---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: barry levine Date: Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:22 AM Subject: re: Peace Without Partners To: letters@nytimes.com
To the Editor: Sometime around the end of the first century c.e, Rabbi Tarfon said: "It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it" His words are as apt today as they were then. For too long, Israeli governments have been content to cling to power by blaming Palestinians for intransigence. The status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable.Those who claim to be political "leaders" must not be content with finger-pointing and whining. Barry Haskell Levine
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: barry levine Date: Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 7:49 PM Subject: re: Insurers, Pushing for Higher Rates, Challenge Key Component of Health Law To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
As you note, "subsidies to help pay premiums" shield consumers partially from drastic hikes in insurance costs. But they do nothing to reduce the total cost of healthcare in this country. Americans currently pay more for healthcare than anyone, anywhere, has paid since the invention of money, and we don't have superior health outcomes to show for it. RomneyCare (AKA Affordable Care Act) guarantees the profitability of our Insurance Companies rather than optimizing the delivery of health care. Against this background, some version of Single Payer would represent a vast simplification of administrative costs, an vast improvement in tracking medical records and--if dozens of foreign experiments are any guide--a substantial saving of money over our current fee-for-service hodgepodge.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: barry levine<levinebar@gmail.com> Date: Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 9:20 AM Subject: re: Hillary Clinton has Clinched Democratic Nomination, Survey Reports To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>
To the Editor:
this Clinton nomination's in the bag
if you believe the 'papers in her sway
they risk the reputation of their rag
preempting California's polling day
her fictive inevitability
collapsed like smoke in Two Thousand and Eight
when delegates showed that their loyalty
was to the most compelling Party Slate
this year, it's Sanders, advocating CHANGE
appealing to the liberal and hip
to turn our course, not merely rearrange
the deck-chairs on our rudderless State-ship
like Bush-the-first, she lacks that "vision thing"
but fiercely strives to grasp that big brass ring
Barry Haskell Levine
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: barry levine Date: Fri, May 20, 2016 at 10:55 PM Subject: re: Obama’s War on Inequality To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
Professor Krugman makes an impassioned call for a renewed New Deal and correctly points to what FDR accomplished 80 years ago, in circumstances parallel to the present. But he ties himself in knots to endorse Hillary Clinton's candidacy while praising Bernie Sanders' agenda. I'm not spilling any secrets to point out that senator Sanders is a New Deal Democrat and secretary Clinton is not.
There were two big economic policy stories this week that you may have missed if you were distracted by Trumpian bombast and the yelling of the Sanders dead-enders. Each tells you a lot about both what President Obama has accomplished and the stakes in this year’s election.
One of those stories, I’m sorry to say, did involve Donald Trump: The presumptive Republican nominee — who has already declared that he will, in fact, slash taxes on the rich, whatever he may have said in the recent past — once again declared his intention to do away with Dodd-Frank, the financial reform passed during Democrats’ brief window of congressional control. Just for the record, while Mr. Trump is sometimes described as a “populist,” almost every substantive policy he has announced would make the rich richer at workers’ expense.
The other story was about a policy change achieved through executive action: The Obama administration issued new guidelines on overtime pay, which will benefit an estimated 12.5 million workers.
What both stories tell us is that the Obama administration has done much more than most people realize to fight extreme economic inequality. That fight will continue if Hillary Clinton wins the election; it will go into sharp reverse if Mr. Trump wins.
Step back for a minute and ask, what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums. In practice, governments that succeed in limiting inequality generally do both.
We can see this in our own history. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps. On one side, pro-labor policies led to a striking expansion of unions, which, along with the establishment of a fairly high minimum wage, helped raise wages, especially at the bottom. On the other side, taxes on the wealthy went up sharply, while major programs like Social Security aided working families.
We can also see this in cross-country comparisons. Among advanced countries, the U.S. has the highest level of inequality, Denmark the lowest. How does Denmark do it? Partly with higher taxes and bigger social programs, but it starts with lower inequality in market incomes, thanks in large part to high minimum wages and a labor movement representing two-thirds of workers.
Now, America isn’t about to become Denmark, and Mr. Obama, facing relentless opposition in Congress, has never been in a position to repeat the New Deal. (Even F.D.R. made limited headway against inequality until World War II gave the government unusual influence over the economy.) But more has happened than you might think.
Most obviously, Obamacare provides aid and subsidies mainly to lower-income working Americans, and it pays for that aid partly with higher taxes at the top. That makes it an important redistributionist policy — the biggest such policy since the 1960s.
And between those extra Obamacare taxes and the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts made possible by Mr. Obama’s re-election, the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
What about predistribution? Well, why is Mr. Trump, like everyone in the G.O.P., so eager to repeal financial reform? Because despite what you may have heard about its ineffectuality, Dodd-Frank actually has put asubstantial crimp in the ability of Wall Street to make money hand over fist. It doesn’t go far enough, but it’s significant enough to have bankers howling, which is a good sign.
And while the move on overtime comes late in the game, it’s a pretty big deal, and could be the beginning of much broader action.
Again, nothing Mr. Obama has done will put more than a modest dent in American inequality. But his actions aren’t trivial, either.A COMMENT
And even these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite. Money talks on both sides of the aisle, but the influence of big donors hasn’t prevented the current president from doing a substantial amount to narrow income gaps — and he would have done much more if he’d faced less opposition in Congress.
And in this as in so much else, it matters hugely whom the nation chooses as his successor.
Thomas L. Friedman proceeds from the assumption that the international borders are too sacred to mention to the conclusion that the role of the U.S. is impossible. What someone needs to mention is that Syria and Iraq were invented in 1916 by Sykes and Picot without regard to ethnic or cultural coherence, and have been held together since then by unrepresentative governments. The position of the U.S. is impossible because we have made ourselves the enforcers of an illegitimate order. The British and the French who drew this map abandoned their imperial ambitions two generations ago. The position of the U.S will be impossible as long as we go on defending the errors of another century.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: barry levine Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:38 AM Subject: re: WhatsApp Encryption Said to Stymie Wiretap Order To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
Most of our Bill of Rights--indeed, much of the U.S. constitution--was written to prevent the rise and establishment of a repressive central government where we had so recently thrown off British rule. In this spirit, "the [U.S.] government helped develop the technology behind WhatsApp’s encryption. To promote civil rights in countries with repressive governments, the Open Technology Fund, which promotes open societies by supporting technology that allows people to communicate without the fear of surveillance, provided $2.2 million to help develop Open Whisper Systems, the encryption backbone behind WhatsApp."
What is lost on this Obama administration is the possibility of such a repressive regime taking over the levers of power in Washington, in the future if not in the present. These encryption tools are invaluable not only for the brave opponents of al-Assad or Mubarak or Kadyrov. They are the necessary tools of free people everywhere.
WASHINGTON — While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said.
No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration’s dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy.
WhatsApp, which is owned byFacebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge’s wiretap order.
As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.
The Justice Department and WhatsApp declined to comment. The government officials and others who discussed the dispute did so on condition of anonymity because the wiretap order and all the information associated with it were under seal. The nature of the case was not clear, except that officials said it was not a terrorism investigation. The location of the investigation was also unclear.
To understand the battle lines, consider this imperfect analogy from the predigital world: If the Apple dispute is akin to whether the F.B.I. can unlock your front door and search your house, the issue with WhatsApp is whether it can listen to your phone calls. In the era of encryption, neither question has a clear answer.
Some investigators view the WhatsApp issue as even more significant than the one over locked phones because it goes to the heart of the future of wiretapping. They say the Justice Department should ask a judge to force WhatsApp to help the government get information that has been encrypted. Others are reluctant to escalate the dispute, particularly with senators saying they will soon introduce legislation to help the government get data in a format it can read.
Whether the WhatsApp dispute ends in a court fight that sets precedents, many law enforcement officials and security experts say that such a case may be inevitable because the nation’s wiretapping laws were last updated a generation ago, when people communicated by landline telephones that were easy to tap.
“The F.B.I. and the Justice Department are just choosing the exact circumstance to pick the fight that looks the best for them,” said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital rights. “They’re waiting for the case that makes the demand look reasonable.”
A senior law enforcement official disputed the notion that the government was angling for the perfect case, and said that litigation was not inevitable.
This is not the first time that the government’s wiretaps have been thwarted by encryption. And WhatsApp is not the only company to clash with the government over the issue. But with a billion users and a particularly strong international customer base, it is by far the largest.
Last year, a dispute with Apple over encrypted iMessages in an investigation of guns and drugs, for instance, nearly led to a court showdown in Maryland. In that case, as in others, the company helped the government where it was able to, and the Justice Department backed down.
Photo
The messaging service WhatsApp has been adding encryption, challenging wiretapping laws last updated a generation ago.CreditChris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s founder, who was born in Ukraine, has talked about his family members’ fears that the government was eavesdropping on their phone calls. In the company’s early years, WhatsApp had the ability to read messages as they passed through its servers. That meant it could comply with government wiretap orders.
But in late 2014, the company said that it would begin adding sophisticated encoding, known as end-to-end encryption, to its systems. Only the intended recipients would be able to read the messages.
“WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have,” the company said this month when Brazilian police arrested a Facebook executive after the company failed to turn over information about a customer who was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation.
The iPhone case, which revolves around whether Apple can be forced to help the F.B.I. unlock a phone used by one of the killers in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., massacre, has received worldwide attention for the precedent it might set. But to many in law enforcement, disputes like the one with WhatsApp are of far greater concern.
For more than a half-century, the Justice Department has relied on wiretaps as a fundamental crime-fighting tool. To some in law enforcement, if companies like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram can design unbreakable encryption, then the future of wiretapping is in doubt.
“You’re getting useless data,” said Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor who now represents law enforcement agencies that filed briefs supporting the Justice Department in its fight with Apple. “The only way to make this not gibberish is if the company helps.”
“As we know from intercepted prisoner wiretaps,” he added, “criminals think that advanced encryption is great.”
Businesses, customers and the United States government also rely on strong encryption to help protect information from hackers, identity thieves and foreign cyberattacks. That is why, in 2013, a White House report said the government should “not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption.”
In a twist, the government helped develop the technology behind WhatsApp’s encryption. To promote civil rights in countries with repressive governments, the Open Technology Fund, which promotes open societies by supporting technology that allows people to communicate without the fear of surveillance, provided $2.2 million to help develop Open Whisper Systems, the encryption backbone behind WhatsApp.
Because of such support for encryption, Obama administration officials disagree over how far they should push companies to accommodate the requests of law enforcement. Senior leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have held out hope that Congress will settle the matter by updating the wiretap laws to address new technology. But the White House has declined to push for such legislation. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said on Friday that he was skeptical “of Congress’s ability to handle such a complicated policy area.”
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, told Congress this month that strong encryption was “vital” and acknowledged that “there are undoubtedly international implications” for the United States to try to break encryption, especially for wiretaps, as in the WhatsApp case. But he has called for technology companies and the government to find a middle ground that allows for strong encryption but accommodates law enforcement efforts. President Obama echoed those remarks on Friday, saying technology executives who were “absolutist” on the issue were wrong.
Those who support digital privacy fear that if the Justice Department succeeds in forcing Apple to help break into the iPhone in the San Bernardino case, the government’s next move will be to force companies like WhatsApp to rewrite their software to remove encryption from the accounts of certain customers. “That would be like going to nuclear war with Silicon Valley,” said Chris Soghoian, a technology analyst with theAmerican Civil Liberties Union.
That view is one reason government officials have been hesitant to rush to court in the WhatsApp case and others like it. The legal and policy implications are great. While no immediate resolution is in sight, more and more companies offer encryption. And technology analysts say that WhatsApp’s yearlong effort to add encryption to all one billion of its customer accounts is nearly complete.
From: barry levine Date: Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 8:48 AM Subject: re: Dark Again After Report on C.I.A. Torture To: "letters@nytimes.com"
To the Editor:
It is within president Obama's power to declassify the entire Torture Report, not just the Executive Summary. Indeed, the American People have paid for that report and for the conduct on which it reports. The Summary cannot suffice; if this Congress were to offer such a summary of the U.S. Constitution it might well quote "Congress shall make no Law", redacting away what some of us consider the important bits.
President Obama has an opportunity here. Now that it is revealed that the C.I.A. had deceived him, he could shed his mistaken pledge to "look forward and not backwards" and put that Torture Report (with small redactions to protect ongoing operations and the innocent) up on the White House website this week. But if he prefers to continue the cover-up of these crimes, he will make them his own.
