Why the Public Questions the Recovery
While economists and politicians celebrate economic recovery, the
American people refuse to accept the good news. Only a third of the
public sees the nation headed in “the right direction” – a figure that’s
dropped ten points since President Obama’s re-election.
Improved unemployment numbers hide the fact that millions have
dropped out of the work force. The percentage of the working age
population that’s employed is only 58.6% – much worse than 2007, and
virtually unchanged since the recession’s darkest days.
New claims that US households have, overall, regained the wealth they
lost, concentrate on improved circumstances for the top third, while
most families still face hard times and dim prospects.
As Republicans focus on Obama scandals they must remember that
ordinary citizens still care most about the struggling economy and the
difficulty of finding jobs.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2013/06/10/why-the-public-questions-the-recovery-n1616695
CBS News: State Department covered up misconduct, interfered with IG probes
CBS News reports
that the State Department has interfered in internal investigations
into criminal conduct and wrongdoing by high-ranking officials,
including one ambassador who prowled public parks for prostitutes. A
very familiar name appears in this exposé, too:
CBS News has uncovered documents that show the State
Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate
behavior within their ranks.
The Diplomatic Security Service, or the DSS, is the State
Department’s security force, charged with protecting the secretary of
state and U.S. ambassadors overseas and with investigating any cases of
misconduct on the part of the 70,000 State Department employees
worldwide.
CBS News’ John Miller reports that according to an internal State
Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were
influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS
News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State
Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on
foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that
members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail
“engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a
problem the report says was “endemic.”
And here’s a good way to exercise diplomacy in a critical theater — allow your personnel to get strung out on drugs:
The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug
ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State
Department security contractors with drugs.
What did Foggy Botton do when the allegations came to light? The
case of the prostitute-patronizing ambassador ends up involving Patrick
Kennedy, a familiar name from the Benghazi scandal and cover-up:
In one specific and striking cover-up, State Department
agents told the Inspector General they were told to stop investigating
the case of a U.S. Ambassador who held a sensitive diplomatic post and
was suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park.
The State Department Inspector General’s memo refers to the 2011
investigation into an ambassador who “routinely ditched … his protective
security detai” and inspectors suspect this was in order to “solicit
sexual favors from prostitutes.”
Sources told CBS News that after the allegations surfaced, the
ambassador was called to Washington, D.C. to meet with Undersecretary of
State for Management Patrick Kennedy, but was permitted to return to
his post.
Remember that State Department whistleblower Eric Nordstrom publicly
rejected the Accountability Review Board on Benghazi, claiming that it
purposefully pushed responsibility onto lower-level careerists, and
specifically charged that the ARB was trying to protect Kennedy at a
minimum. It seems a little coincidental that Kennedy’s name pops up in
another cover-up at State now. What did Kennedy do about the oversexed
ambassador, especially considering the risk this created for security
and for potential espionage penetration of the State Department?
Congress needs to find out who ordered the cover-ups on these investigations — and how much else might be going on at State now.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/10/cbs-news-state-department-covered-up-misconduct-interfered-with-ig-probes/
Elementary School Beginning Toy Gun Turn-In Program
Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill has a brilliant idea:
he’s holding a toy gun exchange next Saturday in which students of the
Hayward, CA school can turn in a toy gun to receive a book and a raffle
ticket to win one of four bicycles.
Really.
Hill believes that children who play with toy guns may not think real
guns are dangerous. “Playing with toy guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot
you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to
use a real gun,” he claims.
Hill was inspired by a school photographer, Horace Gibson, who was
upset about the number of police shootings of young people in Oakland.
At Strobridge Elementary Safety Day, a local policeman will
demonstrate bicycle and gun safety, (does he get to use a real gun?),
while the Alameda County Fire Department will speak about fire safety.
Just to show that local governments can do surveillance too, there will
be opportunities for the children to be fingerprinted and photographed,
with that information transferred to CD’s if it is ever needed for a
missing child case.
Hill, defending his take-away program, asserted that police are
justifiably afraid when they face armed suspects, and toy guns have been
mistaken for real ones.
But Yih-Chau Chang, spokesman for Responsible Citizens of California,
said, ”Having a group of children playing cops and robbers or cowboys
and Indians is a normal part of growing up.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/10/Elementary-School-Urges-Students-To-Turn-In-Toy-Guns
The All-Seeing State
The inevitable corruption of the permanent bureaucracy
By Mark Steyn
A few years ago, after one corruption
scandal too many, the then Liberal government in Canada announced that,
to prevent further outbreaks of malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new
federal auditors plus a bunch of ethics czars, and mandating “integrity
provisions” in government contracts, including “prohibitions against
paying, offering, demanding or accepting bribes.” There were already
plenty of laws against bribery, but one small additional sign on the
desk should do the trick: “Please do not attempt to bribe the Minister
of the Crown as a refusal may offend. Also: He’s not allowed to bribe
you, whatever he says.” A government that requires “integrity
provisions” is by definition past the stage where they will do any good.
I
thought of those Canadian Liberal “integrity provisions” passing a TV
screen the other day and catching hack bureaucrats from the IRS Small
Business/Self-Employed Division reassuring Congress that systems had now
been put in place to prevent them succumbing to the urge to put on
Spock ears and moob-hugging blue polyester for the purposes of starring
in a Star Trek government training video. The Small
Business/Self-Employed Division had boldly gone where no IRS man had
gone before — to a conference in Anaheim, where they were put up in
$3,500-a-night hotel rooms and entertained by a man who was paid $27,500
to fly in and paint on stage a portrait of Bono. Bono is the veteran
Irish rocker knighted by the Queen for his tireless campaign on behalf
of debt forgiveness, which doesn’t sound the IRS’s bag at all. But don’t
worry, debt forgiveness-wise Bono has Africa in mind, not New Jersey.
And, as Matthew Cowart tweeted me the other day, he did have a big hit
with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which I believe is
now the official anthem of the IRS Cincinnati office.
It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart
of the matter: “With all due respect, this is not a training issue,” he
said. “This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt
all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it
strikes me — and maybe it’s just me — but it strikes me as a cultural,
systemic, character, moral issue.”
He’s right. If you don’t
instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at
public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual
isn’t going to fix the real problem.
So we know the IRS is
corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it
can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the
revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS
official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood
that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When
Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS
told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on
thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very
enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the
tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they
should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far
more circumscribed powers.
Here’s another
congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator
Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on
members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage
over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:
“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”
Senator
Kirk responded that “the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within
our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’”
For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I
think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.
Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn’t really
regard Fox News’s James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” but had to pretend
he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant.
So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when
he said he hadn’t lied to Congress because in fact he’d been lying when
he said he told the truth to the judge.
If you lie to one of
Holder’s minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the
slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the
attorney general’s. But the attorney general can apparently lie
willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress.
This, incidentally, is at the heart of the revelation (in a non-U.S.
newspaper, naturally) that hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone
records have been subpoenaed by the United States government. In 2011,
Eric Holder’s assistant attorney general Todd Hinen testified to the
House Judiciary Committee that “on average, we seek and obtain Section
215 orders less than 40 times per year.” Forty times per year doesn’t
sound very high, does it? What is that — the cell phones of a few
Massachusetts Chechens and some Yemeni pen-pals? No. The Verizon order
will eventually be included as just another individual Section 215
order, even though it covers over a hundred million Americans. Ongoing
universal monitoring of mass populations is being passed off to Congress
and the public as a few dozen narrowly targeted surveillance
operations. Mr. Hinen chose his words more carefully than his boss, but
both men are in the business of deceiving the citizenry, their elected
representatives, and maybe the judges, too.
Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state.
Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute
monarchy “clothed kings with a power almost without limits” in practice
“the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily
escaped his control.” What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if
administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social
life and of individual existence” within the King’s oversight? Eric
Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. My comrade John Podhoretz,
doughty warrior of the New York Post, says relax, there’s
nothing to worry about. But how do I know he’s not just saying that
because Eric Holder’s monitoring his OnStar account and knows that when
he lost his car keys last Tuesday he was in the parking lot of Madam
Whiplash’s Bondage Dungeon?
When the state has the power to know
everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the
only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the
non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging. In August 2010,
President Obama began railing publicly against “groups with
harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity” (August 9th, a
speech in Texas) and “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names”
(August 21st, radio address). And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the
IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups
with harmless-sounding names, like “tea party,” “patriot,” and
“constitution.”
It may be that the strange synchronicity between
the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and
not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party
and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has
the capability to know everything except the difference between right
and wrong, it won’t end well.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350537/all-seeing-state-mark-steyn
Above the Law: Government Officials Engaged in Insider Trading With Medicare Stocks
If you haven't read Peter Schweizer's Throw Them All Out,
I highly suggest you do. His book is all about how politicians in
Washington D.C. engage in insider trading with zero consequences,
something that is illegal for the rest of America.
One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting
to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how
the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest
of us. Insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, yet it is routine
among members of Congress. Normal individuals cannot get in on IPOs at
the asking price, but politicians do so routinely. The Obama
administration has been able to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars
to its supporters, ensuring yet more campaign donations. An entire class
of investors now makes all of its profits based on influence and access
in Washington. Peter Schweizer has doggedly researched through
mountains of financial records, tracking complicated deals and stock
trades back to the timing of briefings, votes on bills, and every other
point of leverage for politicians in Washington. The result is a
manifesto for revolution: the Permanent Political Class must go
Why is this relevant? Because the Washington Post is
out with a story today about Health and Human Services employees
engaging in insider trading with stocks involved in Medicare.
Hundreds of federal employees were given advance word of a
Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers in the
weeks before the official announcement, a period when trading in the
shares of those firms spiked.
The surge of trading in Humana’s and other private health insurers’
stock before the April 1 announcement already has prompted the Justice
Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate
whether Wall Street investors had advance access to inside information
about the then-confidential Medicare funding plan.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told The Washington Post late last
week that his office reviewed the e-mail records of employees at the
Department of Health and Human Services and found that 436 of them had
early access to the Medicare decision as much as two weeks before it was
made public.
The number of federal employees with advance knowledge is surely
higher; the figures Grassley’s staff compiled did not include people at
the White House’s Office of Management and Budget who also saw the
information. The e-mail records of those employees have not been made
available to Grassley.
More from Allahpundit on why this is a big deal:
There are two potential scandals here. One is HHS tossing
around what was supposed to be sensitive information to a huge swath of
employees in-house. The other scandal is who actually leaked it,
assuming anyone did. It might not have come from HHS at all but rather
from some old-fashioned Beltway congressional/lobbyist incest. As with
most of the other Obama scandals, this story is less about O himself
than about the foreseeable abuses that result as the federal whale
grows. You can have bigger government or you can have more accountable
government. The guy who signed ObamaCare into law has made his choice
Big government equals big problems, people. Scandalpalooza is an
understatement. Lets not forget about Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius practically extorting funds from private companies HHS regulates in order to fund ObamaCare.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/06/10/terrific-government-officials-engage-in-insider-trading-with-medicare-n1616817
White House knew about Lisa Jackson’s secret email account
Email records show that the White House knew about the secret email account used by former Environmental Protection
Agency administrator Lisa Jackson since at least February 2010.
In a 2010 email exchange between Jackson and Gary Guzy, the Deputy Director and General Counsel at the White House Council on Environmental
Quality, after some initial confusion, Jackson reveals to the White
House staffer that “Richard Windsor” is her “private” email account.
“Thanks kindly Richard for this information,” Guzy writes in response to a February 16, 2010 email from Jackson’s alias account.
“It’s Lisa Jackson and that’s my private email,” Jackson responded, to which Guzy than responds: “Even better! Thanks Lisa.”
Last week the Associated Press reported that top administration
officials have been using secret email accounts to conduct official
business. The AP investigated the issue after it was revealed that
former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson had been conducting official
business under the Windsor alias.
The Daily Caller News Foundation later reported that the Windsor account had also been used to correspond with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack — who was using a secret account of his own — and outside environmental groups.
The White House acknowledged the use of secret email accounts by
administration officials, but argued that it made sense for high-level
officials to use alternate email accounts to keep their inboxes from
being filled with unwanted messages.
“There’s nothing secret,” Carney told reporters, adding that all
emails are subject to government records requests and congressional
oversight. Critics counter that such email practices allow federal
officials to skirt public disclosure laws.
“The release of the infamous ‘Richard Windsor’ email alias documents
has led to the discovery of even more, widespread inappropriate
record-keeping practices within the EPA and multiple other Agencies,”
said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter.
Richard Windsor was ironically honored
for three years in a row as a “scholar of ethical behavior” for three
years in a row, and completed various training programs at the EPA.
“I’m unclear how grown men and women could think that it’s acceptable
to have a nonexistent employee sign in as the test-taker [or to have
an] administrator take required certification training
in the name of a false identity,” said Chris Horner, senior fellow at
the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who was behind the lawsuit that
forced the EPA to release the Richard Windsor emails.
GINNI THOMAS: Six big problems with the immigration bill from someone who has actually read it
Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey bets “you can’t find five members of Congress who have read” the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill.
The former Democrat is experienced at reading
large bills the Congress seems inclined to pass without reading, such
as Obamacare. She tabs them, underlines them and tries to see the big
picture of what will happen if the provisions of the bill are
implemented.
In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas, McCaughey brought her dog-eared immigration bill with her and pointed to it repeatedly.
“There are many interest groups involved in this bill,” she said. “In fact, many, many, many — except one. I didn’t find anything for
Joe Q. Citizen in this bill. I didn’t find anything for the average
tax-paying citizen in this bill.”
“Somebody forgot to tell him about the meeting, so he or she is not represented in this bill,” she added.
McCaughey, author of “Beating Obamacare,”
laid out six criticisms and unexamined problems of the bill beyond what
she sees as the problematic pathway to citizenship and lax border
security provisions of the bill.
According to McCaughey, the bill imperils national security by
weakening rules for asylum seekers; outsources government jobs to
community organizers, like happened in Obamacare; doubles the numbers of
legal immigrants with green cards; contradicts Florida Republican Sen.
Marco Rubio’s ads that promise new citizens will be self-supporting; costs too much; and impedes border agents from doing their basic enforcement job.
The Administration: Scarier Than You Could Imagine
If
a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
If the Obama administration breaks the law at will, lies to the
American people, uses every government agency at its disposal to punish
its conservative/Republican enemies and no one does anything about it,
does the administration make a sound? Yes it does -- resulting in
devastating consequences for the American people.
Despite
a trifecta of scandals, Obama and company continue to stonewall, lie,
or refuse to answer questions -- in essence, giving Congress and the
American people the finger. Pundits are shocked and taken aback by the
unprecedented arrogance of the Obama administration.
Such pundits are a bit late coming to the dance,
as we in the Tea Party have been well aware for years of the
lawlessness and arrogance of this bunch of thugs from Chicago. Have
these surprised pundits forgotten Obama's unprecedented overreaches into
the private sector -- nationalizing General Motors, bullying banks, ignoring the ruling of federal judges, trashing the Constitution, and more?
Still,
pundits are missing the much greater horrifying picture. My fellow
Americans, we are in deep, deep trouble. The cold reality is that until
someone steps forward in real opposition to Obama governing according
to his will while ignoring all the laws, checks, and balances, we are
defenseless, expendable supplicants of a tyrannical dictator.
Remarkably,
the mainstream media is complaisant with Obama acting like our king
rather than our president because he is liberal, he is black, and his
presidency is historic. Obama's agenda fits neatly with the mainstream
media's socialist/progressive agenda. So they are elated to have a Teflon liberal black guy in the White House furthering their cause.
Speaking
of expendable supplicants, let us not forget Ambassador Chris Stevens,
Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty, and Sean Smith, who lost their lives -- left
to die in our consulate in Benghazi.
The
people in the Obama administration are emboldened to do whatever they
please: bully conservative groups and individuals, secretly invade our privacy,
target reporters, and thumb their noses when they get caught -- all
without any real political push-back or consequences. We the American
people are in deep excrement.
Ponder
that, folks. As long as the mainstream media provides cover for Obama
and keeps his poll numbers high by making sure no bad news is linked to
Obama (Limbaugh Theorem), our president is empowered to function as a
supreme ruler, free to do whatever he pleases to us. Dear God, help us!
Obama
is the first black president. Okay, I get it. But neither Obama's
black skin nor the mainstream media's rabid desire to protect his legacy
should award him imperial dictator status, trumping the best interest
of the American people.
The
Republican party desperately needs leadership -- someone willing not
just to say "no" to Obama's tyranny. We need someone who will walk tall
and passionately proclaim, "H*** no!"
America
needs a politician with backbone and fortitude willing to endure being
called racist by Obama's subservient mainstream media; someone unafraid
of being targeted by the IRS; someone willing to be hated by clueless
poll participants; someone willing to endure EPA persecution
if he is a business owner; someone willing to endure his phone and
e-mail privacy illegally violated; and someone willing to endure
attempts to criminalize their opposition to Obama's agenda.
Under Obama's IRS-controlled health care,
any politician daring to oppose Obama's agenda will more than likely
suffer delays and denial of medical care for his family and himself.
Suddenly, his conservative Republican mom finds herself at the bottom
of the list for that kidney.
Yes,
it is going to take a politician with incredible stones to challenge
the great all-powerful beast, the Obama administration.
I am confident that such a hero will step forward. Between you and me, I am keeping an eye on Rep. Trey Gowdy, House Oversight & Government Reform Committee.
Most people caught lying or with their pants down back off. When caught red-handed, Obama pokes his finger in our eye.
It
has been exposed that the administration sent Susan Rice out to lie
about Benghazi on five national TV shows. In response to getting
caught, Obama promoted Rice. Lois Lerner was caught using the IRS to
bully, intimidate, and suppress the conservative vote in the 2012
presidential election. Obama promoted Lerner. The latest in his
growing list of offenses and scandals, Eric Holder was caught lying about targeting reporter James Rosen.
Naïve pundits say, "Eric Holder is toast. He has to go." My reply is, "Holder
ain't goin' nowhere. You guys still do not get it. Holder is black
and liberal, and Obama is arrogant beyond belief, with the media in his
back pocket." Obama recently stated that he is behind Holder 100 percent.
Folks,
do you see the horror of what we are dealing with in America today? We
have an administration free to rule as it pleases, with no one -- I
repeat: no one -- really holding its feet to the fire. Will someone
please throw this out-of-control administration across their knee, spank
its butt, and say no?
Meanwhile, I heard someone say on TV in response to Holder's stonewalling and lying, "Holder risks another contempt of Congress filed against him." I am sure Holder is quaking in his boots.
The U.S. government has given the embattled Afghan National Army
(ANA) more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded ammunition, according to
the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR)
latest oversight report.
This is in addition to $288 million
that has been spent on ammunition for the troubled Afghan National
Police (ANP), which has been cited by SIGAR for its widespread
corruption.
The United States has spent more than $54 billion in total to arm,
train, and sustain Afghanistan’s security forces, which continue to
underperform and suffer low enlistment rates, according to SIGAR’s
quarterly progress reports.
It is unclear just how much ammunition the $1.03 billion translates to and just how much of this ammo has been used.
In addition to the billion-dollar ammo purchase, the United States
has spent more than $878 million on weapons for the ANA and another $5.6
billion on military vehicles.
However, a large amount of this money has been wasted on vehicles
that either do not work or that have been destroyed beyond repair,
according to SIGAR.
The issue of arming Afghan security forces continues to cause
controversy, as Afghan security personnel engage in so-called “insider
attacks” on the remaining U.S. forces in the country.
A man wearing an ANA uniform murdered three Americans over the weekend, according to NBC News.
The purported ANA soldier “turned his weapon against” U.S. forces,
killing two soldiers and a civilian, the International Security
Assistance Force was quoted as saying in a statement.
“Insider attacks accounted for one in every five combat deaths
suffered by NATO-led forces in Afghanistan and 16 percent of all
American combat casualties according to 2012 data,” NBC said in its
report.
There were 12 such attacks in 2011 and 34 in the first half of 2012, according to the New America Foundation.
The final accounting of U.S. ammo purchases in Afghanistan also comes
as lawmakers on Capitol Hill hotly debate domestic ammunitions
purchases at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other related
agencies.
DHS has said that it reserves the right
to purchase nearly a billion round of ammunition, prompting accusation
from lawmakers that it is hoarding bullets and wasting money.
House lawmakers voted last week to block DHS ammo purchases until it provides greater transparency on how the bullets are used.
Meanwhile, the ANA continues to receive shipments of large-scale military equipment from the United States.
The Afghan Air Force’s inventory now consists of 113 aircraft,
including attack helicopters and transport planes, according to SIGAR’s
latest report. At least 32 various helicopters have yet to be delivered.
The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) continuously failed to hit
recruiting numbers despite the U.S.-funded equipment and weapons.
“We are very concerned because the ANSF were supposed to achieve an
end-strength of 352 thousand troops by last October,” SIGAR lead
inspector John Sopko said in May.
“The ANSF has fallen short of its staffing goals by 20,000 troops,”
Sopko said. “The number of troops ready for duty is even lower when you
consider AWOL employees, desertions, and ghost employees.”
Sopko also said the White House has tried to silence him due to his
oversight work, which has detailed massive waste and abuse of U.S.
taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan.
“Over the last 10 months, I have been criticized by some bureaucrats
for not pre-clearing my press releases with them, for not letting them
edit the titles of my audits, for talking too much to Congress, for
talking too much to the press, and, basically, for not being a ‘team
player’ and undermining ‘our country’s mission in Afghanistan,’” Sopko
said in his speech.
The top commander of U.S. Special Operations forces has also expressed frustration over his inability to speak honestly about the harm massive defense cuts are causing to the military.
http://freebeacon.com/a-billion-bucks-in-bullets/
Guess Who's Coming to... Everything
The world is presently inundated with revelations or reminders of the U.S. federal government's various means of collecting information about
everyone's private correspondence, of how bureaucratic offices
sympathetic to the current administration are using private information
to target political opponents, and of how federal officials are using
legitimate national security concerns to build support for increasing
public surveillance and private "data-mining" so ominous that a "career
intelligence officer" felt compelled to reveal the secret data-mining system,
explaining that "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you
type." I dare anyone to say "So what?" in answer to that claim.
Conservative
response to the data-mining and phone record collecting stories has
been mixed. While many are sounding alarm bells, and citing the IRS
"scandal" as evidence of the danger of allowing the government
indiscriminate access to private communications data, others are
offering legalistic arguments to quell irrational fears, telling us that
these procedures are all quite justifiable, and merely a reasonable
extension of traditional information-gathering methods.
As
for the people casually dismissing all concerns by noting that the
programs in question are "legal," I'm sure I'm not the only person who
can think of another recent program of the U.S. federal government that
is "legal" in exactly the same sense: supported and funded by Congress,
upheld by the courts. Indeed, that other program has even been declared
"the law of the land" by John Boehner himself; and yet it is properly
regarded by many conservatives as the heights of authoritarian
overreach.
Perhaps the most intellectually serious effort at a reasonable "calm down, everyone" case is offered by the indispensable Andrew McCarthy,
a man certainly well-versed in the law, and not at all dismissive of
U.S. constitutional concerns. His argument is that the data collected
through the government's electronic surveillance systems is equivalent
to the names and addresses available in every phone book, or to the
information on the outside of a posted envelope -- information which is,
for legal purposes, public in nature.
[T]he Constitution expressly protects
the American people only in their "persons, houses, papers, and
effects." Modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has expanded this ambit
to include matters or items in which there is an "expectation of
privacy" judicially deemed "objectively reasonable." Notwithstanding the
caterwauling of privacy activists, though, the courts have forcefully
rejected the notion that telephone metadata qualifies. The content of
conversations? Yes. The numbers dialed, the duration, the fact that the
conversation took place? No.
First of all, it appears that the newly-revealed PRISM program may reach far beyond the outside of the envelope. For example,
According
to a separate "User's Guide for PRISM Skype Collection," that service
can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional
telephone and for any combination of "audio, video, chat, and file transfers"
when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google's offerings include
Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and
live surveillance of search terms.
Of
course, digging for such details would, in theory, only take place if
there were a suspicion that the participants in a given communication
were engaged in wrongdoing. But how would this suspicion be arrived at?
And what would constitute "wrongdoing," in the eyes of a U.S.
administration that has countenanced IRS targeting of private
individuals and organizations expressing views opposed to the
administration's policies?
But
I think there are grounds for a more basic concern, even apart from the
case of "monitoring for audio" or "live surveillance of search terms."
In short, is the government's collection of data regarding, in effect,
any and all electronic communications, anywhere, by anyone, really
analogous to having a phone directory on one's desk, or having access to
the address information on the outside of an envelope?
Consider this difference: Knowing your phone number
and home address tells us nothing about where you are and what you are
doing right now, or where you were and what you were doing last
Wednesday at 3:20 p.m. Knowing fixed, permanent identification-type
information about you is not the same as keeping a real time record of
your daily activities. Knowing where you live is several removes from
knowing the identities of all your regular contacts, and when and how
often you interact with each of them. Legal analogies and court
precedent are not satisfactory arguments here, because they do not
address the primary issues, as follows.
Why
is it acceptable for the government to know whom you spoke with today?
There is a difference between the government knowing my phone number and
the government knowing whose names and numbers are in my personal
address book. And even if you should reply that the government has only
"generic" knowledge of such information unless and until they choose to
isolate me for investigation, is it not unseemly, not to say spooky,
that everyone in the world should have to become inured to the fact that
the U.S. federal government is keeping a log of their activities, and
has standing legal authority to consult that log whenever it deems
necessary? Does this not reduce freedom of speech and assembly to
"freedom to speak or assemble, as long as a government monitor is
present"? But wasn't the purpose of that old-fashioned "natural rights"
talk precisely to mark out the area upon which government may not
encroach without just cause?
Why
is it acceptable for the government to know which websites you visit,
anymore than it is legitimate for them to know which stores you have
entered, or which television programs you watch? And please don't get
mired in sophistical answers such as, "Does that mean a policeman walking
the beat has to avert his eyes before you enter a shop on his block?"
No -- and the case is not similar. It would become similar, however, if
that policeman started following you around the neighborhood, taking
notes on which shops you entered and how long you stayed in each shop.
For then the officer would no longer be keeping an eye on the
neighborhood, but rather conducting an unwarranted and intrusive
surveillance of an individual who is not suspected of any wrongdoing.
Would you, faced with such police behavior, be satisfied if the officer
said, "We just want to have a complete report on your movements in case
we should ever find the information useful"?
Some
may wish to argue that electronic communication is more public by
definition, and hence while you may gather with anyone you please in the
privacy of your own home, without government monitoring, you tacitly
agree to give up such privacy when you choose to engage in a "virtual
gathering," such as by phone or on the internet.
Perhaps
this takes us into a deeper philosophical question which cannot be
answered fully here. Nevertheless the question must be asked: What is
the relationship between technological developments and a free society? Do we not properly view technology as an extension of our natural
purposes and pursuits? Is it not a means of facilitating activities we
would have pursued anyway, albeit less efficiently, before the
technology was available? Is not the telephone, in its defining purpose,
a means of conducting private conversations at distance --
conversations which we would have wished to pursue, though much less
conveniently, before the invention of the telephone? In other words, is
the telephone to be seen as essentially a means of facilitating and
enhancing our pursuit of our natural right to speak and associate
freely, or is it to be seen as essentially opening up a new realm of
governmental authority? That is, does genuine freedom of association end
where the lines of telecommunication begin?
Does the "reasonable
expectation of privacy" end when we sign in to our personal e-mail
accounts? Do we tacitly waive our natural freedom merely by availing
ourselves of technological aids?
If
so, why? On what principle has it been determined that the
technological realm is inherently public -- that is, open to unwarranted
and indiscriminate state monitoring? How has the belief evolved that
government has the legitimate authority to keep track of our electronic
comings and goings in ways men would never have thought legitimate with
regard to their physical comings and goings? (As for my use of the past
conditional form, "would never have," see below.)
If
the very fact of using a telephone or the internet means sacrificing
your claims against unwarranted government intrusion, this raises a very
profound issue. For it suggests that as modern life becomes
increasingly entwined with our technology, it becomes unavoidably less
free. That is, the very conditions of individual liberty that made these
technological advances possible are necessarily undermined by the
advances themselves. If so, then this would seem to lend credence to the
Marxist historicist hypothesis, as it implies that individual liberty
really is a transitional phase of history, inexorably bound to create
the conditions of its own undoing, and the rise of the socialist state.
This, I propose, follows from the premise that private action becomes
government property when it is pursued through technology.
Where
is all this tending? That is the question which the best detached legal
argument is intrinsically unable to address. Once we accept the premise
that government should be permitted to keep a record of all your
"public" activity -- including such activity as would never have been
regarded as public in the past (private communication), when such
activity happens to be conducted through technological means -- it is
difficult to see where real lines can be drawn to determine where the
state cannot go without properly established grounds for suspicion.
Already, the British government,
the world leader in public video surveillance, has experimented with
the idea of installing cameras in "high risk" private homes to monitor
the parents' methods of raising their children. In America, the current
administration is on the record, through official white papers and in
public statements from the president and his subordinates, as regarding
people who revere their Constitution or worry about the loss of their
liberty as extremists and potential terror risks.
Furthermore,
if the defenders of big government can make the case for keeping
records of exactly where you were, what computer you were using, and
with whom you were corresponding, last Wednesday at 3:20 p.m., on the
grounds that electronic communication is somehow "different" from the
private speech and association this technology was invented to
facilitate, then might they not, having achieved complete acquiescence
to this fuzzy principle, turn the argument around? That is, once it has
been accepted as a truism, including through legal precedent, that the
presence of a technological component overrides normal considerations of
free association and private speech, how great a step will it be to
make the reverse case for putting cameras and microphones in every home,
or conducting random police searches?
After
all, your government may argue, we already collect data on all your
private telephone and e-mail correspondence, and monitor your web
searches, in the name of maintaining public safety. The problem is that
there is still a dangerous loophole in our data, namely your offline
communications. And since it has already been established that online
communications ought to be accessible to the government at all times, it
is only a matter of consistency that government should have equal
access to your offline interactions. In principle, the only difference
between the face to face conversations you have with your guests in your
living room and the e-mail correspondence you engage in online is the
physical distance, so the court has ruled that there is nothing to bar
us from monitoring your home and workplace for the same kind of
information we routinely collect from your e-mail and telephone
providers, namely whom you are meeting, at what times, how often, and
where?
But
don't concern yourself; it's for the security of the community, and if
you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Let
me state, for the record, that I know Islamic terrorism is a real
threat, and that all means consistent with a free society ought to be
used to prevent it, including the targeted use of electronic records
with just cause. Universal data-mining of all electronic communication,
however, which is able, in principle, to reveal anyone's patterns of
behavior, whereabouts, and particular associations, without even looking
at content, is qualitatively different from such legitimate use of
state power. Some will focus narrowly on the risk of granting such
overwhelming authority to the Obama administration, with its subversive
motives and its history of abuse of authority. I am with those who
question such authority more broadly. After all, it is precisely the
purpose of the concept of limited government to establish permanent
political conditions which militate against the abuse of scoundrels.
Rush Limbaugh recently
called the Obama administration's activity on this front a "coup
d'état." Doesn't French make everything sound more polite? At any rate,
as this surveillance program encompasses global communications, and not
just those among American citizens, we might amend the description to
"coup d'états."
"The
national security of the United States" is, as Andrew McCarthy says,
the nation's "highest societal purpose." Certainly, at least, it is the
highest purpose of the Executive Branch of the federal government.
However, on this issue, as on many others, this non-American finds
himself standing behind Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up
essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither
liberty nor safety." Or, if you prefer, "Whoever would overthrow the
liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/guess_whos_coming_to_everything.html#ixzz2Vq3nRYle
No comments:
Post a Comment