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There are 46 Guantánamo Detainees Who Will Never Be Tried and Never Be Released

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:46:09 +0000

Throughout the years-long debate about fate of the Guantánamo prison, there's always been one unanswered question: how many detainees are in permanent limbo? That is, how many of them are considered unquestionably too dangerous to release, but just as unquestionably not prosecutable. Now we know:

The Obama administration Monday lifted a veil of secrecy surrounding the status of the detainees at Guantánamo, for the first time publicly naming the four dozen captives it defined as indefinite detainees — men too dangerous to transfer but who cannot be tried in a court of law.

....Administration officials have through the years described a variety of reasons why the men could not face trial: Evidence against some of the indefinite detainees was too tainted by CIA or other interrogation torture or abuse to be admissible in a court; insufficient evidence to prove an individual detainee had committed a crime; or military intelligence opinions that certain captives had undertaken suicide or other type of terrorist training, and had vowed to engage in an attack on release.

The formal classification for these prisoners is "continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war," as you can see in the excerpt below.

There are lots of Guantánamo detainees who have no near-term prospect of being prosecuted or released, but still could be if circumstances change. However, even if we handled every single one of them, there's still a hard nut of 46 prisoners with no recourse at all. They will never be tried, and they will never be released.

Poll of the Day: Nobody Wants to Get Involved in Syria

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:15:26 +0000

A new Pew poll tells a remarkable story: not only does the American public not want to get more involved in Syria, the American public doesn't even want to send arms to the rebels. What's more, this feeling is entirely bipartisan: Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all oppose arming the rebels by a margin of about 70-20. When was the last time that happened? It's a sign of the strength of the Beltway consensus in favor of intervention that despite this, President Obama was feeling pressure from all sides to do exactly the opposite of what 70 percent of the public wants. The war gods are strong in America.

Yep, Having More Money Is Good for Your Health (and Your Baby's)

Kevin Drum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:55:42 +0000

In 1990, a pregnant low-income mother with one child would have received an EITC tax credit of $1,250. A mother with two children would have received the same amount, because back then EITC didn't take into account the number of children you had.

That changed in 1993, and the change was fully phased in by 1996. So in 1996, the first mother would have received $2,250, while the second mother would have received $3,750.

This provides us with the ability to perform a lovely little natural experiment. In the 1990 group, both pregnant mothers get the same amount of money, so you can use this as a baseline. In the 1996 group, pregnant mothers with two children get more money. Do their newborn babies do any better relative to this baseline? Last year a team of researchers did the legwork to find out, and as it turns out, the answer is yes:

We find that increased EITC income reduces the incidence of low birth weight and increases mean birth weight. For single low education (<= 12 years) mothers, a policy-induced treatment on the treated increase of $1000 in EITC income is associated with a 6.7 to 10.8 percent reduction in the low birth weight rate.

So an extra $1,000 produces about a 10 percent reduction in low birth weights. That's a pretty persuasive argument that having more money really does produce better health. As Bill Gardner puts it, "The bottom line is that redistributing income to poor families improves the health of their infants. It is, in effect, a form of prenatal care."

Can the Christian Right Persuade Republicans to Fix Obamacare?

Kevin Drum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:30:50 +0000

A loyal reader just emailed to beg me to write about something other than NSA surveillance. I make no promises for the future, since I'm pretty caught up by the story, but perhaps a breather is in order. Luckily, Ann Kim and Ed Kilgore have served up a perfect little morsel to warm the heart of any liberal.

As you know, conservatives are doing everything they can to sabotage Obamacare. This includes court fights, refusal to expand Medicaid even though it's practically free, declining to set up state exchanges, and, of course, the flat rejection of any tweaks to Obamacare from House Republicans. The problem is that any big law is likely to need small adjustments here and there to clarify things or fix small bugs, but Republicans don't want to fix bugs. They want Obamacare to fail, so as far as they're concerned, bugs are good things. But what happens if one of those bugs happens to impact a key part of the GOP base?

For the first time, a constituency group to whom the GOP normally pays close attention—religious institutions—is asking for a legislative "fix" of the Affordable Care Act to make it work as intended....Without the requested "fix," as many as one million clergy members and church employees now enrolled in church-sponsored health plans could soon face the choice of leaving these plans (designed to meet their unique needs, such as the frequent reassignment of clergy across state lines) or losing access to the tax subsidies provided by the ACA to help lower-to-middle income Americans purchase insurance.

Observers generally agree that the exclusion of church health plans from eligibility for the exchanges, which occurred because they do not sell policies to the general public, was an oversight caused by staffers scrambling to draft bill language under tight deadlines. Because employees of religious institutions are usually paid modestly, many will qualify for subsidies made available on a sliding scale to families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. But the subsidies can only be used to purchase insurance from the exchanges.

Apparently this problem is starting to attract the attention of religious groups, including large, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, who don't want their clergy to lose access to tax breaks just because of an unintentional drafting error. But can even the Christian Right persuade House Republicans to take a short break from their scorched-earth campaign against Obamacare? Stay tuned.

When You Get Right Down To It, Everything is Policy

Kevin Drum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:47:57 +0000

There's a lot more heat than light in Edward Snowden's live Q&A over at the Guardian, which is too bad. We could use more clarity on the scope of NSA's surveillance. Along those lines, I was glad to see Josh Marshall picking up on this point:

For all the back and forth about Phoenixes and what exactly he expected a spy organization to do, the one interesting and significant thing to come out of this Snowden live chat is his focus on what is technically possible within the NSA vs whatever policy restrictions are in place to protect privacy, constitutional protections for US citizens and so forth. It’s not even totally clear, reading these answers, how much Snowden and his nemeses within the Intel Community are even disagreeing about how things work.

I'd guess there's not much disagreement at all. After all, Snowden has so far presented no evidence that NSA has abused its statutory powers. He obviously doesn't like NSA's statutory powers, but that's a different thing. At one point, for example, he says that the focus on whether NSA is sweeping up domestic communications is a "distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%." Maybe so, but spying on foreigners is NSA's whole reason for existence.

And that gets to the nub of things: If you simply disapprove of spying on foreigners, then you're obviously not going to think much of the NSA. But that's a disagreement with U.S. policy, not a criticism of the agency itself.

Ditto for Snowden's comments about NSA being restricted only by "policy." Well, of course that's what restricts them. Once the technical capability is available to do something, then policy is always the only restriction. That policy can take the form of laws, of executive orders, of court oversight, or of internal NSA rules. Some of those are better than others, and all are subject to abuse if oversight is poor, but they're all policies. Pointing this out is like saying that Social Security is insecure because it's merely a policy of the federal government. That's true, but what isn't?

NOTE: There is, of course, a difference between Social Security and NSA surveillance. They're both creatures of policy, but NSA's actions are largely constrained by secret policies. That's a legitimate beef. The simple fact that NSA's constraints are policy-based isn't.

Edward Snowden Says More Info About "Direct Access" Is In the Works

Kevin Drum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:09:44 +0000

Edward Snowden is holding a live Q&A at the Guardian. Here's one exchange:

Anthony De Rosa:

1) Define in as much detail as you can what "direct access" means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

Answer:

1) More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on — it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

2) NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

Snowden's reply about direct access is weirdly nonresponsive. He's talking here about analysts' access to NSA databases, not to corporate servers, and he seems to be talking about metadata, not content. What's more, even if he is talking about content, he's talking about content that's already been collected by NSA, not content "direct" from Google's servers. He's right that access to this stuff is policy-based, but then again, I'm not sure what else it could be. In the end, access to everything is policy-based.

His reply to the warrant question is a little clearer, but doesn't really say anything new. Section 702 warrants are indeed very broad, and once issued can cover communications from a lot of targets. When this stuff is swept up, some of it inevitably turns out to be domestic communications, which NSA is required to either discard or segregate away from the view of analysts according to court-mandated minimization procedures.

Now, does NSA really do this? How do we know? Those are good questions, but Snowden sheds no light on that. He's just telling us that 702 warrants are very broad, something we already knew.

I really wish Snowden were more forthcoming and less evasive in his answers to questions like this. It's been over a week now, and if he really has more detail about what "direct access" means, it's long past time to share it with us. Ditto for any evidence that NSA is abusing its minimization protocols.

Immigration Reform Faces Long Odds in the House

Kevin Drum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:17:51 +0000

David Drucker says that immigration reform is in trouble in the House:

House Speaker John Boehner is not going to bring a comprehensive immigration-reform plan to the floor if a majority of Republicans don't support it, sources familiar with his plans said. "No way in hell," is how several described the chances of the speaker acting on such a proposal without a majority of his majority behind him.

So what are the odds of getting a bill that a majority of House Republicans support? Kinda slim. But you never know. A combination of arm-twisting, modestly tighter enforcement requirements, and a fuzzy definition of "majority" (40 percent, anyone?) could be enough. Right now, I'd probably put the odds of passage at about a third or so. That's not great, but it's better than the 10 percent odds that a lot of folks are assuming these days.

Yet More Reporting on NSA's Surveillance Programs

Kevin Drum — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 05:08:09 +0000

I can't keep up with all the new reporting on NSA surveillance programs tonight. Here are two more. First, Mark Hosenball of Reuters reports that although NSA collects metadata for every phone call made, it makes only modest use of them:

Millions of phone records were collected in 2012, but the paper says U.S. authorities only looked in detail at the records linked to fewer than 300 phone numbers.

A person familiar with details of the program said the figure of fewer than 300 numbers applied to the entire mass of raw telephone "metadata" collected last year by the NSA from U.S. carriers — not just to Verizon, which is the only telephone company identified in a document disclosed by Snowden as providing such data to the NSA.

Is this true? Is this figure only for searches that began with a U.S. phone number, or for all searches of any kind? I don't know, but I'm passing it along. Take it with a grain of salt for now.

Next up is an AP story that describes how the PRISM program works. Prior to 2007, it reports, tech companies responded to warrants manually. But after the passage of the Protect America Act, NSA decided it wanted to streamline things:

Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as Prism....What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

....Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company. Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

How accurate is this? It sounds about right to me, but reporting on this is reaching a fever pitch, so our understanding might change in the near future. Apparently the government is also preparing an unclassified white paper about all this, so we'll have that to chew over before long. Stay tuned.

How Much Email Metadata Does NSA Collect?

Kevin Drum — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 04:30:14 +0000

In Barton Gellman's big NSA surveillance piece, he says it wasn't bulk collection of telephone metadata that caused the dramatic showdown in John Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004. (Metadata consists of records about phone calls—time, location, and participants—not the contents of the calls themselves.) Everyone was fine with that. It was collection of internet metadata for email, chat, Skype, and so forth that caused the showdown. In the end, the program was shut down, but then a few months later it was started back up under the oversight of the FISA court.

So it's still cruising along, right? I'd guess so, but then there's this at the tail end of Gellman's article:

As for bulk collection of Internet metadata, the question that triggered the crisis of 2004, another official said the NSA is no longer doing it. When pressed on that question, he said he was speaking only of collections under authority of the surveillance court.

“I’m not going to say we’re not collecting any Internet metadata,” he added. “We’re not using this program and these kinds of accesses to collect Internet metadata in bulk.”

That's clear as mud, isn't it? Gellman also describes NSA's initial contention after 9/11 that it could collect bulk internet metadata because, legally, it didn't "acquire" the information merely by putting it in a database. It only "acquired" it when an analyst actually retrieved it for some reason. So as long as analysts only retrieved records they were legally entitled to, everything was kosher:

Goldsmith and Comey did not buy that argument, and a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said the NSA does not rely on it today. As soon as surveillance data “touches us, we’ve got it, whatever verbs you choose to use,” the official said in an interview. “We’re not saying there’s a magic formula that lets us have it without having it.”

Taken together, these two officials are suggesting that NSA no longer collects internet metadata in bulk. It collects only data it's legally allowed to have in the first place, presumably based on a Section 702 warrant. But that's still a helluva lot. One of the documents released by Edward Snowden suggests that it amounts to over 1 trillion records per year.

Washington Post Provides New History of NSA Surveillance Programs

Kevin Drum — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:02:19 +0000

Barton Gellman has a big piece in the Washington Post today about NSA's codenamed surveillance programs that draws on "a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials." STELLARWIND, an umbrella name for the original Bush-era program that collected phone and internet data, was succeeded by four separate programs:

Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.

The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.

For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

....The Post has learned that similar orders have been renewed every three months for other large U.S. phone companies, including Bell South and AT&T, since May 24, 2006. On that day, the surveillance court made a fundamental shift in its approach to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to compel production of “business records” that are relevant to a particular terrorism investigation and to share those in some circumstances with the NSA. Henceforth, the court ruled, it would define the relevant business records as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database.

Gellman also tells us for the first time what it was that caused the famous 2004 showdown in John Ashcroft's hospital room:

Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.

At Bush’s direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.

For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.

In other words, it wasn't the collection of telephone records that upset Comey, it was the collection of email, chat, Skype and other internet communications records. There's more at the link about the showdown over the data collection programs, as well as the secret policies and legal opinions that govern exactly what NSA can and can't do.

Can NSA Analysts Listen to Your Phone Calls?

Kevin Drum — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 01:17:36 +0000

Declan McCullagh at CNET draws our attention today to testimony from FBI director Robert Mueller at a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday:

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."

Nadler was unavailable for comment, and this is apparently the sum total of the information we have. It's not clear precisely what "information from that telephone" means, or whether this applies to all calls or only to non-U.S. calls. It's also possible that Nadler was confusing the ability of an analyst to get subscriber information for a phone number with the ability to listen to the call itself. Another possibility is that this applies only to phone content that's already been acquired by warrant and is currently in NSA's database. Or perhaps it applies to real-time wiretapping, but only if an analyst concludes that the target is a non-U.S. person already covered by a "programmatic" (i.e., broad-based) Section 702 warrant.

Alternatively, it could be that NSA analysts have the ability to listen in on phone calls on their own say so. We won't know for sure until Nadler or someone else clears this up. Stay tuned.

NOTE: For more, check out Julian Sanchez's Twitter feed, which provided much of the background for this post.

UPDATE: Sanchez now has a more detailed blog post about all this. It's worth a read.

NSA Apparently Surveils About 0.01 Percent of Foreign Facebook Accounts

Kevin Drum — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:03:11 +0000

Tech companies, under pressure from foreign users who want to know if their accounts are routinely under surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, have been begging the federal government to allow them to release general figures on how many FISA requests they get. The feds haven't allowed them to do that yet, but they have allowed them to release a bit of information:

Over the last six months of 2012, Facebook said, it had received as many as 10,000 requests from local, state and federal agencies, which impacted as many as 19,000 accounts. Facebook has 1.1 billion accounts worldwide. Microsoft said that it received between 6,000 and 7,000 similar requests, affecting as many as 32,000 accounts.

The companies said some of the requests were for terrorism investigations. But others were from a local sheriff asking for data to locate a missing child or from federal marshals tracking fugitives. From these statements, it was impossible to ascertain the scale of the FISA requests made by the National Security Agency.

....That the company would rush to release a figure that gives the public little idea of the scale of the FISA requests is a sign of the pressure it has been under since the PRISM program was made public.

I'm not surprised at all that Facebook and Microsoft rushed to release this information. Their motivation is simple: they want to demonstrate that they aren't providing NSA with broad access to every foreign account holder in their systems, and even this partial release pretty much does that. In Facebook's case, they get requests covering about 38,000 accounts per year, which suggests that FISA warrants cover maybe 30,000 accounts or so, most of them foreign. At a rough guess, Facebook has about 900 million non-U.S. accounts, of which perhaps half are truly active. This means that NSA surveils about .01 percent of their active foreign accounts each year. There's obviously some guesswork in this estimate, but I think it gets us in the right ballpark.

The fact that Facebook and others have begged the government to allow them to release more detailed information is a clue all by itself that the number of surveilled accounts isn't huge. If they were handing over data on millions of accounts, they wouldn't be eager for the world to know it.

However, it's worth noting that Google hasn't yet made this partial information public, saying that they wanted to wait until they could release more detailed breakdowns. This might be genuine on their part, or it could suggest that the raw number of warrants served to Google is more dramatic than it is for Facebook or Microsoft. After all, Gmail might be a lot more interesting to NSA than a Facebook timeline. We'll have to wait and see.

Friday Cat Blogging - 14 June 2013

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:11:46 +0000

Today's catblogging photo shows Domino in pretty much the same place as last week. But a small change in position and camera focal length makes all the difference.

I wish I could have gotten a better version of this. But even though I was 20 feet away and Domino's back was to me, as soon as she heard the shutter button she immediately turned and trotted over to see me. I suppose I was lucky even to get one picture. She can be a real catblogging pain sometimes.

Today's Chin Scratcher: Why Are People So Distrustful of Big Government?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:02:55 +0000

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer summarizes a talking point about the NSA's spying programs that's already getting a lot of air time on the right:

The object is not to abolish these vital programs. It’s to fix them. Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation — provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government, and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling.

To summarize: People are groundlessly suspicious of vital panopticonish surveillance programs, and this is all due to Barack Obama's weaselly ways, not to the Republican Party's relentless 30-year campaign to destroy the public's faith in domestic programs of all sorts, mock the very idea that government accomplishes anything useful, and pander to the black-helicopter conspiracy theories of the Glenn Beck crowd.

Sorry Charlie, that's not going to fly. If you spend decades inventing scandals out of whole cloth and insisting that big government is a menace to liberty, don't be surprised when it turns out that an awful lot of people no longer have any trust in government. You reap what you sow.

Is the U.S. Actively Trying to Prolong the Syrian Civil War?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:28:22 +0000

Why is President Obama escalating U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war? Dan Drezner offers this take, which he's been murmuring about occasionally for the past year:

[Obama's goal] is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible. This is exactly what the last two years have accomplished.... at an appalling toll in lives lost.

This policy doesn't require any course correction... so long as rebels are holding their own or winning. A faltering Assad simply forces Iran et al into doubling down and committing even more resources....For the low, low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East.

....Now let's be clear: to describe this as "morally questionable" would be an understatement. It's a policy that makes me very uncomfortable... until one considers the alternatives. What it's not, however, is a return to liberal hawkery.

In a nutshell, the idea here is that we want both sides to be evenly matched so the fighting continues as long as possible. That will weaken pretty much everyone we hate: Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Al Qaeda groups among the rebels. As long as these folks continue killing each other, we're happy.

Is it a sign of terminal naiveté that I find myself unable to believe that this is conscious Obama administration policy? Or has Drezner simply been watching too much Game of Thrones?

Partisan Hypocrisy and NSA Surveillance

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:06:53 +0000

One of the hot themes of the day is calling out hypocrisy on the NSA spying story: Republicans used to love it when Bush was in charge, but now it's an assault on our freedoms when Obama is in charge. Democrats are the same in reverse. Dave Weigel writes about this here, Michael Gerson warns his fellow Republicans about it here, and Glenn Greenwald berates Democrats about it here. Plus, of course, we can back this up with hard numbers from that infamous Pew poll earlier this week showing that Republican and Democratic attitudes have swapped sides over the past few years.

As it happens, I think this narrative is being exaggerated a bit as the media enters feeding frenzy stage. Still, there's plainly something to it. So what about me? Have my views changed? I'd probably have to dig pretty deeply into my archives to know for sure, but for what it's worth, here's my position as best as I can reconstruct it:

My basic view hasn't changed: I didn't like this stuff back in 2005 and I don't like it now. I doubt very much that the benefit is substantial enough to justify the rather obvious potential for abuse.
At the same time, I never viewed NSA's surveillance programs as self-evidently worthless. My best guess is that they provide genuinely useful information and probably really do help detect/prevent terrorist activity.
What's more, part of my objection to the program in 2005 was that it involved warrantless surveillance. Like it or not, that's changed. Congress essentially gave its blessing to the program in 2008 and, as Glenn Greenwald confirmed last week, it's now done under the aegis of warrants lawfully issued to telcos (for the phone record program) and tech companies (for the PRISM program).
On a personal note, I'll confess that it's hard to sustain a feeling of outrage over this. We had a huge fight about all this stuff five years ago and we lost. Now everyone is supposedly shocked, shocked that NSA is hoovering up huge amounts of private data. Well, of course they are. We lost.
But despite my personal fatigue over this—something I won't pretend to be proud of—I'm glad that Edward Snowden has put these programs back in the spotlight. It gives better folks than me a second bite at the apple of public opinion.

On another note, Glenn Greenwald keeps promising that there are more blockbusters to come that are even more blockbusterish than what he's revealed so far. Given that, it's probably wise for everyone to hold off on any final judgments for now. Let's wait a bit and see what he has for us.

Bank Robbery Suspect Wants NSA Phone Records to Prove His Innocence

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:04:04 +0000

This is genuinely fascinating. A guy named Terrance Brown is on trial in Florida for allegedly masterminding the robbery of a Brinks armored truck. Prosecutors have used phone records to track the movements of one of Brown's codefendants, but guess what? They don't have phone data for Brown himself because his carrier apparently didn't keep it.

You can see where this is going, right? Here's the LA Times:

On Sunday, after federal officials acknowledged the NSA trove, Brown's attorney, Marshall Dore Louis, filed a midtrial motion asking the NSA to turn over Brown's phone records. "The records are material and favorable to Mr. Brown's defense," Louis wrote, adding that the request was "not intended as a general fishing expedition."

Everyone quoted in the article expects the federal government to fight back like crazed weasels against this order, and I don't doubt that they're right. They'll probably win, too. But it would certainly be an intriguing case for the Supreme Court to decide, wouldn't it?

Chart of the Day: America's 30-Year Project to Make the Rich Even Richer

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:40:19 +0000

Here's a remarkable chart from EPI. Actually, no: Strike that. It's true that in a normal world it would be remarkable, but in the world we live in it's actually totally unsurprising. It illustrates the rise in income inequality over the past three decades (top dark blue line), and as you can see, it's been rising steadily. Totally unsurprising.

But then author Andrew Fieldhouse did another calculation. The middle blue line shows rising inequality after you account for taxes and transfers. But what if we had the same tax system we did in 1979? Well, inequality still would have gone up, but it would have gone up significantly less (bottom light blue line). In other words, during an era in which the rich were getting richer anyway, we deliberately set out to reduce their tax burdens so that they could become even richer.

Like I said, totally unsurprising. You knew this already. And yet, no matter how many different ways you illustrate this, it's still pretty remarkable. Instead of trying to ameliorate the effects of a broad economic trend, we've done everything we possibly can to accelerate it. That includes tax policy, financial deregulation, trade policy, anti-labor policy, and much more. And since there's approximately zero evidence that any of this has actually increased economic growth, it means that U.S. policy for the past 30 years has been aggressively dedicated to shifting income share away from the poor and middle class and into the pockets of the already rich.

Remarkable.

If the Economy Is Back, Why Are Wages Still So Low?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:05:06 +0000

Five years after the Great Recession began, the US economy appears to be rebounding a bit. But two recent bits of evidence suggest that the impact of the recession on ordinary workers may have been even worse than we thought—and that the impact of future recessions might be worse too.

First off, a new paper by a trio of researchers confirms some old news: Adjusted for inflation, wages began stagnating for both men and women 10 years ago. Men's wages have actually decreased slightly since 2000, while women's wages, which had been rising steadily for decades, flattened out nearly to zero. But it could have been worse. Economists have long known that there's a floor to wages because employers don't like to reduce nominal wages. If you make $10 per hour, they won't cut your wage to $9 per hour. They'll just hold it at $10 and let inflation eat it away. This phenomenon is called wage stickiness.

But in "Wage Adjustment in the Great Recession," these researchers have found that wage stickiness, which is driven mostly by social convention, not economic law, might be dying out. During the Great Recession, employers were increasingly willing to cut nominal wages. Among hourly workers, the usual number who experience wage cuts is around 15 percent. That had risen to 25 percent by 2011. Among nonhourly workers, the number rose from about 25 percent to nearly 35 percent. Increasingly, it seems, wage stickiness isn't acting as a barrier against wage losses.

So what does this mean in the real world? Economist Jared Bernstein points us to the chart below. It shows growth in nominal wages, growth in benefits, and growth in total compensation (wages plus benefits). The news is grim. Total compensation (the gray line) grew at about 3 to 4 percent per year during most of the aughts. Since the Great Recession hit, that's dropped to 1 to 2 percent. This is less than the inflation rate, which means that even when you account for benefits, real compensation has been declining since 2008.

Bottom line: Wage stickiness is disappearing, and with it a social convention that prevented wages from dropping too harshly even during recessions. As a result, wages are getting cut in bad times and never catching back up in good times. This is the world we live in today.

Quote of the Day: We Should Treat the Citizenry Like Mushrooms

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 04:19:34 +0000

From Newt Gingrich, explaining to Greta Van Susteren why Edward Snowden's leaks have been so harmful:

What Snowden did was very damaging at one level because there are a lot of things a democracy can do to protect itself, as long as they're genuinely secret. And people will tolerate it as long as it's genuinely secret.

Yeah, I guess people will tolerate just about anything as long as they don't know it's happening. This is why Newt is the philosopher king of the Republican Party.

Here's Why Arming the Syrian Rebels Is a Bad Idea

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 04:11:55 +0000

Ah crap. A couple of months ago, President Obama caved in to the hawks and announced $127 million in "nonlethal" aid to the Syrian rebels. Today he caved in again and trotted out Ben Rhodes to announce a further escalation. We'll now be sending some decidedly lethal aid to the rebels:

The United States has concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in its fight against opposition forces, and President Obama has authorized direct U.S. military support to the rebels, the White House said Thursday…Rhodes did not detail what he called the expanded military support, but it is expected initially to consist of light arms and ammunition. He said the shipments would be "responsive to the needs" expressed by the rebel command.

The next step, of course, is to cave in to the hawks and send the rebels the antitank and antiaircraft weaponry they want. I figure, what? Another couple of months before Obama decides to do that? Then the no-fly zone. Then…something else.

The official justification for the new arms shipments is verification of some "small scale" use of sarin gas by the Assad regime. However, the real justification seems to be this:

After weeks of efforts to organize a conference at which the Assad government and the opposition were to negotiate a political transition, the administration is now slowing down that effort, fearful that if it were held now, Mr. Assad would be in too strong a position to make any concessions…Now, an administration official said, the focus will switch from setting a date to fortifying the rebels before they sit across the table from the government.

Great. So now we're committed to continuing escalation until Assad cries uncle and agrees to come to the table. That strategy doesn't have a sterling track record.

This seems like a good time to embed this video of Fareed Zakaria explaining why it's such a bad idea to intervene in Syria. This isn't just the usual anti-intervention shtick, either. It's a broad overview of who's who and why Syria's civil war is likely to last a very long time indeed. It's well worth five minutes of your time.

How Much Bang Do We Get For Our Infrastructure Buck?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:51:10 +0000

Responding to a CAP report about how to grow the economy, Josh Barro pushes back on the contention that we have a serious infrastructure problem. Setting that aside for the moment, his follow-up comment is worth addressing:

The real U.S. infrastructure gap is a cost gap: Big public construction projects cost way more here than they do in other countries. Why would we make a major new financial commitment to infrastructure before fixing the problem that we pay way too much for what we do build?

Is this true? I don't doubt that it costs more to build public infrastructure in America than it does in, say, China or Mexico. But is it more expensive than in Spain or Germany or Denmark? If so, why?

As I said, this is worth addressing. Unfortunately, I can't find anything very authoritative on this subject. Does anybody know of anything? Even given the obvious problems of construction in an already-built environment, the cost of building infrastructure in America, as well as the time it takes to complete anything, has always struck me as puzzling. If this problem really is worse here than it is even in other densely built, advanced economies, I'd sure like to know why.

UPDATE: Alon Levy has some raw numbers for rail projects here and subway projects here. His figures suggest that average U.S. costs per mile are considerably higher than in Europe. Stephen Smith takes a crack at explaining why here. (If it sounds familiar, it's because I linked to Smith's column last year.)

Some Questions For and About Edward Snowden

Kevin Drum — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:05:31 +0000

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that a number of people are pushing back against Glenn Greenwald's insistence that the PRISM program allows "direct access" to servers from Google, Microsoft and other tech companies. I'm glad to hear that, because it raises some questions that deserve answers.

As regular readers know, the "direct access" claim puzzled me from the start. Even with my modest technical background, I understood immediately that it didn't make sense. Sure enough, the Washington Post walked back the claim a bit the next day, the New York Times walked it back further the day after that, and even the Guardian has now finally agreed that it's wrong—though they buried the admission in the 18th paragraph of a story published a week after the original report.

There are various reasons this is important. The number one reason, obviously, is that we need to understand what's really happening. There's a huge difference between (a) Google giving NSA unfettered access to all of its user data whenever NSA feels like looking at something, and (b) Google agreeing to set up a secure method of transferring data that NSA has obtained a court order for. It's night and day.

But there's another reason: I want to know how far I can trust Edward Snowden. He's supposed to be a technical guru of some sort, but apparently he didn't understand this. Or, if he did, he didn't bother clearing it up for either Glenn Greenwald or Bart Gellman, who both went with the "direct access" phrase in their initial stories. If it's the former, I wonder just how much he actually knows about NSA's capabilities. If it's the latter, I wonder about his motivations.

I'd also like to know just what PRISM is. Is it really an NSA codeword for a data collection program? Or is it merely the name of the unclassified software they use to provide access and project management capabilities for the data they already collect? Does Snowden know? If not, why not?

Snowden has made several other dubious statements, including the suggestion that he could order a wiretap on anyone he wanted, and that he had access to any CIA station. Put this all together, and I think it's reasonable to ask just how much we can trust what Snowden is saying. He's done a public service by shining the spotlight on NSA's activities, but that doesn't mean he gets a pass on tough questioning. I'd like to hear some answers about this stuff.

UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that NSA's own PowerPoint presentation claims that PRISM provides data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft etc. That's true, and it's precisely the problem: Greenwald and Gellman apparently read that and simply passed it along without understanding what it implied. That can lead you badly astray, as it seems to have done here.

This is not a pedantic point. It's absolutely critical. "Direct access" implies that NSA can just root around in Google's servers whenever they want. That's big news. Conversely, a story about how companies transfer information to NSA after they get a court order is a complete nothing. Who cares what technical means are used to transfer data to NSA? What we care about is what kind of information NSA is getting, and nothing in the PRISM story has given us any insight into that.

If Snowden really has the technical chops he claims to have, he should have cleared this up. But Greenwald and Gellman apparently didn't ask about it, and Snowden apparently didn't volunteer anything. (I say "apparently" because I don't know for sure who said what to whom.) This suggests either that Snowden didn't know what this phrase meant or else chose not to explain it properly. Either one raises some red flags.

Yeah, It Was a Thumb Drive

Kevin Drum — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:09:43 +0000

I guess this comes as no surprise:

Former National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden used a computer thumb drive to smuggle highly classified documents out of an NSA facility in Hawaii, using a portable digital device supposedly barred inside the cyber spying agency, U.S. officials said.

....“Of course, there are always exceptions” to the thumb drive ban, a former NSA official said, particularly for network administrators. “There are people who need to use a thumb drive and they have special permission. But when you use one, people always look at you funny.”

Hmmm. "Looking at you funny" doesn't really seem like high-grade security, does it?

On the other hand, what's the answer? Thumb drives these days can be as small as a fingernail, so it's hard to know what kind of measures can keep them out of secure sites completely. And yes, network admins probably do need to use them sometimes. Ironically, this means that the kind of people who probably pose the greatest security threat are also the kind of people who are least invested in NSA's actual mission.

I suppose the answer here is going to be yet another crackdown on thumb drives, as well as a more general crackdown on security in general. This will throw plenty of sand in the gears at NSA, but I have a feeling Snowden might not have a problem with that.

Republicans Really, Really Don't Care About Improving Healthcare

Kevin Drum — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:29:48 +0000

Ramesh Ponnuru argues today that Republicans are foolish for hanging their hats on the likelihood that Obamacare will die a fiery death in 2014, sweeping them into control of Congress and then, two years later, into the presidency. That won't happen, he says. Instead, Obamacare will die a slow, painful, lingering death, and Republicans need to get busy now coming up with a replacement healthcare plan for when that happens. But what should it be?

Congressional Republicans have not reached agreement on what should replace Obamacare, let alone a strategy for enacting that replacement. The best option for replacing Obamacare would be a plan that made it possible for almost everyone in the country to purchase catastrophic insurance (and possible for most people to buy insurance that goes beyond catastrophic coverage) by removing the obstacles that government policy puts in the way of that goal.

A plan to do that would involve six key steps....

I'll spare you the six steps. It's all the usual stuff—catastrophic coverage, high-risk pools, tax reform, etc.—and I think Paul Waldman's response pretty much says what needs to be said:

The biggest problem with this kind of appeal is that he will never, ever get anything beyond a tiny number of Republicans to invest any effort in coming up with a health-care plan. That would involve understanding a complex topic, weighing competing values and considerations against one another, and eventually getting behind something that will be something of a compromise. And let me say it again: They. Just. Don't. Care.

I don't blame Ponnuru and others for trying to get conservatives to embrace some kind of healthcare plan. I think they're kind of crazy to think their proposed plan would (a) work, (b) be politically attractive, or (c) be popular, but maybe that's just my liberal bias talking. What's not my liberal bias talking, however, is the plain fact that conservatives don't care about expanding access to healthcare. As Waldman says, the evidence on this score is overwhelming. They opposed Medicare. They opposed CHIP. They've opposed every expansion of Medicaid ever. Only brutal strongarm tactics got them to support their own president's prescription drug plan, despite the sure knowledge that killing it would likely lose them the White House the following year. And of course, they've opposed every Democratic attempt to pass universal healthcare legislation in the last century.

During that same period, Republicans have never shown any interest in a plan of their own. They periodically put on a show whenever Democrats propose something that looks like it might have legs, but it's purely defensive. When the threat goes away, so does the show. This has happened like clockwork for decades.

There is no way—repeat: no way—to broaden access to healthcare without spending more money. That's something Republicans have never been willing to do, and they're less willing now than ever. Nor is there any way to tap dance around this. You can try, but you'll get caught pretty quickly. There's just no way to square this circle.