with Russia.

This is not going to end well.

H/t R1 at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeal F%$#s Up Again

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In Oracle vs. Google, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal, aka the “Patent Court”, has once again taken a delusionally extremist position on IP, and ruled that software APIs are subject to copyright. As Timothy B. Lee observes, “The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too.”

A few years ago, the database company Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google’s Android operating system infringed the copyright of Oracle’s Java technology. On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with Oracle in the long-running dispute.
The decision seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works. And it could create serious headaches for companies that want to make their software compatible with that of competitors.

Why did Oracle sue Google?

The lawsuit focuses on technical decisions Google made when it created the Android operating system.

 Google wanted people who wrote programs in the popular programming language Java to be able to re-use their code in Android apps. To do that, Google had to ensure that Java code written for other purposes ran exactly the same on Android. But negotiations with the company behind Java, Sun Microsystems (which was later acquired by Oracle), broke down, so Google decided to create its own version of Java from scratch.

 ………

 The trial court judge, William Alsup, sided with Google. Copyright only protects the creative aspects of a work, not its functional characteristics. Judge Alsup ruled that because the names of Java functions was essential to achieving interoperability, they were a functional characteristic rather than a creative aspect of Java, and using them wasn’t copyright infringement.

 But on Friday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The court was unimpressed with Google’s argument that function names were functional characteristics not protected by copyright. In the Federal Circuit’s view, the list of Java functions was just another kind of “code” that couldn’t be copied without its creator’s permission.

 The court’s reasoning didn’t impress James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland. “Not only do they not understand how computers work, they can’t even read,” he says.

 ………

 The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible.

 Ordinarily, copyright cases in California would be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But because Oracle’s fight with Google also includes some patent issues, the Federal Circuit gets jurisdiction.

 And evidently, the Federal Circuit has a bias toward copyright holders to go with its pro-patent bias.

Needless to say, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is completely insane, and should be abolished, and the judges on that court should be told to take up knitting.

So Not Shocked

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The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that “pro business” policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify “business-friendly” policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy “variables,” such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there’s an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index–low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That’s the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states–California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota–dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Here is Something to Fill You With Dread………

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The Obama administration is proposing adding “papers, please” to the web:

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

………

To start, there’s the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least “we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant.”

First, we need to be clear that the NSA would use this to track users whether or not they can get the rubber stamp FISA court to approve.

We know that they will, because that is what they do.

Second, to paraphrase Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, PhD, any technology that the government can create will be duplicated by criminals, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Koch brothers.

The depressing thing is that I don’t think that Republicans have enough outrage left after, Bengazi! Bengazi! Bengazi!, and the Democratic establishment won’t challenge the US state security apparatus, at east not while one of their own is running it.

I hope that this goes the way of the Clipper chip, but I would not bet on this.

Not the Onion

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The energy company Kinder Morgan is arguing for putting an oil pipeline through an environmentally sensitive area because oil spills can be good for the economy:

That’s according to a 15,000 page application Kinder Morgan has submitted to the National Energy Board for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (a document so large that it “stands over two metres tall and fills 37 binders”).

 In a section of the application dedicated to the risks and effects associated with oil tanker traffic and the possibility of oil spills, Kinder Morgan finds that “spills can have both positive and negative effects.” In particular, “spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers.”

Great googly moogly!

As Charlie Pierce observed, this is on a par with a parent murderer asking for for mercy as an orphan.

Why is this Woman Still a Part of Our Political Discourse?

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Sarah Palin just said that, “Waterboarding Is How We Baptize Terrorists.”

No, I am not paraphrasing, this was a direct quote:

With her legitimate political career all but unsalvageable, Sarah Palin has embraced her new role as a carnival barker. Speaking over the weekend at the National Rifle Association “Stand And Fight” rally at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Palin attempted an Ann Coulter routine meant to offend anyone not white and at least a little racist. “Not all intolerant, anti-freedom leftist liberals are hypocrites,” she offered before endorsing torture. “I’m kidding — yes, they are!” Zing — plus 1,000 patriot points.

And then her centerpiece joke, which really had very little to do with the gun nuts directly. “If I were in charge …” — wistful pause — “they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” The crowd erupted.

How I long for the day that she is relegated to the ash heap of history.

Oh, Not this Sh%$ Again

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Jeb Bush is now saying that he is thinking about running for President in 2016:

Jeb Bush on Wednesday was the most vocal he’s been about considering a run for the White House in 2016.

The Republican told a crowd of about 200 people at a Catholic Charities fundraiser in New York that he is “thinking about running for president,” according to an attendee.

The response came to one of the first questions posed to Bush at the Union League luncheon. After his answer, the room went wild, and then someone said they hoped he would take the step.

Please, God, make it stop!

Another Bush?

Haven’t they done enough to destroy this country?

Thanks, Obama

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You know, this is to be expected. Obama appoints an industry lobbyist to head the FCC, and the FCC ends network neutrality: (See also here)

………

 The following can be attributed to Michael Weinberg, Vice President at Public Knowledge:

“The FCC is inviting ISPs to pick winners and losers online. The very essence of a “commercial reasonableness” standard is discrimination. And the core of net neutrality is non discrimination. This is not net neutrality. This standard allows ISPs to impose a new price of entry for innovation on the Internet. When the Commission used a commercial reasonableness standard for wireless data roaming, it explicitly found that it may be commercially reasonable for a broadband ISP to charge an edge provider higher rates because its service is competitively threatening.

“It is hard to see how the commercial reasonableness standard, which inherently offers less protection than the standard in the previous Open Internet Rules, can serve the same policy goals. Additionally, approaching discrimination on a case-by-case basis creates less certainty than clear rules and disadvantages small businesses and entrepreneurs. The Commission should instead seek to find a way to ensure true net neutrality, including protections against discrimination by ISPs for commercial purposes. The DC Circuit Court opinion made it clear that the only way to achieve net neutrality is to reclassify internet access as a telecommunications service.”

What a thought: Obama’s FCC chair does not have the guts to reverse the that it made under the Bush administration to classify if ISP’s service as information services, as opposed to telecommunications services, which meant that they were not common carriers.

It also refused to appeal the DC Court of Appeals decision to the Supreme Court.

And they did this because ……… Regulatory capture, I guess.

It certainly fits in with Obama cozying up to malefactors in dysfunctional markets as opposed to trying to fix those markets. (Obama care, Banksters walking free, The Droning of Brown People, the NSA, etc.)

Oh well, when the Kochs take over the internet, maybe they will give Obama a medal.

Naah ……… I’m just sh%$#ing you ……… They’ll find a trumped up charge to throw him in jail.

H/t Kevin Drum for the pic.

And Our Forever War Continues………

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Under the laws of war, once the war is over, the POWs are set free. Well, not this time:

Typically, when a war ends, so does the combatants’ authority to detain the other side’s fighters. But as the conclusion of the US war in Afghanistan approaches, the inmate population of Guantánamo Bay is likely to be an exception – and, for the Obama administration, the latest complication to its attempt to close the infamous wartime detention complex.

In December, when President Barack Obama and his Nato allies formally end their combat role in Afghanistan, US officials indicate there is unlikely to be a corresponding release of detainees at Guantánamo who were captured during the country’s longest conflict.

The question has been the subject of recent internal debate in the Obama administration, which is wrapped up in the broader question of future detention policy.

Already human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees say they anticipate filing a new wave of lawsuits challenging the basis for a wartime detention after the war ends – the next phase in more than a decade of attempts to litigate the end of indefinite detention.

For the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon, the complicating factor is the unique legal authority undergirding the Afghanistan war.

Passed by Congress days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Authorization to Use Military Force cleared the legal path for the invasion of Afghanistan – and much more.

Known as the AUMF, its broad language blessed not only the Afghanistan war, but a global battle against al-Qaida without an expiration date. Subsequent interpretations of the AUMF broadened the definition of the adversary to include al-Qaida’s “associated forces”.

If they are not released when the war is over, then try them in civilian courts.

This state if nebulous never-ending war is destroying us.

Osama bin Laden is sitting somewhere laughing.

Why Does this Psychopath Still Have a License to Practice Psychology?

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James Mitchell, who designed the CIA’s torture program, and who tortured people himself, has a sad over the prospect of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report describing how f%$#evil and twisted he is:

Mitchell insists the torture techniques he developed had produced results, and is dismissive of critics of the CIA program. Photograph: US Department of Defense/AP

 The psychologist regarded as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program has broken a seven-year silence to defend the use of torture techniques against al-Qaida terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

 In an uncompromising and wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, his first public remarks since he was linked to the program in 2007, James Mitchell was dismissive of a Senate intelligence committee report on CIA torture in which he features, and which is currently at the heart of an intense row between legislators and the agency.

 The committee’s report found that the interrogation techniques devised by Mitchell, a retired air force psychologist, were far more brutal than disclosed at the time, and did not yield useful intelligence. These included waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for days at a time, confinement in a box and being slammed into walls.

 But Mitchell, who was reported to have personally waterboarded accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, remains unrepentant. “The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time,” he said. “You can’t ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later.”

It’s nice to know that your alibi would apply to Nazi war criminals as well.

BTW, he continues to claim that torture worked, but as whistleblower Steve Keinman observes:

Steven Kleinman, an air force colonel who participated in interrogations in Iraq and who is credited with blowing the whistle on abuses taking place there, told the Guardian he did not understand how Mitchell could still believe torture methods that generated false confessions could also produce “reliable, accurate and timely intelligence”.

“Why would anybody think that a model that would produce those outcomes would also be effective in producing the opposite?” Kleinman said.

Charlie Pierce correctly derided him as, “another monster“:

Let us be quite clear. Nobody in the torture chambers — and certainly not Mitchell — was being asked to “put his life on the line.” If you have someone fastened to a plank, and you’re pouring water into his mouth to make him believe he’s drowning, he is in no position to threaten your life. James Mitchell was not in any kind of danger, unless whatever vestigial conscience he had came to life and ate him alive, which I sincerely doubt. There is no excuse for what we did. September 11 is no excuse. It wasn’t a matter of the “people on the ground” not understanding the law. It was a matter of them not caring what the law was because they had a thin legal excuse ginned up for them by pet lawyers in the employ of sociopaths. Mitchell should be facing a tribunal for war crimes, not whining about an unflattering Senate committee report.

He should be sharing a cell with John Yoo, who said that it was OK to crush the testicles of a child to get their parent to talk.

The problem with, “Looking forward, not backward,” as Obama is wont to say is that these people continue to poison our national culture.

Of course, looking backward, and charging the malefactors of the Bush administration would set a precedent that might lead to Obama charged for the excesses of his murder by drone program, but I really don’t care if any of them, from either administration, do some well-deserved time in a deep dark hole.

Would You Like a Loss of Civil Rights with Your Breakfast Cereal?

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General Mills is looking to make binding arbitration mandatory for people who take their lives into their hands when they eat their food:

Might downloading a 50-cent coupon for Cheerios cost you legal rights?

General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, “join” it in online communities like Facebook, enter a company-sponsored sweepstakes or contest or interact with it in a variety of other ways.

Instead, anyone who has received anything that could be construed as a benefit and who then has a dispute with the company over its products will have to use informal negotiation via email or go through arbitration to seek relief, according to the new terms posted on its site.

In language added on Tuesday after The New York Times contacted it about the changes, General Mills seemed to go even further, suggesting that buying its products would bind consumers to those terms.

“We’ve updated our privacy policy,” the company wrote in a thin, gray bar across the top of its home page. “Please note we also have new legal terms which require all disputes related to the purchase or use of any General Mills product or service to be resolved through binding arbitration.”

………

The change in legal terms, which occurred shortly after a judge refused to dismiss a case brought against the company by consumers in California, made General Mills one of the first, if not the first, major food companies to seek to impose what legal experts call “forced arbitration” on consumers.

“Although this is the first case I’ve seen of a food company moving in this direction, others will follow — why wouldn’t you?” said Julia Duncan, director of federal programs and an arbitration expert at the American Association for Justice, a trade group representing plaintiff trial lawyers. “It’s essentially trying to protect the company from all accountability, even when it lies, or say, an employee deliberately adds broken glass to a product.”

You have problem with Corporate Capitalist ™®©, comrade?*

We really need to pass Al Franken’s Arbitration Fairness Act, and put an end to this bullsh%$.

*H/t CZ at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for this quote.

Yes, this is the Very Epitome of Terrorizing the Populace

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Peter Schaapveld, a forensic psychologist, has surveyed people Yemenis who live in areas target by drones, and has determined that 92% of the populace is suffering from PTSD:

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you’ve shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn’t matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don’t require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen’s 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Throughout Yemen, it seems, the endless blue heaven above has become a bad omen.

So, do you think that these folks will learn to hate the United States, and revisit violence with violence?

We are damaging a whole generation, and these damaged people will become tomorrow’s warriors determined to get vengeance.

Why We Have a College Funding Crisis

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The University of Maine is suffering the budgetary equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, and they gave their vice chancellor for administration and finance a $40,000.00 raise:

While confronting a $36 million budget shortfall, the University of Maine System gave its top financial administrator a $40,000 raise between last fall and this spring, according to reports of employee salaries that the system publishes twice a year.

The salary for Rebecca Wyke, UMS vice chancellor for administration and finance, was listed at $205,000 annually as of April 8, 2014. That’s up from $165,000 listed in the report published Nov. 5, 2013.

“Is it a lot of money? Yes,” said University of Maine System Chancellor James Page, when asked Tuesday about the raise amid widespread budget cutting efforts at the seven UMS campuses and system office. “And we’re looking at reducing our financial management structure on an ongoing basis. But you do need to have the right people in place to get the job done.”

Page said Wyke was a finalist for a position at a higher education institution out of state that would have paid her more. He brought the question of her raise to the board of trustees in January, and they ratified the decision in an executive session. There was no mention of the raise in the open session.

“We determined that her leaving at this time would have significant adverse impact on the projects that we now have underway,” he said.

Wyke declined to be interviewed for this story.

The median salary of a vice chancellor at universities that award doctorate degrees in the United States is $326,863, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The median salary for a vice chancellor at any institution, including those that only have two-year programs, is $186,750.

………

The raise comes at a financially stressful time for the system. In November, Wyke told the board of trustees that the universities would need to cut $36 million, or about 6.6 percent of the system’s budget, in order to pass a balanced budget in fiscal year 2015.

Page told the state Legislature in March that up to 165 full-time jobs would have to be cut as a result of the budget shortfall.

The bureaucratic overhead at higher education has exploded over the past 50 years, and the upcoming crisis in student loans continues barreling down on us.

There is a genuine problem with looting in education, and it is at the administrative level where the problem exists, and not at the instructor level.

There are way too many people who have little interest in education beyond finding a way to loot education for their own personal benefit.  (I’m talking to you, Michelle “Sell the Public Schools to Wall Street” Rhee)

New York City Racial Profiling Police Unit Shuttered

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Yes, Bill de Blasio being the Mayor of New York City makes a difference:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

To many Muslims, the squad, known as the Demographics Unit, was a sign that the police viewed their every action with suspicion. The police mapped communities inside and outside the city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch-counter conversations.

The program was evil and un-American, and played right into the hands of people who might actually be intending to do harm to the United States, because it alienated people from our law enforcement.

Dianne Feinstein* is Right, Both on the Principal, and the Form

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The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the White House, and not the CIA to conduct the declassification review of the Senate torture report:

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called for the White House – not the Central Intelligence Agency – to lead the declassification process for the panel’s summary of its massive, scathing report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., challenged both the White House and CIA, which have suggested in recent days that the agency would spearhead the declassification.

“The CIA, in consultation with other agencies, will conduct the declassification review,” Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said after the Intelligence Committee voted last week to declassify the 481-page executive summary.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Obama administration wanted a thorough review.

“I agree that as much of the report as possible should be made public, of course allowing for redactions that are necessary to protect national security,” he told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “So I was pleased that the committee voted to send portions of the report forward for declassification.”

Holder recalled that Obama “believes that bringing this program into the light will help the American people understand what happened in the past and can help guide us as we move forward so that no administration contemplates such a program in the future.”

In her letter, Feinstein calls for swift action on the summary, findings and conclusions of the report. The summary, she says, should be released quickly and with minimal redactions.

“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the president and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that while only the CIA could declassify, “We’re trying to build up pressure on the White House and the CIA. It’s not just declassify. It’s to do a minimum of redactions.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of the CIA’s interrogation methods – widely regarded as torture – said he fully understood Feinstein’s concerns.

“She doesn’t trust the CIA. I think she’s probably right. I don’t trust them either,” he told McClatchy.

“This is the same outfit that destroyed the videos of the interrogations. That’s one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

Also note that a target of the investigation, whose name was mentioned more than 1600 times in the Senate report, was the one who supervised CIA “Cooperation” (i.e. hacking into) Senate computers while staffers were reviewing documents.

The CIA is not to be trusted.

What’s more, they don’t have the authority to take lead on declassification, because they did not classify the program in the first place.

That was the White House:

Five years ago, I reported (BREAKING) that the Bush Administration (aka Dick Cheney) made the torture program a Special Access Program in unusual fashion. Rather than CIA Director George Tenet make torture a SAP, as mandated by the Executive Order governing such things, unnamed people in the National Security Council did so.

………
Since that time, I’ve asked experts in classification and they agree that something funky went down (note, too, that torture wasn’t a SAP at the very beginning).
I believe torture’s odd SAP status is one of the things that has implicated the Presidency, which the Obama Administration went to some lengths to cover up.

But it also should dictate the White House take the lead on declassification of the torture program.

Don’t take my word for it — take Dianne Feinstein’s word. In a letter to the White House, she invoked torture’s status as a “covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council” to call for the White House to lead declassification.

In a letter to the President dated April 7 and obtained by McClatchy, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called for swift action on the summary and the findings and conclusions of the report, which members voted last week to declassify. The summary, Feinstein said, should be released “quickly and with minimal redactions.”
“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.


Note, Dianne Feinstein has just formally confirmed the same detail the Obama Administration appealed to keep secret: torture was authorized by the President, not by OLC, not by George Tenet, not by John Rizzo. The President.

Which is why the President should take responsibility for releasing the report.

For some reason Barack Obama has the protection of Bush and Cheney as one of the most important goals of his presidency.

He may think that this position prevents a political schism, but what it really does is normalize corruption and create a criminogenic environment.

H/t Garrett at Daily Kos.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

What, You Mean $1000.00 a Pill is too Expensive?

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A few months back, I wrote of push-back from an NGO about the price of Gilead Sciences’ Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi.

Well the World Health Organization and the pharmacy benefits management company Express Scripts are pushing back as well.

While the WHO is engaging in fairly typical hand wringing:

Gilead Sciences’ new hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, will cost $84,000 for a 12-week treatment plan, rounding out to $1,000 a day. Bound to cause a whirlwind among investors and the healthcare world, the World Health Organization has stepped in.

 The drug is facing protests in the United States because of the excessively high price that Gilead Sciences set for their new product. Despite its potential effectiveness – it is projected to cure 90% of the targeting hepatitis C patients – its gross income will exceed that of every other pharmaceutical drug if a majority of 150 million hepatitis C patients purchase it.

 As a result, the World Health Organization is urging Gilead Sciences to make the drug cheaper and more accessible to help those in dire need of the medication and to avoid creating tremendous problems for insurance companies and investors. But pharmaceutical companies argue that they need to charge high prices on new effective drugs because they need to cover the expensive cost of development.

Express Scripts is playing some serious, and very well deserved, hardball:

Express Scripts Holding Co. (ESRX), a pharmacy benefit manager that handles more than 1 billion prescriptions annually in the U.S., is ratcheting up its effort to force Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) to cut the $84,000 price of its new hepatitis C pill Sovaldi.

 Express Scripts plans to ask its clients, composed of national employers, health insurance plans and government agencies, to join a coalition that would stop using Sovaldi once a rival medicine is approved for the U.S., expected next year, said Steven Miller, chief medical officer of the St. Louis-based company. Express Scripts said in December it may block reimbursement for Foster City, California-based Gilead’s pill once other new hepatitis C therapies are on the market.

 “What they have done with this particular drug will break the country,” Miller said in a telephone interview. “It will make pharmacy benefits no longer sustainable. Companies just aren’t going to be able to handle paying for this drug.”

 Cara Miller and Amy Flood, Gilead spokeswomen, didn’t return phone calls yesterday seeking comment. The company has previously justified the price for Sovaldi by saying it would pay for itself by avoiding future complications from the virus.

(emphasis mine)

Note that Sovaldi has been granted a breakthrough designation by the FDA, which allows the drug to hit the market faster, for which the US government, and the taxpayers got a consideration of ……… nothing at all.

Basically the declaration of “breakthrough” status, and that is the term the 2010 law uses, is a subsidy to the manufacturer, both extending the time available to Gilead under exclusivity, and reducing capital costs by allowing revenue to start earlier.

Maybe the FDA should include a “reasonable and justifiable pricing” clause to things like this.

So Not Surprised: Hedge Funds as Slumlords

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Hedge funds have gone big time into small and single family rentals, and in turn, they have illegally ignored their responsibilities as landlords:

The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.

One of the reasons many investors have been skeptical of the way private equity firms have gone full bore into buying distressed single family homes is that property management is a hands-on business even when it’s done it the most favorable possible setting, an apartment building. Individuals who have invested in single family home rentals almost without exception report that even when they found it to be an economically attractive proposition, it was still oversight-intensive. Admittedly, there are some private equity firms who have bought rental properties who actually do seem to be targeting markets and renters in such a way that they might be able to do a decent job of property management, for instance, by buying homes where they can rehab the kitchen and bath plumbing using the same fixtures, screening tenants in person, and then inspecting the properties monthly and giving the tenants points for passing that they can convert into credits against a purchase or take in cash.

But the biggest fish in this ocean, Blackstone, is clearly taking the opposite approach, of doing as little as they can to maintain the houses and trying to fob off the responsibility onto the tenant, even when local regulations clearly prohibit it. So managing dispersed homes is no problem if you never planned to do the job in the first place.

Blackstone tries to evade this duty formally, through lease terms, and informally, by making themselves inaccessible. And because Blackstone is the largest and highest profile player in this space, they may be hoping that if enough PE landlords follow their lead, communities will accept the new finance-dictate bad standards, just as they have with foreclosure abuses.

But the difference here is while stressed borrowers were the ones that were hurt in foreclosures, and foreclosures and bankruptcies are seen as shameful event, there’s no reason for a victim of a bad landlord to be seen as unsympathetic. Moreover, deliberately negligent PE landlords like Blackstone traditionally have hurt the value of neighboring properties. If this trend continues, abused tenants and their neighbors face a common threat.

Notice that contracts that violate local law are almost certain to fail a legal challenge. In New York, which has more extensive tenant protections than other cities, landlords sometimes try to include provisions that are impermissible, like prohibiting a tenant from having a roommate. Housing court judges exhibit a bit of zeal in smacking down landlords when challenges to those leases come before them.

………

Now to the update on Blackstone’s latest escapades, via some original reporting at In These Times. The article, Game of Homes, makes for good one-stop shopping if you want to get friends and colleagues up to speed on this topic. For NC readers, the first two-thirds of the article covers familiar terrain. Here are the sections that discuss how Blackstone, which is using “Invitation Homes” as its brand for its single-family rentals, is trying to evade its duties as landlord:  ………

If you thought Wall Street was bad as a lender, just imagine how badly they can f%$# you up as a landlord.

As an FYI, I was in a dispute with a landlord and property management company in Texas, one of the less tenant friendly jurisdictions, we lawyered up and won, because even the professional property management firm did not grasp the actual rights of tenants.

Here’s hoping that we will see some major court losses for the hedge fund pukes.

Maybe Because They do not Want to be Revealed as Sociopathic Sadists?

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This would explain why the CIA has consistently lied about both the effectiveness and the extent of its torture program:

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified. The 6,300-page report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or “black sites,” that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009.

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

(emphasis mine)

Also, the techniques used were far worse than previously revealed.

We now understand why the CIA has bee pushing back against the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

It’s one thing to argue that it was a necessary evil that yielded results, it’s another that the policies were prosecuted out of nothing more than a sadistic need to prove how macho they are.

Truth be told, I am not surprised.  This sort of narcissistic cruelty is something that I would expect to have originated from the mind of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

The problem is that for the entire Bush-Cheney years, being a sadistic torturer, or at least pretending to be one, was the only way for advancement in the CIA, and Obama has done nothing to clean house since then.

This means that the upper echelons of the CIA need to cover up this at all cost, or they will be sidelined.

Torture comes home, nu?