“Like A Rooster Taking Credit For The Sunrise”: Evidence Of Rand Paul Losing Another Fundraising Stream
The relevant details are still elusive, but President Obama is reportedly prepared to propose sweeping changes to U.S. surveillance policy, including an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection. The reforms will be dependent on congressional approval, but for privacy advocates and civil libertarians, the White House’s apparent intentions are most welcome.
But this is still silly.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he takes some credit for President Obama’s decision to end the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program.
In an interview after Obama announced the change on Tuesday, Paul was asked on “Fox and Friends” if it would make him happy for phone companies, not the government, to retain the metadata.
“Well, you know, I don’t want to take all the credit for ending this, but I think our lawsuit had something to do with bringing the president to the table,” Paul said.
Look, if Edward Snowden and his defenders want to take some credit for NSA reforms, they’re on solid ground. Putting aside the debate over the legality and propriety of his leaks, Snowden’s revelations obviously were dramatically consequential, caused an international controversy, and were directly responsible for the debate that led to the administration’s review.
If Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and other journalists responsible for reporting on NSA surveillance want to claim some credit, too, they also have a credible case to make, for many of the same reasons.
But for Rand Paul to toot his horn on Fox is just foolish.
For one thing, the senator’s timeline is badly flawed. President Obama delivered a speech in January ordering an internal review of possible changes to U.S. surveillance policy. When did Paul file his lawsuit? Nearly a month later.
In other words, according to Rand Paul, the president didn’t launch this process in response to a global firestorm, but rather, in anticipation of a stunt lawsuit from a senator that hadn’t even been filed yet.
For another, Paul’s lawsuit wasn’t exactly a credible effort. It was a redundant case, largely mirroring a case that had already been filed by someone else, and it was organized through the senator’s political campaign, rather than his official Senate office. (Supporters were supposed to endorse Paul’s lawsuit against “Big Brother” by giving the senator their name, address, zip code, and if they didn’t mind, credit card number.)
It’s very hard to believe the White House was scrambling to change their national-security policies in response to a Rand Paul p.r. stunt.
It makes sense that the senator is trying to turn this into a positive for him, but as a practical matter, if the reports are accurate and the administration is prepared to scrap the controversial NSA program, it’s not evidence of Paul winning; it’s evidence of Paul losing a fundraising stream.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 26, 2014
“The Dumbest Rock In The Box”: Unemployed Ken Cuccinelli Finds A Job With Rand Paul Suing Obama
Say you’re Ken Cuccinelli. You’ve recently lost the Virginia governor’s race to Terry McAuliffe, of all people. You’ve given up your post as America’s most litigious state attorney general. A good chunk of the GOP establishment resents your hyper-conservative crazy talk for damaging the brand. Yet another snowstorm is bearing down on the nation’s capital in what has been a particularly cold and miserable winter—and despite this, most Americans still believe that global warming is a real thing. How on earth do you pull yourself out of this funk?
Sue the president, of course! And the Director of National Intelligence! And the heads of the FBI and NSA! And anyone else you can think of who might know anything about the massive government spying program that Edward Snowden revealed to such great effect. And to guarantee public attention (because, really, at this point, why should anyone be paying attention to you?), file the suit on behalf of someone vastly more popular than you—for instance, libertarian nerd-chic rockstar and 2016 presidential hopeful Rand Paul.
So it was that, late Wednesday morning, Cuccinelli and Paul stood before a gaggle of political reporters on the freezing plaza outside the E. Barrett Prettyman district court house, a vaguely Soviet-looking box of a building just a couple of blocks west of the Capitol, to tout their freshly filed complaint against a government gone wild in its violation of the Fourth Amendment. In his brief remarks, Paul cited the “huge and growing swell of protest” against the government’s overzealous monitoring of its own citizenry. To illustrate what he predicts will be “a historic lawsuit”—a class action complaint on behalf of every American citizen who has used a telephone in the past seven-plus years—Paul brandished two fistfuls of cell phones (including one with an especially snazzy leopard-print case). Considering the hundreds of millions of Americans who use phones, he noted gravely, this case “may well be the largest civil action lawsuit on behalf of the Constitution.”
Paul and Cuccinelli did not stand alone, physically or metaphorically. The Tea Partying libertarians at FreedomWorks are co-plaintiffs in this case, and a couple dozen of the groups’ young ground troops had been milling about in the cold for the past hour, chanting and snapping pics and generally lending some pep to the proceedings. After Paul got the presser rolling, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, characteristically hipsterish in his black-rimmed specs and blade-like sideburns, offered his take. “This is one of the most important things my organization has been involved in,” he asserted. “This isn’t a Republican vs. Democrat issue. It isn’t about the Obama administration. The government has crossed a line.” Kibbe then assured everyone that FreedomWorks was going to “put that genie back in the bottle.”
As lead counsel, Cuccinelli fielded questions about the legal whys and hows of the suit. Yes, he is optimistic that this will go all the way to the Supreme Court. No, he does not expect it to be tried in conjunction with a similar suit brought by Larry Klayman, the lawsuit-happy conservative gadfly who has a similar complaint wending its way through the courts. Is he worried about “standing”—that is, showing that his clients have themselves been injured and so have the legal right to file this complaint? Don’t be ridiculous! “If you use a phone—and both my clients do—then they are injured by the gathering of this information,” he insisted. Most fundamentally, why exactly are Paul et al even bothering with this crusade when there are multiple other suits already farther along in the pipeline? “The other cases thus far are on behalf of individuals,” explained Cuccinelli. “That does not provide relief for every American using telephones.” By contrast, this class action seeks not only to end the data collection but also to compel the government to purge its databases of all info amassed since 2006. In other words: When Paul wins, we all win!
And make no mistake, Senator Paul has his eye on winning—though political watchers suspect he is focused on a juicier prize than some random lawsuit, even a constitutionally “historic” one. It has, for instance, been repeatedly noted that Paul’s online effort to gather the signatures of Americans upset by the NSA’s spy games will yield a fat database of like-minded voters that could be usefully mined for, say, a presidential campaign.
As for Paul’s new BFF, bringing Virginia’s lightning-rod ex-AG on board with this case makes better political sense than legal sense. Not to question Cooch’s legal chops, but surely Paul had his pick of Fourth Amendment geniuses. In fact, Paul and Cuccinelli are currently embroiled in a nasty spat with former Reagan administration attorney Bruce Fein—who spent the past several months working with Paul on this complaint before being unceremoniously jettisoned for Cuccinelli.
It’s not just that Fein’s people are ticked that Cuccinelli has taken over the case; they are accusing the former AG of appropriating huge chunks of a legal brief previously written by Fein. As Fein’s spokesman (and ex-wife) Mattie Fein fumed to the Washington Post on the very day of the presser, “I am aghast and shocked by Ken Cuccinelli’s behavior and his absolute knowledge that this entire complaint was the work product, intellectual property and legal genius of Bruce Fein.” Testy emails have been zipping back-and-forth between Teams Paul, Cuccinelli, and Fein, complete with finger-pointing and name calling. In one, Mattie, somewhat indelicately, called Cucinnelli “dumb as a box of rocks.” Bottom line, she told the Post, “Ken Cuccinelli stole the suit.”
From a political perspective, however, one can easily imagine why Paul would value this particular box of rocks. While the senator already has the love and trust of the GOP’s small-government enthusiasts, he needs to do some serious wooing of its social conservatives. Thus, for example, his recent efforts to revive the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. So who better to ally himself with in his current undertaking than anti-abortion, anti-gay-rights champion Cuccinelli? For many of the same reasons that Virginia women gave their AG the cold shoulder in November’s gubernatorial election, Republican “values voters” love the guy. Paul’s making common cause with Cuccinelli could help soothe some of the base’s suspicions regarding the libertarian senator’s moral fitness.
Not to suggest that the senator isn’t genuine in his outrage over the NSA’s antics. Those Paul men are nothing if not consistent in their small-government passions. But if linking arms with Cooch in this crusade happens to serve Paul’s broader political aims, where’s the harm? (Unless you’re Bruce Fein, of course.)
Certainly, Cuccinelli seems happy with the arrangement. At Wednesday’s presser, after Paul bid the media farewell to return to his senate duties, the former AG hung around to answer additional questions. As the TV camera guys broke down their equipment and the FreedomWorks activists began drifting back down Constitution Ave., Cuccinelli lingered on the plaza, surrounded by a tight circle of reporters. Nothing takes the sting out of a frigid winter day like a warm bath of attention.
By: Michele Cottle, The Daily Beast, February 13, 2014
“Peek-A-Boo”: The Police Can’t Wait To Get Their Hands On Augmented Reality
Now that New York City is under the rule of a socialist dictator, the “stop and frisk” method of policing, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens who brazenly walked the streets while in a state of non-whiteness were subjected to questioning, delay, and some unfriendly touching, has come to an end. But what if the cops didn’t even need to stop you to give you a virtual pat down?
Imagine this: You walk by a police officer and notice that he’s wearing a pair of odd-looking glasses, which he points in your direction. Almost instantly, a facial recognition program visible in those glasses identifies you, pulls up your file, and informs him that though you have a parking ticket you haven’t yet paid, there are no arrest warrants outstanding for you. A combination of infrared and hopefully non-cancer-causing scanning sensors tells him that you’ve got keys and change in your pockets, but nothing that looks like a gun or a knife, so he lets you pass. That may have all happened without you even noticing.
We’ve seen these kinds of things in science fiction for a while, but they’re getting very close to becoming a reality, like within-the-next decade close. Which is why it isn’t too surprising that the New York Police Department is exploring what it can do with Google Glass, to bring augmented reality to the cop on the beat. “We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” said one NYPD official.
There isn’t anything to be afraid of—yet. The capabilities of augmented reality for law enforcement are, at the moment, very limited. But they won’t be for long. There are no real large leaps in technology necessary to get from where we are now to where the cops would like to go—basically all you need is some steady and inevitable improvements in the sensors, the software they rely on, and the databases that integrate and process the information.
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind as this technology matures. First, law enforcement agencies are going to want them, and bad. Just imagine how much easier it would make their jobs if they could identify every person they come across as either a civilian with a clean record or a potentially dangerous criminal who needs a second look. Second, when privacy advocates raise objections, they’re going to make persuasive arguments for why they should be allowed to use the technology. One scenario they like to bring up is a cop chasing a suspect into an abandoned warehouse, whereupon she immediately sees the blueprint of the warehouse to identify possible exits, then switches to infrared to locate the suspect hiding behind a cabinet. Got him! Or, they’ll say, what about if they get a call about a suspect wielding a knife in a parking lot, they get there, scan and identify him, and learn his entire history of mental illness; then they can call in their colleagues who are trained to deal with that kind of suspect, instead of shooting him.
There are going to be controversies and lawsuits about the details, sorting out what kinds of sensors cops will be allowed to use and when. But law enforcement is almost certainly going to win the argument, first because people usually opt for safety at the expense of privacy, and second because at least parts of what the law enforcement officials claim will have genuine merit. It really will make some kinds of policing more efficient and effective. It really will catch some criminals. Getting scanned by a cop wearing augmented reality glasses as you walk by him is certainly preferable to getting slammed against a wall and frisked. And by the time we’ve fully considered whether the privacy invasion is too high a price to pay, it’ll be firmly in place and there’ll be no going back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 7, 2014
“Data Is Digital Gold”: Beyond The NSA, What About Big Data Abuse By Corporations, Politicians?
Taking steps to end, or at the very least to constrain, the federal government’s practice of storing information on the personal communications of Americans is a good thing. There is every reason to respect initiatives that seek to prevent the National Security Agency’s metadata programs from making a mockery of the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
But the moves that President Obama announced Friday to impose more judicial oversight on federal authorities who might “listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails” and the steps that may be taken by Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to check and balance the NSA following the submission of proposals on March 28 ought not be seen mistaken for a restoration of privacy rights in America.
What the president and his aides are talking about—in response to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, congressional objections and public protests – are plans to place some controls on the NSA and perhaps to keep most data in “private hands.”
But what controls will there be on those private hands?
As long as we’re opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider the fact that it’s not just the government that’s paying attention to our communications—and to what they can reveal about our personalities, lifestyles, values, spending habits and political choices.
There’s a reason the NSA has been interested in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you’re mining, you go where the precious resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.
Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They’re big into data mining.
This data mining, and the commercial and political applications that extend from it, gets far less attention than the machinations of the NSA or other governmental intelligence agencies. Tech publications and savvy writers such as Jaron Lanier recognize these concerns. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Senate Commerce Committee have taken some tentative steps to address a few of the worst abuses. But that’s not enough, especially when, as Fordham University’s Alice E. Marwick noted in a smart recent piece for The New York Review of Books,
there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known. Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy. Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals. The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of the activities of data-mining and digital marketing firms are not publicly known at all.
Significantly, it is not just financial profit that data can yield.
As Robert W. McChesney and I note in Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), data is also mined by those who seek power.
Political candidates, political parties, Super PACs and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around. They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time.
Both parties do it. All major candidates do it. Obama did it better than Romney in 2012, and that played a critical role in providing the president with the resources and the strategies that allowed him to easily defeat a well-funded and aggressive challenger. The Grand Old Party’s response was to begin hiring the best and the brightest technical talent. A recent headline announced: “Republican National Committee to Build Platform to Share Voter Data.” Another reported: “RNC Pledges $20 Million to Build Data-Sharing Operation.”
So campaigns are going to do more mining. And so are the billionaires who fund so-called “independent” political operations. Last spring, Politico announced: “Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Lead Charge to Control Republican Data.”
Data already drives the money-and-media election complex that is rapidly remaking American democracy into an American dollarocracy, where election campaigns are long on technical savvy but short, very short, on vision.
So, give the president credit for wading into the debate about how the government uses and abuses phone data. Give key members of Congress, like Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, credit for pointing out that what the president has proposed is “not enough” to “safeguard against indiscriminate, bulk surveillance of everyday Americans.”
But then go the next step. Recognize that addressing governmental actions and abuses does not begin to restore privacy rights. For that to happen, there must be recognition that Marwick is right to argue: “While closer scrutiny of the NSA is necessary and needed, we must apply equal pressure to private corporations to ensure that seemingly harmless targeted mail campaigns and advertisements do not give way to insidious and dangerous violations of personal privacy.”
And that recognition must extend beyond concern regarding abusive commercial applications to include an examination of and responses to new approaches to fund-raising and campaigning that have the potential to warp our politics—and democracy itself.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 17, 2014
“Bad History And Bad Policy”: The Hidden Consequences Of Snowden’s NSA Revelations
There is more than a little hypocrisy to the outcry that the government, through the National Security Agency (NSA), is systematically destroying Americans’ right to privacy. Edward Snowden’s revelations have been stripped of their social, technological and historical context. Unless you’ve camped in the Alaskan wilderness for two decades, you know — or should — that millions upon millions of Americans have consciously and, probably in most cases, eagerly surrendered much of their privacy by embracing the Internet and social media.
People do not open Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts because they wish to shroud their lives in secrecy. They do not use online dating services or post videos on YouTube because they cherish their anonymity. The Internet is a vehicle for self-promotion, personal advertising and the pursuit of celebrity.
The Pew Research Center’s surveys confirm that these behaviors are now entirely mainstream. In 2013, 85 percent of Americans used the Internet. Of these, almost three-quarters (73 percent) belonged to social media sites (the biggest: Facebook). Almost one-fifth of adult Internet users have posted personal videos, many hoping, says Pew, that “their creations go viral.” Among people “single and looking” for mates, nearly two-fifths (38 percent) used online dating.
If Americans think their privacy is dangerously diminished, there are remedies. They can turn off their PCs, toss their smartphones and smash their tablets. Somehow, this seems unlikely, even though another Pew survey finds that “86 percent of adult Internet users have taken steps . . . to avoid surveillance by other people or organizations.”
To these conscious sacrifices of privacy must be added murkier, collateral losses that are orchestrated by the world’s Googles, Facebooks, service providers and “data brokers,” writes Alice Marwick of Fordham University in the New York Review of Books. They scan users’ digital decisions (sites visited, products and services purchased, habits and hobbies favored) to create databases, often merged with other socio-economic information. These target advertising, improve political appeals — President Obama’s campaign excelled at this — and influence hiring decisions, as Don Peck notes in the Atlantic.
The NSA’s damage to privacy is dwarfed by the impact of market activity. The sensationalism surrounding Snowden’s revelations obscures this. Case in point: The disclosure that U.S. telephone calls are open to NSA monitoring. Suddenly, Big Brother looms. In our mind’s eye, we see the NSA’s computers scouring our every phone call. We’re exposed to constant snooping and the possibility that the government will misuse the information it finds.
The reality is far more limited. The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has determined there’s a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups. In 2012, there were 288 of these findings. After one is made, the NSA can retrieve three items about the number: the dates of calls made and received for five years; the other phones’ numbers; and the calls’ length. The NSA is not entitled to listen to conversations, but it can order similar searches on the other numbers involved. Thousands of calls are caught in the dragnet, but the total is puny compared with the untold billions of annual calls.
Whether these searches are effective in fighting terrorism is disputed. The NSA says they’re valuable. A panel of experts appointed by Obama concluded that the monitoring “was not essential to preventing attacks.” But more important for civil liberties and privacy, the panel found that present practices don’t approach past abuses. During the Vietnam War, the panel noted, the CIA investigated 300,000 anti-war critics. The government also sought to “expose, disrupt, and neutralize their efforts to affect public opinion.”
By all means, let’s debate the NSA. Some policies seem suspect, spying on the heads of friendly governments topping the list. It’s also important to recognize that government can coerce and punish in ways that private markets cannot. The potential for abuse is greater. But let’s also keep the debate in perspective.
In a digitized world, spying must be digitized. Then there’s cyberwarfare. Our electronic systems remain vulnerable, as the recent theft of data from millions of credit and debit cards at Target demonstrates. Government and the private sector need to collaborate more closely to protect vital systems. But these “efforts are as good as dead for the foreseeable future,” says Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm. The NSA controversy has “significantly damaged the trust between the private sector and government.” This may be the Snowden affair’s most insidious (and overlooked) consequence.
Vilifying the NSA — letting Snowden dictate the terms of debate — promotes bad history and bad policy. It’s bad history, because the most powerful assaults on privacy have originated in markets. It’s bad policy, because weakening the NSA leaves the United States more exposed to cyberattacks.
By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 5, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 