http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/us/poll-shows-complexity-of-debate-on-trade-offs-in-government-spying-programs.html?pagewanted=all

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:42 AM
Subject: re: Poll Shows Complexity of Debate on Trade-Offs in Government Spying Programs
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  It is plain that James Clapper, like Keith Alexander, lied to Congress. As long as such grave breaches of the public trust go unprosecuted, we the People will rely on Snowdens and Mannings and Drakes and Ellsbergs to tell us the truth. Any anyone who persecutes them for blowing the whistle is setting himself against the will of the sovereign People.

Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

Poll Shows Complexity of Debate on Trade-Offs in Government Spying Programs

Mario Tama/Getty Images

A rally last month for Edward J. Snowden, whose disclosures of government surveillance have prompted a national discussion.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 10, 2013 57 Comments

WASHINGTON — When Edward J. Snowden risked prison to go public with classified documents about National Security Agencysurveillance, he said he wanted to give the public a chance to weigh in on what he considered an excessive intrusion on the privacy of Americans.

It is still unclear whether Mr. Snowden, the 30-year-old former N.S.A. contractor now holed up at a Moscow airport, will escape punishment. But he has succeeded in opening the government spying’s trade-offs between civil liberties and security to the broadest and best-informed public debate in many years, even as intelligence officials are horrified at the exposure of their methods and targets.

Gregory F. Treverton, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said he found Mr. Snowden’s leaks “reprehensible.” But he said there had been nothing in the past quite comparable to the recent national discussion on government eavesdropping and data collection.

“It is kind of paradoxical that it took Snowden to get to this debate,” said Mr. Treverton, now with the RAND Corporation. “I’m disappointed that neither the intelligence committees nor the administration pushed this debate sooner.”

While both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have labeled Mr. Snowden a traitor, the American public apparently disagrees. In a national poll from Quinnipiac Universityreleased Wednesday, voters said by 55 percent to 34 percent that he was a whistle-blower, not a traitor.

The poll showed that the view of Mr. Snowden as a whistle-blower predominated among nearly every subgroup, regardless of political party, gender, income, education or age. The concerns about privacy and government power raised by the N.S.A. disclosures do not break down along conventional ideological lines, with libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats alike questioning the surveillance.

The poll showed continuing division, and perhaps some confusion, in the views of Americans about the surveillance programs Mr. Snowden revealed. In the same poll, for instance, 54 percent of the voters questioned said the security agency’s collection of data on Americans’ phone calls “is necessary to keep Americans safe.” But in a separate question, 53 percent said the same program “is too much intrusion into Americans’ personal privacy.”

“Americans’ views on antiterrorism efforts are complicated,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “They see the threat from terrorism as real and worth defending against, but they have a sense that their privacy is being invaded and they are not happy about it at all.”

Peter D. Feaver, a political-science professor at Duke who studies public opinion and foreign policy, said that “it would be a mistake to say that the public has a settled and coherent view” on the surveillance programs a month after they were disclosed. But he said that sympathy for Mr. Snowden appeared to be growing.

“You could say that Obama has gotten the debate he said he wanted,” Professor Feaver said, referring to a remark President Obama made when the news of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures first broke. “But he is not prevailing, and he has not really engaged in the debate.”

Mr. Obama “doesn’t want to spend his political capital on this,” said Professor Feaver, who served in the George W. Bush White House. “He wants to spend it on immigration.”

While intelligence officials have tried to explain and defend the N.S.A. programs, their efforts have been seriously handicapped by accusations of inaccuracy.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was forced to admit publicly that his previous assurance in Senate testimony that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans was false. A fact sheet was withdrawn after two senators charged that it contained errors. And officials who testified about terrorist plots uncovered with the help of the N.S.A. programs got the details of some cases wrong.

The Snowden disclosures, meanwhile, have prompted a flood of discussion, including Congressional hearings, research organization panels and newspaper editorials and opinion articles, both supportive and critical of the security agency. At least five federal lawsuits have been filed challenging the programs.

The debate culminated in Tuesday’s all-day “workshop” of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal panel that invited former government officials and civil libertarians to discuss two of the security agency programs: the collection of data on nearly all telephone calls made in the United States and the interception of e-mail and other messages sent by foreigners overseas using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype.

A former judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees eavesdropping orders and programs in secret, said he thought the debate was overdue. The retired federal judge, James Robertson, argued for several changes, including adding a privacy advocate to the court’s closed hearings to allow an adversarial process.

Intelligence officials have expressed concern about damage done by the leaks to the N.S.A.’s collection efforts, as terrorism suspects and others have tried to switch communications methods to avoid detection. They have also noted that Mr. Snowden’s revelations have gone far beyond programs touching on the rights of Americans.

While Mr. Snowden initially explained his leaks to The Guardian as a defense of American privacy, he has made it clear that he opposes surveillance of foreign citizens, as well. By exposing a range of operations by the N.S.A. and its British equivalent against China, Russia, Brazil and the European Union, he has gone far beyond the debate over American privacy and set off a series of international disputes.

Mr. Snowden, who has asylum offers from Venezuela and other countries but has not yet found a way to leave Moscow, spoke again with The Guardian in recent days to defend his actions. In interviews with Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian columnist, Mr. Snowden denied widespread speculation that he had shared the thousands of N.S.A. documents he reportedly has on four laptops with Chinese or Russian intelligence, either deliberately or unwittingly.

“I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops,” Mr. Snowden told the newspaper. He did not explain how he could be certain that intelligence officers of the two countries, which have very sophisticated electronic spying abilities, had not gotten access to the information on his laptops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/opinion/the-laws-you-cant-see.html?hp&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:01 AM
Subject: re: The Laws You Can’t See
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Where there is no adversarial process, there is no duly constituted court of law in the American system.  The FISA court and the Surveillance court that may be modelled on it both fail this simple test. They are wholly owned subsidiaries of our Executive branch not of our Judiciary at all, despite their misleading names.

Barry Haskell Levine

EDITORIAL

The Laws You Can’t See

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: July 8, 2013 

In the month since a national security contractor leaked classified documents revealing a vast sweep of Americans’ phone records by the federal government, people across the country have disagreed about the extent to which our expectation of personal privacy must yield to the demands of national security.

Related

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. (July 7, 2013)

Today's Editorials

Under normal circumstances, this could be a healthy, informed debate on a matter of overwhelming importance — the debate President Obama said he welcomed in the days after the revelations of the surveillance programs.

But this is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.

As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.

But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.

The few public officials with knowledge of the surveillance court’s work either censor themselves as required by law, as Senator Ron Wyden has done in his valiant efforts to draw attention to the full scope of these programs, or they offer murky, even misleading statements, as the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., did before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.

When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.

Even before the latest revelations of government snooping, some members of Congress were trying to provide that check. In a letter to the court in February, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three others asked that any rulings with a “significant interpretation of the law” be declassified. In response, the court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, wrote that the court could provide only summaries of its rulings, because the full opinions contained classified information. But he balked at releasing summaries, which he feared would create “misunderstanding or confusion.” It is difficult to imagine how releasing information would make the confusion worse.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently reintroduced a bill that would require declassification. It was defeated in December. In light of the national uproar over the most recent revelations, the leadership in Congress should push to pass it and begin to shine some light on this dark corner of the judicial system.

We don’t know what we’ll find. The surveillance court may be strictly adhering to the limits of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Or not. And that’s the problem: This court has morphed into an odd hybrid that seems to exist outside the justice system, even as its power grows in ways that we can’t see.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 9:32 PM
Subject: re: In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Since no one has--or indeed can ever have--standing to challenge the rulings of the FISA court, the "Court of Review" is an empty gesture towards due process of law.  In practice, the FISA court is a wholly-owned subsidiary of our Executive that doesn't deserve the name of "court". The balance of powers on which our nation was founded can't operate when law is being promulgated and interpreted entirely within the Executive branch.

Barry Haskell Levine

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: July 6, 2013WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”

While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Mr. Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns. In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to get access to an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran’s nuclear program.

In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications. In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of “foreign intelligence” to include “weapons of mass destruction,” was used to justify access to the message.

The court’s use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings had eased access to data on espionage, cyberattacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.

“The definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ is very broad,” another former intelligence official said in an interview. “An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that.”

The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court’s rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. Judges on the FISA court refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.

Beyond broader legal rulings, the judges have had to resolve questions about newer types of technology, like video conferencing, and how and when the government can get access to them, the officials said.

The judges have also had to intervene repeatedly when private Internet and phone companies, which provide much of the data to the N.S.A., have raised concerns that the government is overreaching in its demands for records or when the government itself reports that it has inadvertently collected more data than was authorized, the officials said. In such cases, the court has repeatedly ordered the N.S.A. to destroy the Internet or phone data that was improperly collected, the officials said.

The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court’s opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of “metadata” — facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations — does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications.

This concept is rooted partly in the “special needs” provision the court has embraced. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data,” a third official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing.”

Under the new procedures passed by Congress in 2008 in the FISA Amendments Act, even the collection of metadata must be considered “relevant” to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities.

The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to the officials with knowledge of the decisions.

Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system. “That whole notion is missing in this process,” he said.

The FISA judges have bristled at criticism that they are a rubber stamp for the government, occasionally speaking out to say they apply rigor in their scrutiny of government requests. Most of the surveillance operations involve the N.S.A., an eavesdropping behemoth that has listening posts around the world. Its role in gathering intelligence within the United States has grown enormously since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Soon after, President George W. Bush, under a secret wiretapping program that circumvented the FISA court, authorized the N.S.A. to collect metadata and in some cases listen in on foreign calls to or from the United States. After a heated debate, the essential elements of the Bush program were put into law by Congress in 2007, but with greater involvement by the FISA court.

Even before the leaks by Mr. Snowden, members of Congress and civil liberties advocates had been pressing for declassifying and publicly releasing court decisions, perhaps in summary form.

Reggie B. Walton, the FISA court’s presiding judge, wrote in March that he recognized the “potential benefit of better informing the public” about the court’s decisions. But, he said, there are “serious obstacles” to doing so because of the potential for misunderstanding caused by omitting classified details.

Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, was noncommital when he was pressed at a Senate hearing in June to put out some version of the court’s decisions.

While he pledged to try to make more decisions public, he said, “I don’t want to jeopardize the security of Americans by making a mistake in saying, ‘Yes, we’re going to do all that.’
”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/us/job-title-key-to-inner-access-held-by-snowden.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:28 AM
Subject: re: Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Never mind that a professional spy has slippery circumlocutions for what he did. When James Clapper lied to the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, he spat on Congressional oversight. Effectively, he declared that as an agent of the Executive, he is answerable to no one and to no law.

   Until James Clapper is canned, charged and convicted of lying to Congress, we need more Edward Snowdens, not fewer.

Barry Haskell Levine

Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden

By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 30, 2013 266 Comments

WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials refer to Edward J. Snowden’s job as a National Security Agency contractor as “systems administrator” — a bland name for the specialists who keep the computers humming. But his last job before leaking classified documents about N.S.A. surveillance, he told the news organization The Guardian, was actually “infrastructure analyst.”

Enlarge This Image

Susan Walsh/Associated Press

James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence. Edward J. Snowden’s records forced him to backtrack on testimony.

»

It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.

That assignment helps explain how Mr. Snowden got hold of documents laying bare the top-secret capabilities of the nation’s largest intelligence agency, setting off a far-reaching political and diplomatic crisis for the Obama administration.

Even as some members of Congress have challenged the N.S.A.’s collection of logs of nearly every phone call Americans make, European officials furiously protested on Sunday after Mr. Snowden’s disclosure that the N.S.A. has bugged European Union offices in Washington and Brussels and, with its British counterpart, has tapped the Continent’s major fiber-optic communications cables.

On Sunday evening, The Guardian posted an articlesaying documents leaked by Mr. Snowden show 38 embassies and missions on a list of United States electronic surveillance targets. Some of those offices belong to allies like France, Italy, Japan and Mexico, The Guardian said.

Mr. Snowden, who planned his leaks for at least a year, has said he took the infrastructure analyst position with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii in March, evidently taking a pay cut, to gain access to a fresh supply of documents.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the N.S.A. hacked,” he told The South China Morning Post before leaving Hong Kong a week ago for Moscow, where he has been in limbo in the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

A close reading of Mr. Snowden’s documents shows the extent to which the eavesdropping agency now has two new roles: It is a data cruncher, with an appetite to sweep up, and hold for years, a staggering variety of information. And it is an intelligence force armed with cyberweapons, assigned not just to monitor foreign computers but also, if necessary, to attack.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the documents suggest, the N.S.A. decided it was too risky to wait for leads on specific suspects before going after relevant phone and Internet records. So it followed the example of the hoarder who justifies stacks of paper because someday, somehow, a single page could prove vitally important.

The agency began amassing databases of “metadata” — logs of all telephone calls collected from the major carriers and similar data on e-mail traffic. The e-mail program was halted in 2011, though it appears possible that the same data is now gathered in some other way.

The documents show that America’s phone and Internet companies grew leery of N.S.A. demands as the years passed after 9/11, fearing that customers might be angry to find out their records were shared with the government. More and more, the companies’ lawyers insisted on legal orders to compel them to comply.

So the N.S.A. came up with a solution: store the data itself. That is evidently what gave birth to a vast data storage center that the N.S.A. is building in Utah, exploiting the declining cost of storage and the advance of sophisticated search software.

Those huge databases were once called “bit buckets” in the industry — collections of electronic bits waiting to be sifted. “They park stuff in storage in the hopes that they will eventually have time to get to it,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “or that they’ll find something that they need to go back and look for in the masses of data.” But, he added, “most of it sits and is never looked at by anyone.”

Indeed, an obscure passage in one of the Snowden documents — rules for collecting Internet data that the Obama administration wrote in secret in 2009 and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved — suggested that the government was concerned about its ability to process all the data it was collecting. So it got the court to approve an exception allowing the government to hold on to that information if it could not keep up. The rules said that “the communications that may be retained” for up to five years “include electronic communications acquired because of the limitation on the N.S.A.’s ability to filter communications.”As one private expert who sometimes advises the N.S.A. on this technology put it: “This means that if you can’t desalinate all the seawater at once, you get to hold on to the ocean until you figure it out.”

Collecting that ocean requires the brazen efforts of tens of thousands of technicians like Mr. Snowden. On Thursday, President Obama played down Mr. Snowden’s importance, perhaps concerned that the manhunt was itself damaging the image and diplomatic relations of the United States. “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” the president said during a stop in Senegal.

Mr. Obama presumably meant the term to be dismissive, suggesting that Mr. Snowden (who turned 30 on June 21) was a young computer delinquent. But as an N.S.A. infrastructure analyst, Mr. Snowden was, in a sense, part of the United States’ biggest and most skilled team of hackers.

The N.S.A., Mr. Snowden’s documents show, has worked with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, to tap into hundreds of fiber-optic cables that cross the Atlantic or go on into Europe, with the N.S.A. helping sort the data. The disclosure revived old concerns that the British might be helping the N.S.A. evade American privacy protections, an accusation that American officials flatly deny.

And a secret presidential directive on cyberactivities unveiled by Mr. Snowden — discussing the primary new task of the N.S.A. and its military counterpart, Cyber Command — makes clear that when the agency’s technicians probe for vulnerabilities to collect intelligence, they also study foreign communications and computer systems to identify potential targets for a future cyberwar.

Infrastructure analysts like Mr. Snowden, in other words, are not just looking for electronic back doors into Chinese computers or Iranian mobile networks to steal secrets. They have a new double purpose: building a target list in case American leaders in a future conflict want to wipe out the computers’ hard drives or shut down the phone system.

Mr. Snowden’s collection of pilfered N.S.A. documents has cast an awkward light on officials’ past assurances to Congress and the public about their concern about Americans’ privacy.

It was only in March that James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told a Senate committee that the N.S.A. did not collect data on millions of Americans. Mr. Snowden’s records forced Mr. Clapper to backtrack, admitting his statement was false.

Last week, two senators challenged even the accuracy of a fact sheet prepared by the N.S.A. to counter Mr. Snowden’s claims about the phone data and Internet collection programs. Agency officials did not defend themselves; the fact sheet simply disappeared, without explanation, from the agency’s Web site.

Newly disclosed slides from an N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation on the agency’s Prism database of Internet data, posted on Saturday by The Washington Post, reveal that the F.B.I. plays a role as middleman between the N.S.A. and Internet companies like Google and Yahoo. The arrangement provides the N.S.A. with a defense, however nominal, against claims that it spies on United States soil.

Even in the unaccustomed spotlight after the N.S.A. revelations, intelligence officials have concealed more than they have revealed in careful comments, fearful of alerting potential eavesdropping targets to agency methods. They invariably discuss the N.S.A.’s role in preventing terrorist attacks, an agency priority that the public can easily grasp.

In fact, as Mr. Snowden’s documents have shown, the omnivorous agency’s operations range far beyond terrorism, targeting foreigners of any conceivable interest. British eavesdroppers working with the N.S.A. penetrated London meetings of the Group of 20 industrialized nations, partly by luring delegates to fake Internet cafes, and the N.S.A. hacked into computers at Chinese universities.

At Fort Meade, on the N.S.A.’s heavily guarded campus off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland, such disclosures are seen as devastating tip-offs to targets. The disclosure in Mr. Snowden’s documents that Skype is cooperating with orders to turn over data to the N.S.A., for example, undermined a widespread myth that the agency could not intercept the voice-over-Internet service. Warned, in effect, by Mr. Snowden, foreign officials, drug cartel leaders and terrorists may become far more careful about how, and how much, they communicate.

“We’re seeing indications that several terrorist groups are changing their communications behavior based on these disclosures,” one intelligence official said last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We’re going to miss tidbits that could be useful in stopping the next plot.”

Mr. Snowden’s breach is an unplanned test of the N.S.A.’s decades-old conviction that it can operate effectively only under absolute secrecy. The agency is conducting a damage assessment — a routine step after major leaks — but the assessment itself is likely to remain classified.

The N.S.A.’s assessment of Mr. Snowden’s case will likely also consider what has become, for intelligence officials, a chilling consideration: there are thousands of people of his generation and computer skills at the agency, hired in recent years to keep up with the communications boom.

The officials fear that some of them, like young computer aficionados outside the agency, might share Mr. Snowden’s professed libertarian streak and skepticism of the government’s secret power. Intelligence bosses are keeping a closer eye on them now, hoping that there is not another self-appointed whistle-blower in their midst.

Invest, Divest and Prosper

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/krugman-invest-divest-and-prosper.html?ref=todayspaper

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 9:15 PM
Subject: re: Invest, Divest and Prosper
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Although I tremble to write it, professor Krugman has got the economics of coal wrong. Reducing or eliminating coal-fired generation would reduce the cost of electricity, even as it increased the rate on our bills. The scandal of coal is that the public bears huge externalities--in atmospheric warming, in ocean acidification, in mercury poisoning, in environmental degradation--that far outbalance the profits of the coal industry.  With every kilowatt-hour generated, American coal costs America far more wealth than the mine owners pocket.

Barry Haskell Levine

A Broken Outsourcing Model

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/a-broken-outsourcing-model.html


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 8:52 AM
Subject: re: A Broken Outsourcing Model
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
  One searches in vain in the writings of Adam Smith for evidence of
concern for the "race to the bottom". In his 18th century world, all
wages tended towards subsistence because starvation was commonplace
and there was always a lower applicant for low-skill work. That
changed with the Industrial Revolution; for the first time, the
world's economic activity could absorb the world's labor resource. The
result was an increase in total wealth inconceivable to an earlier
generation of economist.
   In this new industrialized world, we need policy more sophisticated
than Adam Smith's insight that globalization produces more efficient
use of human resource. We need to couple trade policy to civil rights
and to environmental policy. It should be no more acceptable to import
a garment made by abused labor than it would be to import a child in a
crate and put her to slave labor in our homes.
Barry Haskell Levine


Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day
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EDITORIAL

A Broken Outsourcing Model

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: June 26, 2013



In the two months since the collapse of a factory building killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, 50 Western clothing companies have signed an agreement designed to improve working conditions in that country’s apparel factories. That should help, but the effort can be sustainable only if it is accompanied by much bigger changes in how the industry does business.


Workers die inpreventable fires, building collapses and other workplace catastrophes in developing countries because factory owners have few incentives and little money to build safe plants. Most American and European brands and retailers use a rotating cast of hundreds of third-world suppliers, instead of establishing long-term relationships with fewer of them. This helps keep costs low because factories must submit competing bids for each bulk order of T-shirts, jeans and cargo shorts.

Even factory owners who want to improve conditions find it hard to do so because the customers have no obligation to give them more work in the future or to compensate them for the renovations through higher prices, labor activists and industry executives say. Those who do make big improvements may have to raise their costs so much that they might lose orders to less scrupulous suppliers.

The current system also hurts big Western brands and retailers in important ways. Many of the clothes produced in poor conditions tend to be of inferior quality because plant owners who skimp on safety often spend less money on training and installing technology, factory inspectors say. As a result, clothing companies who use cut-rate suppliers often end up wasting time sending back defective merchandise and waiting for replacement goods.

But it does not have to be this way. American and European retailers could contract with fewer factories and establish long-term relationships with them. If they did so, they would have to monitor fewer factories and would have greater influence over suppliers to demand upgrades and changes. Reducing the number of suppliers would certainly raise retailers’ costs compared with the current race-to-the-bottom system of outsourcing. But those costs could be offset by benefits like better-quality products and more timely deliveries of products, retail executives and factory inspectors say. In fact, companies like Nike have said that reducing the number of factories they use has made their businesses more efficient.

The agreement recently signed by clothing retailers and brands, including Zara, H&M and Calvin Klein, commits the companies to help pay for renovations and stick with Bangladeshi suppliers who agree to improve their facilities. This is a good start in addressing an entrenched problem — and also makes sound business sense.

Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?ref=todayspaper


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:41 AM
Subject: re: Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   If the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional for singling out some
counties for special scrutiny, the remedy is at hand. Congress should
apply the same test to all counties, nationwide. As Anatole France put
it "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread". Let one law apply to all. It's no burden to those who weren't
engaging in discriminatory practices.
Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.


Drew Angerer for The New York Times

Representative John Lewis of Georgia, center left, and Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, right, at a news conference. The Voting Rights Act covered nine states, mostly in the South.


The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and the nation’s progress in rooting out racial discrimination in voting. At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval. Changes in voting procedures in the places that had been covered by the law, including ones concerning restrictions on early voting, will now be subject only to after-the-fact litigation.

President Obama, whose election as the nation’s first black president was cited by critics of the law as evidence that it was no longer needed, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized her dissentfrom the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement. She cited the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and said his legacy and the nation’s commitment to justice had been “disserved by today’s decision.”

She said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from “first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting in places with a sizable black minority. She said the law had been effective in thwarting such efforts.

The law had applied to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and to scores of counties and municipalities in other states, including Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on contemporary data. But the chances that the current Congress could reach agreement on where federal oversight is required are small, most analysts say.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion. Justice Ginsburg was joined in dissent by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The majority held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by Congress in 1975, was unconstitutional. The section determined which states must receive clearance from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before they made minor changes to voting procedures, like moving a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.

Section 5, which sets out the preclearance requirement, was originally scheduled to expire in five years. Congress repeatedly extended it: for five years in 1970, seven years in 1975, and 25 years in 1982. Congress renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance requirement for 25 years. But it relied on data from the 1975 reauthorization to decide which states and localities were covered.

The current coverage system, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”

“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”

The decision did not strike down Section 5, but without Section 4, the later section is without significance — unless Congress passes a new bill for determining which states would be covered.

It was hardly clear, at any rate, that the court’s conservative majority would uphold Section 5 if the question returned to the court in the unlikely event that Congress enacted a new coverage formula. In a concurrence, Justice Thomas called for striking down Section 5 immediately, saying that the majority opinion had provided the reasons and had merely left “the inevitable conclusion unstated.”

The Supreme Court had repeatedly upheld the law in earlier decisions, saying that the preclearance requirement was an effective tool to combat the legacy of lawless conduct by Southern officials bent on denying voting rights to blacks.




The Formula Behind the Voting Rights Act


Critics of Section 5 say it is a unique federal intrusion on state sovereignty and a badge of shame for the affected jurisdictions that is no longer justified.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the towering legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, and Chief Justice Roberts said its “strong medicine” was the right response to “entrenched racial discrimination.” When it was first enacted, he said, black voter registration stood at 6.4 percent in Mississippi, and the gap between black and white registration rates was more than 60 percentage points.

In the 2004 election, the last before the law was reauthorized, the black registration rate in Mississippi was 76 percent, almost four percentage points higher than the white rate. In the 2012 election, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “African-American voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered by Section 5.”

The chief justice recalled the Freedom Summer of 1964, when the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered near Philadelphia, Miss., while seeking to register black voters. He mentioned Bloody Sunday in 1965, when police officers beat marchers in Selma, Ala.

“Today,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “both of those towns are governed by African-American mayors. Problems remain in these states and others, but there is no denying that, due to the Voting Rights Act, our nation has made great strides.”

Justice Ginsburg, in her dissent from the bench, drew a different lesson from those events, drawing on the words of Dr. King.

“The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she said. “ ‘The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

In her written dissent, Justice Ginsburg said that Congress was the right body to decide whether the law was still needed and where. Congress reauthorized the law in 2006 by large majorities; the vote was 390 to 33 in the House and unanimous in the Senate. President George W. Bush, a Republican, signed the bill into law, saying it was “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”

The Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the 2006 extension of the law in a 2009 decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. But it avoided answering the central question, and it seemed to give Congress an opportunity to make adjustments. Congress, Chief Justice Roberts noted on Tuesday, did not respond.

Justice Ginsburg suggested in her dissent that an era had drawn to a close with the court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96.

“Beyond question, the V.R.A. is no ordinary legislation,” she wrote. “It is extraordinary because Congress embarked on a mission long delayed and of extraordinary importance: to realize the purpose and promise of the Fifteenth Amendment,” the Reconstruction-era amendment that barred racial discrimination in voting and authorized Congress to enforce it.

“For a half century,” she wrote, “a concerted effort has been made to end racial discrimination in voting. Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, progress once the subject of a dream has been achieved and continues to be made.”

“The court errs egregiously,” she concluded, “by overriding Congress’s decision.”