Archive: Year: 2013

The White House is making a huge effort to convince Congress to support President Obama's request for authorization to attack Syria, but one big piece of its political machine is conspicuously absent from the field: Organizing for Action, the nonprofit "grassroots" continuation of the 2012 campaign. On BarackObama.com, which functions as the group's online front-page, the top issues OFA is working on are climate change, immigration reform and reducing gun violence. All of OFA's upcoming actions are on defending Obamacare, pressing gun violence prevention and the like. The group's Twitter account is similarly focused on those domestic battles. This is curious, since again and again OFA spokespeople have insisted that the group's purpose was to support the president's agenda. CNN obtained...

Verbed Overturned: The Washington Post reports that in 2011 the Obama administration successfully got the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse a 2008 ruling and allow the NSA to search its databases for American communications without a warrant and to extend the time they can keep those communications. Shafted: Jack Shafer digests the latest news about the NSA's efforts to get around most encryption standards and finds a huge irony: Can somebody explain to the NSA that Snowden has merely done to the NSA what the NSA has been doing to U.S. citizens and business for decades? Snowden deceitfully ignored the legally binding promises he made to the NSA; the NSA similarly runs roughshod over both the letter and the spirit...

The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica are jointly reporting a major new angle in the ongoing Snowden Saga: The National Security Agency has managed "to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age." Remember the war over public access to strong encryption and the government's call for the "Clipper Chip"? "Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert [the NSA's] own 'back door' in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth," the Times reports. Here's the key graf from the Times' story: “For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a...

While Congress wrestles with President Obama's unexpected request for formal legal authorization before he orders airstrikes on Syria, it's been fascinating to watch the country's big online advocacy groups try to figure out their own position on the crisis. Should the US bomb Syria in order to punish Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons on his own people, risking a wider American involvement in the conflict and potentially further destabilizing the region? Or should the US stay out of that kind of direct involvement, even if that risks emboldening Assad and could lead to more frequent uses of chemical weapons in the future? These are just some of the hard questions at stake. And what makes any decision even harder is...

This Town Public opinion is opposed to air-strikes in Syria, while congressional leadership opinion is congealing in favor. Are we headed for a repeat of the first vote on the Wall Street bailout, when conventional wisdom inside the Beltway was overwhelmed by populist sentiment outside it? Senator John McCain makes light of his being spotted playing poker on his iPhone while waiting his turn to speak during yesterday's Senate hearing on Syria. The commenters on his Twitter post aren't very amused, however. In case you need any more evidence, after Peter Hamby's report yesterday, that Washington's denizens are fully occupied by Twitter, and by each other, read New York magazine's study, done with third-party analytics firmTwiangulate, of who follows who in DC....

Twitterization CNN political reporter Peter Hamby says, in a long and well-reported 95-page essay for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School where he was a fellow last spring, that not only has Twitter become "the central news source for the Washington-based political news establishment," its arrival, "along with the proliferation of media platforms that now deliver content to hungry, informed consumers, marks a vast improvement over an era when a small handful of sainted journalists interpreted political news for the masses." But, at the same time, he argues that it--along with the changing economics of the news business--has ruined the once useful intimacy of the campaign trail, where political reporters could sometimes get close enough to the candidates to figure...

Precognition In a NYTimes oped, privacy advocate Ginger McCall warns that rapid advances in facial recognition technologies being developed by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI must be addressed by new legal safeguards to insure "some degree of anonymity in public" or else "mission creep [will turn] crime-fighting programs into instruments of abuse." In related news, Reuters reports that "Facebook is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members' profile photos into its growing facial recognition database." Earlier this week, Facebook revealed that in the first six months of 2013, it had received more than 25,000 inquires on more than 38,000 users from 71 governments around the world. The greatest number of requests and accounts affected came from the US. The...

Thousands of Instances Here's our Sarah Lai Stirland this morning, summing up the Washington Post's huge new scoop on the NSA front and its political implications: A startling new report published late Thursday evening that reveals for the first time thousands of instances where the National Security Agency overstepped its legal authority by illegally collecting the phone and e-mail communications of U.S. citizens is likely to put privacy and surveillance issues on the front-burner next month when members of Congress return to Washington D.C. from the August recess. A top-secret audit" of the NSA's surveillance activities dated May 2012 documented 2,776 "incidents" in the preceding 12 months of "unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications," The Washington Post reported...

No Mercy in Egypt The Egyptian Army takes a page from the Chinese playbook (or rather, repeats a chapter from its own history), killing hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members encamped at Rabaa al-Adawiya in Cairo and wounding thousands more. Here's Washington Post reporter Abigail Hauslohner's eyewitness report. President Obama issues a statement on Egypt, condemning the military's attacks on protestors, as well as retaliatory attacks on Christian churches, canceling bi-annual joint military exercises and saying "the Egyptian people deserve better than what they've seen the last few days." This 2009 embassy cable, released by WikiLeaks, shows that the Egyptian military views its $1.3 billion in annual aid from the US to be "'untouchable compensation' for making and maintaining peace with Israel." In...

Not Clapping The White House now says that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, won't be running the review of government surveillance programs that President Obama has called for. Peter Maass has posted the full transcript of his encrypted interview with Edward Snowden. Coming late to this: EFF's Micah Lee's "Encyrption Works: How to Protect Your Privacy in the Age of NSA Surveillance," is must-reading. The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee is asking the federal government to investigate Bitcoin, following on the heels of subpoenas sent to several Bitcoin businesses by NY Financial Services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky. After decades of official denials, Foreign Policy magazine has unearthed documentary proof that the CIA kept a file on noted antiwar activist Professor...