Independence Day

It's Independence Day in America. Like Joyce Arnold, I can't think of a better way to celebrate it than showing this video of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing the full version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is My Land":

Then maybe we can celebrate the anniversary of one of the most radical declarations of human rights ever written to ask ourselves what kind of country spies on its own citizens and requires its employees to report politically incorrect thoughts to their superiors.

The answer isn't "the land of the free", that's for sure. Maybe, like those wild-eyed radicals 237 years ago, we should do something about ending it, like realizing that freedom is safer than not being able to discuss the truth.

Happy Fourth.

Twitter Message(s) Of The Day

Trevor Timm, perhaps best known as one of the founders of the Freedom Of The Press Foundation, on the decidedly contradictory messages we are hearing from our government regarding domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA):

Twitter message by @trevortimm June 26, 2013

As is her wont, Marcy Wheeler provided a pointed follow-up:

Twitter message by @emptywheel, June 26, 2013

In arguing with some morons about this issue over the last few days, it's gradually occurred to me that people don't have a clue what the NSA and the government have been up to all these years. Anyone who has read James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace, his expose of the NSA's activities during the Cold War, would not be terribly surprised at the latest revelations. The NSA has always been stretching both the limits of technology and legality in order to listen in on foreign governments' conversations.

Maybe the best example of this is the Rhyolite satellite program. As Wikipedia describes it:

Caption: Microwave relay interception. A Rhyolite satellite located at the right position in space can pick up stray signals from a ground microwave link.

A major purpose of the Rhyolite satellites was reportedly the interception of Soviet and Chinese microwave relay signals traffic. During the 1960s-70s, much of the long distance telephone and data traffic in both the US and Eastern Europe was carried by terrestrial microwave relay links, each consisting of a dish antenna on a microwave tower that transmitted a narrow beam of microwaves to a receiving dish in a nearby city. A good deal of the microwave beam would miss the receiving dish and, because of the curvature of the Earth, radiate out into space. By placing a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit at a position in the sky where it could intercept the beam, the US government was able to listen in on Soviet telephone calls and telex cables during the Cold War.[1]

Wikipedia: Aquacade (satellite)

This program began in the late 1960s, if you work back from the first reported launch date (January, 1970). Recall that the first communications satellites were launched only a decade or so earlier. The sheer audacity of this program, both from a technological perspective and an international relations point of view, is breathtaking. To spend the 1960s equivalent of billions of dollars to launch satellites into orbit to listen in on faint signals that were never intended to go anywhere near that far (geosynchronous orbit is 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the Earth) would be a significant achievement by any standards. To keep it secret for so long (it wasn't revealed until the trial of Christopher Boyce and Andrew Lee for espionage in the mid-1970s), shows an amazing ability to keep secrets, even when a large number of people were clearly involved in the effort.

This is what the NSA does. It's what the NSA has always done, and continues to do. Anyone who can't imagine that this could be a problem if the NSA's gaze ever turned inward has no idea what it does, or has done, or is incapable of imagining things in any useful way.

UPDATE: I've fixed all the broken links I know about.

Quote Of The Day

Referring to Edward Snowden's run to daylight, Atrios writes at Eschaton:

Apparently we are at war with Russia, China, Venezuela, and Ecuador and not a single journalist David Gregory knows in Washington has ever published classified information.

While I Was Sleeping

If you have any mind left at all, you can't help but wonder what Snowden's actions will ultimately mean to our freedom. The specious claims, sadly many by progressives, that what he has done has somehow hurt the United States make it pretty clear that there is a vast difference between the people who run things and the rest of us. My guess is that whatever happens here, it will be something that escapes the notice of most Americans. They clearly don't value freedom, even for the chance it gives us to make ourselves safer. Of course, what they see on television and in the press certainly doesn't make that concern any greater.

Taylor Marsh put that thought pretty well today:

Too many elite media types make light of just how important what’s happened in our country during the Bush-Obama era is ... What’s been instituted, funded by millions of dollars and government partnerships since 9/11 cannot possibly be mitigated in the few weeks that the Edward Snowden story has been ricocheting through the country and around the world.

Media Frenzy as Snowden Skips Hong Kong for Russia (& Beyond)

What people ought to be asking themselves, among other things, is why Ecuador, which hasn't ever had any real beefs with the US that most Latin American countries haven't, is looking to harbor its second asylum seeker from the US. Could it be that maybe we're the ones who don't understand what the rule of law means anymore?

Twitter Message(s) Of The Day

Update/correction June 24

Marcy Wheeler, AKA emptywheel, nails it:

emptywheel ‏@emptywheel

The Admin that did not prosecute anyone for illegally wiretapping Americans is lecturing Hong Kong about rule of law.

emptywheel ‏@emptywheel

The Admin that didn't prosecute any torturers is lecturing Hong Kong about rule of law. Expand

emptywheel ‏@emptywheel

The Admin that has not prosecuted a single major bankster is lecturing Hong Kong about the rule of law.

emptywheel emptywheel ‏@emptywheel

The Administration that won't prosecute James Clapper for lying to Congress is lecturing Hong Kong about the rule of law.

[Apologies. Blogger dysfunction once again prevents me from uploading images, so the text is the best I can do at the moment.]

She's referring, of course, to the Obama Administration lecturing Hong Kong because Hong Kong apparently intends to go through its normal legal procedure to decide whether to grant extradition of Edward Snowden. Reportedly, that could take years to run its course.

Still, the irony of this, and what it shows about our government's priorities, is certainly profound.

Afterword/UPDATE: When we're discussing irony, let's not forget President Obama's nominee for FBI Director:

At the close of his speech, [former Bush Administration Deputy Attorney General James] Comey—much like he did when approving the torture techniques used by the Bush administration—justified rights violations. He said that because of Padilla's military detention and interrogation, "what we have learned confirms that the president of the United States made the right call and that that call saved lives."

James Comey's Indefensible Defense of Indefinite Detention

So, add "nominates a man to be Attorney General FBI Director who is OK with torture and detention without trial" to the list.

I wouldn't blame Hong Kong citizens for chuckling over this one.

For a rundown of what Comey did during the Bush Administration, the ACLU has compiled a list.

UPDATE (Jun. 24): Just noticed an editing issue in the afterword. James Comey has been nominated to be the director of the FBI, not Attorney General. I got that right once, but not the second time. ;) Hopefully, all I've done is confuse people a little, rather than spreading misinformation.

The Slippery Slope

Caption: A protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, April 24, 1971.

Image credit: Leena Krohn/Wikimedia

In a guest editorial for Florida Today, former Army officer Peter Stitt wrote about his experiences while assigned to the unit that spied on anti-war groups during the Vietnam War. Chris Pyle, the officer who blew the whistle on this illegal surveillance, described his introduction to the program this way on Democracy Now:

I received a briefing at the U.S. Army Intelligence Command that showed me the extent of the surveillance system. There were about 1,500 Army agents in plain clothes watching every demonstration in the United States of 20 people or more. There was also a records system in a giant warehouse on about six million people. I disclosed the existence of that surveillance and then recruited 125 of the Army’s counterintelligence agents to tell what they knew about the spying to Congress, the courts and the press. As a result of those disclosures and the congressional hearings, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished.

Chris Pyle, Whistleblower on Domestic Spying in 70s, Says Be Wary of Attacks on NSA’s Critics

Peter Stitt describes how things went while he was a part of the Army Intelligence Command unit:

I did not know the work was illegal. That would be revealed by another intelligence captain [Chris Pyle] who turned whistle-blower. Until the news media confronted our government and citizen outrage forced change, we amassed data on countless, improperly targeted U.S. citizens.

..

The initial rationale for Army Intelligence spying on civilians seemed noble enough. The occasional need for military troops to deal with domestic disturbances puts solders in harm’s way. Ergo commanders should keep track of violent people. Call them dissidents. Spy and report on these evil doers.

Once spying began, other organizers became suspects, then the frequent companions of these organizers. First civil disobedience and then peaceful protest became suspect. The dissident became defined by his or her state of mind, not actions. Eventually, we found our towns and campuses and churches were full of so-called dissidents. And we went to those places and spied on innocent people.

Snooping on citizens

Soldiers are supposed to not obey illegal orders, but there are lots of reasons why it's often unrealistic to expect that they will. Stitt's recollection shows one of the reasons - most Americans are not lawyers, and many are ignorant of what the Constitution and federal law say.

Plus, as he notes, it's easy for a program like this, conducted in secret with rather nebulous goals to begin with, to morph into something else. When that program has something to do with investigating peoples' loyalties or politics, that effort can quickly turn into a witch hunt. As Stitt concludes:

Please believe me: I have watched this inexorable progression in the intelligence community. No gaggle of oversight committees can alter this phenomenon. And later, when we hear from the next whistle-blower, we will be told this has been going on for years, gosh even in prior administrations. So everything is OK, folks. Move along, nothing to see here.

Eventually your right to privacy will be a token idea. Are we so terrorized that we willingly give away precious freedoms? This NSA overreach must not continue.

Snooping on citizens

Pyle's whistle blowing led to the Church Committee Hearings, which in turn created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That act was recently amended, and I would say weakened, toward the end of the Bush Administration. It didn't take us long to forget the lesson Pyle and Stitt are trying to remind us about.

The NSA's current surveillance programs that have been disclosed in the last week or so are similar enough to the Army's dissident surveillance program of the 1970s that it should stand as a warning that such programs carry too great a risk. Just like the Vietnam-era surveillance, the NSA's is essentially an open-ended mission. However incidentally, it targets citizens of this country, which makes it potentially a means of government control of its citizens. It is carried on in secret, with no oversight worth mentioning. That it will get out of control is a foregone conclusion, assuming it hasn't already.

As Mark Twain once observed, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. The means of surveillance are different, as is the perceived threat. Still, this is another lesson that we should have learned from Vietnam: that ultimately, we can't trust our government if it's not doing what it's doing right in front of our eyes. The slippery slope of NSA surveillance will lead us to the same place that we were headed in the 1970s, before principled individuals prevailed.

There's no guarantee they'll win this time.

In Which I Try To School Dr. Skeptic

Dr. Michael Shermer has done some great work in the realm of debunking nonsensical claims about paranormal activity, and describing the difference between science and pseudo-science. His books Why People Believe Weird Things and Borderlands are fundamental reading if you want to understand the difference between science and belief. Unfortunately, he seems to not be as skeptical as he should be about what he reads in the New York Times. Here's an example of what I mean in a long Twitter monologue regarding this NYT article:

Twitter Message by @michaelshermer w/ replies by @Cujo359, June 12, 2013

Go to the byline link to see the entire conversation.

We all have our blind spots, but the points I make seem so obvious that I can hardly believe I have to make them. I guess it's true - you should never meet your heroes, even online.

Claims made on the basis of secret information are usually classified as claims of special knowledge, and are dismissed as nonsense. When Madam Cleo claims she can talk to the dead, reasonable people recognize this as absurd. When the government does it, though, claiming they have "intelligence" that proves their point but they can't tell us what it is, generally sensible people lap this up as their god's truth. I don't get that, but maybe that's because spending a couple of decades in the defense industry gives you a jaded perspective.

Afterword: Here are the links embedded in those Twitter messages:

• N.S.A. Chief Says Phone Logs Halted Terror Threats (Dr. Shermer's link)
• Public Documents Contradict Claim Email Spying Foiled Terror Plot (my first link re: Mike Rogers)
• Stuxnet virus strengthened Iranian nuclear programme: Report (my second link re: Stuxnet)

UPDATE: Added that bit of exposition about special knowledge and Madam Cleo.

UPDATE 2: This is precious. Not completely related to this particular subject, but it does challenge people's credulity when it comes to their trust in certain parts of our government. Click. Read. Enjoy.

Collateral Damage

There's another problem with a government agency conducting surveillance when it won't reveal either the targets of its surveillance, the procedures used, nor the methods, as Democracy Now notes:

Key tech giants implicated in the recent NSA surveillance revelations have asked the U.S. government for permission to prove they haven’t enabled wholesale spying. On Tuesday, Google, Facebook and Microsoft said they want to release info on how they respond to classified surveillance requests in response to the fallout over the surveillance program PRISM. According to leaked documents, the National Security Agency uses PRISM to gather data on foreign Internet users directly from the servers of nine major firms. It’s unlikely the government will grant the request. A former Justice Department prosecutor, Larry Klayman, says he plans to file a class action lawsuit today against all nine companies named in the leaked documents as PRISM participants.

Tech Giants Seek Gov’t Permission to Disclose FISA Orders

Those Internet companies, to say the least, have an image problem right now. Given the secrecy surrounding what they have or haven't done, and the amazingly similar way they all disavowed having done, well, something, it should be no surprise that people have assumed the worst.

It's not just Americans making those assumptions, either:

The European Union's chief justice official has written to the U.S. attorney general demanding an explanation for the collection of foreign nationals' data following disclosures about the "PRISM" spy program.

In a letter seen by Reuters, the European commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, Viviane Reding, said she had serious concerns about the possibility that U.S. authorities had accessed European citizens' data on a vast scale.

...

Companies considering adopting cloud technology still cite security as their biggest concern and European officials say they are aware that Europe's cloud market hinges on privacy.

"The storage of the data in the foreign servers and related legal uncertainty constitutes a real impediment," a second Commission official said.

EU justice chief seeks answers on U.S. data spying

[italic emphasis added]

Which means that US-based Internet companies may end up as collateral damage in this foolish invasion of privacy.

Quote(s) Of The Day

A couple of quotes regarding the ongoing NSA surveillance scandal that are worth considering. What makes these quotes interesting to me is the expertise of the people quoted.

The first is from Susan Landau, a computer engineer formerly with Sun Microsystems, on how intrusive government possession of phone meta-data can be:

[F]or example, if you call from the hospital when you’re getting a mammogram, and then later in the day your doctor calls you, and then you call the surgeon, and then when you’re at the surgeon’s office you call your family, it’s pretty clear, just looking at that pattern of calls, that there’s been some bad news. If there’s a tight vote in Congress, and somebody who’s wavering on the edge, you discover that they’re talking to the opposition, you know which way they’re vote is going.

One of my favorite examples is, when Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, there were a number of calls that weekend before. One can imagine just the trail of calls. First the CEO of Sun and the CEO of Oracle talk to each other. Then probably they both talk to their chief counsels. Then maybe they talk to each other again, then to other people in charge. And the calls go back and forth very quickly, very tightly. You know what’s going to happen. You know what the announcement is going to be on Monday morning, even tho

More Intrusive Than Eavesdropping? NSA Collection of Metadata Hands Gov’t Sweeping Personal Info

I could think of a couple of alternative hypotheses in both of those cases, but a little digging, particularly in the second case, would reveal pretty clearly that Ms. Landau's company was about to be bought out. Meta-data may not mean much on its own, but combined with other information it can be very revealing.

She also notes in that Democracy Now interview that cell phone calls can be used to find out where you are, or have been.

The other quote is from Richard Clarke, former terrorism advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush:

I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

Secondly, we should worry about this program because government agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have a well-established track record of overreaching, exceeding their authority and abusing the law. The FBI has used provisions of the Patriot Act, intended to combat terrorism, for purposes that greatly exceed congressional intent.

Why you should worry about the NSA

With all the references to it in popular entertainment that originates in the US, it's hard to believe that international terrorists don't assume this already. They certainly remember that the Bush Administration did similar things after 9/11. If they don't realize this by now, they're probably not that much of a danger.

Afterword: As this article notes, back in 2006 then-Senator Joe Biden knew how sensitive telephone meta-data could be.

Cenk Uygur On Domestic Surveillance

In plain language and a loud voice, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explains what's wrong with letting the NSA collect whatever it wants without any meaningful checks:

The video is reduced in size here to fit into this blog's page format. Go to the YouTube page for more viewing options.

What he says about the relative ease of finding information after the fact versus predicting and preventing acts of terrorism is absolutely true. I had a similar job once upon a time - figuring out how network performance can be improved by recording all the data sent over it and categorizing it in various ways. Specific questions about things that were wrong were usually easy to answer. Predicting bottlenecks, slowdowns, or malfunctions was nearly impossible.

There is no need, and no justification, for the sort of surveillance that we are currently being subjected to. As for the concern about us eavesdropping on the rest of the world, I think that as long as only the US has that information, it shouldn't be a big problem for those peoples' freedoms. We do share that information, though, and there should be serious restrictions placed on how and when that is done, as well.

Afterword: While we're embedding videos, here's The Daily Show, on substitute anchor John Oliver's inaugural show, making some excellent points on the surveillance issue:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

Yes, it's basically a coin toss whether the NSA will consider your information to be of foreign origin or not. Officially, at least - who knows what they're actually doing?

(h/t Taylor Marsh)

UPDATE: When you're done watching, go read Tom's Dispatch.

The Illusion Of Safety

Due to commitments I made a long time ago, I've been largely unable to discuss much about the ongoing NSA surveillance revelations. Basically, when I see something that says "Top Secret/NOFORN" or the like on something, I'm not allowed to discuss it. I signed up for that, and I don't mind that much. What I mind is the people who abuse that system, who are the folks in the Obama Administration and Congress who are talking about how "gut-wrenching" it is that some of those slides were released to the public. I don't have grief with the whistle blower who released this stuff. He clearly didn't do this for personal profit. At worst, he mishandled classified data, which is a serious offense. I think it's more accurate to say he did this country a big favor. My beef is with the folks who created a system of surveillance that has no meaningful oversight or control, and who make it their priority to punish anyone who reveals anything about it - other than them, of course.

So, I can't discuss the details much, which is too bad. The details are pretty fascinating. I can, however, offer some observations about the public's reaction to this news. I'll start with my favorite Abe Lincoln quote:

“All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, … with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

He spoke those words in 1838, regarding the lynching of a black man. He worried that if we lost our respect for law that we would quickly lose our freedom as well. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it quite clearly says that among other things, we should be secure from government in our persons, our papers, and effects. If we ignore that principle in the interest of “defending ourselves” from some crackpots halfway around the world, we have truly become a pathetic shadow of a free nation.

Those who maintain that somehow all this intrusiveness and secrecy is necessary to keep us “safe” have clearly never considered what it’s like to not be safe from your own government. They haven’t considered what the cost is of corruption that can’t be punished because it can’t be revealed, or how many lives bad policy and bad government can cost. If they had, they’d know that what they were saying is utterly foolish. We lose more people every month for lack of health care, and for letting people who shouldn’t be near them have guns. We lost more people in Iraq and Afghanistan than we did to terrorism. We lost way more in Vietnam. All that death is due, at least in part, to foolish government policy. While we spend vast sums of money on surveillance equipment that may not even work, we don't educate our young well enough to operate all those whiz-bang weapons we always seem to have money to build.

Nearly everything our government does affects lives and livelihoods. Not being able to discuss that, because we know that if we do the government will use the data it collects against us, will be the price we pay for these absurd priorities. If you think otherwise, ask yourself who watches the watchers? Who makes sure those people are doing what they’re supposed to, and is there anyone outside of government who can make sure that watching process, in fact, is happening as it’s supposed to? The answers, in order, are "who knows?" and "nobody".

And if you think that the only people who have something to fear are those who have nothing to hide, think again. Or maybe I should just say “think”.

Giving our rights over to our own government isn't safety. At best, it's the illusion of safety. there is no such thing as perfect safety. There is only the hope that we can make things safer, through informed debate and the actions of citizens who feel empowered to make change. Neither will happen if the government can collect whatever information it wants, and use it with no oversight or accountability.

Google Is Watching

This is what greeted me when I tried to log into this blog from a remote location:

Creepy. I suppose I should be reassured that Google is making sure that I am who I say I am, and that my blogging job hasn't been taken over by a spam bot, but it isn't. It's also pretty clear that Google records where I log in from, and keeps that information at least a couple of weeks.

In a world where it's hard to avoid surveillance no matter where you are or what you're doing, this is not at all reassuring. I'm sure I'm just old fashioned, but moments like this give me an overwhelming urge to "anonymize".

A Tale Of Two Hypocrisies

Caption: The new, way better USS Zumwalt, a new class of destroyer scheduled to launch starting next year. In contrast to all those "entitlement" programs that just keep us healthy and employed, it has lots of shooty, blowy-uppy things. You want to pay for that, right?

Image credit: U.S. Navy/Wikimedia

Just a couple of things that caught my attention today that demonstrate what our rulers are up to these days. The first is an article at Talking Points Memo, explaining how all of a sudden defense contractors are into the "tax and spend" philosophy:

The very real possibility that defense programs will suffer deep, across the board spending cuts early next year has major defense contractors and their allies making an unusual plea to members of Congress: Put everything on the table to avoid the so-called sequester — including higher taxes. That might not sound like an extraordinary ask. But it’s typical for incumbent interests to leave all questions of ways and means to Congress. And given the defense industry’s enormous power and historic alignment with the GOP, it could have enough force to finally break the GOP of its anti-tax absolutism.

Defense Industry Leans On Congress — Avoid Cuts, Even If It Means More Taxes

Which just goes to show that within every conservative there's a liberal just waiting for self-interest to set him free.

Image credit: Parody by Cujo359 (See NOTE)

Not that the GOP is alone in its commitment to hypocrisy. Emptywheel fills us in on what the Obama Administration is claiming in a U.S. District Court regarding seizure of electronic data on the Internet:

The ruling sucks for al-Haramain. But it has larger implications. Effectively, the 9th Circuit is saying there’s no way to hold the government accountable for simply collecting your telecommunications illegally; you can only hold them accountable if they use that information in a trial.

9th Circuit: No Way to Punish the Government If They Illegally Collect (But Don’t Use) Your Telecommunications

We transact business over the Internet every day. Some people's entire business is done over the Internet - independent software vendors, for instance. Our bank records and all our other private information goes over it as well.

When are the courts going to catch up with events of the late Twentieth Century? The phrase “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” means the government isn’t allowed to seize those things without reason. That means that when the government collects information on the Internet, which includes what would be considered “papers”, they are seizing our papers without due process.

That provision doesn't just apply to trials. It means the government can't seize those things, period. They don't have to bring it to trial to use it against you. Just ask Eliot Spitzer.

Of course, as we learned during the 2008 primary, Barack Obama is no stranger to the idea that the rules are somehow different when something is composed of flowing electrons. Anyone who thinks that it's OK to seize someone else's work without paying for it because it's on the Internet is certainly not likely to be bothered by his government seizing anything else it can get its hands on. "Constitutional scholar", my furry butt.

So, there you have it - two tales of hypocrisy, one from each "side". So, not only are we fair here, we're balanced.

Strike!

Image credit: Fight For The Future

While this blog will not be "on strike" today, I fully support the aims of these Internet organizations, which are taking the day off to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and its sister legislation, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). These two acts, the U.S. House and Senate version of the same bill, respectively, are supposedly designed to prevent copyright theft on the Internet.

This is, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, a ridiculously restrictive and dangerous bill:

The "Stop Online Piracy Act"/"E-PARASITE Act" (SOPA) and "The PROTECT IP Act" (PIPA) are the latest in a series of bills which would create a procedure for creating (and censoring) a blacklist of websites. These bills are updated versions of the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA), which was previously blocked in the Senate. Although the bills are ostensibly aimed at reaching foreign websites dedicated to providing illegal content, their provisions would allow for removal of enormous amounts of non-infringing content including political and other speech from the Web.

The various bills define different techniques for blocking “blacklisted” sites. Each would interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. SOPA would also allow rightsholders to force payment processors to cut off payments and advertising networks to cut ties with a site simply by sending a notice.

These bills are targeted at "rogue" websites that allow indiscriminate piracy, but use vague definitions that could include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire, and Rapidshare; sites that discuss piracy such as pirate-party.us, p2pnet, Torrent Freak, torproject.org, and ZeroPaid; as well as a broad range of sites for user-generated content, such as SoundCloud, Etsy, and Deviant Art. Had these bills been passed five or ten years ago, even YouTube might not exist today — in other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

Internet Blacklist Legislation

The potential for abuse is obvious to anyone familiar with how YouTube, for instance, has been gamed numerous times into blocking content that was wrongly alleged to be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by people who simply wanted to make the content disappear. It would also give entertainment companies that also provide Internet presence the opportunity to censor sites that compete with it, at least on its own networks.

The Obama Administration has gone on record as being opposed to these bills:

Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

Of course, counting on the Obama Administration to stand on principle is a good way to be disappointed, as we learned with the recent reverse course on the unlimited detention provisions added to the NDAA.

Intellectual property, the concept that includes ideas like patents and copyrights, is a deal that society strikes with people who have spent time and effort creating something of value. Most modern countries, including the U.S., make a deal with people who invent or create innovative work. That deal is that they have the exclusive right to sell that particular work or product for a set period. This makes the work of innovating monetarily valuable, because without it anyone could then steal the work and sell it as his own, usually at lower cost.

What has happened in recent years, though, is that these ideas have gotten out of hand. Partly thanks to the not terribly bright practice of shipping the designs of our products overseas to be manufactured by others, it is now far more difficult to control the use of the designs or works that U.S. intellectual property law is supposed to provide. Meanwhile, those protections have been extended for enormous periods, well beyond the lifetimes of the people who came up with the works in the first place. When movies that are so old that all the people who made them are dead can still be claimed as intellectual property by the corporations that own the rights, it seems to me that it's time those rights expired, too.

To try to enforce these increasingly unenforceable intellectual property rights, various corporations that own those rights and the congresspeople they've bought and paid for are determined to turn the Internet into a shopping mall. And it will be a shopping mall where the security guards can look in your bags, your purses, and your clothes any time they like, then can beat the crap out of you and throw you outside.

So, the Internet is going on strike. Not all of it, of course, but many of the things you're used to doing on the Internet today will be harder, and you'll be asked numerous times to do this:

Sign the petition to remind your congressmen that they work for all Americans, not just the ones who have enough money to hire lobbyists.

UPDATE: Here's what Raw Story has to say in support of the strike:

Raw Story is, as always, a small, privately-owned company, so we understand uniquely the problems caused by people who reprint our articles without permission or attribution, taking the intellectual property of our company and our employees without so much as a pageview in return. But our reporting has shown, time and again, that neither SOPA nor PIPA will help small companies like ours do much, if anything, to combat the theft of our intellectual property — heck, even the movie industry can’t say that its profits are actually down, despite rampant piracy. SOPA/PIPA is simply a cudgel supported by large, corporate interests who would rather spend money lobbying for outmoded legislation intended to stall the internet’s engine for change rather than learning a new way to operate in a modern world.

Announcement: Raw Story to go dark on January 18 to protest SOPA/PIPA

I'd have to agree, I don't see how this would help anyone legitimately reclaim or recover losses for stolen intellectual property. It can be used as a way for corporations that both provide content and Internet access to stifle competition, though.

I (Won't) Be Home For Christmas

Caption: Denver Airport snowed in, December, 2006.

Image credit: ashleyniblock/Flickr

I'm so glad that I'm not traveling over the holidays this year:

Delta Air Lines plans to cancel 500 flights Saturday because of heavy snow expected in Nashville and Atlanta. For the first Christmas in 17 years, Nashville and Atlanta could get more than just a dusting of snow, according to the National Weather Service. The storm is expected to intensify and move northeast on Sunday to the mid-Atlantic states and New England.

In fact, a good section of the U.S. is getting snow Friday night. Winter weather advisories were in effect from Kansas east to Kentucky and from Minnesota south to Arkansas on Friday.

Some Regions Getting Fresh Snow for Christmas

Atlanta is a major hub airport for Delta. Odds are fairly good that if I'd been flying Christmas day, I would have been going through Atlanta. Of course, it could be worse, I could have been trying to get to or from Europe:

Thousands of travellers were stranded at the main Paris airport Saturday after hundreds of Christmas flights were cancelled, as freezing weather and widespread snowfalls caused travel chaos across Europe.

About 400 flights in and out of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle were scrapped, with some 30,000 travellers plans disrupted by the cancellations and delays, said the airport's director Patrice Hardel.

Flights in Belgium and Germany were also affected and motorists stayed off the roads as western Europe battled the latest cold snap.

Christmas chaos in Europe as snow strands thousands

Frankfurt and Heathrow, the other two of Europe's three busiest airports, have been either closed or operating at reduced capacity much of the week.

As it turns out, at least part of the problem is that the airlines in Europe weren't planning ahead:

Airport authorities at Charles de Gaulle ordered part of Terminal 2E to be cleared of passengers because of fears that the roof might collapse under the weight of 60cm (2ft) of snow.

In 2004, the same roof collapsed shortly after the terminal opened, killing four people.

The disruption at Charles de Gaulle was also blamed on a shortage of de-icing fluid, and the cancellation of flights led to 2,000 people being stranded at the airport overnight.

The French authorities, struggling to cope with the country's third major snowfall of the winter, said fresh supplies were on their way but would not arrive before Monday.

Snow paralyses transport in parts of Western Europe

Who could have foreseen that there would be lots of snow in winter, or that they might need de-icing fluid? Only people familiar with air travel, I suppose. You'd think they'd rather have a little extra on hand than have to refund thousands of tickets, and having to put 2,000 people up for the night in Paris hotels.

There's at least one woman who is probably sorry her flight wasn't canceled.

Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim and who has a pacemaker-type device implanted in her chest, says her constitutional rights were violated. She says she never broke any laws. But the Transportation Security Administration disagrees.

Hirschkind was hoping to spend Christmas with friends in California, but she never made it past the security checkpoint.

"I can't go through because I have the equivalent of a pacemaker in me," she said.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this,'" she said.

Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

Woman arrested at ABIA after refusing enhanced pat down

They're really good at beating up and arresting 56 year old women, but they don't seem to be much good at finding security problems:

Houston businessman Farid Seif says it was a startling discovery. He didn't intend to bring a loaded gun on a flight out of Houston and can't understand how TSA screeners didn't catch it.

Nearing the height of last year's Christmas travel season, TSA screeners at Bush Intercontinental Airport somehow missed a loaded pistol, one that was tucked away inside a carry-on computer bag.

"I mean, this is not a small gun," Seif said. "It's a .40 caliber gun."

Man boards plane at IAH with loaded gun in carry-on

I'm sure Mr. Seif obeyed all the instructions from the TSA agents. It would be nice if they were just useless, but sadly, the TSA are a danger to travelers, and they're an expensive one, at that. Their current budget (PDF - see page 24) is just shy of $7 billion. That could buy a lot of snow plows and de-icing fluid.

Based on the dates of those reports, these two incidents with TSA occurred roughly a week apart.

Why do I hate traveling in winter? Your fate is in the hands of airport administrators who don't think they need to have collapsed roofs beefed up to meet worst case winter conditions, airline logisticians who can't plan for a snow storm, and "security" people who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a big type copy of Gray's Anatomy.

Come to think of it, those are good reasons to avoid airline travel the rest of the year...

UPDATE: James Ala has a quote from a report about the man who managed to smuggle that gun through the TSA (in)security checks. It appears that the TSA does, as I expected, routinely miss these things. It's not the first such report, either.

Please, Tell Me There's Video Of This

Not too long ago, I wrote that I was really starting to like Sen. Al Franken. It's still early in his career, of course. He could go off the rails and turn into a lefty Jim Bunning or a lefty Arlen Specter. But somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.

Today, while the Senate Judiciary Committee was interviewing a Department of Justice official about the Constitution, particularly the Fourth Amendment:

Franken, who opened by acknowledging that unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, he’s not a lawyer, but according to his research “most Americans aren’t lawyers” either, said he’d also done research on the Patriot Act and in particular, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to get a warrant to wiretap a an unnamed target and his or her various and changing cell phones, computers and other communication devices.

...

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking [DoJ Assistant Attorney General David] Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.

Al Franken Reads the 4th Amendment to Justice Department Official

I'll get to the DoJ official's response in a moment, but first I should probably quote the amendment, which doesn't get mentioned often enough to suit me:

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

The part I emphasized is the part Franken emphasized, which explicitly says that the persons and things to be seized must be explicitly identified. The PATRIOT Act tries to make it legal to tap someone without identifying him by name. Incredibly, as the DoJ witness pointed out, this appears to be OK with the courts:

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”

Kris explained that the courts have held that the law’s requirements that the person be described, though not named, is sufficient to meet the demands of the Constitution. That did not appear to completely satisfy Franken’s concerns.

Al Franken Reads the 4th Amendment to Justice Department Official

Franken seems to be able to take nonsense with good humor, which is a good thing. He's going to hear a lot of it in his new job. Kris's answer, technically speaking, is correct, but it's yet another reason that I say the Obama Administration is effectively no different from the Bush Administration on this point.

As I say, it's early in Franken's career. Nevertheless, I wish we had about fifty more Al Frankens in the Democratic Senate Caucus right now.

(h/t Earthbound Misfit)

Hypocritical Wanker Of The Day: Jane Harman

Image credit: Official Congressional portrait

Occasionally, I've written phrases of the form, "you don't have to be an expert to understand this, just a human being". What I always assume when I write such things is that the people I'm addressing have the imagination and self-knowledge to understand how they would feel or react in a given circumstance. Often, I'm disappointed to find out that there are many people who don't understand. These are the sorts of people who think, for instance, that the Palestinians will calm down if Israel just gets tough on them. What they fail to realize, of course, is that the problem is that Israel has been tough on them, by creating the conditions that put them in small, densely populated areas, and then bombing or invading them whenever they feel the need. Anyone who thinks people will calm down in such circumstances has to be an emotional idiot - someone not the least bit aware of how he reacts to stress and fear.

It appears that Rep. Jane Harman (CA-36) is such a person, as Glenn Greenwald writes today:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of the most shameless and absurd spectacles to appear in Washington in some time: the self-righteous, self-obsessed rage expressed by Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) -- leading defender of Bush's illegal domestic eavesdropping programs -- upon learning that one of her conversations had been legally eavesdropped upon as part of a criminal investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli agent. Over the weekend, Harman (along with half of the U.S. Congress) appeared at the AIPAC conference and continued her new anti-eavesdropping crusade, actually vowing to lead an investigation into potential eavesdropping abuses to assure that it would never happen again. Atrios notes just some of the points that makes her behavior incomparably shameless.

Someone Needs To Give Jane Harman An Award For This

As one of the articles Glenn referred to states:

[Y]ou are told that under orders from the president, the National Security Agency set up “unique access points inside the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.” You are assured that this is legal. You are a trained lawyer.

What do you do?

Well, if you are one particular Congresswoman, you don’t think that’s its highly suspicious that the NSA is operating inside the United States. You don’t find a way to research the legality of the program, by getting hypothetical answers from constitutional and intelligence experts. You don’t read the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to see if the program sounds legal.

Harman: It’s Not My Fault I Couldn’t Figure Out Domestic Wiretapping Was Illegal

Now, of course, Harman is up in arms, because the government was wiretapping her. Someone leaked this fact to the press, along with what that wiretap allegedly exposed, which was Harman at least considering trading support for AIPAC for campaign contributions. In any event, the hypocrisy of one of the biggest champions of illegal wiretapping protesting her being exposed by a legal wiretap is rich, to say the least.

So, as the title of Glenn's article suggests, Harman is, indeed, receiving an award for this. Around here, we have the perfect award. There's no monetary value to this award, but then Ms. Harman ranks as one of the richest members of Congress. It's the perfect award for someone who has everything.

Congratulations to Jane Harman for becoming our new Hypocritical Wanker Of The Day. The best thing about this award is that, if history proves to be any guide, she'll be able to keep it for some time.

Irony Abounds In Right's Response To DHS Report

The right-wing blogs, Fox News, and the usual gang of idiots are all up in arms, so to speak, about a report that was released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently. Glenn Greenwald provides a summary:

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity."  The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed:  The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!"  Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto."  Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents.  Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

[links from original]

As Glenn points out, the same people who are now complaining about this situation were some of the main cheerleaders for the domestic surveillance and human rights abuses of the Bush Administration. This report has opened a rich vein of irony that may supply all our needs for decades.

As Blue Girl notes, if there's any group of radicals that has proved themselves dangerous to public safety in the last couple of decades, it's those on the right.

As Dana Hunter observes, these people identify themselves with militias and other armed and potentially dangerous cranks. They haven't shown any similar concern for the rights of liberal, progressive, LGBT, or anti-war groups that have confined themselves to peaceful protest.

As Brendan Calling points out, this is something we've been warning about for years.

In fact, I have deliberately invoked the specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency to get my point across. I didn't do that because I found her to be particularly scary. I did it because I knew the Right finds her scary. Here's what I wrote on the subject of domestic surveillance in 2007:

I'll just add parenthetically that I don't trust any government with my civil rights and liberties. Governments are supposed to serve their people, not the other way round. That's as true for a Clinton Administration as it is for a Bush Administration. Everyone who has been in politics for a while has enemies and antagonists. You'd think all these bozos who assume that they can trust President Bush would think about that for a moment. Of course, if you're foolish enough to trust Bush, thinking probably isn't your strong suit.

Finally, A Definite Answer

In all the articles I've written on the subject of human rights or domestic surveillance, you'll have to look hard to find mention of left-wing or Democratic Party organizations in particular being at risk. My worry is that any government can abuse its powers, and that many do.

That's clearly not the case on the Right.

Today, Think Progress showed that the irony runs much deeper than we imagined:

Yesterday, a Department of Homeland Security report about the rising radicalization of “rightwing extremists” was leaked. The right wing was immediately incensed, viewing the report on radical “extremists” as an attack on “conservatives.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, for example, tried to suggest it was a report about Republican “loyalists.”

However, this morning, Fox News’s Catherine Herridge revealed that the report, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was actually “requested by the Bush administration” but not completed until recently:

HERRIDGE: Well this is an element of the story which has largely gone unreported. One looks at right-wing groups, as you mentioned. And a second is on left-wing groups. Significantly, both were requested by the Bush administration but not finished until President Bush left office.

Herridge’s reporting undermines her network’s own “reporting” over the past 24 hours. Since news of the DHS assessment broke yesterday, Fox anchors and guests have been seizing upon the report as evidence that the administration is trying to intimidate tea party goers or “stifle speech”[.]

Fox Reporter Contradicts Fox: DHS Report On Right Wing Was ‘Requested By The Bush Administration’

I suspect that with reporting instincts like those, Ms. Herridge will soon be the go-to correspondent for Big Disastrous Fires and Bizarre, Scary Street Crimes. She certainly is far too inquisitive to be covering Washington politics for Fox News.

It's delicious that their own hero, George W. Bush, was the one who ordered these reports. It's even more delicious that, while these same people have been lamenting every step the Obama Administration has taken in the direction of the rule of law and respecting our rights, the Obama Administration has mostly chosen to continue the abuses of the Bush Administration. In view of the fact that this is a project left over from the prior administration, the protests ring particularly hollow.

It's hard to imagine that there will be more irony content in this story, but I'm sure if it's there, the right wing will find it and expose it for us.

UPDATE: It was Blue Girl, not Blue Gal, who made noted the relative danger from right and left-wing radicals. I've now corrected that oversight, thanks to Blue Gal's comment.

Hearings On Holder Thursday

Image credit: National Archives This is the Constitution. It's going to need some help in the coming days, and you can be a part of it.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold hearings on the nomination of Eric Holder to be President-Elect Obama's Attorney General on Thursday. Apparently, Arlen Specter and other Senators had a trip planned (PDF), or committee chairman Pat Leahy would have scheduled it earlier. In return for that consideration, it appears that Specter is promising to resist the nomination.

In an e-mail to my real-world self, People For The American Way wrote:

You may have seen some of the news coverage already. Holder's critics are citing his role in some of President Clinton's last-minute pardons. But even Holder's Republican supporters -- of which he has many, including Sen. Orrin Hatch, Solicitor General Ted Olsen and James Comey, the former Bush administration deputy attorney general who tried to fight DOJ approval of the NSA's warrentless domestic spying program -- acknowledged that even if Holder made some mistakes in the past, he learned from them and will be a good attorney general.

The real opposition to Holder comes from those who want to use his confirmation process as a proxy fight for future judicial confirmation battles, including for the Supreme Court. And in the last few weeks, leading right-wing voices like Karl Rove, Vice President Cheney and many on FOX News have been making the case that broad surveillance powers and loose restrictions on detainee treatment and interrogation techniques (that's a euphemism for torture) are the only way to protect America from terrorists. Holder is with us in resisting those objectionable arguments, and we're confident he will fight for our values and our rights as Americans if confirmed as attorney general.

I share some of the reservations about Holder. Nevertheless, he's on record as being against torture, rendition, and unlimited surveillance of the sort that the Bush Administration have been engaging in. That the folks who brought us the last eight years of darkness are against him strikes me as a great recommendation.

Karl Rove and the other apologists for torture and the violation of our rights keep insisting that this is what's necessary to keep us safe. Frankly, I'm far more worried that we won't be safe from our government, and unless the Attorney General is willing to stand for the rule of law on these issues, we won't be.

With that in mind, and the thought that no nominee is likely to be perfect, I encourage folks to sign PFAW's online petition and, if your Senator is a member of the Judiciary Committee, write him with your concerns.

A Third Way?

Updated below on Dec. 23.

By now, if you read more than a couple of the blogs on my blog roll, you've read about this already:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This article was put onto Matt Yglesias' blog by Palmieri. To my way of thinking, and to that of many of the commenters to that article, she was stating the blindingly obvious, which is that the articles on Yglesias' blog contain his opinions, which are not the official position of Think Progress or the Center For American Progress, which funds the site. Since most readers of the blog are smart enough to know this, the question that occured to many was why this needed to be said. This comment expressed a fairly typical sentiment, albeit in an atypically clear manner:

I don’t have a problem with clarifications like this per se, as long as they’re unaccompanied by pressure that Matt self-censor or moderate his statements. I read the blog because I trust him as an independent journalist, and any doubts I might have about his independence undermines the value of the Web site (not to mention my goodwill toward CAP.)

It’s hard for me to believe, after a late-night intrusion like this, that he’ll feel no pressure to self-censor.

A Special Note Re: Third Way

Which is basically how I feel about this. Matt Yglesias later wrote his own reaction to this post:

I wish the guest post from Jennifer Palmieri that I put up Sunday evening had been handled differently in a variety of ways since just sticking it on the blog and then going to bed seems to have given people a lot of misleading notions about the site being somehow “hijacked.” But when you get right down to it, all she was doing was reiterating what’s always been the case — I’m posting un-screened posts on an un-edited blog and covering every issue under the sun. Under the circumstances, it’s better for me, better for CAP and CAPAF, and better for everyone to understand that I’m writing as an individual not as the voice of the institution. Pointing that fact out isn’t contrary to me having an independent voice, it’s integral to having one. Nobody has deleted my post criticizing Third Way, or forced me to retract those criticisms, or prevented me from following up with a more substantive critique of something they wrote.

Teach the Controversy

This, plus the fact that the next article that Matt wrote on Third Way didn't strike me as different in tone or content from his previous ones, leads me to believe that this was just a rather foolish gesture on Palmieri's part.

This begs the question, though, of just what it is she was making that gesture for.

Third Way, if their website is any indication, appear to be another of those tiresome "message shaping" firms of which there are far too many of in DC. This particular one, despite calling itself progressive, has some views that don't strike me as very progressive. Here's what Yglesias originally wrote that started this furor:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago.

The New Moderate

What does he mean by a "weak brew"? Let me give you an example. I've been reading what Third Way bills as a manual for the Homeland Security transition team. In a nutshell, it's thirty pages of wankery. Here are the basic steps it recommends:

➤ Make selection of the DHS Secretary a Tier 1 choice, announced along with the first wave of appointees (Treasury, Defense, etc.).
➤ Engage early and often with the Bush administration security team and transition council.
➤ Conduct a table-top exercise with the new leadership team prior to the inauguration to clarify roles and responsibilities in the event of a terrorist attack.
➤ Integrate the existing White House Homeland Security Council within the National Security and Domestic Policy Councils, but maintain an Assistant to the President (and Deputy National Security Advisor) to oversee homeland security policy functions.
➤ Organize a homeland security summit within the first 100 days, bringing together federal, state, local, and private sector leaders to review the state of intergovernmental cooperation and public-private partnership, particularly in light of the unfolding economic crisis.

Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative (PDF)

See anything that isn't blindingly obvious there, assuming you think homeland security is a priority? I suppose the "table top exercise" might be a good idea, since it's nearly inevitable that when positions are actually filled with real people they have trouble figuring out who's doing what. The rest of it is just DC mumbo-jumbo. What follows these bullet points is twenty-seven more pages of such pap, consisting mainly of recommendations on when to hold meetings and visits. Occasionally, they'll address issues like what it is that people are supposed to talk about at these meetings, usually in the most general terms they can manage. Someone with half Obama's IQ, which is a group of people that almost certainly includes John McCain, would have known most of this already.

The only thing about this that I take seriously is that someone actually bothered to write it down. What a waste of time, money, and paper.

As Dana Hunter observed, Third Way was a big supporter of telecomm immunity. How do you solve the energy crisis? Why, nuclear power, of course. Matt's description of their ideas on retirement plans, which is basically that they're warmed over nonsense, strikes me as more restrained than is merited. While they look better on issues like abortion and gay rights, on the whole these guys aren't doing the progressive movement any favors.

In retrospect, Matt Yglesias having not explained why a post ended up on his blog that he didn't write has given me a glimpse into the machinations of what passes for our progressive infrastructure. It turns out to be as flimsy as a bridge that hasn't been maintained for decades. The next time someone asks me why progressives can't make any headway, even when they allegedly have the power, I'll point them to this site.

UPDATE (Dec. 23): Fixed the link to that Third Way "manual". Now you can be impressed by it as I was.

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein adds some context to all this:

CAP is not a blog publisher. They are a think tank. They are the nerve center of the Democratic governing class. Their president has led Obama's transition effort. It's fairly uncharted territory for a think tank of that prestige -- indeed, of any prestige at all -- to hire a young progressive blogger and let him retain his voice on their site. Brookings doesn't do it, and nor does EPI, or Heritage, or the Urban Institute, or the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. But CAP is following a model in which they provide income support to promising progressives so their work isn't lost to law school or the commercial sector. That requires giving them a fair bit of editorial freedom, which will inevitably lead to conflicts and uncomfortable moments. As Ben Smith says, there are real consequences if Third Way is seen to be disfavored by CAP. And CAP has to balance that against their desire to support bloggers.

The fact that Palmieri's message was public is, I think, a good sign. It's transparent. They could have called Matt into the president's office, explained that he would never ever write anything like that ever again, and the editorial intervention would have been simultaneously invisible to readers -- no one would be criticizing CAP -- and much more pernicious. They did not do that.

Blogging And Independence

The truth is that there are times when employers find that publicly slapping down an employee is a useful technique, but I don't think that's what was going on here. My point about how this was handled was simply that it was handled clumsily. As a result, people rightly questioned why someone was stating the obvious on someone else's blog. Matt Yglesias and Jennifer Palmieri both made mistakes handling this, and hopefully they will learn from them.

The rest of us, meanwhile, learned a little something about how progressive institutions work these days.

Another Good Day

Image credit: National Archives This is the Constitution. It got a bit of a break from the beating it's been taking lately.




Via Glenn Greenwald, this is what Barack Obama's intelligence advisor John Brennan wrote in a letter to Obama that was released today:

John Brennan, President-elect Barack Obama's top adviser on intelligence, took his name out of the running Tuesday for any intelligence position in the new administration.

Brennan wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction. His potential appointment has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs that associate him with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

Brennan out of running for top intel post

According to the IHT article, this is part of Brennan's letter:

"The fact that I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," he wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press. "Indeed, my criticism of these policies within government circles was the reason why I was twice considered for more senior-level positions in the current administration only to be rebuffed by the White House."

Brennan out of running for top intel post

In all likelihood, he was asked to remove himself from consideration. As Glenn observes, it seems clear that Brennan is in excuse-making mode:

Brennan's self-defense here is quite disingenuous. Whether he "was involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies" is not and never was the issue. Rather, as I documented at length when I first wrote about Brennan, he was an ardent supporter of those policies, including "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition, both of which he said he was intimately familiar with as a result of his CIA position. As virtually everyone who opposed his nomination made clear -- Andrew Sullivan, Digby, Cenk Uygur, Big Tent Democrat and others -- that is why he was so unacceptable.

Exceptional news: John Brennan won't be CIA Director or DNI

[links and emphasis from original]

"Others" would include yours truly, by the way.

This is good news on two fronts, I think. First, the obvious one is that John Brennan, an apologist for both the rendition and torture of people from around the world without the consent or acquiescence of their own governments, and the telecom immunity debacle, will not be running the agencies most responsible for those travesties. Second, and perhaps as importantly, this indicates that progressive blogs can have an influence on this President. I don't for a moment think that he will always take us seriously, but he's at least susceptible to persuasion if we're vocal and united enough.

So today was a good day. Enjoy the rest of it.