Taliban attack shows militant spirit unbroken

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A Taliban attack at the gates of the Afghan presidential palace cast a cold light Tuesday on the course of a war that Washington remains committed to ending.

A week after NATO forces handed all security operations to the Afghans, local forces fought off the attackers on their own, killing all eight militants without calling in any coalition help. But the assault also made clear that the Taliban's fighting spirit remains unbroken and demonstrated their ability to bluff their way past two checkpoints and storm a highly fortified zone of the capital.

The firefight took place in Ariana square, about 500 meters (yards) and several more checkpoints away from the presidential palace, where President Hamid Karzai was apparently preparing for a speech later in the morning.

The attack could complicate American efforts to try to get Karzai's government to sit down with the Taliban to talk peace. U.S. President Barack Obama later talked with Karzai in a video conference that lasted more than an hour and covered issues including the peace process and the newly opened Taliban political office in the Gulf nation of Qatar, Karzai's office said without giving further details.

The White House said Obama and Karzai affirmed that Afghanistan, not the U.S., must lead the reconciliation process. The leaders also said they still support meetings between Afghanistan's High Peace Council and Taliban representatives at a political office the Taliban recently opened in Qatar.

The Taliban have said they would continue fighting even as they pursued peace talks, and the attack served to drive that home, said Moeen Marastial, a political analyst and former member of the Afghan parliament.

"The main point is the Taliban wants to show to the government of Afghanistan and to the world and to the powers who are working for the peace process that they are in power," Marastial said. "They can come close to the palace, they can come close to the places where NATO is, where American forces are - they wanted to show to the world that `we can do it.'"

The gunbattle started about 6:30 a.m. near the east gate leading to the palace next to the Afghan Ministry of Defense and the former Ariana Hotel, which former U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed is used by the CIA. One carload of Taliban fighters dressed in military-style camouflage uniforms emerged from their black Land Cruiser and started shooting. Another got stuck between two checkpoints and detonated their explosives-laden vehicle.

The Taliban said all eight of its fighters died in the attack, while the Interior Ministry said three security guards were killed and another wounded.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility, saying in an emailed statement that "eight of our suicide bombers were able to reach the most secure area of Kabul," identifying them by name and saying they were carrying hand grenades, a machine gun and rocket-propelled grenades.

"The brave mujahedeen, with special tactics and help from inside, were able to reach their target with their weapons and cars," he said. He said their targets were the CIA building, the palace and the Defense Ministry and claimed "a number of foreign invaders were killed and wounded in the attack."

Karzai reacted sharply, saying that the Taliban cannot on one hand open an office for peace in Qatar and on the other hand kill people in Afghanistan.

"The enemies of the people of Afghanistan once again proved with their failed attack that they are against peace, stability and progress in Afghanistan," he said.

The Taliban have refused to negotiate with Karzai's government in the past, saying the U.S. holds effective control in Afghanistan, but the Americans are hoping to bring the two sides together. Long-stalled negotiations have become more urgent with Afghan presidential elections and the withdrawal of most U.S. and other foreign combat troops looming in 2014.

The Americans announced last week that they planned to begin formal talks with the Taliban in Doha, which would be followed by talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

But when the Taliban opened the Doha office under the name "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" and the flag it used while ruling Afghanistan, Karzai and other Afghans reacted sharply, saying that agreements had been violated and that the office was more akin to a rival embassy than a bureau for peace negotiations.

The Taliban have since been forced to remove the offending flag and sign but no peace talks have yet begun and the incident served to highlight the tensions between the various sides.

After Tuesday's attack, U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham urged an end to the violence and again pushed for the Taliban to open peace negotiations.

"All of the attackers were killed, without success in achieving their goals - This again demonstrates the futility of the Taliban's efforts to use violence and terror to achieve their aims," he said in a statement. "We again call on the Taliban to come to the table to talk to the Afghanistan government about peace and reconciliation."

The palace is in a large fortified area of downtown Kabul that also includes the U.S. Embassy and the headquarters for the NATO-led coalition forces, and access is heavily restricted. Some Kabul residents initially thought the gunfire was a coup attempt because the idea of a Taliban attack within the security zone seemed so unlikely.

A group of journalists, including from The Associated Press, were waiting to enter the palace grounds for a news event with Karzai when they witnessed the start of the attack. The journalists took cover behind a religious shrine, pulling a young boy off the street who had been caught in the open on his way to school.

Kabul police chief Gen. Mohamad Ayub Salangi said the gunmen jumped out of their SUV and opened fire after the second vehicle was stopped by security forces while trying to use fake documents to get through a checkpoint. The second vehicle's car bomb then exploded.

Smoke could be seen coming from the area of the hotel where the CIA is said to be located, but there was no immediate indication any of the buildings were hit in the attack.

Also early Tuesday, in the southern province of Kandahar, a minibus hit a bomb buried in the road, killing 11 members of a groom's family on their way to an engagement party, said Kandahar governor's spokesman Ahmad Jawed Faisal. Faisal said the dead included eight women, two children and a man, and two other men were also wounded.

In Oruzgan, the province north of Kandahar, provincial governor's spokesman Abdullah Hemat said Tuesday that six Afghan national police were killed the day before when their patrol was attacked with a roadside bomb.

And a NATO convoy was hit with a roadside bomb in the province of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, destroying a vehicle but causing no casualties.
AP

You think the AP could turn on O?

Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield [Hardcover]

In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies.

Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.

Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield,” as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government.

As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk—we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.
Amazon

Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant

Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed.

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants.

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.

Since the Guardian first revealed the extent of the NSA's collection of US communications, there have been repeated calls for the legal basis of the programs to be released. On Thursday, two US congressmen introduced a bill compelling the Obama administration to declassify the secret legal justifications for NSA surveillance.

The disclosure bill, sponsored by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican, is a complement to one proposed in the Senate last week. It would "increase the transparency of the Fisa Court and the state of the law in this area," Schiff told the Guardian. "It would give the public a better understanding of the safeguards, as well as the scope of these programs."

Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which was renewed for five years last December, is the authority under which the NSA is allowed to collect large-scale data, including foreign communications and also communications between the US and other countries, provided the target is overseas.

FAA warrants are issued by the Fisa court for up to 12 months at a time, and authorise the collection of bulk information – some of which can include communications of US citizens, or people inside the US. To intentionally target either of those groups requires an individual warrant.

One-paragraph order

One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment.

Those procedures state that the "NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person".

It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination - including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases, which can include public information and data collected by other agencies.

Where the NSA has no specific information on a person's location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues.

"In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person," it states "a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person."

If it later appears that a target is in fact located in the US, analysts are permitted to look at the content of messages, or listen to phone calls, to establish if this is indeed the case.

Referring to steps taken to prevent intentional collection of telephone content of those inside the US, the document states: "NSA analysts may analyze content for indications that a foreign target has entered or intends to enter the United States. Such content analysis will be conducted according to analytic and intelligence requirements and priorities."

Details set out in the "minimization procedures", regularly referred to in House and Senate hearings, as well as public statements in recent weeks, also raise questions as to the extent of monitoring of US citizens and residents.

NSA minimization procedures signed by Holder in 2009 set out that once a target is confirmed to be within the US, interception must stop immediately. However, these circumstances do not apply to large-scale data where the NSA claims it is unable to filter US communications from non-US ones.

The NSA is empowered to retain data for up to five years and the policy states "communications which may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on the NSA's ability to filter communications".

Even if upon examination a communication is found to be domestic – entirely within the US – the NSA can appeal to its director to keep what it has found if it contains "significant foreign intelligence information", "evidence of a crime", "technical data base information" (such as encrypted communications), or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property".

Domestic communications containing none of the above must be destroyed. Communications in which one party was outside the US, but the other is a US-person, are permitted for retention under FAA rules.

The minimization procedure adds that these can be disseminated to other agencies or friendly governments if the US person is anonymised, or including the US person's identity under certain criteria.


A separate section of the same document notes that as soon as any intercepted communications are determined to have been between someone under US criminal indictment and their attorney, surveillance must stop. However, the material collected can be retained, if it is useful, though in a segregated database:

"The relevant portion of the communication containing that conversation will be segregated and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice will be notified so that appropriate procedures may be established to protect such communications from review or use in any criminal prosecution, while preserving foreign intelligence information contained therein," the document states.

In practice, much of the decision-making appears to lie with NSA analysts, rather than the Fisa court or senior officials.

A transcript of a 2008 briefing on FAA from the NSA's general counsel sets out how much discretion NSA analysts possess when it comes to the specifics of targeting, and making decisions on who they believe is a non-US person. Referring to a situation where there has been a suggestion a target is within the US.

"Once again, the standard here is a reasonable belief that your target is outside the United States. What does that mean when you get information that might lead you to believe the contrary? It means you can't ignore it. You can't turn a blind eye to somebody saying: 'Hey, I think so and so is in the United States.' You can't ignore that. Does it mean you have to completely turn off collection the minute you hear that? No, it means you have to do some sort of investigation: 'Is that guy right? Is my target here?" he says.

"But, if everything else you have says 'no' (he talked yesterday, I saw him on TV yesterday, even, depending on the target, he was in Baghdad) you can still continue targeting but you have to keep that in mind. You can't put it aside. You have to investigate it and, once again, with that new information in mind, what is your reasonable belief about your target's location?"

The broad nature of the court's oversight role, and the discretion given to NSA analysts, sheds light on responses from the administration and internet companies to the Guardian's disclosure of the PRISM program. They have stated that the content of online communications is turned over to the NSA only pursuant to a court order. But except when a US citizen is specifically targeted, the court orders used by the NSA to obtain that information as part of Prism are these general FAA orders, not individualized warrants specific to any individual.

Once armed with these general orders, the NSA is empowered to compel telephone and internet companies to turn over to it the communications of any individual identified by the NSA. The Fisa court plays no role in the selection of those individuals, nor does it monitor who is selected by the NSA.

The NSA's ability to collect and retain the communications of people in the US, even without a warrant, has fuelled congressional demands for an estimate of how many Americans have been caught up in surveillance.

Two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall – both members of the Senate intelligence committee – have been seeking this information since 2011, but senior White House and intelligence officials have repeatedly insisted that the agency is unable to gather such statistics.
Guardian

Eighth-Grader Who Refused to Remove NRA Shirt Could Face Year in Prison

Perhaps a suddenly firearm-friendly President Obama can put in a good word for Jared Marcum. In April, Marcum, an eighth-grader at Logan Middle School in Logan, W. Va., was arrested when he refused to take off his NRA t-shirt. The New York Daily News reports:

The clothing kerfuffle began when Marcum wore a shirt bearing the NRA’s logo and a hunting rifle. As he stood in line in the cafeteria, a teacher ordered him to either change shirts or turn it inside out.
Marcum declined and was sent to the office, where an officer was dispatched after he again refused to comply with the school’s request.
Cops arrested him and charged him with disrupting the educational process and obstructing an officer.

Late last week Marcum “appeared before a judge and was officially charged with obstructing an officer,” reports Fox News. If convicted, he could face up to a $500 fine or a year in prison. He will be back in front of the judge on July 11 if his attorney cannot get the charge dismissed before then.

One can understand this sort of silliness across the border in Maryland (as we have chronicled here and here) — but in West Virginia? This is, after all, the state whose senator’s campaign ad featured him shooting Obama’s cap-and-trade bill. Ah, those were the days.
NRO

NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."

There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws."

The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week's disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)


Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.

William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. "They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's what they record," Binney said.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.

NSA's annual budget is classified but is estimated to be around $10 billion.

Documents that came to light in an EFF lawsuit provide some insight into how the spy agency vacuums up data from telecommunications companies. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed in 2006 (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously "diverted" through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.

AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to a law that Congress enacted in 2008 and renewed in 2012. It's a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as the FISA Amendments Act.

That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.

A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA "may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States." A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically -- on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to "target" a specific American citizen.


Rep. Nadler's disclosure that NSA analysts can listen to calls without court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday that included FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness.

Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual."

Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked.

"I don't think so," Mueller replied.

"Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged this week that the agency's analysts have the ability to access the "content of a call."


Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA's surveillance process involves "billions" of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.

They can be accessed by an analyst who's part of the NSA's "workforce of thousands of people" who are "trained" annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden's former employer.)

If it were "a U.S. person inside the United States, now that would stimulate the system to get a warrant," McConnell told the committee. "And that is how the process would work. Now, if you have foreign intelligence data, you publish it [inside the federal government]. Because it has foreign intelligence value."

McConnell said during a separate congressional appearance around the same time that he believed the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without warrants.

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN last month that, in national security investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously made telephone call. "All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not," he said. Clemente added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the "intelligence community" -- an apparent reference to the NSA -- "there's a way to look at digital communications in the past."

NSA Director Keith Alexander said this week that his agency's analysts abide by the law: "They do this lawfully. They take compliance oversight, protecting civil liberties and privacy and the security of this nation to their heart every day."

But that's not always the case. A New York Times article in 2009 revealed the NSA engaged in significant and systemic "overcollection" of Americans' domestic communications that alarmed intelligence officials. The Justice Department said in a statement at the time that it "took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance" with the law.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, says he was surprised to see the 2008 FISA Amendments Act be used to vacuum up information on American citizens. "Everyone who voted for the statute thought it was about international communications," he said.
CNet

Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth -- that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.
Independent

Ron Johnson’s Transformative Proposal

At his March dinner at the Jefferson Hotel with a small group of Senate Republicans, President Obama made something of an admission.

“The problem you have reforming Medicare is that for every dollar Americans pay into the system, they’re going to get three dollars out in benefits. Americans don’t understand that,” Obama said, citing a study from the Urban Institute.

“You’re right about Medicare. We’ve been quoting that exact same study,” Senator Ron Johnson responded, according to attendees. “We’re pretty small little voices compared to your platform. It would be enormously helpful if you use that bully pulpit and start telling the American people the truth.”


Three months later, Johnson and his fellow Senate Republicans are working with top White House officials to define how big the entitlement problem really is. Their proposal is to agree on the size of the problem before tackling the reforms that would solve it.

White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough, congressional liaison Rob Nabors, and other Obama officials came into the initial meetings on the Hill reiterating the president’s position that $4 trillion in deficit reduction would basically solve the problem for now.

But according to GOP deficit projections subsequently prepared by Johnson and obtained by National Review Online, the true size of the problem is staggering, and surprised even many of the seasoned budget negotiators involved.

$4 trillion? Try $106 trillion, the medium estimate. That’s $106,954,000,000,000. Even the lowest, extremely conservative estimate comes in at $72 trillion; the highest is over $120 trillion.

The amounts are so large that some controversial reforms appear inconsequential in comparison. Take Obama’s “chained CPI” proposal: it would save an estimated $89 billion over ten years, or 1.3 percent of the total deficit over those same ten years.

Part of the difference is time. The Congressional Budget Office pegs its cost estimates of bills to ten years. Not only has that led to a sort of CBO-score arms race on Capitol Hill, where legislation — Obamacare being the best example — is designed to exploit the ten-year window to produce a lower cost estimate. It also obscures the scope of the long-term entitlement crisis and the savings of reforms that would compound in the second and third decade.

The Senate GOP projection is for 30 years, which encompasses the retirement of the baby boomers — a far more significant problem than the deficits of the past few years.

“In all of these budget negotiations, we’re really trapped by this ten-year budget window, which, truthfully, minimizes the problem,” Johnson observes.

Another difference is the assumptions behind the projection. CBO’s long-term budget outlook, for example, offers two estimates: the “baseline” scenario and “alternative fiscal scenario.”

Baseline is according to current law, including all of the gimmicks Congress has put in current law to game their CBO scores. According to that, we’re totally fine — the debt will slowly go down without Congress’s having to do anything. It’s also fantasy.

The other scenario is more realistic. In it, debt begins to really ramp up around 2025, and quickly becomes unwieldy — even insurmountable — by 2040, when the graph ends.

The third difference between a single, staggering, 30-year deficit figure and most of the current efforts to quantify the problem is presentation.

Wednesday, White House officials came back to Republicans, having reviewed the $106 trillion projection, with their own figures. But theirs weren’t dollar amounts, they were percentages of GDP (and much smaller).

That’s the same way CBO presents its long-term estimate. It may be more useful to experts, but it’s also less palpable to the average person. It’s also easier to think about matching up reforms, by their cost savings, to the total deficit.

One potential criticism is that a single number offers a false sense of precision.

“I used to joke that the estimate was based on whatever my mood was in the shower that morning,” says former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. That is, by tinkering with the assumptions, you can essentially come up with whatever number you want.

While that’s true, it doesn’t really matter if Republicans and Obama were to agree on a figure. The Senate GOP’s projections are based on CBO’s cost projections and generally conservative. The range is well within where experts would peg the problem. It would just be a useful vehicle to help Americans understand the scope of the problem and a measuring stick for the savings of reform proposals.

“I think it was a very good exercise that he went through and very helpful to understand the order of magnitude that we’re dealing with,” says Senator Bob Corker.

It’s not a grand bargain, but it could be a significant first step.

“The one thing that has to be established is an agreement on where we are, number wise, before you can ever have an agreement on how you’re going to solve the problem,” says Senator Saxby Chambliss, noting that he began working on bipartisan debt negotiations with Senator Mark Warner three years ago next month.

“We haven’t come very far in that three years,” Chambliss adds. “Just getting an agreement on the numbers is a major step that moves us forward.”
NRO

Clinton to Obama: Override Public Opposition to Syria Intervention

At a closed-door event in New York City with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Tuesday evening, former President Bill Clinton suggested that President Barack Obama should ignore public opposition to U.S. intervention in Syria and give rebel groups "a decent chance" of winning their war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

According to Politico, which obtained a surreptitious recording of Clinton's remarks, the former President said that even strong public opposition should not be taken at face value. "What the American people are saying when they tell you not to do these things, they’re not telling you not to do these things...I simply mean when people are telling you ‘no’ in these situations, very often what they’re doing is flashing a giant yellow light and saying, ‘For God’s sakes, be careful, tell us what you’re doing, think this through, be careful.'"

A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this week showed that the American public is "extremely hesitant" to intervene in the Syrian conflict, where several of the leading rebel groups are linked to Al Qaeda. Tens of thousands have already died in the Syrian civil war, marked by brutal attacks against civilians by the regime.

Politico described Clinton's stance as a "split" with the Obama administration. However it may have been a trial balloon. The recent nomination of Samantha Power as UN Ambassador is thought by some to signal a shift towards intervention in Syria. Power has argued for military intervention for humanitarian reasons as part of a "responsibility to protect" doctrine, and is thought to have played a key role in pushing for intervention in Libya in 2011.

In contrast to intervention in Syria, the Iraq War enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans when the administration of George W. Bush launched military strikes against the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Breitbart

Terrorist Attacks in Afghanistan Get Bolder

Terrorist attacks in Afghanistan appear to be getting bolder in recent days.  The Taliban also increasingly is targeting the civilian population, including children.

Terrorist attacks increasing

A suicide bomber blew himself up right outside the Supreme Court building in the capital, Kabul, Tuesday, killing 17 people and wounding almost 40 others.  Mohammad Zahir, Chief of the Kabul Police Criminal Investigation Department, said all of the victims were civilians, including women and children.

"There are children and women among those who were martyred (killed) and wounded, all the ones who are martyred [killed] and wounded are civilians and there aren't any military personnel among them," said Zahir.

The United Nations said Tuesday that the civilian death toll in Afghanistan has increased by almost 25 percent compared to the same period last year.

U.N. Special Envoy for Afghanistan Jan Kubis said that more than 3,000 people in Afghanistan have been killed or wounded since the beginning of this year, mostly by insurgents. "What is even of more concern is the fact that the children account for 21 percent of all civilians killed or wounded in 2013," Kubis noted. "This is an increase of 30 percent compared to 2012 and 34 percent compared to 2011.''

Also Tuesday, insurgents ambushed a NATO convoy carrying cargo through Afghanistan's eastern province of Ghazni, killing at least two police officers and two drivers.

On Monday, Afghan officials said the Taliban beheaded two teenage boys in the southern province of Kandahar for alleged spying.

But the attacks against NATO and Afghan government targets are getting bolder.  On Monday, insurgents attacked Kabul's international airport with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

US withdrawal on track

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that military cuts will not affect the U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan. "In particular, this budget enables the department to support troops still at war in Afghanistan," he stated.

But the United States plans to withdraw all its troops in 2014 from the South Asian country where close to 2,100 U.S. service members have been killed so far.

Analysts say the Taliban is testing whether the Afghan security forces will be ready to take over when U.S. troops depart next year.
VoA

No one told O

Internet's big names in battle to salvage reputations after NSA revelations

Google. Apple. Facebook. Microsoft: they are the brands that want the world to trust them with personal information, emails, photos, documents – yet they are now facing a battle to maintain that trust after disclosures that the US government was given access to their customers' data online via the Prism programme operated by the NSA.

The companies involved – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple – vigorously deny giving the Obama administration backdoor access to users' internet information, but the potential damage to their brand reputation has left the companies floundering for a way to respond.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, believes there could be serious consequences for the collective reputations of all internet companies who have meticulously built their trade on trust.

He cites Amazon – not one of the companies involved in Prism – as a case in point when the company took the side of consumers after publishers protested about bad reviews. "It may have dissuaded someone to buy a book, but it instilled trust in Amazon which was far more important to it long-term," said Mayer-Schonberger. "If you violate that trust, it is difficult to re-establish. Even if it turned out to be a hoax, trust has been destroyed because everyone is talking about it."

He added: "These companies depend on their users being sufficiently trusting to give them personal data. Many of us are perfectly fine for these companies to use this information for their own commercial benefit, to place more relevant adverts on the right hand side, but we do not want it passed on to the government or to tax authorities for instance."

Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at Centre for Democracy and Technology in New York said that for Google – a company which has Don't be Evil as an informal company slogan and has pioneered online openess, "more transparency would be helpful". He said: "An important step would be for these companies to exert even more pressure; pressure on the intelligence authorities to disclose more information about intelligence related surveillance that they are compelled to conduct."

In his statement following the Prism revelations, Google CEO Larry Page indicated this was the tack his company would be taking to protect its brand reputation. "The level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish," he said.

Civil liberty activists have also been alarmed. In the UK, the US surveillance, even of high level data, has raised questions about breaches of domestic data protection laws.
Guardian

After they took your money, now they know nothing

U.S. whistleblower drops out of sight, faces legal battle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A contractor at the National Security Agency who leaked details of top-secret U.S. surveillance programs dropped out of sight in Hong Kong on Monday, ahead of a likely push by the U.S. government to have him sent back to the United States to face charges.

Edward Snowden, 29, who provided the information for published reports last week that revealed the NSA's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook, checked out of his Hong Kong hotel hours after going public in a video released on Sunday.

In Washington, several lawmakers called for the extradition and prosecution of the ex-CIA employee behind one of the most significant security leaks in U.S. history. Members of the U.S. Congress said they would be briefed on the topic on Tuesday; the U.S. Justice Department is in the initial stages of a criminal investigation.

"If anyone were to violate the law by leaking classified information outside the legal avenues, certainly that individual should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, said on CBS's "This Morning."

Snowden, who asked the Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspapers to identify him and his role, said he leaked the information because he believed the United States had built a vast and secret espionage machine to spy on Americans.

The former technical assistant at the CIA, who had been working at the NSA as an employee of contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said he had become disenchanted with President Barack Obama. Snowden said that Obama had continued the overly intrusive surveillance policies of George W. Bush, Obama's predecessor.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under," Snowden told the Guardian, which published a video interview with him, dated June 6, on its website.

Snowden, who the Guardian said had been working at the NSA for four years as a contractor for outside companies, copied the secret documents at the NSA office in Hawaii three weeks ago and told his supervisor he needed "a couple of weeks" off for epilepsy treatments, the paper said. He flew to Hong Kong on May 20.

Staff at a luxury hotel in Hong Kong told Reuters that Snowden had checked out at noon on Monday. Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian journalist, said that Snowden was still in Hong Kong.

"He didn't have a plan. He thought out in great detail leaking the documents and then deciding rather than being anonymous, he'd go public. So he thought that out in great detail. But his plans after that have always been vague," MacAskill said.

'A REAL BATTLE'

"I'd imagine there's now going to be a real battle between Washington and Beijing and civil rights groups as to his future," MacAskill said. "He'd like to seek asylum in a friendly country but I'm not sure if that's possible or not."

The United States and Hong Kong signed an extradition treaty in 1996, a year before the former British colony was returned to China. It allows for the exchange of criminal suspects in a formal process that may also involve the Chinese government.

The treaty went into force in 1998 and provides that Hong Kong authorities can hold Snowden for 60 days, following a U.S. request that includes probable cause, while Washington prepares a formal extradition request.

Regina Ip, a Hong Kong lawmaker and former security secretary, said it would be wise for Snowden to leave Hong Kong.

"We do have bilateral agreements with the U.S. and we are duty-bound to comply with these agreements. Hong Kong is not a legal vacuum, as Mr. Snowden might have thought," Ip said.

But Simon Young, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said that going to the former British colony was probably a good decision because there are strong protections for people making asylum claims under its extradition laws.

"He's come really at probably the best moment in time because our asylum laws are in a state of limbo," Young said.

Snowden's revelations launched a broad debate on privacy rights and the limits of security programs in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Many members of Congress have expressed support for the surveillance program but raised questions about whether it should be more tightly supervised and scaled back.

"In my mind, things that may have been appropriate in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the weeks and months and even years after that, may no longer be appropriate today," Republican Representative Luke Messer of Indiana said on MSNBC.

He said the leaks were obviously a violation of law.

"Our system of security can't work if folks who have access to classified information are allowed willy-nilly on their own to decide what to leak, so the young man's going to have to be prosecuted," Messer said.
Reuters

He should get the Congressional Medal of Honor

President Obama’s Dragnet

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.
NYT

NSA, FBI secretly mining data from Internet firms...
Obama administration collecting phone records of millions daily...
Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over ALL CALL DATA...
WH defends: Critical tool against 'terrorist threats'...
Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners...
'Homeland Security': Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches...
NSA SEES ALL: Phone Sex, Banks, Emails...
CIA: We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher...
'1984' Published 64 Years Ago Today...
Drudge Report

Deadline Looms for Suspect to Decrypt Laptop, or Go Directly to Jail

If a judge orders you to decrypt the only existing copies of incriminating files, are your constitutional rights against compelled self-incrimination being violated?

That’s the provocative question being raised as a Wisconsin man faces a deadline today either to give up his encryption keys or risk indefinite imprisonment without a trial. The defendant’s attorney, Robin Shellow of Milwaukee, said it’s “one of the most important constitutional issues of the wired era.”

Shellow is making a novel argument that the federal magistrate’s decryption order is akin to forcing her client to build a case for the government. That’s because encryption basically transforms files into unreadable text, which is then rebuilt when the proper password is entered, she said.

“Some encryption effects erasure of the encrypted data (so it ceases to exist), in which case decryption constitutes re-creation of the data, rather than simply unlocking still-existing data,” Shellow wrote in a court filing. (.pdf)

In a telephone interview Monday, she said “this area is a new way of thinking about encryption.”

UPDATE: A federal judge this afternoon halted the decryption order, and demanded further briefing on the constitutional implications.

Though rare, decryption orders are likely to become more common as the public slowly embraces a technology that comes standard even on Apple computers. Such orders have never squarely been addressed by the Supreme Court, despite conflicting opinions in the lower courts.

The latest decryption flap concerns Jeffrey Feldman, who federal authorities believe downloaded child pornography on the file-sharing e-Donkey network. They seized 15 drives and a computer from his suburban Milwaukee apartment with a search warrant. A federal magistrate has ordered Feldman to decrypt the drives by today.

Feldman has refused, citing the Fifth Amendment. A federal judge could find him in contempt as early as today and jail him pending his compliance.

The magistrate in the case stepped aside Monday after Shellow argued that only U.S. district court judges, not magistrates, have the legal power to issue decryption orders. As of now, the new judge in the case has not decided whether to uphold the magistrate’s order.

U.S. Magistrate William Callahan Jr. initially said the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination protected Feldman from having to unlock his drives.

But last month, prosecutors convinced Callahan to change his mind. Among other reasons, the authorities were able, on their own, to decrypt one drive from Feldman’s “storage system” and discovered more than 700,000 files, some of “which constitute child pornography,” the magistrate said.

When the magistrate ruled against the government last month, the magistrate said the authorities did not have enough evidence linking Feldman to the data, and that forcing the computer scientist to unlock it would be tantamount to requiring him to confess that it was his. But that theory is now out the door, because the data on the decrypted drive contains pictures and financial information linking Feldman to the “storage system,” Callahan ruled last week.

Among the last times an encryption order came up in court was last year, when a federal appeals court rejected an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents could be used in her criminal case. The issue was later mooted for defendant Romano Fricosu as a co-defendant eventually supplied a password.

Shellow said it was unclear whether her client even remembers the passwords to the 16 drives the authorities confiscated.

“The government is claiming that our client has the capacity to decrypt them,” Shellow said.

That issue has never been addressed in court. But judges usually view forgetfulness “as a sham or subterfuge that purposely avoids giving responsive answers.”

Prosecutors did not respond for comment.
Wired

Court: Police can take DNA swabs from arrestees

WASHINGTON (AP) - A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.

"Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's five-justice majority.

But the four dissenting justices said that the court was allowing a major change in police powers.

"Make no mistake about it: because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason," conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom.

At least 28 states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court was one of the first to say that it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King's DNA without approval from a judge, saying King had "a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches."

But the high court's decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King's rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest. Kennedy wrote the decision, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Scalia was joined in his dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court's blessing. The fight at the Supreme Court was over whether that DNA collection could come before conviction and without a judge issuing a warrant.

According to court documents, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System or CODIS - a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles - already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault. Taking advantage of the Maryland law that allowed warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King's DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state courts said it violated King's rights for the state to take his DNA based on an arrest alone. The state Court of Appeals said King had "a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches." But the high court's decision reinstates King's conviction.

Maryland stopped collecting DNA after that decision, but Roberts allowed police to keep collecting DNA samples pending the high court's review.
MyWay

The stazi would be so proud