Category: reason

From the beginning of the NSA mass-surveillance scandal,
revelations that the U.S. spy agency was not only scooping up
international communications, but had
conscripted American companies into the effort have
opened doors for foreign firms. Tech companies in other
countries are relatively shielded from pressure by U.S. spooks
(whatever their relationships with spy agencies in their own
countries) and some American entrepreneurs, like Ladar Levison of Lavabit, actively urge
people to avoid U.S.-based services. Worse, though, the NSA’s
connection to some companies is giving European politicians cover
to discriminate against American businesses. Never mind that
Europeans do their own fair share of spying; they now have
legitimate concerns to raise about the security of data in the
hands of Apple, AT&T, Google, and other familiar names.

Reports Juergen Baetz of the
Associated Press:

BRUSSELS—The backlash in Europe over U.S. spying is threatening
an agreement that generates tens of billions of dollars in
trans-Atlantic business every year—and negotiations on another pact
worth many times more.

A growing number of European officials are calling for the
suspension of the “Safe Harbor” agreement that lets U.S. companies
process commercial and personal data—sales, emails, photos—from
customers in Europe. This little-known but vital deal allows more
than 4,200 American companies to do business in Europe, including
Internet giants like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Revelations of the extent of U.S. spying on its European allies
is also threatening to undermine one of President Barack Obama’s
top trans-Atlantic goals: a sweeping free-trade agreement that
would add an estimated $138 billion (100 billion euros) a year to
each economy’s gross domestic product.

The Safe Harbor agreement allows companies to move data around
their networks as needed. In its absence, data from Europeans might
have to be stored and processed only within the physical confines
of Europe—a huge expense and possibly insurmountable hurdle for
many companies. Many U.S. companies would effectively be unable to
operate in Europe if they were reachable by European law.

Some companies could explicitly be barred from expanding their
presence in Europe out of fears that they operate as pipelines to
the NSA. According to the Wall Street Journal‘s
Anton Troianovski:

AT&T Inc.’s ambitions to expand in Europe have run into
unexpected hurdles amid the growing outcry across the region over
surveillance by the National Security Agency. German and other
European officials said any attempt by AT&T to acquire a major
wireless operator would face intense scrutiny, given the company’s
work with the U.S. agency’s data-collection programs.

Resistance to such a deal, voiced by officials in interviews
across Europe, suggests the impact of the NSA affair could extend
beyond the diplomatic sphere and damage U.S. economic interests in
key markets. AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson has
signaled repeatedly in recent months that he is interested in
buying a mobile-network operator in Europe, highlighting the
potential for growth on the continent at a time when the U.S.
company faces headwinds at home.

Some of this resistance to American companies is legitimate;
Europeans are as outraged as Americans about the spying
scandal—quite possibly more so, given that continent’s long history
with authoritarian regimes and secret police. And some of these
moves are just opportunistic; the NSA has turned into a great
excuse for European politicians to openly favor well-connected
companie in their own countries at the expense of U.S. firms.

In a recent report
(PDF), the European Parliament called out Britain, France, Germany,
and Sweden for tapping directly into communications networks—though
it insisted “The capacities of Sweden, France and Germany (in terms
of budget and human resources) are low compared to the magnitude of
the operations launched by GCHQ and the NSA and cannot be
considered on the same scale”. Germany’s
BND worked closely with the NSA to facilitate spying, and
France’s
DGSE needed no encouragement to hoover up communications data,
though it apparently
aided the NSA, as did a counterpart agency in Spain. Britain’s

GCHQ is reported to have burrowed its way into Begian
telecommunications firms in the course of its extensive
cooperation with the NSA.

In other words, European government officials are shocked.
Shocked!

But, however cynical the response, by compromising the
independence of American firms, U.S. officials created a hell of a
justification for other countries to torpedo those companies and
favor their own.

Yesterday the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
announced the end of its annoying, frequently flouted, and
seemingly arbitrary ban on the use of portable electronic devices
by airplane passengers at altitudes below 10,000 feet. It says
travelers should be free to play games, listen to music, watch
movies, and read ebooks throughout flights by the end of the year.
First each airline has to certify that the electromagnetic energy
generated by smartphones, MP3 players, and iPads does not interfere
with its planes’ “highly sensitive communications, navigation,
flight control and electronic equipment.” This is the same approach
that European regulators have taken for years. Notably, the FAA
does not anticipate that any airlines will be unable to show that
it’s safe for passengers to use electronic devices at any
altitude. 

Which makes you wonder: Was there any real basis for this
concern about interference to begin with? In a 2012 survey of
people who had flown in the previous year, 40 percent admitted that
they had left their electronic devices on throughout the flight,
while 7 percent said they had not even bothered to put their phones
in airplane mode. The FAA says “there are
reports of suspected interference to communication and navigations
systems in both the NASA Aviation Safety
Reporting System and the FAA’s Service Difficulty Reporting
system.” But even though many passengers have routinely disobeyed
the restrictions on electronic devices for many years, as far as I
can tell no one has ever cited an actual mishap related to such
infractions.

The ban on using phones for voice communication remains in
place, but there does not seem to be a safety rationale for that
rule either. “Cell phones differ from most PEDs [portable
electronic devices] in that they are designed to send out signals
strong enough to be received at great distances,” the FAA says. But
while passengers will still officially be expected to turn off the
wireless functions of their devices (except for Bluetooth), FAA
Administrator Michael Huerta
concedes “there’s no safety problem if they’re not,”
although he warns that “you’re going to arrive at your destination
with a dead battery” because your phone will keep looking
unsuccessfully for a signal.

In fact, the rule requiring de-activation of wireless
capabilities was imposed by the Federal Communications Commission,
not the FAA. The FCC says
“the ban was put in place because of potential interference to
wireless networks on the ground.” The FCC has considered lifting
the ban but concluded in 2007 that “the technical information
provided by interested parties in response to the proposal was
insufficient to determine whether in-flight use of wireless devices
on aircraft could cause harmful interference to wireless networks
on the ground.” The FAA
says its PED Aviation Rulemaking Committee “did recommend that
the FAA consult with the [FCC] to review its current rules.”

They may track our every statement and hobble our every move,
but the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security ought not be immune to parody, says Dan McCall. The
details on
his suit to protect his, and our, right to laugh at Leviathan
from Sauk City Times:

A St. Cloud State University graduate and Sauk Rapids resident
is suing the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security after they issued cease-and-desist letters against
merchandise he was producing through his web-based business.

Dan McCall, who runs LibertyManiacs.com from an office in his
home, filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Baltimore. He says
the agencies violated his First Amendment rights, and is being
assisted in his suit by Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based
government watchdog organization.

McCall sells T-shirts, mugs and posters, often with satirical
messages.

To ridicule electronic surveillance disclosures, he paired the
NSA’s official seal on T-shirts for sale with the slogan: “The only
part of the government that actually listens.”

He also has one with the sub-heading “Spying On You Since 1952,”
and altered the NSA seal to read “Peeping While You’re
Sleeping.”….

Zazzle, which prints some of McCall’s designs on merchandise,
received the letters in 2011. Zazzle informed him of the letters in
June and the company said it would no longer carry his items with
the NSA seal because they infringed on the NSA’s intellectual
property rights. McCall is now selling those items on on CafePress,
an online business similar to Zazzle.

According to Public Citizen, the NSA and DHS threatened Zazzle
with litigation or criminal prosecution unless McCall’s designs
were removed.

Public Citizen claims no reasonable person would believe
McCall’s graphics were produced by the NSA or DHS. The organization
also believes the First Amendment guarantees McCall’s right to use
the seals to identify the agencies he’s criticizing….

The lawsuit asks the court to declare provisions of the National
Security Agency Act can’t stop McCall from displaying his
merchandise and that two other laws are unconstitutional because
the violate the First Amendment….

McCall graduated from St. Cloud State in 2001 with a degree in
political science and emphasis on economics and philosophy. He
started selling items that combined art, politics and humor a
decade ago and turned it into a full-time job in 2010. As recent as
2011, Libertymaniacs.com was on pace to generate $1 million in
sales annually and had three other employees.

Reason on the
NSA.

They may track our every statement and hobble our every move,
but the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security ought not be immune to parody, says Dan McCall. The
details on
his suit to protect his, and our, right to laugh at Leviathan
from Sauk City Times:

A St. Cloud State University graduate and Sauk Rapids resident
is suing the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security after they issued cease-and-desist letters against
merchandise he was producing through his web-based business.

Dan McCall, who runs LibertyManiacs.com from an office in his
home, filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Baltimore. He says
the agencies violated his First Amendment rights, and is being
assisted in his suit by Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based
government watchdog organization.

McCall sells T-shirts, mugs and posters, often with satirical
messages.

To ridicule electronic surveillance disclosures, he paired the
NSA’s official seal on T-shirts for sale with the slogan: “The only
part of the government that actually listens.”

He also has one with the sub-heading “Spying On You Since 1952,”
and altered the NSA seal to read “Peeping While You’re
Sleeping.”….

Zazzle, which prints some of McCall’s designs on merchandise,
received the letters in 2011. Zazzle informed him of the letters in
June and the company said it would no longer carry his items with
the NSA seal because they infringed on the NSA’s intellectual
property rights. McCall is now selling those items on on CafePress,
an online business similar to Zazzle.

According to Public Citizen, the NSA and DHS threatened Zazzle
with litigation or criminal prosecution unless McCall’s designs
were removed.

Public Citizen claims no reasonable person would believe
McCall’s graphics were produced by the NSA or DHS. The organization
also believes the First Amendment guarantees McCall’s right to use
the seals to identify the agencies he’s criticizing….

The lawsuit asks the court to declare provisions of the National
Security Agency Act can’t stop McCall from displaying his
merchandise and that two other laws are unconstitutional because
the violate the First Amendment….

McCall graduated from St. Cloud State in 2001 with a degree in
political science and emphasis on economics and philosophy. He
started selling items that combined art, politics and humor a
decade ago and turned it into a full-time job in 2010. As recent as
2011, Libertymaniacs.com was on pace to generate $1 million in
sales annually and had three other employees.

Reason on the
NSA.

News stories increasingly
feature accounts of militarized police forces employing weaponry
and tactics more commonly seen on the battlefield. As Steven
Greenhut observes, such accounts raise a question rarely asked
about policing policies today: Do they unnecessarily endanger the
public’s safety?

View this article.

In the opening days of
Obamacare’s October 1 launch, federal officials touted high
web-traffic numbers, but repeatedly refused to provide enrollment
data for the federally facilitated exchanges.

On October 3, White House spokesperson Jay Carney, pressed for
enrollment numbers,
said, “No, we don’t have that data.” On October 7, in an
appearance on the Daily Show, Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius repeated the claim when questioned about
enrollment: “I can’t tell you,” she said, “because I don’t
know.” 

But that simply wasn’t true—at least not during the first few
days.

Leaked meeting notes from high-level war room briefings inside
the federal health bureaucracy on October 2 and October 3 report
that federal officials were aware of the exact number of federal
enrollees on the first and second days in which the exchanges were
running.

And,
as seemed likely at the time, it turns out that the numbers
were very, very low.

According to the
notes, which were released by the House Committee on Oversight
& Government Reform and taken from daily briefings in the
Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the
federal office directly in charge of the exchanges, there were just
six successful enrollments across the 36 federal exchanges on
launch day.

The second day was a little better. By the morning of October 3,
officials reported that the number had reached triple digits on the
second day of operation. “As of yesterday, there were 248
enrollments,” it says, with the enrollment figure in bold. Later
that same day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told
reporters asking for enrollment figures that “we do not have that
data.”

It’s possible that Carney didn’t have the numbers at the time.
And I suppose it’s even possible that, four days later, HHS
Secretary Sebelius hadn’t seen the numbers either. But that
explanation is not particularly believable, especially in the case
of Sebelius, whose is the nation’s top health bureaucrat and is
therefore expected to keep informed of such things. And on the
vanishingly small chance that it is true that neither Sebelius nor
Carney were at all aware of the enrollment numbers themselves, then
that reveals that both remained, perhaps by choice, clueless and
out of the loop regarding crucial details about Obamacare’s
operations. 

HHS has attempted to drum up uncertainty about the figures in
the leaked documents. “These appear to be notes, they do not
include official enrollment statistics,” an HHS spokesperson said
in a statement, according to The Washington Post. But
while the notes do mention that some insurers didn’t get the
enrollment forms they were expected to receive, they express no
doubts about the specific enrollment numbers presented. Indeed, the
notes from the first day’s meeting list exactly which insurers have
reported successful enrollments. 

The more likely explanation here is that Carney and Sebelius
simply lied because the enrollment numbers were embarrassingly
low.

These early denials came while  top administration
officials were still
suggesting that the problem with the exchanges was too much
traffic, and major improvements in the exchanges were right around
the corner. They hoped that the exchange problems would be resolved
rapidly, and didn’t want to reveal how poorly the launch had
gone—which might generate more bad press, and perhaps scare more
people away. It’s possible, in other words, that the denials were a
result of cluelessness and incompetence—but more plausible that
federal officials knowingly lied because it was convenient for
their purposes.  

California Democratic Sen.
Dianne Feinstein’s bill to “reform” the National Security Agency’s
surveillance systems is moving forward, having
passed a vote in the Senate Intelligence Committee Agency,
11-4. Tech privacy experts are banging their faces against their
keyboards for good reason.

Here’s how Feinstein promotes the reform in her own
statement: “[It] prohibits the collection of bulk communication
records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except
under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the
bill.” Emphasis added.

The specific procedures and restrictions set forth? It’s what
they were already doing. This isn’t a ban. It’s
permission. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
notes:

Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst
practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it
would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone
record held by U.S. telecoms. We urge members of Congress to oppose
it.

We learned for the first time in June that the NSA secretly
twisted and re-interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act six years
ago to allow them to vacuum up every phone record in
America—continuing an unconstitutional program that began in 2001.
The new leaks about this mass surveillance program four months ago
have led to a sea change in how Americans view privacy, and poll
after poll has shown the public wants it to stop.

But instead of listening to her constituents, Sen. Feinstein put
forth a bill designed to allow the NSA to monitor their calls. Sen.
Feinstein wants the NSA to continue to collect the metadata of
every phone call in the United States—that’s who you call, who
calls you, the time and length of the conversation, and under the
government’s interpretation, potentially your location—and store it
for five years. This is not an NSA reform bill, it’s an NSA
entrenchment bill.

Other parts of the bill claim to bring a modicum of transparency
to small parts of the NSA, but requiring some modest reporting
requirements, like how many times NSA searches this database and
audit trails for who does the searching.

But its real goal seems to be to just paint a veneer of
transparency over still deeply secret programs. It does nothing to
stop NSA from weakening entire encryption systems, it does nothing
to stop them from hacking into the communications links of Google
and Yahoo’s data centers, and it does nothing to reform the PRISM
Internet surveillance program.

Reason’s Ron Bailey previously
warned about this terrible legislation and noted the much
better alternatives by other congressmen that actually would limit
bulk data collection and preserve Americans’ online privacy.

 

Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

For well over a decade, Saudi women have been
fighting to convince their Islamic rulers to give them driving
rights. But now their argument has taken a strange twist, Shikha
Dalmia notes. They are invoking the same law that has for centuries
subjugated them to argue their case. They claim that lifting the
driving ban would be more consistent with sharia that, elsewhere,
has been used to circumcise them and make them subordinate to men.
Is this a wise strategy?

View this article.