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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.

Supreme Court: Arizona Law Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote Is Unconstitutional

AJ Vicens — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:27:49 +0000

The US Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona law that required people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The case, Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, concerned Arizona's Proposition 200, which was passed by voters in 2004 during the fight over President George W. Bush's immigration reform proposal. The now-defunct law required new voters to prove that they're citizens during the voter registration process. That proof could be in the form of a driver's license number, a copy of a birth certificate, a copy of a passport, copies of naturalization documents, a Bureau of Indian Affairs card number, a tribal treaty card number, or a tribal enrollment number.

Unfortunately, millions of US citizens—mostly poor and elderly people—lack documentary evidence of their citizenship. Because of that, thousands of US citizens who should otherwise have been able to vote—31,000, according to the American Civil Liberties Union—were denied access to the ballot box under Proposition 200.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires only that potential voters check a box on a form attesting that they are citizens and eligible to vote. During oral arguments before the high court in March, the groups challenging Proposition 200 said that the federal voter registration law and the stricter Arizona law were incompatible, and the federal statute should take precedence. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, defending Proposition 200, said the federal requirement was "essentially an honor system" and that the two laws should be allowed to coexist. The Supreme Court decided the anti-Proposition 200 forces were right, and the federal law trumped Arizona's.

But voting rights advocates aren't out of the woods yet. At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston notes that although the justices ruled that the state's requirements were out of line with federal election law, states that want to require potential voters to provide proof of citizenship may still be able to convince the Election Assistance Commission or Congress to implement such a requirement. The court also said that states could claim they had a constitutional right to require proof of citizenship for voter registration—an argument Arizona did not make in this particular case. In other words, there's a strong chance that Arizona or any other state that wants to could eventually get strict proof-of-citizenship requirements into law.

"The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing, because that part of [Justice Antonin Scalia's] opinion laid a very heavy stress on the power of states under the Constitution to decide who gets to vote," Denniston wrote.

Arizona voting rights advocates will also have to deal with a batch of election-reform bills sitting on Republican Gov. Jan Brewer's desk right now that could derail mail-ballot collection drives and purge the state's permanent early voting list.

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."

Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

Erika Eichelberger — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:18:03 +0000

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms. Financial reformers say this is dangerous because markets are global, and a bad bet made by a US bank operating in another country could easily affect banks in the US and cause the US economy to crash again. Bad for America, but good for banks that want to avoid tough new rules. Perhaps that's why lawmakers who received more money from banks and the finance industry in recent years were more likely to vote in favor of the bill. House members who supported the bill received more than twice as much in contributions from the financial industry over the past two years as lawmakers who voted against it, according to a new analysis from the MapLight Foundation, an independent research group that tracks campaign finance.

Interest groups supporting the bill, including securities and investment companies, banks, and chambers of commerce, contributed an average of 102 percent more to House members who supported the bill than to those who voted no. Check it out:

Democratic House members who voted yes on the bill received 75 percent more money from from the financial services industry than Democrats who voted no.

In 2011 and 2012, groups that supported this bill gave five times more to House members than groups that opposed the bill did. The gap was even larger for donations to Democrats. Over those two years, House Democrats received less than $250,000 from interests that opposed this measure. During the same time period, groups in favor of allowing the banks to skirt regulation gave Dems 28 times as much—close to $7 million. Here's what that looks like:

What's remarkable is that some Democrats held firm. Although the bill passed the House last week by a vote of 301 to 124, most Democrats voted against it, which financial reformers say is a significant turn of events. "A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill...even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide," Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told Mother Jones after the vote last week. "I'm pretty psyched."

Is This Conservative Think Tank Astroturfing the EPA To Approve Pebble Mine?

Kate Sheppard — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:09:57 +0000

Are pro-mining forces trying to sway the Environmental Protection Agency on Pebble Mine?

Last month, I reported on the potential environmental threats posed by the massive proposed gold and copper mine in Alaska. The EPA conducted a watershed analysis, released in April, that showed that the mine would endanger rivers and the Bristol Bay, as well as the region's salmon fishery. The EPA extended the comment period through the end of June, allowing more time for the public to weigh in.

A number of organizations, both pro- and anti-Pebble, had circulated mass mailings asking supporters to comment. You've seen the type; they're form letters that people can sign onto via email. As of Friday, pro-mining groups had generated 118,294 comments from those mass mailings. But 117,401 of those comments—or 99.25 percent—came from a single group called Resourceful Earth. Here's a sample of one of its letters:

I am writing to voice my strong opposition to the EPA’s draft watershed assessment for the vast Bristol Bay region of Alaska because it sets a dangerous precedent, is wholly unnecessary, and relies on dubious source material from biased anti-mining organizations and scientists that recently admitted to falsifying reports submitted in legal proceedings.

Resourceful Earth is a project of the conservative think-tank Competitive Enterprise Institute. Started in 2011, the project's mission is to "promote access to natural resources and oppose special interests that abuse the regulatory process to lock up the raw materials of prosperity." CEI is generally opposed to environmental regulations, and has taken millions of dollars over the years from industry like ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and groups associated with the Koch brothers. CEI was critical of the EPA the last time the agency used the Clean Water Act to block a permit for a coal mine in West Virginia (which is what activists in Alaska are asking it to do on Pebble).

CEI President Fred Smith also signed onto a letter from conservative groups opposing the assessment of Pebble sent to the EPA on June 4. Other groups signing onto that letter include Americans for Limited Government, Americans for Prosperity, and Americans for Tax Reform.

The Save Bristol Bay coalition—which is working to block Pebble Mine—tallied all the comments from the EPA's docket. As of Friday, the agency had received 424,492 comments. The vast majority—306,198—were against the mine and in support of the EPA's evaluation of the risks. Many of those came from major environmental groups as well, including Trout Unlimited, Earthworks, and the Sierra Club.

7 New Revelations From Edward Snowden

Dana Liebelson — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:05:52 +0000

Today, the Guardian hosted a live chat with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who disclosed classified information about top-secret NSA surveillance programs. Readers and journalists asked the 29-year-old, who was reportedly chatting over a secure internet connection, about his departure to Hong Kong, his new disclosures on the US hacking foreign countries, and his thoughts on the Obama administration. Here are the seven most significant revelations:

1. Snowden denies having any contact with the Chinese government…in colorful language.

Because Snowden is allegedly taking refuge in Hong Kong and recently disclosed information about US cyberattacks on China, he was asked whether he's prepared to make a deal with the Chinese government in exchange for amnesty. Snowden insists that he has not had any contact with the Chinese government. He adds, "I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous." He also says that "the US media has a knee-jerk 'RED CHINA!' reaction…If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now." Snowden did not address the close relationship between the Chinese government and its military, business, and civilian institutions.

2. Snowden suggests that the NSA reviews the email and phone calls of Americans on a daily basis, without a warrant. But then he says there are some protections against this, even if the security measures are weak.

Addressing a question on whether the NSA can listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant, Snowden says, "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." Snowden adds that the only thing protecting Americans' email is changing policy protections—which he says he doesn't trust—and a filter that "is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the 'widest allowable aperture,' and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border."

3. When the NSA taps into email, it collects content (not just metadata).

"If I target for example an email address…and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time—and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants."

4. He doesn't say whether the NSA listens in to calls without an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Asked what advice he would give whistleblowers and "what evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit and defined court order from FISC?" Snowden simply said, "this country is worth dying for."

5. He claims that NSA warrants aren't real.

"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."

6. He explains why he decided not to go to Iceland.

"I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration."

7. He says there's more information about "direct access" coming.

Tech companies deny that the NSA has "direct access" to their servers, but Snowden claims that "more detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming."

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.

VIDEO: "Daily Show" Investigates Ag Gag Laws

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:35 +0000

Last Thursday, The Daily Show did a segment on the wave of "ag gag" laws sweeping the country. The laws aim to prevent whistleblowing on animal cruelty, but supporters of the legislation claim that videos released by animal rights groups are heavily edited, often just document standard industry practice, and that the production of undercover videos is motivated by profit-seeking animal rights groups. "Animal activism is a huge business…one that's almost somewhat completely dwarfed by the US agriculture industry," says Al Madrigal during the segment.

Watch the segment here:

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And read Ted Genoways' cover story, "Gagged By Big Ag," in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

Has Your State Outlawed Blowing the Whistle on Factory Farm Abuses?

Zaineb Mohammed — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:33 +0000

You've heard about things like pink slime, or contaminated slaughterhouses, cruelty on factory farms. But did you know that there's a trend to criminalize those who expose such conditions? In his MoJo cover story, Ted Genoways found that "ag gag" laws have cropped up with increasing frequency in the past few years. Outlawing things like creating recordings at animal facilities or obtaining employment under false pretenses, these laws are intended to make it more difficult for activists and journalists to investigate and report animal abuses. In 2011, five ag-gag laws were proposed and two passed. In 2013, 14 were introduced, and seven including a quick reporting provision mandating that witnesses of animal abuse at must report it within one to three days or face criminal charges themselves. The effect is to make it much harder to report systemic abuse or other dangerous conditions. The map below shows where these laws have passed, failed, or are currently pending, along with details about what specifically these bills have tried or succeeded in outlawing.

Don't Squeal

Which states have ag gag provisions?

Passed

Pending

Failed

If you see don't see a map on the first try, please reload.

Are Conservatives More Likely Than Liberals to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

Chris Mooney — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:31 +0000

Ever since Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger's pioneering work on doomsday cults in the 1950s, the concept of cognitive dissonance has been well established in psychology and even, to some extent, embedded in public consciousness. Basically, when the mind is faced with an idea that is threatening to one's identity or sense of self—an idea that induces unpleasant dissonance—one tends to try to either avoid the thought or, perhaps, reinterpret it into something unthreatening or positive. Thus, in Festinger's landmark work, a doomsday cult interpreted the failure of the world to end on the precise day they had predicted as evidence that their beliefs were right in the first place!

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck

The Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans

The More Republicans Know About Politics, the More They Believe Conspiracy Theories

There's No Such Thing As the Liberal War on Science

But do liberals and conservatives differ in their tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance? Suggestive evidence from past research suggests they might. For instance, a study of voters in the 2000 election by Stanford public opinion specialist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues found that although Republicans and conservatives were more interested in learning information about George W. Bush than about Al Gore, Democratic and liberal voters had no such political preference.

In a recent study in PLOS One, an online academic journal, the psychologist Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues at New York University set out to explicitly test whether conservatives are more likely than liberals to avoid the unsettling sensation of cognitive dissonance. For the experiment, they asked George W. Bush and Barack Obama supporters to write an essay supporting the president whom they had already said they opposed. It was a test, as the study's instructions instructions put it, of "the ability to craft logical arguments arguing positions you may not personally endorse."

Importantly, the study sometimes presented writing the essay as a choice—which is more likely to arouse dissonance—and other times presented it as an assignment. As a control, the participants were put through the same routine by being asked to write essays on a nonpolitical issue: How they felt about Macs vs. PCs.

Sure enough, the results yielded a significant partisan difference in the willingness to write the essay—but only when the essay was political (not about Macs vs. PCs) and only when writing it was presented a choice, not an assignment. In that context, the results were rather stunning: Not a single Bush supporter was willing to write a pro-Obama essay. That's 0 out of 28 Bush supporters overall. Obama supporters didn't like writing pro Bush essays much either, but they were a lot more willing in general: 20 out of 71 did so, or 28 percent overall. (The study sample, obtained through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, contained more liberals than conservatives.)

In fact, some conservatives sounded rather miffed after taking the study, leaving comments like: "Not for all the tea in China would I write that." In contrast, note the study authors, some liberals seemed to revel in the assignment. "This was fun!" as one put it.

The same finding arose—but less sharply—in a second study, when the presidents involved were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, rather than Bush and Obama. Here, 13 out of 58 Clinton supporters—or 22 percent—wrote essays supporting Reagan, whereas just 3 out of 30—or 10 percent—of Reagan fans bothered to extoll Clinton. (The authors hypothesized that the response might have been different in this case because both former presidents are now quite well regarded, their reputations much more insulated from the partisanship of the current political moment.)

Like responsible scientists, the study authors noted factors other than the obvious one that could have contributed to their results—e.g., maybe liberals just enjoy the opportunity to be devil's advocates more than conservatives do. Or maybe it's really true (as much other research suggests) that the left-right divide reflects a deeper divide in psychology.

Liberals and conservatives did look almost identical when they were required to write the dissonance-inducing essay, rather than having a choice about the matter. When people are required to think positively about their political foes, they will, says NYU's Van Bavel. It isn't impossible, then—just something that happens far too rarely.

Did a Slave Process the Shrimp in Your Scampi?

Tom Philpott — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:30 +0000

Over the past 20 years, the rapid rise of South Asian shrimp farms has transformed our relationship to the tasty crustaceans, shifting it from an occasional luxury to an all-you-can-eat commodity *. Twenty years ago, most of our shrimp came from domestic wild fisheries. Today, we import 90 percent of it, almost all of it farmed. But who works on these foreign farms and processing facilities—and under what conditions? A new briefing paper by the well-respected International Labor Rights Forum and the Warehouse Workers United (WWU) alleges serious labor abuses, including illegal use of underage workers, at the Thai shrimp producer Narong Seafood, at least until recently a major supplier of Walmart and a leading shrimp processor for the US market, according to a recent analysis by the consultancy Accenture for Humanity United.

Narong, for its part, disputes the charges in the report. "We insist that Narong is against child labor or any unfair treatment to our staff or workers," a company official wrote in an emailed statement.

Continue Reading »

Bitchin Bajas "Bitchitronics" Is a Mesmerizing Head Trip

Jon Young — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:30 +0000

Track 4: "Turiya"
From Bitchin Bajas' Bitchitronics
Drag City

Liner notes: Looking for a safe, legal head trip? Take a journey through the canyons of your mind on this mesmerizing 16-minute epic, which finds surprising variety in oozing synthesizer sounds.

Behind the music: Originally a solo side venture of Cooper Crain from the rowdier Chicago band Cave, Bitchin Bajas became a duo with the addition of Mahjongg's Dan Quinlivan. With four tracks spanning 44 minutes, Bitchitronics was recorded primarily in a house in Fennville, Michigan.

Check it out if you like: Brain-melting electronic pioneers such as Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, and Can.

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.

"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He'd Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on the Show

Asawin Suebsaeng — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:25:04 +0000

Armando Iannucci, the acclaimed satirist and creator of the HBO comedy Veep, is a self-described longtime politics geek. When he was growing up in a Scottish-Italian household in Glasgow, he stayed up late to watch American election results—the first US presidential election he watched with a budding fascination was in 1976, when Carter trumped Ford. His childhood attraction to observing UK and US politics evidently carried over into adulthood. The 49-year-old writer/director has a number of well-regarded political satires under his belt, and he's influenced such comic darlings as Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ricky Gervais.

Since the mid-1990s, Iannucci has been noted for a patented mold of rollicking commentary—a brand of comedy that takes mischievous deromanticization of political elites, and filters it through his rapid-fire sardonicism. (Prime examples are his work in British television including The Day Today and The Thick of It, and the latter's brilliant 2009 spin-off film In the Loop.) Many of his scripts are famous for their blitzes of carefully constructed, linguistically acrobatic profanity that's acidic enough to qualify as minor human rights abuses.

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Is BPA Making Girls Obese?

Maddie Oatman — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:39:49 +0000

A chemical common in food packaging—Bisphenol-A (BPA)—has for years been scrutinized for potential links to reproductive problems, heart disease, cancer, and even anxiety. And now new research suggests BPA, which leeches out from things like aluminum cans, drink straws, plastic packaging, and even cashier's receipts, could increase the risk for obesity in preteen girls.

A Kaiser Permanente study, published this week in PLOS ONE, examined obesity and BPA levels in a group of Chinese school children. While most of the kids were not significantly effected by the chemical, 9-12 year-old girls with high BPA levels in their urine were found to be twice as likely to be obese than other girls their age. In girls with especially high levels (more than 10 micrograms per liter) the risk of obesity was five times as great.

This isn't the first study to reveal BPA's particular effect on girls. My colleague Jaeah Lee explored how girls exposed to the chemical as fetuses were more likely to be anxious and depressed than boys, and another study on rhesus monkeys revealed how it messes with the reproductive system. So why are women more susceptible to the chemical?

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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.