The American Bear

› Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Documents Are Not Widely Available On Web

The Senate Security Office sent an email around the Hill Friday afternoon asking Senate employees and contractors to try to ignore the fact that top-secret, highly-classified documents are now floating around the Web freely (and, in the case of a terribly designed NSA Powerpoint, getting facelifts.) The email asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already read them.

› The Food Stamp Fight | Dean Baker

Congress is debating whether to cut the Food Stamp program, the government’s main nutrition program for low-income families. The coverage of this debate is a great example of “fraternity reporting,” that is reporting that shows you are a member of the reporters fraternity but has nothing to do with informing the audience.

We see this by the convention of referring to the $80 billion annual budget for the program (here for example). It is standard practice to refer to the dollar amount being spent on the program, pretending that this is actually providing information to readers.

As a practical matter, almost no one has a clear sense of how much much $80 billion a year is. They don’t have their heads in budget documents. (Yes, I know the Post has a well-educated readership, but it doesn’t matter.) It would mean pretty much the same thing to the vast majority of readers if the number was $8 billion or $800 billion. Often budget numbers appear without even telling the readers the number of years being covered.

If the standard practice was to write the numbers as a percent of total spending it would be providing actual information to a large percentage of its readers. In this case, current spending on Food Stamps is a bit over 2.2 percent of total spending. This figure is bloated by the downturn, since people qualify for benefits based on their income and many of the unemployed or underemployed qualify. (Contrary to Republican claims, President Obama did not ease the eligibility rules for food stamps.) The projections show that spending on food stamps will fall to 1.2 percent of the budget over the next decade as unemployment falls back to more normal levels.

It would be useful if we had a debate based on an informed public, with the country actually having a sense of how much food stamps and other programs cost. However, as long as fraternity reporting is the norm, large segments of the public will continue to believe that half of the budget is going to pay for food stamps.

› Congress Moves Toward Full Trade Embargo on Iran | LobeLog

Congress moved closer here Wednesday to imposing a full trade embargo against Iran and pledged its support to Israel if it felt compelled to attack Tehran’s nuclear programme in self-defence.

The Senate voted 99-0 to adopt a resolution that urged President Barack Obama to fully enforce existing economic sanctions against Iran and to “provide diplomatic, military and economic support” to Israel “in its defense of its territory, people and existence”.

Washington, it said, should support Israel “in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force” if Israel “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

The measure also re-affirmed the official policy of the administration of President Barack Obama that it would take whatever action necessary to “prevent” Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Republican-led House of Representatives unanimously approved new sanctions legislation that, if passed into law, would blacklist foreign countries or companies that fail to reduce their oil imports from Iran to virtually nil within 180 days.

The same bill would expand the current blacklisting of companies that do business with Iran’s financial sector to include those engaged in the country’s automotive and mining sectors, as well.

In perhaps its most controversial section, the bill also eliminates President Obama’s ability to waive most sanctions for national-interest or national-security reasons. [++]

› The Folks Who Brought You Military Detention in the NDAA Are Rewriting the AUMF | emptywheel

Yesterday, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced a hearing to revisit the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force. In addition to a bunch of DOD figures (but not the recently departed Jeh Johnson, the DOD-connected person who said the most interesting things about the AUMF), it’ll have (I’ve linked their most salient comments on the AUMF):

Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Geoffrey Corn, Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law

Jack Goldsmith, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch

Charles Stimson, Manager, National Security Law Program, The Heritage Foundation

Curiously, John Bellinger who (as far as I understand) started the discussion of a new AUMF is not slated to testify. Also note that the Deputy Director of Special Operations for Counterterrorism will testify, but no one from CIA is scheduled to; while JSOC can operate under the President’s inherent authority, it likely prefers the legal cover of an AUMF (and therefore may be one of the entities pushing for an AUMF that matches reality on the ground).

Politico reports that this hearing is more than speculative: Levin and no-longer-SASC-Ranking-Member-but-he-might-as-well-be John McCain are planning to rewrite the AUMF, with help from Bob Corker, Dick Durbin, and Lindsey “all detainees must be military” Graham.

And if the inclusion of Graham in that group doesn’t scare you, remember that this crowd is substantively the same one that enshrined military detention in 2012’s NDAA. While that effort might be regarded as “reasonable” Carl Levin and John McCain’s attempt to present something more reasonable than House Armed Services Committee Buck McKeon was pushing for, and while the NDAA originally included exceptions for US citizens, in the event, the White House pushed Carl Levin to effectively rubber stamp its claims to unlimited authority, including detaining (or killing) US citizens.

[…]

Ultimately, though, what is likely to happen with this debate is that all players will be unwilling to discuss openly what we’ve actually been doing in the name of war against al Qaeda, up to and including waging war in the “homeland.” That’s one thing the 2001 AUMF was written to exclude. And I can almost guarantee you, it’s an authority the President will want to preserve.

› Senate committee advances bill to prevent warantless email searches | guardian.co.uk

A bipartisan committee voted on Thursday to advance a bill to clamp down on warrantless government searches of email and other private electronic information.

The bill seeks to modify the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and require government and law enforcement agencies to get a judge’s approval in most cases in order to access electronic communications. A vote is now expected next month, but while the bill has cross-party support law officials, regulators and some senators are pushing for amendments to weaken its impact.

Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, co-sponsor of the bill with Utah’s Republican senator Mike Lee, said: “I think Americans are very concerned about unwanted intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace. There’s no question if someone wants to go into your house and go through your files and draws you are going to need a search warrant. But if you have those same files in the cloud you ought to have the same sense of privacy.”

› ACLU: CISPA Is Dead (For Now)

CISPA is all but dead, again.

The controversial cybersecurity bill known as the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives last week, will almost certainly be shelved by the Senate, according to a representative of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

The bill would have allowed the federal government to share classified “cyber threat” information with companies, but it also provided provisions that would have allowed companies to share information about specific users with the government.* Privacy advocates also worried that the National Security Administration would have gotten involved.

“We’re not taking [CISPA] up,” the committee representative says. “Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., chairman of the committee, said the passage of CISPA was “important,” but said the bill’s “privacy protections are insufficient.”

* This is goodish news. However, “provisions that would have allowed companies to share information about specific users with the government” already exist, without CISPA, thanks to the Obama DOJ: U.S. gives big, secret push to Internet surveillance | CNET

h/t quickhits

› House passes controversial “cybersecurity” bill CISPA in 288-127 vote | Ars Technica

The United States House of Representatives approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) [Thursday] by a comfortable 288 to 127 margin. Almost half of the House’s Democrats joined 196 Republicans in supporting the measure.

The legislation grants companies broad legal immunity when they share information related to online threats with one another and with the federal government. Advocates argue that the legislation is needed to allow companies to quickly and efficiently share information in order to help secure their networks.

But critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation describe the legislation as an attack on user privacy. They worry that companies will use the broad immunity offered by CISPA to ignore other laws that protect consumer privacy. And in a veto threat issued on Tuesday, the White House echoed these arguments.

“The bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities,” the Obama administration said on Tuesday.

“The US House just passed CISPA, undermining the privacy of millions of Internet users,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a tweet. “Now we take this fight to the Senate.”

“I voted against #CISPA because it does not adequately protect the civil liberties of Americans,” Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) tweeted. “People deserve both privacy and security.”

So far, the CISPA debate has been a repeat of last year’s legislative process. An earlier version of CISPA passed the House in 2012 despite the objection of civil liberties groups, but companion legislation got bogged down in the Senate.

› The Definition of Insanity: Democrats Working to Undermine Financial Regulation | Notes on a Theory...

Erika Eichelberger has a great and depressing story on how some Democrats (and more Republicans), are trying to weaken the major financial regulation legislation Dodd-Frank, passed in response to the financial crisis, before it takes full effect. This massive legislation requires a great deal of administrative rule making to implement it

A group of 21 House lawmakers—including eight Democrats—is pushing seven separate bills that would dramatically scale back financial reform. The proposed laws, which are scheduled to come before the House financial-services committee for consideration in mid-April, come straight on the heels of a major Senate investigation that revealed that JP Morgan Chase had lost $6 billion dollars by cooking its books and defying regulators—who themselves fell asleep on the job. Why the move to gut Wall Street reform so soon? Financial-reform advocates say Democrats might be supporting deregulation because of a well-intentioned misunderstanding of the laws, which lobbyists promise are consumer-friendly. But, reformers add, it could also have something to do with Wall Street money.

“The default position of many members of Congress is to do what Wall Street wants. They are a main source of funding,” says Bartlett Naylor, a financial-policy expert at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “These are relatively complicated [bills]. It’s easy to come to the misunderstanding that they are benign.”

This challenges two narratives about the problems in Congress among the left leaning. First, is the idea that Republicans are solely responsible for what’s wrong, and Democrats are well-meaning but sometimes forced to doing bad things by Republicans. But that’s not the case here. This isn’t about deal making, it’s not about the filibuster. The other narrative is that the problem with the Democrats is the so-called corporate Democrats, those who often represented marginal or red districts / states.

Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), both of whom are members of the lefty House progressive caucus, [my emphasis] cosponsored the Inter-Affiliate Swap Clarification Act along with two Republicans. Moore and Fudge’s bill would allow certain derivatives that are traded among a corporation’s various affiliates to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a major Wall Street regulator, just issued its final rule on these products on Monday, and although the rule includes many exemptions, reform advocates say it is still stronger than what Fudge and Moore’s legislation proposes.

Fudge advocated for the bill “because it came at request of corporations and businesses in our district,” says Belinda Prinz, a spokeswoman for the congresswoman.

These are not your typical villains.

This is all bad policy and bad politics. But it strikes me that this episode gives us a window into the larger problem. To run a typical campaign, members need money. In certain moments, people are mobilized, watching them, and members will be more likely to do the right thing. But we tend to focus too much on formal decision-making, especially on legislation, and we miss that decisions are just a moment within a larger political process. But the powerful make no such mistake. And they are the ones those members must rely on the fund their campaigns. No doubt it’s easy to convince themselves that what they are doing does not undermine reform. [++]

› A Look Back at Congressional Oversight of Intelligence, 2011-2012 | Secrecy News

Several nuggets of interest are presented in the latest biennial report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, summarizing the Committee’s oversight activities in the 112th Congress:

* The Director of National Intelligence abruptly cancelled a multi-year effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud computing.

* Under criticism that the number of intelligence contractor personnel has grown too high, too fast, intelligence agencies have been cutting the number of contractors they employ or converting contractors to government employees. But some of those agencies have continued to hire additional contractors at the same time, resulting in net growth in the size of the intelligence contractor workforce.

* A written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every quarter.

The March 22 report also provides some fresh details of the long-awaited and still unreleased Committee study on CIA’s detention and interrogation program. That 6,000 page study, which was completed in July 2012 and approved by the Committee in December 2012, is divided into three volumes, as described in the report:

“I. History and Operation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. This volume is divided chronologically into sections addressing the establishment, development, and evolution of the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

“II. Intelligence Acquired and CIA Representations on the Effectiveness of the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. This volume addresses the intelligence attributed to CIA detainees and the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically focusing on CIA representations on how the CIA detention and interrogation program was operated and managed, as well as the effectiveness of the interrogation program. It includes sections on CIA representations to the Congress, the Department of Justice, and the media.”

“III. Detention and Interrogation of Detainees. This volume addresses the detention and interrogation of all known CIA detainees, from the program’s inception to its official end, on January 22, 2009, to include information on their capture, detention, interrogation, and conditions of confinement. It also includes extensive information on the CIA’s management, oversight, and day-to-day operation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” according to the report’s description.

“I have read the first volume, which is 300 pages,” said CIA Director John O. Brennan at his February 7 confirmation hearing. “There clearly were a number of things, many things, that I read in that report that were very concerning and disturbing to me, and ones that I would want to look into immediately, if I were to be confirmed as CIA Director.”

“It talked about mismanagement of the program, misrepresentations of the information, providing inaccurate information,” Mr. Brennan said then. “And it was rather damning in a lot of its language, as far as the nature of these activities that were carried out.”

[Clarification: Mr. Brennan’s reference to “the first volume” does not correspond to “Volume I” as described in the new Committee report. He was referring to the executive summary, findings, and conclusions of the report, which are bound separately from the body of the report.]

The Committee said it is awaiting comments on the study from the White House, the CIA and other executive branch agencies, and that it will then “discuss the public release of the Study.”

On February 15, 2013, Republicans who were members of the Committee in the last Congress formally filed dissenting comments opposing the study and its conclusions, the report said.

For its first couple of decades, the Senate Intelligence Committee held that “even secret activities must be as accountable to the public as possible,” as Sen. Daniel Inouye stated in the Committee’s first biennial report in 1977, and that “as much information as possible about intelligence activities should be made available to the public,” as Senators Richard Shelby and Bob Kerrey wrote in the 1999 version of the report.

But in the past decade, the Committee seems to have reconceptualized its relationship with the public. It no longer promises to make “as much information as possible about intelligence activities” available to the public. The notion that “secret activities” could be “accountable to the public” is now evidently considered a contradiction in terms (although release of the report on CIA interrogation practices, if it ever came to pass, would nullify and transcend that contradiction).

Today, as the latest report states, the Committee aims merely “to provide as much information as possible to the American public about its intelligence oversight activities.” (Intelligence Oversight Steps Back from Public Accountability, Secrecy News, January 2, 2013).

Even within the narrowed horizons to which it has limited itself, however, the report presents a rather attenuated, “skim milk” account of the Committee’s work. Judging from the new report, intelligence oversight consists of frequent briefings, followed by numerous “evaluations” and “reviews.” [++]