In today’s adventure, Julia Ioffe visits the People’s Republic of Donetsk, aka an 11-story concrete building that used to house the Donetsk city administration:

In the press center, we found four gray, doughy men in post-Soviet polyester and a mint-green leather sectional, but no Claudia. In a minute, she blew in, lanyard with propusk around her neck, juggling cell phones and a note book, and looking every bit the busy, important press secretary of a busy and important country.  

“Sergei will do it,” she said and whirled out the door.

Sergei, a 28-year-old itinerant IT worker with bare feet, looked at Max’s Russian press card and my business card. The latter he found puzzling.

“Where’s the stamp?” he asked, turning it over.

I explained there’s no stamp.

Read the rest if you feel in the need for a bit of comic relief in an otherwise bleak situation.

Justin Amash, one of the original sponsors of the House bill that would eliminate the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, voted against the amended version of the act that passed the House today:

Amash said that the bill, which was originally drafted by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., was “so weakened” by behind-the-scenes negotiations that it allows the government to order large swaths of American phone records “without probable cause.” For example, the government could order AT&T to turn over all phone records for a particular area code or for “phone calls made east of the Mississippi,” according to Amash.

Is this true? It’s surprisingly hard to get a good read on it. Marcy Wheeler has written about this several times, and if I’m reading her correctly (not always a good assumption) her objection is based on a two-step interpretation.

First, the amended bill says that records to be collected must be identified by a “specific selection term,” which is defined as “a term used to uniquely describe a person, entity, or account.” The problem here is with the word entity, which can be defined pretty broadly. What’s worse, a later amendment broadened the definition even further to mean “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device.”

Second, specific selection terms are “to be used as the basis for selecting the telephone line or other facility.” The combination of entity and as the basis for could provide a legal basis for very wide record collection. It wouldn’t allow collection of every record, as now allowed, but it could be pretty broad-based.

This is very hard for a layman to parse. It’s enough for the EFF to call the bill “gutted,” while the ACLU—though opposed to the wording changes—continues to support it. But just barely: “Any time they introduce ambiguity, which is what these changes do, that is a very worrying thing for us, because that is what got us here in the first place,” said Patrick Toomey of the ACLU. “Without there being a more precise definition, it seems like they’re opening the door to very bulky collection.”

So perhaps that’s where we are. Our shiny new bill prohibits bulk collection, but keeps the door open for bulky collection. But just how bulky? Unless another Edward Snowden comes along a few years from now, we may never know.

The Wall Street Journal has yet another article today telling us how terrible it is that we’re all still using passwords:

“Passwords are awful and need to be shot,” says Jeremy Grant, head of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a task force created by President Barack Obama in 2011 to bolster online security.

Despite all their flaws, passwords are so ubiquitous, cheap to use and entrenched in the architecture of websites and the rhythm of human behavior that efforts to supplant them have barely budged. “It’s the only piece of technology from 50 years ago we’re still using today,” says Brett McDowell, a senior Internet security adviser at eBay’s PayPal unit.

First things first: McDowell is wrong. We still use keyboards. We use monitors. We use hard drives. We use integrated circuits. Now, you might argue that we use way better versions of those things (except for keyboards, which inexplicably keep getting worse), whereas passwords are mostly just as primitive as they were in 1964. But that’s as far as you can plausibly go.

Anyway. Why do we still use passwords? Answer: for the same reason front doors still use simple locks. They may provide weak security, but they do provide some security, and they’re the only solution that’s both cheap and universal. So if you think it’s scandalous that we’re still using passwords 50 years after they were invented, then prepare to be even more scandalized by front-door locks. That technology is centuries old!

And then prepare to be even more scandalized, because none of the proposed replacements for passwords (fingerprint scanners, gesture identification, face detection, etc.) are either cheap or ubiquitous, and they’re not going to be anytime soon. No matter what your preferred solution is, it needs to become a standard and then get rolled out on every computer in existence. Please note: Not every PC. Every computer. Not every American computer. Every computer in the world.

So quit moaning about all this ancient technology. Passwords are going to be around for a while, no matter what the security gods of Silicon Valley would prefer. In the meantime, if you’re a user, use strong passwords. If you’re a corporation, encrypt your hash databases. If you’re a technology guru, put away the retinal scanners and alpha wave detectors and figure out a clever way to make passwords more secure. Passwords may be here to stay for a while, but they don’t have to be the Achilles’ heel of the entire internet.

Will Democrats boycott the Benghazi committee? Nope. Yesterday Nancy Pelosi announced the five Democratic members of the committee:

• Elijah Cummings of Maryland
• Tammy Duckworth of Illinois
• Linda Sánchez of California
• Adam Schiff of California
• Adam Smith of Washington

This ends days of speculation about a possible boycott, and will probably disappoint a lot of people who didn’t want to provide Republicans with a veneer of respectability for their Benghazi witch hunt. But longtime political leaders rarely withdraw from the political process in order to make a point, so this decision isn’t surprising. The fireworks should begin shortly.

Matt York/AP

A couple of days ago I was emailing with a friend who was bemoaning President Obama’s slow response to the crisis at the Veterans Health Administration. It’s obviously hard to take the other side of that argument, especially since Obama made the poor performance of the VHA a big campaign issue in 2007. Here’s what he said:

It’s time for comprehensive reform. When I am President, building a 21st century VA to serve our veterans will be an equal priority to building a 21st century military to fight our wars. My Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs will be just as important as my Secretary of Defense. No more shortfalls — it’s time to fully fund the VA medical center. No more delays — it’s time to pass on-time VA budgets each and every year. No more means testing — it’s time to allow all veterans back into the VA. I will immediately reverse a policy that led the VA to turn away nearly 1 million middle and low-income veterans since 2003.

Obviously this makes Obama an even bigger target than he would have been anyway. And the charges aimed at the VHA are pretty ugly. They need to be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, I replied that there was more to this than we were getting from the feeding-frenzy stories offered up by the media. Perhaps somebody ought to do a deep dive on the story of the VHA over the past couple of decades? I don’t have the background to do this myself, but in the meantime I’d like to offer a few quick bullet points that anyone writing about the VHA should at least be aware of. Here they are:

• During the Clinton administration, the performance of the VHA was revolutionized under Kenneth Kizer. The old VHA of Born on the 4th of July fame was turned into a top-notch health care provider that garnered great reviews from vets and bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill. The best account of this is Phil Longman’s 2005 article, “Best Care Anywhere.”
• In 1999, Republicans decided to play dumb political games with Kizer’s reappointment. Eventually, with the handwriting on the wall, he chose to leave the VHA.
• Under the Bush administration, some of the VHA’s old problems started to re-emerge, most likely because it no longer had either presidential attention or a great administrator. As early as 2002—before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars made things even worse—claims-processing time skyrocketed from 166 days to 224 days.
• Under the Obama administration, the patient load of the VHA has increased by over a million. Partly this is because of the large number of combat vets returning from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and partly it’s because Obama kept his promise to expand access to the VHA.
• It was inevitable that this would increase wait times, and the VHA’s claims backlog did indeed increase during the first three years of Obama’s presidency. Over the past couple of years, however, wait times have shrunk dramatically. A digital claims system has finally been put in place, and the claims backlog today is less than half what it was at the beginning of 2013.
• What’s more, despite its backlog problems, the VHA still gets high marks from vets. Overall, satisfaction with VHA care is higher than satisfaction with civilian hospitals.
• The most sensational charge against the VHA is that 40 or more vets died while they were waiting for appointments at the VA facilities in Phoenix. But so far there’s no evidence of that. The inspector general investigating the VHA testified last week that of the 17 cases they’ve looked at so far, they haven’t found any incidents of a patient death caused by excessive wait times.
• In February, Republicans killed a bill that would have funded two dozen new medical centers. “I thought that maybe, just on this issue, this Senate could come together and do the right thing for our veterans,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. Nope.

Finally, it’s important to distinguish between complaints about medical care and complaints about access to the VHA system. There are lots of complaints about the latter, partly because the rules about who’s eligible for VA coverage are fairly complex. Both of these things are fair game, but they shouldn’t be confused. They have different causes and different repercussions.

None of this is really meant to exonerate the Obama administration from whatever faults the VHA still has. He’s been president for more than five years, after all. At the same time, the VHA has had a lot of problems for a long time, and their origins span parties, administrations and branches of government. Obama may deserve to get knocked around for not doing more to fix them, but he also deserves credit for finally making significant progress on issues that have festered for decades.

This isn’t a story that deserves to be treated like Benghazi 2.0. Leave that to Fox News. If you’re going to tell this story, you need to tell it all, both good and bad.

I have to schlep up to Anaheim for an extensive pulmonary exam this morning, and then I’ve got another one after lunch. So blogging will be pretty light for the rest of the day. I’ll try to catch up this evening.

Via TPM, here’s the latest proposal from the Republican Party in its agriculture and food safety bill:

In a surprising twist, the bill language specifies that only rural areas are to benefit in the future from funding requested by the administration this year to continue a modest summer demonstration program to help children from low-income households — both urban and rural — during those months when school meals are not available.

Since 2010, the program has operated from an initial appropriation of $85 million, and the goal has been to test alternative approaches to distribute aid when schools are not in session. The White House asked for an additional $30 million to continue the effort, but the House bill provides $27 million for what’s described as an entirely new pilot program focused on rural areas only.

Democrats were surprised to see urban children were excluded. And the GOP had some trouble explaining the history itself. But a spokeswoman confirmed that the intent of the bill is a pilot project in “rural areas” only.

I guess that is surprising. Usually Republicans are a little more subtle in their contempt for poor people in urban areas. But now they’re being completely up-front about it. Poor white kids will get extra money for meals when school is out of session. Poor black kids won’t. I’m not surprised that Republicans had a hard time explaining this. So did Donald Sterling.

The wonks at The Monkey Cage think Republicans have a 77 percent chance of taking the Senate in November. The wonks at The Upshot think Republicans have only a 43 percent chance of taking the Senate. The wonks at 538 seem to think it’s close to a toss-up.

So I don’t know what to think. I guess we’ll have to wait for the actual election to happen. How very 20th century.

From John Boehner, addressing the issue of a war between the tea party and the GOP establishment:

There’s not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican.

Correct. Not anymore, anyway. There was a war between the establishment and the tea party, but the tea party won a pretty resounding victory. There may still be establishment types and Ted Cruz types in the GOP, but the Republican Party as a whole has adopted the tea party line lock, stock, and extremely smoking barrel. It’s been as total a victory as you’re ever likely to see in the real world.

There are always going to be candidates who are more or less rightward, but that’s just normal politics, not a war. The war is over. Nationally speaking, the Republican Party is now all but indistinguishable from the crowds that rallied to the tea party banner in the spring of 2009.

Fracking got a big setback today when a new analysis from the federal government reduced the estimated recoverable reserves of California’s Monterey Shale formation by 96 percent:

Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

….The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza, reducing the nation’s need for foreign oil imports through the use of the latest in extraction techniques, including acid treatments, horizontal drilling and fracking.

Easy come, easy go.