Month: October 2013

Imagine being beaten to a pulp by a mafia hit-man. Your nose is broken and dribbling blood, your left eye is swollen shut, you may have broken ribs. Somehow, you manage to stand up. Just then, the hit-man produces an invoice for his services to the tune of $574.

The only thing worse than being violently assaulted is being forced to pay for your own abuser’s time and effort.

That’s what the NSA is like. According to a Cato blog post by Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, every American taxpayer is billed $574 per year to keep the NSA up and running.

For months, the American public has received a steady stream of new information detailing the massive scale and scope of the United States’ spying activities. Of course, maintaining a surveillance state powerful enough to reach into the inboxes of world leaders, friend and foe, is not cheap. Indeed, as the Washington Post revealed when it released portions of the so-called Black Budget, this year’s price tag on America’s spook infrastructure comes out to a whopping $52.6 billion.

This is, of course, a tremendous sum – more than double the size of the Department of Agriculture, more than triple the size of NASA; the list goes on… But, what really puts this number into perspective is its average cost to each American taxpayer, or what I would call the NSA and associated agencies’ “rent.”

Yes, the NSA’s rent, charged to every taxpayer living under its web of surveillance, comes out to an exorbitant $574 per year. If this is the price the federal government is charging American taxpayers to have their own privacy invaded, then I say the NSA’s rent is too damn high.

The NSA is collecting every American’s daily telephone metadata in bulk. It’s surveilling our emails, IM chats, video conferences. It’s systematically violating both statutory and constitutional laws meant to protect Americans’ privacy and individual rights. Even Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the authoritarian PATRIOT ACT, believes NSA activity “threatens our First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights.”

For all this, Americans get a bill. We pay for our own abuse.

President Obama’s October 9th decision to suspend millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Egypt came after two years of intense public pressure following Mubarak’s ouster. In all likelihood, however, it is probably a temporary scheme to avoid further public allegations that Obama supports the dictatorial coup regime in Egypt.

But it may have been even more cynical than that. One of the biggest problems with U.S. military aid to Egypt is the small arms and riot gear that security forces use to disperse crowds of peaceful protesters or crack down more generally on the population’s democratic ambitions. This type of aid may not be included in the suspension, but it’s hard to know because unless the arms transfer is a multi-million dollar war plane,  they often are not even publicly disclosed.

Amnesty International lays out what Obama needs to do for the suspension of Egypt aid to actually mean something. Geoffrey Mock says “It’s time to ensure that Egyptian human rights violations don’t come labeled ‘Made in the USA.,'” and lists recommendations Amnesty has sent in a letter to the White House.

• Stop putting lives at risk: The U.S. government should publicly halt the transfer of all small arms, light weapons, related ammunition, equipment and vehicles that bear a substantial risk of being used by Egypt’s security forces to commit human rights violations. These human rights violations include the violent dispersals of crowds and unwarranted lethal force against protesters.

• Make U.S. arms exports public: The U.S. should publicly disclose its arms exports and transfers to Egypt. The arms sales of greatest concern are often of low dollar value and seldom subject to public scrutiny or Congressional reporting requirements. The U.S. public needs to know what weapons its government is sending to Egypt, and why.

• Don’t train violators: The U.S. should prioritize training and assistance arrangements that include rigorous practical exercises and operating standards designed to advance full respect for international human rights law. Egyptian participants – both trainees and trainers – should be vetted to make sure they are not themselves implicated in serious human rights abuses.

Mock also worries about the potential that “U.S. arms sales quietly resume months down the road with no real changes in the behavior and accountability of Egyptian security forces.”

I see that as likely. But I also don’t think the current crop of political elites in Washington should be able to get away with the several decades of military and economic support for a brutal political system in Egypt. Unless you want to, ya know, look forward and not back.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander made their umpteenth appearance in front of Congress yesterday to do damage control in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks. As always, they insisted NSA surveillance programs are lawful and subject to oversight by Congress and the courts.

A day after that familiar charade, The Washington Post has published a report on NSA’s secret infiltration of Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

…The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

That’s a huge story. As has been the case since Snowden’s disclosures…they just keep coming.

But the most important part of the story, in my opinion, is the very last paragraph of the Post‘s report. And I’m afraid it will get diminished attention in the fall out. Here it is:

In 2011, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams — on a much smaller scale — from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

Bottom line: the FISA court has already found surveillance of a lesser degree and on a much smaller scale to be illegal and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The PRISM program, mentioned above, is horrendous and invasive, but it is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen, in however limited and biased a fashion, by the FISA courts. This backdoor infiltration is not authorized under 702 and not overseen by FISA courts. Google and Yahoo aren’t even aware they’ve been infiltrated in this way.

Clapper, Alexander, and whatever other official defenders of unlimited NSA spying can repeat the slogans about this being lawful and subject to checks by other branches all they want. Let them scream about it at the top of their lungs.

It isn’t true.

POLITICO gives us a good news bad news report (at least from my perspective) on Lindsey Graham. The article cites two new polls that show support for Graham in his home state of South Carolina is dropping overall. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that his political challengers still have very little chance of getting elected over Graham.

But the POLITICO report actually contained another little gem. See, Graham’s approval ratings aren’t just dropping, they are dropping among conservatives. And what’s more, if  Graham’s Republican challengers’ campaign rhetoric is any indication, one of the reasons for the dip in conservative approval was Graham’s support for war in Syria.

I’ve argued before that the growing distaste for unnecessary war among conservatives is likely to disappear once a Republican gets back into the White House.

But I have to admit this news put a smile on my face.

It’s been really hard for Iran hawks these days. With a reformist Iranian president initiating unprecedented diplomacy with the U.S. and offering major concessions on its nuclear program, the best they’ve been able to come up with is that it’s all a sham. Rouhani is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists. He may seem nice on the outside, but he is really evil. This diplomatic push to resolve longstanding disputes with the West is all a ploy so they can build a nuclear bomb and destroy Israel.

At the Daily Beast, Eli Lake introduces another iteration of this knee-jerk opposition to diplomacy with Iran. His argument is that the Iranians have gotten better at doing things in secret, so if they try to build a bomb, we’ll have a harder time detecting it.

…the Iranians have gotten better at hiding their tracks, according to some current and retired United States intelligence officers who say it could prove very difficult for the world to catch Iran again if it tries to build a nuclear weapon in secret.

Glenn Greenwald went on CNN last night to respond to Dick Cheney’s accusation of Edward Snowden as a traitor and to yesterday’s testimony from Clapper and Keith Alexander on NSA spying.