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On Terrorism, Cruz Has No Idea

On Terrorism, Cruz Has No Idea

Terrorism is not going away. We saw that in the closing of the Los Angeles schools after what was deemed a “credible” threat. The threat turned out to be not real, but with the country under heightened alarm, local authorities have become hyper-vigilant. That was 650,000 students sent or kept home.

When a good piece of time passed without a serious terrorist attack, politicians went soft. Many hawks on the right switched gears, turning on “big government” as the predominant evil and its national security programs as an assault on the privacy of innocent Americans.

With the massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, California, still in the headlines, many Americans are wondering what was so terrible about the federal bulk surveillance program that Congress ended in September. Rekindled fears of terrorism have changed the conversation.

Hence the violent pendulum swinging of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz in Tuesday’s debate. Cruz had championed the law that stripped the National Security Agency of the power to collect the metadata of Americans’ communications. He had some explaining to do on Tuesday.

“Metadata” refers to such information as the time and length of calls and the numbers called. It does not include the content of the conversation or even names. In the now-ended program, the NSA could delve deeper only when a disturbing pattern was detected. And even then, it had to first obtain a court order.

During the debate, tweeters stuck on horse race politics thrilled to the brawl between Cruz and the other Cuban-American candidate, Marco Rubio. But there was real substance in their battle. Rubio, who supported the NSA program, came off as the man for all seasons. Cruz dissolved into frantic evasion.

What was Cruz’s reason for supporting a bill to stop the NSA program? “It ended the federal government’s bulk collection of phone metadata of millions of law-abiding citizens,” he explained.

Well, yeah. Every day, security officials at American airports inspect the baggage of over a million law-abiding citizens to find the one possibly carrying a bomb. The jihadi terrorists who have preyed on this country appeared to be law-abiding, even model, citizens. By what magical, mystical powers of clairvoyance does Cruz think we can spot the “bad guys,” as he puts them?

The candidates routinely bashed President Obama as weak on terrorism. In truth, he fought like a tiger to retain the NSA’s ability to conduct bulk surveillance. In doing so, he often butted heads with fellow Democrats jumping on the same phony privacy-rights bandwagon as did Cruz.

(Would someone please explain why an NSA computer’s going through raw metadata — a computer that doesn’t even register our names — is somehow violating our privacy? Furthermore, what is so private about information that the phone company has?)

Republican backers of the NSA program, such as Rubio and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also had to buck their own party. As it turned out, the program was killed by a Republican-run Senate and a Republican-led House, with considerable help from Democrats.

The collection of the metadata has already ended, and soon all the information will reside with the phone companies. To get at it, the NSA will have to obtain a warrant and take it to a phone company, of which there are thousands.

The goal of protecting both security and privacy is a worthy one, but it requires two things: One is the maturity to accept the often-difficult trade-offs. The other is an understanding of what the data collection being considered actually involves.

It’s unclear how we can have security without a federal bulk surveillance program. Terrorists don’t walk around wearing neon “bad guy” signs.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz speaks during the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada December 15, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake

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

A Cold June In Washington

A Cold June In Washington

Washington is in a funk. A cold June makes things feel out of season. June is meant for picnics, blue garden flowers, and frolicking under a full moon.

First, the PATRIOT Act expired at midnight Monday. Imagine a law that keeps watch on us all — just leaving the building. Somehow the nation survived for a day or two. Now it’s back, “reformed” as the USA Freedom Act. Breathe easy.

Republican Senate leaders were mad as wasps at Rand Paul, one of their own, for taking a grand stand against it. Back in 2001, when it passed after 9/11, only one senator voted against it: Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat.

Deadlines are approaching, like the end of school. The deadline for an Iranian nuclear deal is June 30. The Supreme Court hands down their decisions in June. Obamacare is on the docket, in danger again. Set up in the 1930s, the Export-Import Bank’s charter, helping commerce overseas, expires in days. This is raising howls from lawmakers like Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND).

At the White House, the press corps is out of sorts. Feeling ignored at a distance, correspondents say it’s hard to get access to President Obama — and campaign frontrunner Hillary Clinton. At a Kalb Report forum at the National Press Club in early June, Ed Henry of Fox News noted that Clinton went “28 days without a question.”

Once in a blue moon, the Obama administration has to reach out to Congress — read: savvy Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader — to get a big deal done, this time on trade. The president likes to act alone, ducking the old-fashioned horse trading that used to make life a joy in this city.

Meanwhile, Democrats fret they don’t have enough candidates for president as Hillary Clinton’s polls numbers soften. Problem solved: Former independent governor Lincoln Chafee, also ex-Republican senator, of Rhode Island, just jumped in as a “brand”-new Democrat. With Texas governor Rick Perry joining the fray, Republicans have too many seekers in the field and are right to worry. A leading man, Jeb Bush, is what Hollywood calls a “room emptier.” The British phrase: “heavy furniture.”

The grand Arlington Memorial Bridge suddenly has to have emergency closures and repairs. The bridge’s gold sculptures on the Washington side frame the Lincoln Memorial. It connects to Arlington, Virginia, where many people live and cross over the Potomac River to work every day. The 1930s masterpiece also connects President Abraham Lincoln and Civil War general Robert E. Lee, once the Arlington slave plantation master. How apt, the union is crumbling.

The National Cathedral’s charming gift shop, the Herb Cottage, is the same 1930s-vintage. The gift shop gave me so many grace notes. Who knew what a strawberry huller was? Some ladies who worked and volunteered there belonged to another genteel age. The millennials kept it current. Run by the women’s All Hallows Guild to benefit Cathedral gardens and grounds, the shop is closing its doors June 30. There’s a new dean and bishop in town.

Then the bell that made the village weep: Vice President Joe Biden’s fine beloved son, Beau Biden, dying at 46 of brain cancer. That is really out of time and season.

I watched the evening news with dread. There was David Petraeus, the former “surge” Army general, in civilian clothes as an expert on Iraq. Soon the compress is on my head. More military involvement, says he, is what we need. (Because we did so well before.)

On top of it all, CBS newsman Bob Schieffer retired, signing off from moderating Face the Nation. Through every beat at CBS News in Washington since 1969, he became one of Washington’s (few) wise men. In his Texas folksy way, he thanked people for having him as a guest in their homes. “That meant the world to me,” he said in farewell.

And I almost cried. Strictly speaking, the 78-year-old Schieffer had announced he’d step down in the “summer.” So I braced for losing my Sunday religion. But May 31 is still spring.

Right now the city feels like fall, as a cab driver remarked. Spring, come back soon.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com 

Photo: Vinoth Chandar via Flickr

Congress Curbs NSA Access To Phone Records While Resurrecting Spying Powers

Congress Curbs NSA Access To Phone Records While Resurrecting Spying Powers

By Sean Cockerham and William Douglas, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Congress approved a sweeping overhaul of the government’s access to Americans’ phone records on Tuesday, two days after Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s opposition to the bill forced National Security Agency surveillance powers to go dark.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act, which would renew Patriot Act provisions that expired on Sunday night but start a six-month process of taking phone records from the government and leaving them with the phone companies. The NSA could access the data on a case-by-case basis with a secret court order.

“It’s extremely significant, that for the first time since 9/11, Congress is enacting legislation that would actually limit intelligence authorities rather than dramatically expanding them, which has been the trend,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.

The 67-32 vote comes two years after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the government’s phone data collection program. Several senators called him a traitor on Tuesday, but the changes to the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records wouldn’t have happened without him.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director, called the bill “a testament to the significance of the Snowden disclosures” but said it’s just a start.

“The bill leaves many of the government’s most intrusive and overbroad surveillance powers untouched, and it makes only very modest adjustments to disclosure and transparency requirements,” he said.

The bill already passed the House of Representatives and now goes to the president to be signed into law. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president would quickly sign the bill “and give our law enforcement professionals, once again, tools that they say are critical to their efforts to keep the country safe.”

Paul, who is running for the Republican nomination for president, and other privacy advocates argued the bill didn’t go far enough to keep the NSA from accessing Americans’ phone records, including the numbers, time, and duration of calls.

Paul released a fundraising television ad on Tuesday in which a voice declares that “when government illegally collected our phone records, Rand Paul took a stand, defended our rights, and stopped them.”

His delaying tactics angered other Republican senators, though, and only succeeded in making the NSA surveillance program lapse for a couple of days.

Earnest took a swipe at Paul, saying there are “members of the United States Senate who look for an opportunity to build a political advantage, to gain a political advantage, and they apparently concluded that the risk was worth it.” The bill was sold as a compromise, with President Barack Obama and Republican House leaders telling the Senate to pass it without any changes.

But hawks in the Senate, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made a final attempt Tuesday to change the bill, pushing to delay the transition to the new phone record collection system and remove a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court make some surveillance orders public.

The Senate voted down each of McConnell’s amendments, another major defeat for the powerful majority leader, who was first outmaneuvered by Paul into letting the NSA spy powers lapse and then forced to accept a bill he didn’t like.

“It does not enhance the privacy protections of American citizens. And it surely undermines American security by taking one more tool from our war fighters at exactly the wrong time,” McConnell said.

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) disagreed, saying in a statement that “this legislation is critical to keeping Americans safe from terrorism and protecting their civil liberties.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a written statement that the bill was necessary to pass.

“The vote I cast today wasn’t on the basis that this bill was perfect, but that this bill was the best opportunity to quickly get these programs back up and running,” she said. “I believe we can make further changes to the program, but also think the Senate was right in preserving this program.”

Denise Zheng, deputy director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington think tank, predicted this week’s congressional action and said the debate is only the beginning when it comes to national security and surveillance issues.

“I think it’s going to lead to more reform,” Zheng said. “There’s still a lot of surveillance issues, both domestic and foreign, that still need to be addressed.”

One is so-called end-to-end encryption. Major technology companies and civil liberties groups are pressing the White House to back end-to-end encryption — a system of communication in which only the sender and receiver can read messages — on electronic devices.

“A lot of companies are deploying end-to-end encryption,” Zheng said. “There’s no prohibition on end-to-end encryption.”
But FBI Director James Comey has been a critic of stronger encryption, saying it makes it more difficult to track potential terrorists and other lawbreakers.

And Congress will have to deal with FISA again. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — which allows the NSA to collect information on non-U.S. citizens located abroad — is set to expire in June 2017.

“I think that the current debate Congress has engaged in has been healthy,” Zheng said. “Do I think that some of the tactics by a couple of people on the Hill make sense? I wouldn’t say that.”

(Anita Kumar contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Rand Paul for U.S. Senate, via Flickr