http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/asia/with-snap-of-group-photo-3-members-of-advocacy-group-face-trial-in-china.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 7:38 AM
Subject: re: With Snap of Group Photo, 3 Members of Advocacy Group Face Trial in China
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Selective prosecution of political dissenters on an over-broad statute that everyone violates makes a mockery of the People's Revolution. This is the "rule of law" as cynical windowdressing for capricious tyranny.

Barry Haskell Levine

With Snap of Group Photo, 3 Members of Advocacy Group Face Trial in China

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Published: October 26, 2013

Enlarge This ImageHONG KONG — Three grass-roots rights advocates face trial in eastern China on Monday, with the main charge against them stemming from a group photograph snapped in the courtyard of an apartment block. That brief gathering will be at the heart of the first courtroom test of how far the government will go to extinguish the New Citizens Movement, which has pressed the Communist Party leadership under Xi Jinping to embrace democratic change.

China Daily, via Reuters

Editors

The three residents of Xinyu City in Jiangxi Province — Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping, and Li Sihua — face charges of illegal assembly for gathering below Ms. Liu’s second-floor home in April with other friends to take a photograph to make a political point, said Ms. Liu’s daughter, Liao Minyue, and lawyer, Zhang Xuezhong. The group displayed signs urging the release of detained protesters and the disclosure of officials’ wealth, and released the picture on the Internet. The police detained the three about a week after the photograph was taken.

“If that counts as an illegal assembly, then it would also be an illegal assembly for school students to gather for a graduating photo,” said Mr. Zhang, the defense lawyer, in a telephone interview from Shanghai.

The previously little-known trio has attracted widespread attention as the first detainees associated with the New Citizens Movement to face trial since the government started to round up supporters in March. The movement is a loose network of legal advocates, human rights campaigners and disgruntled citizens that began to coalesce into a more coordinated effort last year. It has demanded greater political rights, equal educational rights for all, and the disclosure of officials’ assets at a time when the comfortable lives of some officials have become a source of intense public resentment.

“I’m personally convinced that, in fact, this is part of a coordinated nationwide campaign to attack and break up the New Citizens Movement,” Mr. Zhang said of the trial.

“They hope to use this Jiangxi case as an opening,” said Mr. Zhang, a law lecturer who was suspended from teaching after he publicly called for democratic constitutional reforms. “They want to test the public reaction, and also test how, internally, the legal system responds.”

The Chinese police have detained, and in some cases formally arrested, 18 participants in and supporters of the New Citizens Movement, according to Human Rights Watch. The most prominent are Xu Zhiyong, a legal advocate who was detained by the police in Beijing in July, and Wang Gongquan, a wealthy investor detained in Beijing in September. Both men are being held on charges of assembling a crowd to disrupt public order, and both have been formally arrested, making it likely they will be indicted. The police have not specified the basis of those charges

“Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping, Li Sihua — they were supporters and participants in the New Citizens Movement, and played a major role in attracting attention in their area,” said Mr. Zhang, the lawyer. When police interrogated them, he said, many of the questions were about Mr. Xu and the movement.

As well as the illegal gathering accusation, Ms. Liu and Mr. Wei face two other charges: “assembling a crowd to disturb the public order” and “using a cult organization to undermine the law,” said their lawyers.

The public order allegation is based on the two handing out leaflets for independent candidates for a local People’s Congress election in 2011, and the cult allegation is based on comments that the two sent on an online messaging service in 2012, calling on friends to pay attention to the trial of a follower of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual group. Lawyers for all three defendants said they intended to plead not guilty to all the charges.

The trial suggests how worried the Chinese Communist Party leadership is about potential challenges to its hold on power, even from citizens who have seized on the leadership’s own promises of less corruption, greater candor and greater respect for the law, said several rights lawyers and advocates. What particularly worries the government, they said, is how some disgruntled ordinary citizens, like Ms. Liu, have increasingly turned personal grievances into political demands.

A 48-year-old former steel mill worker who was laid off, Ms. Liu embodies that transformation. Her activism started about eight years ago when she began petitioning the government for redress after the police beat her uncle, according to her daughter, Ms. Liao. Over years of complaining, however, Ms. Liu became drawn to broader demands. She unsuccessfully tried to stand as an independent candidate in elections for a local party-controlled assembly in 2011, and last year joined the emerging New Citizens Movement.

Her fellow defendants, Mr. Wei and Mr. Li, also started off as petitioners with specific grievances and became drawn into political activism, said their relatives.

“The New Citizen Movement went beyond individual cases to focus on broader demands about civil and political rights,” said Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. “It’s O.K. for citizens to report injustices, but when you start organizing and issuing petitions, that becomes sensitive.”

Chinese courts come under Communist Party control, and there is little likelihood of the trio’s escaping conviction and prison sentences, especially given the political environment.

Since Mr. Xi became Communist Party leader in November, he has demanded that officials strengthen and defend the ideological sinews of party rule, and he also endorsed a directive identifying human rights activists and advocates of civil society as threats to the party. This month, a commentary in a party journal, Red Flag Manuscripts, amplified that warning, and accused hostile Western governments of fomenting subversion inside China by sponsoring dissidents.

The charge of illegal gathering against the trio of activists could bring a prison sentence of up to five years. The other charges could also each bring several years in prison.

But Mr. Zhang, the lawyer for Ms. Liu, saw some hope that the Yushui District People’s Court in Xinyu might reject the charge of illegal assembly. There were no police officers present at the photo shoot, so there was no order to disperse, one of the elements used to define the crime, said Mr. Zhang. The court’s delays in setting a trial date, and the shifting accusations against the defendants, suggested that some officials might be uneasy about prosecuting on the assembly charge, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/opinion/more-damage-from-nsa-snooping.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 7:21 AM
Subject: re: N.S.A. Snooping and the Damage Done
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

To the Editor:

   If America's allies believe " that the United States plays by its own rules and respects neither the sovereignty nor the political sensibilities of some of its closest democratic allies.", they give us too much credit. Our imperious Executive breaks our own rules with impunity.  The extra-judiciary killing of AbdulRahman al-Awlaki violated U.S. statute and our Constitution. Likewise the wiretapping of uncounted Americans.

   What is distinctive about bugging Angela Merkel's phone in all this is only that it didn't actually violate U.S. law. That's almost refreshing.

Barry Haskell Levine

EDITORIAL

N.S.A. Snooping and the Damage Done

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: October 25, 2013

President Obama spent this week trying to persuade America’s close allies, France and Germany, that the National Security Agency’s extensive eavesdropping in those countries is under adequate control. He was not entirely successful. His efforts to reassure President François Hollande of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany seem to have been as incomplete as the explanations the administration has given to the American public about the agency’s excessive domestic surveillance.

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The German government learned this week that the newsmagazine Der Spiegel had new evidence (presumably via information leaked by Edward Snowden) that the N.S.A. had monitored Ms. Merkel’s cellphone. On Monday, Le Monde reported that the agency had gathered data on more than 70 million phone calls and messages inside France within one 30-day period, suggesting a surveillance program that went well beyond any legitimate tracking of international terrorists.

Mr. Obama sought to assure Ms. Merkel that her phone was not being monitored now and would not be in the future, but he seemed to indicate nothing about past monitoring. David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti reported inThe Times on Friday that Germany has evidence of monitoring going back to the George W. Bush administration.

The Guardian also reported this week that the phone conversations of at least 35 world leaders were monitored by the N.S.A. in 2006, according to an agency memo leaked by Mr. Snowden. The N.S.A. apparently encouraged American diplomats and officials to provide phone numbers to be added to the surveillance program. Would it be surprising if foreign leaders now became much more restrictive about sharing their numbers with United States officials?

Such surveillance undermines the trust of allies and their willingness to share the kind of confidential information needed to thwart terrorism and other threats. When the N.S.A. violates French or German law, law enforcement agencies in those nations cooperate with the agency at their own risk. There is also the more subtle damage done by the feeling that the United States plays by its own rules and respects neither the sovereignty nor the political sensibilities of some of its closest democratic allies.

Broad data collection programs by the United States government also harm the efforts of American Internet companies to market their services internationally by casting doubt on their ability to protect privacy. Such companies face heavy legal pressures from the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies to make private data available for government scrutiny.

And there is new pressure on European governments to seek stricter data protection in negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, with the eavesdropping reports souring the political climate for these talks.

European leaders are not naïve about the realities of international snooping. American security is built on the strength and reliability of its international alliances. These should not be put at risk merely because the N.S.A. now has the capacity to monitor more communications in more places than ever.

A good way out of this mess would be for Washington to take up the proposal made Friday by Germany and France to negotiate a formal pact that would set mutually acceptable surveillance guidelines. The next steps must come from Mr. Obama. He should move beyond unpersuasive and vague pledges to balance security against privacy, to substantive guidelines that limit the overreaching of N.S.A. surveillance programs abroad and at home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/opinion/the-deaths-of-innocents.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 5:32 PM
Subject: re: The Deaths of Innocents
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Secrecy and deception are the stock in trade of an Intelligence agency. No one is actually surprised that our CIA lies all the time in carrying out its mission. But the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency is Intelligence. In the application of deadly force, the agents, officers and contractors of our CIA are unlawful combatants. As such, they deserve no special dispensation when they lie to us about what they do in our name.

Barry Haskell Levine

EDITORIAL

The Deaths of Innocents

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: October 23, 2013 185 CommentsOne of the arguments for America’s heavy reliance on drone strikes against suspected extremists has been surgical precision. The weapons are so finely calibrated and precisely targeted, officials argue, that only militants are killed, and that collateral damage to innocent civilians is rare. These claims were always hard to accept, especially given the government’s refusal to provide corroborating data. Now two human rights groups, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have marshaled impressive new evidencechallenging them.

In separate reports released on Tuesday, Amnesty International examined in detail nine suspected drone strikes in Pakistan. Human Rights Watch looked at six suspected strikes in Yemen. The groups reached a similar conclusion — that dozens of civilians have been killed and that the United States may have violated international law and even committed war crimes.

Mr. Obama took an important step in May when he announced that he would reduce the number of drone strikes, allow only those that posed no threat or virtually no threat to civilians, and issue guidelines codifying the use of force against terrorists, including a provision that they be shown to pose “a continuing, imminent threat to America.” The new reports provide fresh evidence that Mr. Obama’s promised policy changes are long overdue. They also require better answers from the president than the vague responses the White House has so far delivered.

The Pakistan attacks occurred between May 2012 and July 2013 in the border region of North Waziristan, where extremists have havens and American drone strikes have been the most intensive. Amnesty International’s report, based on Pakistani and other sources, says there have been 374 strikes since 2004, including four incidents it investigated in which more than 30 civilians were killed.

In one case, in October 2012, a 68-year-old grandmother was gathering vegetables in a field, her grandchildren nearby, when she was “blasted into pieces” by a drone strike that appeared aimed directly at her. Three months earlier, 18 male laborers, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in a series of drone strikes on the remote village of Zowi Sidgi. The first one struck a tent where the men had gathered for an evening meal; others struck those who came to rescue the injured.

The Human Rights Watch report on Yemen, which examined one attack in 2009 and five in 2012-13, determined that 82 people, at least 57 of them civilians, were killed in those episodes. All except one involved drone strikes; the other involved a cruise missile.

Both President George W. Bush and Mr. Obama have used the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the state of war that has existed since as cause to target terrorist suspects. But under international law, parties to armed conflict must minimize harm to civilians in a war zone and observe rules about what is or isn’t a lawful military target.

Hence Mr. Obama’s promised guidelines. But those guidelines have never been made public, so there is no way to judge whether or how well they are being carried out. Similarly, because the government won’t talk about the attacks, there is no way of judging whether the military is honoring Mr. Obama’s pledge that “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” before authorizing a strike.

Drones are important to America’s arsenal, not least because they can reach extremists in lawless areas who otherwise could not be captured and because they avoid putting American troops in harm’s way. But they are also creating enemies for the United States among people in Pakistan and Yemen who say the weapons are killing civilians, as well as militants. That alone argues for greater transparency and accountability from the government.

Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/africas-trauma-epidemic.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:11 AM
Subject: re: Africa’s Trauma Epidemic
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  In all of healthcare, there are only three bargains: potable water, sanitary sewers and vaccines. That's as true today as it was half a century ago when I learned it on my mother's knee.  Everything else (including CAT scans and burn units) is vastly more expensive per life saved.  Where resources are finite (and they're always finite) we must choose to spend dollars where they do the most to save lives, to restore autonomy and to decrease suffering. It's not that Dr. Orekunrin's trauma work isn't critical and valuable. But it's certainly not a rational place to start spending more resources.

Barry Haskell Levine

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Africa’s Trauma Epidemic

By OLA OREKUNRIN

Published: October 17, 2013

LAGOS — It was dusk and I was on my way home from Abeokuta, a vibrant city in southwest Nigeria. My driver had switched off the car’s air-conditioning so I could open the windows and feel the breeze. He was weaving between potholes in the road when suddenly, the scene ahead changed.

A large truck had pulled out carelessly onto the road, knocking a car straight into the median.

That stretch of road is notoriously dangerous, not just because of traffic accidents but also because of armed robbers. It’s for that reason that I suppressed my natural instinct to stop and help.

I was filled with guilt as we passed the wrecked car, because I knew that if the young man at the wheel had been badly injured, there was only a small chance that he would get the emergency treatment he needed.

I knew this because I am a trauma doctor and the founder of West Africa’s first indigenous air ambulance service. Nigeria, a country of more than 170 million people, has no organized trauma response system and no formal training for paramedics. Injured people are often taken to the hospital in a car or minibus or draped across the motorcycle of a good Samaritan, sometimes several hours after the accident has occurred.

Even if the patient does reach a local hospital, it may not have the skilled staff or equipment needed. (There are only a few that do, and there are huge distances between them.) Most of those who are seriously injured probably bleed to death.

So I couldn’t help it when, a few moments later, I said “Stop the car, please.”

I grabbed one of our emergency response bags from my trunk and walked back. I tried to concentrate on the types of injuries the driver might have rather than how unsafe it was walking on that stretch of road, particularly in the evening. Was he bleeding? Was he conscious?

The crash scene had quickly attracted some of the people who typically gather around accidents in Nigeria. Bystanders were pulling the driver out of the car. Before long they were joined by a barefoot “prophet” in a white robe. No Nigerian accident scene is complete without a prophet who commands everyone to stand by while he loudly predicts that the patient will stop bleeding. The patient is often drained of blood by the time the prophecy is complete.

Sadly, these prophets are the best hope that many Nigerians have. Trauma has become a silent epidemic in Africa, an epidemic that will only spread as the economy grows. More and more Africans are buying cars and working in heavy and dangerous industries. At the same time, infrastructure is poor, safety laws lax, and cars badly maintained.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s smallest number of motorized vehicles but the highest rate of road traffic fatalities, with Nigeria and South Africa leading the pack.

The World Bank predicts that in the next two years, road accidents could be the biggest killer of African children between 5 and 15. By 2030, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, road accidents will be the fifth leading cause of death in the developing world, ahead of malaria, tuberculosis and H.I.V.

If you add to these numbers the injuries caused by violent crime and communal conflict, then you have all the ingredients for a public health emergency.

And yet, trauma receives only a tiny fraction of the attention and money given to these three infectious diseases. Every health care conference I attend focuses on vaccines, treatment and training to combat the infamous “triple epidemic.”

Over the last decade, billions of dollars have poured into Africa with the laudable aim of defeating these killer diseases. But that most basic killer, injury, remains neglected.

Part of the problem is that the solutions are so complex. It’s easy to quantify interventions like the number of AIDS-fighting anti-retrovirals or mosquito nets distributed. Pills can be counted, flown in on cargo planes and delivered to large numbers of people in a short time period. But a pill would do very little for someone on a rural road in Nigeria with a head injury and a collapsed lung.

We need to put in place systems to provide lifesaving care for accident victims. They need to be moved to a fully equipped hospital — one with X-ray machines, CT scanners, a burn unit — within the space of 45 minutes. We need at least 10 of these proper hospitals. We need to improve our roads, and we need a high-quality ambulance system to drive on them. And we need paramedic schools — like the one my company is helping to open, the first of its kind in Nigeria.

Some countries in other parts of the world have come up with proactive solutions. In Israel, a group called United Hatzalah helps volunteer emergency workers get quickly to accident sites, by “ambucycle” or on foot, if necessary. But Africa’s challenge will require an African response — and international support.

On the road that night, I quickly assessed that the young man needed urgent medical attention. I gave him oxygen and inserted a makeshift airway. I noted that he probably had internal bleeding and did my best to stem whatever external bleeding I could detect.

A passing taxi then transported him to the nearest hospital. He had a fighting chance. But too many injured Nigerians, forgotten on the side of the road, do not. It’s time the global public-health community paid attention to Africa’s urgent need for emergency medical care.

Ola Orekunrin is a trauma doctor and the managing director of Flying Doctors Nigeria, an air ambulance service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/us/politics/us-legal-shift-may-open-door-for-challenge-to-secret-wiretaps.html?hp&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 7:43 AM
Subject: re: Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretapsq
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  President George W. Bush should have been impeached in 2004 for warrantless wiretaps in violation of the FISA statute and of our Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search. But the editor of this newspaper was intimidated, and our Congress proved craven and it  was papered over by changing the statute ex post facto. 
   Where our "leaders" don't leader, the People have to step up. So it becomes a matter for the courts, each victim left to sue for damages inflicted by our own government. Where our Executive has assaulted us and our Legislature has abandoned us, at least we have recourse to the Court.  In this context, mr. Verilli's assertion that targets of these illegal wiretaps must be notified of that fact gleams like the tentative promise of dawn.
Barry Haskell Levine

Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretaps

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: October 16, 2013 6 Comments

WASHINGTON — Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said.

Meanwhile, the department’s National Security Division is combing active and closed case files to identify other defendants who faced evidence resulting from the 2008 wiretapping law. It permits eavesdropping without warrants on Americans’ cross-border phone calls and e-mails so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at foreigners abroad.

It is not yet clear how many other such cases there are, nor whether prosecutors will notify convicts whose cases are already over. Such a decision could set off attempts to reopen those cases.

“It’s of real legal importance that components of the Justice Department disagreed about when they had a duty to tell a defendant that the surveillance program was used,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor. “It’s a big deal because one view covers so many more cases than the other, and this is an issue that should have come up repeatedly over the years.”

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal discussions. The Wall Street Journal  previously reported on a recent court filing in which the department, reversing an earlier stance, said it was obliged to disclose to defendants if evidence used in court was linked to warrantless surveillance, but it remained unclear if there were any such cases.

The debate was part of the fallout about National Security Agency surveillance set off by leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. They have drawn attention to the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which legalized a form of the Bush administration’s once-secret warrantless surveillance program.

In February, the Supreme Court dismissed a case challenging its constitutionality because the plaintiffs, led by Amnesty International, could not prove they had been wiretapped. Mr. Verrilli had told the justices that someone else would have legal standing to trigger review of the program because prosecutors would notify people facing evidence derived from surveillance under the 2008 law.

But it turned out that Mr. Verrilli’s assurances clashed with the practices of national security prosecutors, who had not been alerting such defendants that evidence in their cases had stemmed from wiretapping their conversations without a warrant.

Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs challenging the 2008 law, said that someone in the Justice Department should have flagged the issue earlier and that the department must do more than change its practice going forward.

“The government has an obligation to tell the Supreme Court, in some formal way, that a claim it made repeatedly, and that the court relied on in its decision, was simply not true,” he said. “And it has an obligation to notify the criminal defendants whose communications were monitored under the statute that their communications were monitored.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The department’s practices came under scrutiny after a December 2012 speech by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee. During debate over extending the 2008 law, she warned that terrorism remained a threat. Listing several terrorism-related arrests, she added, “so this has worked.”

Lawyers in two of the cases Ms. Feinstein mentioned — one in Fort Lauderdale and one in Chicago — asked prosecutors this spring to confirm that surveillance under the 2008 law had played a role in the investigations of their clients so they could challenge it.

But prosecutors said they did not have to make such a disclosure. On June 7, The New York Times published an article citing Ms. Feinstein’s speech and the stance the prosecutors had taken.

As a result, Mr. Verrilli sought an explanation from national security lawyers about why they had not flagged the issue when vetting his Supreme Court briefs and helping him practice for the arguments, according to officials.

The national security lawyers explained that it was a misunderstanding, the officials said. Because the rules on wiretapping warrants in foreign intelligence cases are different from the rules in ordinary criminal investigations, they said, the division has long used a narrow understanding of what “derived from” means in terms of when it must disclose specifics to defendants.

In national security cases involving orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, prosecutors alert defendants only that some evidence derives from a FISA wiretap, but not details like whether there had just been one order or a chain of several. Only judges see those details.

After the 2008 law, that generic approach meant that prosecutors did not disclose when some traditional FISA wiretap orders had been obtained using information gathered through the warrantless wiretapping program. Division officials believed it would have to disclose the use of that program only if it introduced a recorded phone call or intercepted e-mail gathered directly from the program — and for five years, they avoided doing so.

For Mr. Verrilli, that raised a more fundamental question: was there any persuasive legal basis for failing to clearly notify defendants that they faced evidence linked to the 2008 warrantless surveillance law, thereby preventing them from knowing that they had an opportunity to argue that it derived from an unconstitutional search?

The debate stretched through June and July, officials said, including multiple meetings and dueling memorandums by lawyers in the solicitor general office and in the national security division, which has been led since March by acting Assistant Attorney General John Carlin. The deliberations were overseen by James Cole, the deputy attorney general.

National security lawyers and a policy advisory committee of senior United States attorneys focused on operational worries: Disclosure risked alerting foreign targets that their communications were being monitored, so intelligence agencies might become reluctant to share information with law enforcement officials that could become a problem in a later trial.

But Mr. Verrilli argued that withholding disclosure from defendants could not be justified legally, officials said. Lawyers with several agencies — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the N.S.A. and the office of the director of national intelligence — concurred, officials said, and the division changed the practice going forward.

National Security Division lawyers began looking at other cases, eventually identifying the one that will be publicly identified soon and are still looking through closed cases and deciding what to do about them.

But in a twist, in the Chicago and Fort Lauderdale cases that Ms. Feinstein had mentioned, prosecutors made new court filings saying they did not intend to use any evidence derived from surveillance of the defendants under the 2008 law.

When defense lawyers asked about Ms. Feinstein’s remarks, a Senate lawyer responded in a letter that she “did not state, and did not mean to state” that those cases were linked to the warrantless surveillance program. Rather, the lawyer wrote, her point was that terrorism remained a problem.

In a recent court filing, the lawyers wrote that it is “hard to believe” Ms. Feinstein would cite “random” cases when pressing to reauthorize the 2008 law, suggesting either that the government is still concealing something or that she had employed the “politics of fear” to influence the debate. A spokesman for Ms. Feinstein said she preferred to let the letter speak for itself.

On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/technology/on-a-new-jersey-islet-twilight-of-the-landline.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:31 AM
Subject: re: On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    In 2013, U.S. law still treats communications by landline differently from those by cellphone, although users do not.  My communications by landline enjoy a presumption of privacy; to tap the contents legally requires a court warrant or a National Security Letter. My communications by cellphone enjoy no such legal protection. As soon as the message is transmitted by radio from my cellphone to a relay tower I have "shared" it with a third party. From that point onwards, I enjoy no presumption of privacy and no court warrant is needed to tap the contents of my conversation.

   Of course, this law needs to be fixed to give teeth to Americans' Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search. But until the law is fixed, for Verizon to replace landline service with a wireless link is to deprive residents of a basic civil right, as guaranteed in our bill or rights.

Barry Haskell Levine

 

MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Hurricane Sandy devastated this barrier island community of multimillion-dollar homes, but in Peter Flihan’s view, Verizon Communications has delivered a second blow: the telecommunications giant did not rebuild the landlines destroyed in the storm, and traditional telephone service here has now gone the way of the telegraph.

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“Verizon decides then and there to step on us,” said Mr. Flihan, 75, a retired toy designer and marketer.

Verizon said it was too expensive to replace Mantoloking’s traditional copper-line phone network — the kind that has connected America for more than a century — and instead installed Voice Link, a wireless service it insisted was better.

Verizon’s move on this sliver of land is a look into the not-too-distant future, a foreshadowing of nearly all telephone service across the United States. The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category.

The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout.

“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.”

The Federal Communications Commission has long agreed. In its National Broadband Plan, published in 2010, the F.C.C. said that requiring certain carriers to maintain plain old telephone service “is not sustainable” and could siphon investments away from new networks.

“The challenge for the country,” the F.C.C. said, is to ensure “a smooth transition for Americans who use traditional phone service and for the businesses that provide it.”

But as far as Mr. Flihan and others in New Jersey are concerned, that transition from a reliable service — one that has given them a sense of security all their lives — is not smooth at all. An array of state-sanctioned consumer advocacy groups, as well as AARP, have petitioned regulators to disallow the replacement of Mantoloking’s copper lines with Voice Link.

Not only will Voice Link not work if the power fails — a backup battery provides two hours of talking time, hardly reassuring to people battered by Sandy — but Verizon warns Voice Link users that calls to 911 under normal conditions might not go through because of network congestion. Medical devices that require periodic tests over phone lines, like many pacemakers, cannot transmit over Voice Link. Fax machines do not work over most wireless phone networks, including Voice Link. Neither do many home security systems, which depend on a copper phone line to connect to a response center.

“They told us this was the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Flihan said. But he estimates that roughly 25 percent of the calls he makes through the Verizon Voice Link service do not go through the first time he dials, or sometimes the second or third. Occasionally, the call is interrupted by clicking sounds, and sometimes a third party’s voice can be heard on the line, Mr. Flihan said.

Verizon responded that it had offered to visit Mr. Flihan’s house to address the problems. Mr. Flihan said he had refused if Verizon would not bring back his landline. Overall, the company said that a vast majority of Voice Link customers in Mantoloking and elsewhere liked Voice Link, and if not, they could get phone service over cable television lines through Comcast or another provider.

The difference between wired and wireless, however, is a big one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/world/middleeast/egypt-violence.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 9:52 AM
Subject: re: Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    The Arab Spring replaced a corrupt, repressive unrepresentative government in Egypt with an imperfect democracy. Three months ago, that experiment was ended by a military coup d'etat. The American people are unlikely to ever know how deeply we were involved in this coup. At minimum, someone assured al-Sisi that we wouldn't cut off $billions in  U.S. aid as our statutes require in case of a coup.

   So what have we bought? The al-Sisi junta continues to abide by the Peace Treaty with Israel as Morsi did and as Mubarak did. And it goes on beating and jailing and killing anyone who questions its legitimacy. But the Egyptian people now know that we stand by the military, and that our rhetoric of democracy and liberty and rights is a tissue of lies. Americans ask "why do they hate us?". The answer's not that obscure.

Barry Haskell Levine

Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate

Mostafa Darwish/Associated Press

Egyptian security forces at the site of a car bombing on a security headquarters in the Sinai town of El Tur on Monday.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: October 7, 2013 

• 
  
• BACKED GOVERNMENT AND ITS ISLAMIST OPPONENTS ESCALATED ON MONDAY, WITH AN EXPANSION OF ATTACKS AGAINST GOVERNMENT TARGETS, SIGNS THAT THE AUTHORITIES HAVE FAILED TO SECURE THE STREETS AND THAT BOTH SIDES REFUSE TO BACK DOWN.

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Timeline of Turmoil in Egypt After Mubarak and Morsi

Related

• Dozens Are Killed in Street Violence Across Egypt (October 7, 2013)

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Mohamed El-Shahed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A state security building after a car bombing on Monday in the Sinai town of El Tur that killed two police officers and injured nearly 50 other people.

Three brazen attacks across the country included a drive-by shooting near the Suez Canal that killed six soldiers, a car bomb that killed three police officers and wounded dozens near the Red Sea resorts area, and the first rocket-propelled grenade launched in the struggle, exploding near an elite enclave of the capital and damaging a satellite transmitter.

The attacks came a day after security forces killed 53 protesters, many shot in the head and chest, in the worst outbreak of street mayhem in Cairo since mid-August.

Three months after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the violence was the latest evidence that the new government installed on July 3 by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had failed to neutralize the Islamist opposition even after arresting its leadership and demonstrating its willingness to use lethal force.

To many in the government, the protests and attacks seemed only to underscore the need to redouble its fight against the Brotherhood, which officials quickly blamed for Monday’s attacks.

To the Islamist opposition, however, a heavy turnout for a day of protests on Sunday despite the deadly reprisals only proved the resilience of their “anti coup” movement — even with no obvious leadership. Faced with a return to decades of repression, Islamists said, they had no choice but to continue their protests even if they risked death and stood little chance of reversing the takeover.

The seemingly random attacks on Monday, many analysts said, indicated that the violent backlash against the new government had taken on a momentum that the leaders of the Brotherhood could no longer restrain even if they wanted to.

While neither side could fully triumph, neither could see room to pull back, setting the stage for further bloodshed, said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo who has tried without success to broker steps toward compromise. “We have reached a bloody stalemate,” he said.

Since Mr. Morsi was deposed, the killing of security officers has become an almost daily occurrence in the industrial canal zone of the lawless northern Sinai. But the car bomb on Monday morning in the south Sinai town of El Tur, in the same region as the biblical Mount Sinai and the Sharm el Sheik resort, was the first sign that such attacks might be spreading to what had been a pillar of the Egyptian economy, its Red Sea resorts.

And the rocket-propelled grenade attack was the first time in years that such a heavy weapon had been used in the vicinity of the capital. The grenade tore a foot-wide hole in a satellite-transmission dish, and its explosion an hour before dawn sent shivers through the affluent neighborhood of Maadi, a heavily guarded precinct that is home to many embassies and diplomats.

No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, nor did they need to. The attacks were universally assumed to be the work of Islamists angry at Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized as spokesmen, two senior government officials blamed the Brotherhood despite its repeated public disavowals of such tactics.

“Blackmail by terrorism,” said one of the officials, a senior military officer.

Suggesting the Brotherhood was almost predisposed to violence, he argued that the violence might have been worse if not for the crackdown, in which security forces have killed more than 1,000 protesters and jailed hundreds of Islamist leaders. If the violence was this severe with the leaders behind bars, the officer asked, how much worse might it be if leaders were released?

The Brotherhood’s “anti coup” alliance, meanwhile, saluted what it called the courage and sacrifice of “unprecedented numbers” who had turned out the day before. In a statement on Monday, the alliance called for student protests at schools and universities on Tuesday “to denounce the continuation of the massacres.”

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Mostafa Darwish/E.P.A.

Egyptian soldiers at the site of a car bombing on Monday.

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Multimedia Feature

Timeline of Turmoil in Egypt After Mubarak and Morsi

And it all but dared the government to continue the violence against protesters by calling for new marches on Friday to Tahrir Square, the symbolic center of the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak and more recently the staging ground for rallies in support of General Sisi. It was the attempt by pro-Morsi marchers to reach Tahrir Square on Sunday, when it was the site of a pro-military celebration, that set in motion the day of deadly violence, and the opposition alliance’s plans to try again this Friday appeared to set the stage for more.

“Nobody will keep us from the square no matter what the sacrifices,” the alliance said in its statement.

Leaders and supporters of the Brotherhood have said repeatedly for weeks that they have no choice but to continue their street protests regardless of the odds, because the new government has so far shown every intention of suppressing Egyptian democracy as well as their movement.

“This is a final ultimate battle with the military,” Ahmed el-Erainy, 42, a business consultant and Brotherhood member recently released from prison after his arrest at an antigovernment sit-in, said on Monday. “It is the ultimate battle between us and them, and by us I don’t just mean the Brothers — I mean the civil state versus the military state.”

Like others in the Brotherhood, he dismissed the idea that its members could ever hope for fairness under the military-led government, and after his turn through Egypt’s capricious and politicized judicial system he laughed with particular relish at the idea that instead of street protests they might put their trust in the law and the courts. “What judiciary?” he asked. “There is no judiciary in Egypt.”

H. A. Hellyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who is based in Egypt, argued that the Brotherhood’s approach was tragically shortsighted. Egypt’s security forces were likely to meet almost any mass demonstration with force, and the Islamists end up taking the blame for the loss of life, the chaos and any subsequent retaliation like the attacks on Monday.

“Who do you think will be blamed for that R.P.G. attack?” Mr. Hellyer said. “More people will die, you will have violence in other parts of the country, and all that will be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“It is only a question of whether the Brotherhood are pummeled out of the political arena, or if they withdraw on their own terms,” he added.

But Professor Shahin of the American University in Cairo argued that by harassing the government the protests gave the Islamists some leverage, and that the current government was also in a battle it could never fully win. “You can’t just say, ‘I have half the population on my side and with it I can crush the other half,’ and go on like that indefinitely,” he said. “This military-backed government cannot consolidate on the basis of repression and the authoritarian measures of the ‘50s and ‘60s. That is a bygone era.
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