The American Bear

› On whistleblowers and government threats of investigation | Glenn Greenwald

… Like puppets reading from a script, various Washington officials almost immediately began spouting all sorts of threats about “investigations” they intend to launch about these disclosures. This has been their playbook for several years now: they want to deter and intimidate anyone and everyone who might shed light on what they’re doing with their abusive, manipulative exploitation of the power of law to punish those who bring about transparency.

That isn’t going to work. It’s beginning completely to backfire on them. It’s precisely because such behavior reveals their true character, their propensity to abuse power, that more and more people are determined to bring about accountability and transparency for what they do.

They can threaten to investigate all they want. But as this week makes clear, and will continue to make clear, the ones who will actually be investigated are them.

The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.

This dynamic - the hallmark of a healthy and free society - has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.

› Holder’s Off-the-Record Meetings with the Press: A Ploy Intended to Make a Public Relations Point | Kevin Gosztola

[…] During the meeting, participating media executives “reached an agreement with the Justice Department under which they could describe what occurred during the meeting in general terms.” That they would need permission from Holder to discuss the Obama administration’s attitudes around policies and procedures that have profound implications for freedom of the press is a sad statement on establishment media organizations.

James Warren, Daily News Bureau Chief, described how “press representatives” pushed Holder “to consider internal department changes that might prompt greater discretion and avoid what the media feels can be overly broad subpoenas.” There was a “forthright and civil back-and-forth” that “saw the two sides also discuss possible changes in laws relevant to seeking subpoenas of journalists’ phone records and emails.” Yet, they reiterated a favorite administration talking point, that “they seek a balance between protecting national security and honoring the role of a largely unfettered media in a democracy,” which media outlets are undoubtedly tired of hearing, especially since the administration’s record suggests that is not really true.

Politico offered a summary of the meeting, which included an anonymous quote from one of the five journalists at the meeting. It was further evidence of how some of the media organizations had decided to be fully compliant with the Obama administration in these meetings:

The guidelines require a balance between law enforcement and freedom of the press, and we all argued that the balance was out of kilter, with the national security and law enforcement interests basically overwhelming the public’s right to get information…The language concerning ‘aiding and abetting’ comes out of the Privacy [Protection] Act, and they discussed trying to revise that language so that reporters don’t need to be defined as co-conspirators in order to execute search warrants.

In other words, if the administration could do it all over again, they would not label Rosen a “co-conspirator” but they would still investigate him as if he were one. Anyone who finds this to be a reassuring “shift” is desperately searching for a silver lining.

[…] These meetings are not likely to lead to any meaningful change. The result of the review will, at best, advocate for cosmetic changes. The administration will still push a media shield law re-introduced in Congress that has a broad national security exception that would not have protected Rosen’s privacy. Actions will continue to favor national security agencies over journalists’ right to freedom of the press.

The Obama administration understands what is at stake here: the ability of government to control the flow of information and maintain the secrecy it wants to govern without being scrutinized. Whatever adjustments the Justice Department makes will be carefully calculated so the administration still has maximum authority to pursue leaks investigations as it puts in place guidelines to forestall any actions that could lead to outrage among the press. So, in that respect, media organizations, who wisely chose not to participate, are likely to be vindicated as it becomes more and more clear this was some public relations operation put on by the Obama administration.

› Bill Black: How Dare DOJ Insult HSBC’s Crooks as Less “Professional” than Liberty Reserve’s Crooks? | naked capitalism

[T]wo of the largest banks in the world, [HSBC and Standard Chartered], which reap massive explicit and implicit subsidies from the government, were criminal enterprises for at least a decade. Each engaged in violations that were vastly larger than Liberty Reserve. Liberty Reserve’s violations were huge, severe, and warranted the toughest possible prosecution – complete with freezing and forfeiting all of its accounts. The violations of the banks, by contrast, were massively larger, occurred over a longer period, led to vastly greater profits for the banks and the officers, and did vastly greater harm to the world including the loss of life and the potential mass loss of life in the future. DOJ refused to prosecute any of the officers for “knowing and willful criminal conduct.” Incredibly, it insisted on only a two-year period of DOJ leverage over Standard Chartered’s operations to ensure (short-term) compliance with the law. Standard Chartered promptly violated the agreement – and DOJ insisted they apologize.

The DOJ’s claim that Liberty Reserve’s leadership was “professional” and “sophisticated” is farcical. They were clowns. Their web site is illiterate (once one gets past the initial screen). Their invitations to join the many Ponzi schemes they pushed on their web pages are so unprofessional (though littered with the word “professional”) and unsophisticated that one cannot have any sympathy for anyone victimized by the Ponzis. Here’s an example of one of the pitches that is more literate in English (but financially illiterate):

By far our most popular investment pays investors a daily return of 900% daily [sic] for a period of 4 days for a total return of 3600% with a minimum investment of only $50,000 USD!

The word DOJ should have ascribed to the leaders of the Liberty Reserve control fraud was “audacity” – not any variant of “professional” or “sophisticated.” Audacity is the characteristic that separates the most dangerous frauds from their peers. [++]

› HSBC money-laundering investigation letters spark questions over rushed fine | guardian.co.uk

After a decade of investigations, US authorities last September decided to move “as quickly as possible” to fine HSBC on money laundering charges that the Treasury Department concluded were the most “egregious” it had ever seen, according to newly released documents.

A series of emails and letters released to Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group, paint a partial picture of the Treasury Department trying to catch up after a hard-hitting Senate report had blasted the British bank and a New York regulator had threatened to revoke the license of another British institution, Standard Chartered.

Bart Naylor, a policy advocate at Public Citizen, said the documents posed questions about why the Treasury Department wanted a quick resolution to the HSBC scandal. “Why all of a sudden do they want a resolution after 10 years of investigation? Was Treasury pre-empting more vigorous action by the Justice Department? These are questions that need to be answered,” he said.

The documents, which were first reported in the New York Times, are the first of a series that Public Citizen is hoping to obtain from the Treasury Department, Justice Department and others, under the Freedom of Information Act.

HSBC and Standard Chartered were fined last year over allegations they had acted as banker for rogue states, terrorists and drug lords, channeling billions of dollars through the US financial system. The fines, especially HSBC’s record $1.9bn penalty, proved controversial with politicians and other critics, who demanded to know why the Justice Department had not pursued criminal actions against the banks and bankers and questioned whether some financial institutions had become too big to indict.

The newly released emails claim Treasury officials were caught unawares last August, by a New York prosecutor’s threat to revoke Standard Chartered’s banking license. The documents show that US officials were under pressure from their UK counterparts not to revoke Standard’s license, a move that would have been a potentially fatal blow for the bank.

Last September, treasury secretary Tim Geithner received a briefing note from an unnamed Treasury official ahead of a meeting with George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer. Osborne had written to the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, on 10 September, following the New York Department of Financial Services’ (NYDFS) scathing attack on Standard Chartered. Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of the NYSDFS, said Standard Chartered had processed $250bn (£160bn) in illegal transactions over nearly a decade of business with US-sanctioned countries including Libya, Burma and Sudan. [++]

Bonus: James Comey, Barack Obama’s nominee to head the FBI, is a board member at HSBC. More specifically, “an independent non-executive Director and a member of the Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee.” He’ll be helpful.

› Multiple media outlets just say no to Eric Holder meeting

Several news organizations invited to meet this week with Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the Justice Department’s guidelines governing security leak investigations that involve reporters are refusing the invitation citing the meetings’ off-the-record status.

A Justice Department official said on Wednesday that meetings with select bureau chiefs will be off the record to “best facilitate the candid, free-flowing discussions we hope to have in order to bring about meaningful engagement.” [OK.]

Holder called the meetings this week as part of a department review directed by President Barack Obama after controversy over the secret seizure of Associated Press reporters’ and editors’ phone records and secret monitoring of Fox News reporter James Rosen.

But by Thursday afternoon, Reuters, Fox News, CNN, McClatchy and Huffington Post had joined the Associated Press and The New York Times in deciding to boycott the meetings due to their off-the-record status.

“I told folks that I’d be happy to participate if the meeting were on the record. And I offered to bring our first amendment lawyer with me,” McClatchy’s Washington Bureau Chief James Asher wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “So far, no response.”

› Jeremy Hammond Pleads Guilty to Being Involved in the Stratfor Leak | The Dissenter

The activist accused by the United States government of hacking into the private intelligence firm, Stratfor, and releasing the firm’s emails to WikiLeaks pled guilty to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). He now faces up to ten years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on September 6 of this year.

Hammond wrote in a statement published on the “Free Jeremy Hammond” website that he had agreed to a “non-cooperating plea agreement” so he could finally tell the world what he had done and why, “without exposing any tactics or information to the government and without jeopardizing the lives and well-being of other activists on and offline.”

“During the past 15 months I have been relatively quiet about the specifics of my case as I worked with my lawyers to review the discovery and figure out the best legal strategy. There were numerous problems with the government’s case, including the credibility of FBI informant Hector Monsegur,” he stated. “However, because prosecutors stacked the charges with inflated damages figures, I was looking at a sentencing guideline range of over 30 years if I lost at trial. I have wonderful lawyers and an amazing community of people on the outside who support me. None of that changes the fact that I was likely to lose at trial.”

The government would not have been willing to let him go free if he was found not guilty. They would have apparently continued to zealously pursue him for his involvement.

“Even if I was found not guilty at trial, the government claimed that there were eight other outstanding indictments against me from jurisdictions scattered throughout the country,” according to Hammond. “If I had won this trial I would likely have been shipped across the country to face new but similar charges in a different district. The process might have repeated indefinitely. Ultimately I decided that the most practical route was to accept this plea with a maximum of a ten year sentence and immunity from prosecution in every federal court.”

For fifteen months, Hammond has been in prison at the Manhattan Correctional Center and held without bail. Some of the time he has been in solitary confinements. His family and friends have been able to contact or visit him. He had no interest in seeing this “grinding process” repeat.

The plea freed him up to openly admit to his supporters that he had worked with Anonymous to hack into Stratfor and other websites. He called it a “relief” to be able to admit that he had hacked into not only Stratfor but also “military and police equipment suppliers, private intelligence and information security firms, and law enforcement agencies.”

“I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right,” he declared.

[…] Hammond, especially if the judge feels he has no remorse for hacking into Stratfor and is proud, is likely to receive a sentence close to the maximum of ten years. If he does go to jail for that length of time, it will stand in stark contrast to the recent sentencing of three LulzSec hacktivists in the United Kingdom.

Ryan Ackroyd and Jake Davis were both sentenced to 15 months and one year in prison, respectively. Mustafa al-Bassam was sentenced to 300 hours of community service. They were each involved in hacking into major institutions but received much shorter sentences than Hammond is likely to receive.

As the National Lawyers Guild points out, this is all due to the incredible power the government has to use an “outdated” and “vague” computer crimes statute to come down hard on hacktivists:

…[T]he CFAA has seen increasing use against information activists in an effort to criminalize everything from the sharing of links to violating terms of service agreements. The most highly publicized CFAA case involved 26 year-old information activist Aaron Swartz, who was threatened with decades in prison for downloading freely available documents from the academic database JSTOR. Swartz took his own life earlier this year…

The disparity in punishment for hacking is made more clear by the fact that, even though Davis will serve only one year in the United Kingdom, the US government may pursue his extradition to the US to face trial for his involvement in hacking.

What happened today is indicative of how justice increasingly seems to work. One is over-charged and made to experience a level of pretrial punishment before being convicted of any crimes so that prosecutors can ensure the case is won. They intimidate those with limited resources and individuals who believe they did not convict any crime by threatening them with a future where they might be hauled into court to defend themselves again and again.

› 57 Civil Liberties, Press Freedom and Public Interest Groups Demand Answers on Targeting of Journalists | Free Press

jcstearns:

On Friday, Free Press and 57 civil liberties, digital rights, press freedom and public interest groups sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding a full, transparent account of the Justice Department’s targeting of journalists and whistleblowers.

Representing millions of Americans, the groups include the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Communications Workers of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Sunlight Foundation and the Writers Guild of America East. (The full list of signers can be found below.) In addition, Free Press delivered more than 16,000 petition signatures urging the Justice Department to protect press freedom.

› 600 Days after Assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, Administration Admits Doing So | emptywheel

In this letter boasting of “unprecedented transparency,” Eric Holder officially tells Congress that since 2009 the government has killed 4 Americans: Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted and killed, and Samir Khan, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Jude Mohammed were “not specifically targeted.”

One paragraph of the letter details how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told US officials of Awlaki’s involvement in the UndieBomb plot.

Too bad that in two of three confessions, Abdulmutallab said someone besides Awlaki did the things Holder lists here. Too bad that Abdulmutallab’s lawyer now says the solitary confinement associated with the interrogations in which he did implicate Awlaki made him incompetent.

› AG Holder, FBI and U.S. Attorneys' offices can't agree on a warrant requirement for email surveillance | Privacy SOS

› Foreclosed Homeowners Arrested At DoJ While Demanding Banker Prosecution | Occupy America

On Tuesday morning, homeowners facing foreclosure and housing rights activists from across the country — including the Home Defender’s League and Occupy Our Homes (an off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street) — rallied outside the U.S. Department of Justice to demand Attorney General Holder hold the Wall Street Banks that ravaged America’s economy accountable. Dozens of struggling homeowners are prepared to risk arrest in non-violent civil disobedience or set up an ongoing occupation outside the Department of Justice until demands for Wall Street accountability and relief for their communities are addressed.

The action at the DOJ began on Monday, and although they were supported by over 500 allies, the DOJ decided they would rather jail these everyday Americans than step up to help resolve the ongoing foreclosure crisis. Some of those arrested were even tasered — 17 arrests in all, with two being tasered by police.

[…] The breaking point came for these foreclosure victims who are willing to face arrest if necessary when after agreeing to various settlements since 2008 requiring a total of $5.7 billion in payments to homeowners, “banks have paid less than half” that amount to date, according to the Washington Post:

Critics point to the 2011 agreement the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Fed struck with more than a dozen mortgage servicers as a prime example of the dysfunction. […]

After 12 months, no homeowners had received a dime. But the eight consultants managing the process on behalf of the banks were paid nearly $2 billion. …

[++]

› DOJ Releases Completely Blacked-Out Memo on Surveillance of Text Messages

The Justice Department has released 15 pages of completely blacked-out material in response to a request for information about how text messages from cellphones are intercepted. The American Civil Liberties Union says the Obama administration is reading emails and other electronic communications without a warrant, despite a court ruling against the practice. In response to a recent Freedom of Information Act request on the issue, the Justice Department released a memo with black rectangles covering every bit of text except the title, sender and recipient. ACLU spokesperson Josh Bell told ABC News: “We got very little information about the policy on text messages. [The document] does not even show the date, let alone what the policy is.”

Paperclipped to the last page of the redacted document was a sheet of white paper, blank, except for the phrase, perfectly centered both vertically and horizontally, “Go Fuck Yourself” in 12 pt. brush script.