Political MoJo

The Center for Advanced Study of Language near the University of Maryland, College Park.

Since the Guardian revealed Edward Snowden as the source behind its explosive scoops on National Security Agency surveillance, media outlets have been picking over the details of the whistleblower's life, everything from his stint in community college to the identity of his abandoned girlfriend. Here's another small detail about his background that intrigued some people: "[H]e got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency's covert facilities at the University of Maryland." Some reporters were surprised to learn that the University of Maryland had a "covert" NSA facility operating somewhere on or near the school grounds. (The NSA itself is headquartered in nearby Fort Meade, Maryland.)

On Sunday, the Diamondback, the university's student newspaper, noted: "Which facility and exactly where it was Snowden worked is unknown, but the NSA has connections to several university facilities, including the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the Office of Technology Commercialization and the Lab for Telecommunication Science." Later, the university confirmed that in 2005 Snowden worked for less than a year as a "security specialist" for the NSA-linked Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), which serves as a research center for the intelligence community.

The research done at CASL ranges from cultural and linguistic studies to work on "spycraft" technology (click here to read a rundown of the Center's language research, published in the NSA's quarterly online journal). One neuroscience project reportedly focused on filling in the blanks of incomplete texts, such as documents from corrupted hard drives or intercepted communications. "CASL's cognitive neuroscience team has been studying the cognitive basis of working memory's capacity for filling in incomplete areas of text," a CASL document reads. "They have made significant headway in this research by using a powerful high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) machine acquired in 2006." Another project involved training subjects to control their own brain-wave activity.

The university administration has touted its NSA partnership. "In support of the nation's critical need for increased language capabilities, this Center will conduct groundbreaking research in areas such as language acquisition, contextual analysis of language, and human computer interaction and computer translation, and become the largest center for language study in the world," C.D. Mote, Jr., former president of the university, announced in September 2003.

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

With less than a week before New York State lawmakers go home for the summer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) unveiled his own bill on Tuesday to curb Albany's streak of political corruption scandals and battle the state's big-money politics. Cuomo's bill would make it easier to convict someone for bribing public officials and ban anyone convicted of public corruption from ever again working in government. It would expand the state's voter registration period, beef up the enforcement of election laws, and let 16- and 17-year-olds pre-register to vote.

But it is the third piece of Cuomo's bill that campaign reformer types care about most. That piece calls for a public financing system for all New York State elections in which small donations up to $175 would be matched $6 to $1 with public money. The intent here is clear: Nudge candidates running for state Assembly and Senate to collect more two- and three-figure donations as opposed to courting wealthy donors who can legally give five- and six-figure donations under New York's lax election laws. "Governor Cuomo's proposal builds upon a small-donor matching fund system that has proven effective in New York City," says Michael Malbin, the director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. "CFI's research shows the incentives work to get candidates to make low-dollar donors the financial backbones of their campaigns."

Foes of super-PACs and big-money politics see public financing as the best fix to today's money-soaked political system. And since a divided Congress won't take up public financing, public financing supporters believe the states give them the best shot at new reforms. Fair Elections for New York, a coalition of unions, good-government groups, and more, have invested heavily in passing a statewide public financing bill in New York, which they see as the marquee fight in the today's political money wars. "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere," was how Nick Nyhart, president of the reform group Public Campaign, put it last year.

By introducing his own bill, Cuomo is signaling to resistant Republican lawmakers that he wants public financing before the current session ends. The governor is also showing his liberal allies that he's still entrenched in this fight, at least publicly.

Yet the prospects for reform in New York are not good. The Democratic-controlled state Assembly has already passed a public financing bill like Cuomo's, but the state Senate is run by a motley coalition of Republicans and so-called independent Democrats, and Senate Republicans have no interest in public financing. Despite several analyses showing a modest price tag for public financing of statewide elections, state Sen. Dean Skelos, the Senate GOP's leader, said he'd rather invest the money in "education, infrastructure, job creation, child care—there are a lot of areas that we can use that money for."

Even Cuomo questioned whether major corruption or campaign reforms could pass before the legislature adjourns next week. Calling his bill "needed" and "overdue," he added: "I would not say that I see an especially easy glide path to passage for this bill."

The action around public financing isn't just in New York. On Wednesday morning, 10 leaders of liberal groups pressed top Democratic lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to unite behind a national public financing bill for Congressional elections. Read their full letter here.

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The big problem facing legal challenges to the National Security Agency's surveillance powers has always been standing—the legal requirement that, before you can sue, you must prove you've been harmed. The trouble with proving that you've been illegally spied on is that who gets spied on is generally secret. In Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court court ruled that a collection of journalists and advocates lacked standing to sue the NSA for warrantless wiretapping because they couldn't prove that they had, in fact, been spied on. In Al-Haramain v. Obama, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Islamic charity that had been wiretapped couldn't challenge the surveillance in court because the documents it had been inadvertently provided that did prove wiretapping were state secrets and thus inadmissible. (The case was remanded back to the lower court, Al-Haramain tried again, and was finally defeated by the Ninth Circuit in 2012.)

But now, thanks to the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the ACLU thinks it has an in. The leaked documents specifically implicate Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. as providing metadata from phone calls to government databases. The ACLU is a client of Verizon Business Network Services—and the government has already declassified the existence of its program to gather phone data, so it will have trouble claiming that the program is a state secret. On Tuesday, the ACLU filed suit in federal court to "obtain a declaration that Mass Call Tracking is unlawful" and "to enjoin the government from continuing the Mass Call Tracking under the VBNS order."

Here's the suit:

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It's not exactly front-page news that money from business groups have a big influence in judicial elections these days. State supreme court elections have become more contested, more nasty and much more expensive over the past decade as business groups have sought to make state courts more friendly to industry. But a new report from the American Constitution Society, a liberal legal organization, shows a few interesting developments in how all this money in judicial elections is playing out.

The study found the obvious correlation between campaign contributions from businesses and business-friendly judicial decisions. A judge who got a quarter of her contributions from business could be expected to cast pro-business votes in 62 percent of the cases that come before her. But here's the rub: after crunching the data, the study's authors found that large campaign contributions from business interests had a bigger impact on Democrats' decisions than they did on Republicans'—a sign, perhaps that corporate America is wasting its money on GOP judicial candidates who are already pro-business to begin with.

In judicial elections, the most highly contested and expensive races in 2010 and 2012 came in partisan elections, and the money tended to come largely from two groups: business interests and other lawyers, typically trial lawyers. (Union money, interestingly, is almost nowhere to be found in judicial elections.) But the trial lawyers' contributions, which in the late 1980s were the impetus for the business community to get involved in judicial elections in the first place, now pale by comparison to what industry spends. The ACS study found that business groups' spending on TV advertising dwarfed that of interests on the other side. Business groups spent $1.68 for every $1 they donated to an actual campaign, whereas for every $1 that lawyers and lobbyists gave to a judicial candidate's campaign, they spent a mere 26 cents on critical TV ads.

Another thing stands out in the new study's findings: Not all elections are created equal, and the report offers a way to end the potential threat of campaign money to an independent judiciary. In states where a governor appoints a state supreme court justice who then stands every few years for a nonpartisan retention election—an up or down vote on the fate of the single judge—ACS found that there was very little campaign money involved in the races. Justices in retention elections raised 40 times less money than those facing partisan elections, and there was no relationship between contributions to retained judges and their voting patterns. Only nine states elect their judges in partisan elections (almost all of them in the South or other poor states like West Virginia and Michigan), and they've been the primary battlegrounds for deep-pocketed interests groups. If those states switched to retention elections and merit appointments, the judicial election arms race would mostly come to an end.

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