Tag: nsa surveillance
Silicon Valley Emerges As A Political Force

Silicon Valley Emerges As A Political Force

When Jeb Bush visited Silicon Valley this week, the Republican candidate was visiting the heart of a Democratic state that few expect to be contested in the 2016 presidential election. But when it comes to the political money chase, the Northern California home of the world’s technology giants spreads the wealth to both parties — positioning the tech industry as one of the most powerful forces in American politics.

Since 2008, the Internet firms, software companies, computer manufacturers and data processors that comprise Silicon Valley have delivered more than $172 million worth of campaign contributions in federal elections, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a nearly 40 percent increase over the prior 8 years. Counting only presidential election years, the increase is even more dramatic: The $109 million of Silicon Valley money pumped into the 2008 and 2012 elections represents a 61 percent increase from 2004 and 2000.

Out of the money given directly to candidates (as opposed to third party groups) since 2008, Democrats have received 62 percent of the contributions. But Republicans’ 37 percent in that same time was hardly pocket change — it translated into a whopping $55 million.

In a vacuum, these figures may seem unimportant. But in context, they are astounding. All of a sudden, Silicon Valley has surpassed many traditional political powerhouses as a source of campaign cash. Specifically, in the last election cycle, technology firms delivered more money to candidates for president and Congress than defense contractors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, the automotive industry and Hollywood.

“Silicon Valley woke up to the importance of influencing public policy,” said Stanford University’s Vivek Wadhwa.

In 2012, that influence was on display when Internet firms notched an unexpected victory over the Hollywood studios that were pushing legislation to hold Internet companies responsible for the illegal transmission of pirated movies and television shows. Despite the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act being backed by the powerful Motion Picture Association of America, the bill was defeated by tech firms’ furious lobbying campaign against the measure.

Of Silicon Valley’s ability to defeat Hollywood-backed legislation, MPAA chairman Chris Dodd said at the time: “It’s a watershed event, what happened.”

Of course, as Wadhwa notes, there is no single Silicon Valley public policy agenda. Tech firms, he asserts want “freedom from regulation and immigration,” but, he says, “there is no single ideology.”

That said, technology firms have forged a unified front on some hot-button issues, moving beyond immigration reform, corporate regulation and the online piracy bill.

In 2013, Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Mozilla pressed for limits on National Security Agency surveillance after disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden. A few years later, Congress reformed the Patriot Act to add restrictions on such surveillance.

Similarly, in March of this year, Silicon Valley won a victory when the Federal Communications Commission passed so-called “net neutrality” rules designed to prevent cable companies from charging different transmission rates to Internet content providers. Most recently, Apple, Google and Facebook wrote a letter to President Barack Obama declaring their opposition to any efforts to weaken encryption standards.

While the power shift toward Silicon Valley is significant, it should not be altogether surprising. Information technology is becoming ever more integral to American society. And the tech industry’s millionaires and billionaires are ready to take their place as political powerbrokers, in much the same way oil and railroad barons represented new political power more than a century ago.

The implications of that revolution are profound not just for campaign fundraising, but ultimately for a whole new generation of public policy.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising, and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Photo: Patrick Nouhailler via Flickr

Has America Changed Since Edward Snowden’s Disclosures?

Has America Changed Since Edward Snowden’s Disclosures?

Two years ago this month, a 29-year-old government contractor named Edward Snowden became the Daniel Ellsberg of his generation, delivering to journalists a tranche of secret documents shedding light on the government’s national security apparatus. But whereas Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers detailing one specific military conflict in Southeast Asia, Snowden released details of the U.S. government’s sprawling surveillance machine that operates around the globe.

On the second anniversary of Snowden’s historic act of civil disobedience, it is worth reviewing what has changed — and what has not.

On the change side of the ledger, there is the politics of surveillance. For much of the early 2000s, politicians of both parties competed with one another to show who would be a bigger booster of the NSA’s operations, fearing that any focus on civil liberties risked their being branded soft on terrorism. Since Snowden, though, the political paradigm has dramatically shifted.

The most illustrative proof that came last month, when the U.S. Senate failed to muster enough votes to reauthorize the law that aims to allow the NSA to engage in mass surveillance. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s prominent role in that episode underscored the political shift — a decade after the GOP mastered the art of citing 9/11-themed arguments about terrorism to win elections, one of the party’s top presidential candidates proudly led the fight against one of the key legislative initiatives of the so-called war on terror.

There has also been a shift in public opinion, as evidenced by a new ACLU-sponsored poll showing that almost two thirds of American voters want Congress to curtail the NSA’s mass surveillance powers. The survey showed that majorities in both parties oppose renewing the old PATRIOT Act.

Monumental as those congressional and public opinion shifts are, though, far fewer changes are evident in the government’s executive branch.

For example, the Obama administration is celebrating the two-year anniversary of Snowden’s disclosures by intensifying its crackdown on government whistleblowers. After prosecuting more such whistleblowers than any previous administration, Obama’s appointees are specifically moving forward a rule that the nonpartisan Project On Government Oversight says would deny “federal employees in ‘sensitive’ positions the right to appeal a termination or demotion” when they expose wrongdoing. In practice, writes POGO’s Elizabeth Hempowicz, the rule would make “whistleblowers who hold these positions particularly vulnerable to retaliation.”

The Obama administration has also not stopped its selective enforcement of laws against those who mislead Congress or leak classified government information.

Take the issue of perjury. After prosecuting pitcher Roger Clemens for allegedly lying to Congress, the Obama administration has not similarly prosecuted National Intelligence Director James Clapper for insisting to Congress in 2013 that the government does not collect data on Americans. Clapper’s claim was wholly debunked by Snowden’s documents.

The Obama administration has also continued to promise to bring harsh charges against Snowden, even as the same administration has not brought similarly harsh charges against its own employees who give journalists classified information that makes the government look good.

For instance, a draft Inspector General report found that CIA Director Leon Panetta disclosed such information about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Similarly, former CIA director David Petraeus provided classified information to his biographer. Panetta was never charged, and Petraeus was let off with a misdemeanor.

Snowden, meanwhile, sits in exile — a fugitive for exposing his own government’s unprecedented system of surveillance. While Snowden’s critics say he should come back to the United States to air out his grievances in open court, journalist Glenn Greenwald notes: “He’s barred under the Espionage Act even from arguing that his leaks were justified; he wouldn’t be permitted to utter a word about that.”

Things have certainly changed in two years — but not yet so much that America’s government embraces those who blow the whistle.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. Copyright 2015 Creators.com

Photo: Abode of Chaos via Flickr

Congress Curbs NSA Surveillance, Sends Bill To Obama

Congress Curbs NSA Surveillance, Sends Bill To Obama

Washington (AFP) – The Senate passed landmark legislation Tuesday that ends the government’s bulk telephone data dragnet, reining in the most controversial surveillance program since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

The House of Representatives has already passed the measure, which also reauthorizes key national security programs that had lapsed early this week. With the Senate rejecting Republican attempts to modify the bill, it now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Photo: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell heads to to his office at the US Capitol on June 1, 2015 in Washington, DC (Getty/AFP / Chip Somodevilla)

This story is breaking and is being updated.

Rand Paul’s Anti-NSA-Spying ‘Filibuster’ Lasts 10½ hours

Rand Paul’s Anti-NSA-Spying ‘Filibuster’ Lasts 10½ hours

By Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Whether it was technically a filibuster or not hardly mattered Wednesday, as Sen. Rand Paul seized the Senate floor to fight renewal of a controversial domestic surveillance program by doing what he has come to do best: talking.

At 1:18 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Paul (R-KY), the libertarian-leaning presidential contender, stood at his Senate desk before an otherwise empty chamber and began to speak out against a National Security Agency spying program that will expire at the end of the month if Congress fails to act.

“There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer,” Paul said as a few tourists in the gallery looked on. “That time is now.”

The 52-year-old Kentucky senator wrapped it up at 11:48 p.m., his speech clocking in at 10 1/2 hours. His aides had said he planned to hold forth until he could talk no longer, but the outcome didn’t quite match his 13-hour filibuster in 2013 against the Obama administration’s drone program.

It was uncertain whether his maneuver could be accurately described as a filibuster, whether it would do anything to shut down the domestic surveillance program, and whether the talk-a-thon would result in any meaningful delay of Senate business, which is the traditional definition of the legislative tactic.

Though civil libertarians heralded Paul as a hero, skeptics dismissed his move as symbolic at best, largely aimed at boosting fundraising for his nascent presidential campaign.

Paul’s speech came as Congress raced against a June 1 deadline over what to do about an NSA program that collects and stores records of Americans’ telephone calls.

The House overwhelmingly approved a measure last week that reins in some aspects of the surveillance program by requiring the government to rely instead on the phone companies to keep the data, which would then be accessible to the government only with a court order. But the Senate’s Republican leadership under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky opposes the House measure and wants to extend the NSA program as is.

Paul rejects both approaches and advocates ending the program entirely. Though few of his fellow lawmakers are willing to go that far, a steady stream of senators from both parties joined him on the floor in support of restraints on domestic surveillance.

If Congress fails to extend the program in the coming days, the NSA will have to begin shutting down its data-collection process by Friday, according to a Justice Department memo sent to lawmakers on Wednesday.

Though the program would not technically expire until June 1, the NSA would need to start the process to close it down sooner “to ensure that it does not engage in any unauthorized collection” of phone records, Justice Department officials warned.

FBI Director James B. Comey has said in recent days that congressional inaction would put at risk other crime-fighting tools the bureau needs to fight terrorism.
He said the current NSA program allowed the FBI to get court orders for data on individual suspects, and to conduct surveillance of so-called lone-wolf suspects who are not linked to foreign terrorist groups — both of which would be barred if the program ends. Losing those tools, Comey said in a speech Wednesday at Georgetown University, would cause “a big problem.”

Paul’s maneuver Wednesday has little immediate effect on the spy bill itself, instead interrupting proceedings on an unrelated trade measure that is a priority for the Obama administration.

The trade bill, which would give Obama broader powers to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership and similar accords, is scheduled for a vote Thursday, and it was doubtful that Paul would talk long enough to stop it.

If Paul were to speak until past midnight Wednesday, he would cause only a minor delay in a procedural vote on the trade bill.

As his filibuster two years ago did, Paul’s speech prompted a robust debate — not on spying or drones, but on what exactly constitutes a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-style filibuster.

The answer, it turns out, is subjective. “Whether a filibuster is present is always a matter of judgment,” wrote the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in a 2014 report to lawmakers.

For Paul, though, there was no doubt about his intentions.

“I’ve just taken the Senate floor to begin a filibuster of the Patriot Act renewal. It’s time to end the NSA spying!” he said on his Twitter account.

He appears to have determined that the political rewards of holding true to his civil libertarian sensibilities overpower any risks he faces as a presidential candidate trying to appeal to a wider swath of Republicans and other voters who may not support his actions.

But perhaps in an effort to avoid antagonizing his Senate colleagues, Paul carefully timed his protest for Wednesday, when it would fill a lull in proceedings and not delay important votes on the NSA program or the trade bill, which leaders hoped would happen on Thursday before Congress adjourns for the holiday break.

Several senators joined Paul on the floor as early reinforcements, giving the senator a chance to rest his voice while they asked questions that sometimes lasted for 30 minutes or more. Otherwise, he paced at his desk, flipping through an old-fashioned three-ring binder of notes, and kept talking.

After his 2013 filibuster, which temporarily blocked the confirmation of a new CIA chief, Paul complained that he had not properly prepared, and should have done a few things differently, including wearing more comfortable shoes.

On Wednesday, he sported sensible-looking soft-soled dress-casuals.

(Staff writer Richard A. Serrano in Washington contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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