AdamSmith

'Nobody is listening to your calls': Obama's evolution on NSA surveillanceA brief history of the president's position on NSA reforms since first commenting on the surveillance revelations in June Adam Gabbatt in New York theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 17.46 EDT Barack Obama insisted on Friday that the NSA reforms he has proposed would have happened all along and that his views on surveillance programs had "not evolved". But since the president first responded to Edward Snowden's revelations in June he has rejected any suggestion that more safeguards were required. Friday 7 JuneIn his first remarks since the Guardian and the Washington Post's revelations, Obama gave a frank rebuttal to privacy concerns. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president said when asked about the NSA. He said surveillance programs were "fully overseen not just by Congress but by the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". He said the NSA programs made "modest encroachments on privacy" and were under "very strict supervision by all three branches of government". "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said. "And if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the constitution, due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Obama added: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential, you know – you know, program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance." Monday 17 JuneObama defended the NSA program in an interview with Charlie Rose. The president insisted the NSA was "transparent". "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not," Obama said. Asked by Rose if the method of telephone and data collections "should be transparent in some way", the president responded: "It is transparent. That's why we set up the Fisa court." The president said he was confident the necessary system of checks and balances was in place, but conceded the public might not fully be aware of this. "What I've asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program." Speaking to Rose he revealed he had set up an "oversight board" to examine issues of privacy, compiled of independent citizens and "including some fierce civil libertarians". Obama said he would be meeting with the oversight board, but did not give any further details. Tuesday 6 AugustTwo months after the initial NSA revelations, Obama accepted the NSA had "raised a lot of questions for people" in an interview on NBC's Tonight Show, but insisted surveillance programs did not target US civilians. "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful." He said the NSA was "a critical component to counter-terrorism". Friday 9 August"It's not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well," Obama said in a speech at the White House, hours after the Guardian revealed that an NSA loophole did allow for warrantless searches of databases for US citizens' emails and phone calls. The president said he had consulted with Congress, the privacy and civil liberties oversight coard and had directed his national security team to "be more transparent and to pursue reforms of our laws and practices". "And so today I'd like to discuss four specific steps, not all-inclusive, but some specific steps that we're going to be taking very shortly to move the debate forward." Obama pledged to re-examine section 215 of the Patriot Act, potentially reigning in bulk surveillance, and suggested appointing a privacy advocate to monitor to the doings of the Fisa court. He also announced a new website to "inform" Americans about bulk surveillance and pledged greater transparency. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/obama-evolution-nsa-reforms

The book review linked above: Books of The Times The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas By JANET MASLIN Published: April 9, 2007 EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE By Walter Isaacson. 675 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32. The story of Albert Einstein’s life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled. Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that “this Einstein will one day be a great man.” Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein’s earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson’s confidently authoritative “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. “You will stop talking to me if I request it,” this document asserted. “You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way.” Mr. Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein’s life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in the area of science. Mr. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene’s) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him. But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein’s life and times, and Mr. Isaacson acknowledges that. “O.K., it’s not easy,” he writes, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.” In his introduction to “Einstein,” Mr. Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society,” he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. (“Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”) But over all this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core. “Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire.” That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” did. But in Mr. Isaacson’s artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.” Mr. Isaacson does a similarly graceful job of integrating Einstein’s science with his broader philosophical concerns, especially the global worries that plagued him with the approach of the Second World War. Even as a committed pacifist he remained primarily a scientist and revised his opinions as fate required. “For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness,” Mr. Isaacson underscores. And the man who had once listed his religion as “Mosaic” when applying for a professorship in Prague became much more thoughtful about Judaism in later years. Whatever Einstein’s precise faith, Mr. Isaacson says, “his beliefs seemed to arise from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work.” With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom. Among the headlines that appeared in The New York Times: “Unintelligible to Laymen” and “Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.” Mr. Isaacson is also keenly attuned to the intellectual crises hidden by the hoopla. As Einstein aged, he changed from a fierce young iconoclast to a pillar of science, resistant to advances in the very quantum ideas that he himself had brought forth. “The intellect gets crippled,” he said of growing older, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.” Here as throughout the book Mr. Isaacson asks the right questions. (“So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?”) And he answers them with the clear, broad grasp of complex issues that make this book an illuminating delight. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/books/09masl.html

By 1932 he was pretty well decided that it was past time to get out of there (see among many sources Ronald Clark's majesterial bio Einstein: The Life and Times, also of course Walter Isaacson's more recent Einstein: His Life and Universe). During a visit to the U.S. in Feb. 1933 he decided not to return to Germany, went to Belgium where he turned in his German passport to the German embassy and renounced his citizenship, lived temporarily in England, then came to the U.S. permanently in October.

Likewise.

No joke at all.

George Will occasionally gets it right: his term for the Donald was "this bloviating idiot."

The Wikipedia entry is fascinating, if not effortlessly elucidative: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Yikes! Scandinavian skinny-dippers warned of testicle-biting fish By Leslie Holland, CNN updated 12:07 PM EDT, Sun August 11, 2013 The Pacu's large teeth aren't as sharp as a piranha's but are "fully capable" of severing fishing lines and fingers. Happy swimming! STORY HIGHLIGHTS A fish native to South America has been discovered in Scandinavian waters The fish has been known to mistake testicles for nuts, Danish museum says Male swimmers in the strait of Oresund are being warned to wear swimsuits (CNN) -- Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, as the saying goes, male skinny-dippers in Scandinavia are being warned about a fish infamous for munching on testicles. Yes, you read that right. The Pacu, native to South America, was found by a fisherman in the Danish/Swedish strait of Oresund, according to experts at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Though the fish has big teeth and looks menacing, it is generally known as a friendly cousin of the piranha. The Pacu's large teeth aren't as sharp as the piranha's but are "fully capable" of severing fishing lines and fingers, the museum's experts said. Oh yeah, and the Pacu is vegetarian, unlike it's meat-eating cousin. So why should swimmers beware? Pacu fish love crushing nuts with their powerful jaws and sometimes can mistake the male reproductive organs for their favorite snack. Just how the exotic fish ended up in Scandinavian waters is a bit of a mystery, the museum said. "Amateur aquarium owners and fish farmers are "the usual suspects" when we meet fish where they do not belong," said the museum's Peter Rask Moller. Museum experts said they are going to perform a genetic examination on the Pacu found in the fisherman's nets to learn more about the fish. Meantime, the advice of the museum's experts is this: "Anyone choosing to bathe in the Oresund these days had best keep their swimsuits well tied." http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/10/world/europe/scandanavia-swim-warning/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

'Ciao Michele, it's Pope Francis' An Italian man whose brother was shot dead in June has spoken of his shock when he answered the phone to Pope Francis, calling this week to offer his condolences. By Josephine McKenna, Rome 5:00PM BST 09 Aug 2013 The Telegraph Michele Ferri is the brother of 51-year-old Andrea, a petrol station manager who was allegedly gunned down by two men including one young employee he treated like a son. The death shocked the north-eastern town of Pesaro. Michele Ferri wrote a letter to the Pope telling him of his inability to forgive the killers and was shocked when he picked up the telephone on Wednesday evening to hear: "Ciao Michele, it's Pope Francis." At first Mr Ferri thought it was a joke but said he was overcome with emotion when he realised it was really Francis on the line from the Vatican. "He told me he cried when he read the letter I wrote to him," Mr Ferri said. The Pope also asked to speak to Mr Ferri's mother to express his personal sympathy. The telephone call is the latest in a series of spontaneous personal gestures by Pope Francis that have surprised Catholics around the world since he was elected Pope in March. "I forgot to ask him if he wanted to visit us in Pesaro," Mr Ferri said. Father Mario Amadeo, a town priest who knows the family well and conducted the funeral in June, said he did not know about the letter to the Pope until Mr Ferri's mother told him. "It's a very beautiful gesture that indicates the kindness and greatness of this Pope," he said. Pope Francis has adopted an informal approach since the night of his election when he greeted the crowds in St Peter's Square with a simple "Buona sera" or good evening. He has made daily contact with ordinary people a priority ever since and told a friend earlier this year he shunned the papal apartments because he did not want to be isolated. Two men have been arrested and accused of firing seven shots at Mr Ferri through the windscreen of his car as he was driving home and fleeing with the key to his company safe. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/10233855/Ciao-Michele-its-Pope-Francis.html

Edward Snowden is a patriot By TREVOR TIMM | 8/10/13 9:45 PM EDT Updated: 8/11/13 11:33 AM EDT politico.com Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid? That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what has changed over the past two months, though, it’s hard not to wonder, “What could be more patriotic than what Snowden did?” First, the results: More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress. The list goes on. These actions have been accompanied by a sea change in public opinion about surveillance. Poll after poll has shown that for the first time ever, Americans think the government has gone too far in violating their privacy, with vast majorities believing the NSA scooping up a record of every phone call made in the United States invades citizens’ privacy. While the administration certainly doesn’t believe Snowden is patriotic, Americans do. A Quinnipiac poll conducted this month found people agreed, 55 percent to 34 percent, that he is a whistleblower — a large margin that crossed party, gender and age lines. A recent Reuters poll showed only 31 percent of the public thought he should be prosecuted. Obama claimed in his press conference that Snowden stole his thunder, that he was one who tried to initiate a surveillance debate prior to Snowden’s leaks. But, he complained, “rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way.” That argument just doesn’t comport with reality. In his speech in May on national security, the president did indeed announce a review of surveillance policy. What he failed to mention, though, was that the very same speech was spurred by another leak — of the Justice Department white paper justifying drone strikes on Americans overseas. There’s been no change in transparency surrounding drone strikes since the speech, as Obama himself proved later in the press conference when he refused to confirm a drone strike took place in Yemen last week — there were several. The fact is Obama has had years to initiate a debate about surveillance but instead has actively stifled it. Although, as he acknowledged Friday, he was a huge critic of the PATRIOT Act as a senator, his administration actively opposed privacy and oversight amendments in 2011. Similarly, in December 2012 — just eight months ago — the administration opposed all oversight fixes to the FISA Amendments Act. It passed unchanged with little debate. The FISA Amendments Act is the law that, as The New York Times reported on its front page last week, the NSA has used to “search the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ email and text communications into and out of the country.” Obama didn’t say a word about the Times’ bombshell story Friday, nor did he mention the Guardian story from the same day explaining how another loophole in the FISA Amendments Act allows the NSA to search its databases for Americans without a warrant. Just how much has changed since Snowden went rogue? Two cases tell the tale: In litigation over the administration’s secret legal interpretation of the Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act a few months ago, the government wouldn’t even give a page count of its opinion, let alone what it said. Similarly, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling NSA activities unconstitutional led to the release of 30 pages completely redacted. On Friday, the administration released a full white paper of its secret legal interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which the NSA has used to vacuum up every domestic telephone record in the country without suspicion. The administration also announced that the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unconstitutional will be released nine days after its Aug. 12 deadline. Obama said that if Snowden is truly patriotic, he would come back to the United States and make his arguments in court and leave it up to a jury to decide. Unfortunately, there’s no public interest exception to the Espionage Act. The administration has managed to convince courts in recent years that issues like a leaker’s intent to inform the public, the value of the leaks or the lack of damage that the leaks have caused to national security are inadmissible in court. Obama also boasted that he has enhanced protections for whistleblowers. But as the Center for Public Integrity reported after the speech, the president’s executive order “specifically excluded intelligence contractors like Snowden.” Whoops. As New York Times reporter James Risen — who knows a thing or two about whistleblowers — said on CNN recently, “We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for [snowden]. That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.” But Risen made another, less publicized appearance this week at the annual National Press Club awards dinner. What he said there is even more poignant. “I don’t think there’s any personality that’s more American than a whistleblower,” he said. “The entire personality and DNA of America [is made up] of people who wanted to have their own kind of government and be free of oppression. And I think that is the heart of what a whistleblower is. It’s somebody who believes civil liberties or freedom or corruption are important issues that they need to talk about, and their right as an American is to talk about it with the press.” If Congress passes meaningful NSA reform, Snowden may go down in history as the most influential whistleblower in American history. What could be more patriotic than that? Trevor Timm is executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and defending public-interest, transparency journalism. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/edward-snowden-is-a-patriot-95421.html#ixzz2bggjzsJM

As in...

Sort of like those companies that will "name" a star for you, for a fee that gets you an official-looking certificate hot off the laser printer. Meanwhile the NGC remains serenely unperturbed.

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my childrenDraconian new laws brand homosexuals second-class citizens in Putin's regime Masha Gessen The Observer, Saturday 10 August 2013 Unknown anti-gay demonstrator hits Russia's gay and LGBT rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev (centre) during a gay rights activists rally in cental Moscow on 25 May, 2013. Photograph: Andrey Svitailo/AFP/Getty Images The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago. What woke me up was a friend who messaged me on Facebook: "I am worried about how this might impact you and other LGBT people with families." This was enough to get my imagination working. Whatever they meant by "homosexual propaganda", I probably did it. I had two kids and a third on the way (my girlfriend was pregnant), which would mean I probably did it in front of minors. And this, in turn, meant the laws could in fact apply to me. First, I would be hauled in for administrative offences and fined and then, inevitably, social services would get involved. That was enough to get me to read the legislation, which by now had been passed in about 10 towns and was about to become law in St Petersburg, the second-largest city in the country. Here is what I read: homosexual propaganda was defined as "the purposeful and uncontrolled distribution of information that can harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations". Russia has a lot of poorly written laws and regulations that contradict its own constitution, but this one was different. Like other contemporary laws, it was so vaguely worded that it encouraged corruption and extortion (fines for "homosexual propaganda" are backbreaking) and made selective enforcement inevitable. But it also did something that had never been done in Russian law before: it enshrined second-class citizenship for LGBT people. Think about it: it made it an offence to claim social equality. St Petersburg passed the law in March 2012. I no longer thought it was funny. I actually choked up when I saw the news item about the bill being proposed at the federal level. My girlfriend had recently had a baby and this, among other things, meant we needed to sell our tiny cars and trade up to something that accommodated three kids and a pram. I asked her: "Are we doing this or do we just need to get out of the country?" We decided we were doing it. We are fighters, not quitters. So I launched the pink-triangle campaign. I went on TVRain, independent internet and satellite-based television and recorded a segment showing pictures of my family and explaining how the law would make it a crime to say my family was equal to other families. I explained the history of the pink triangle. I called on people who did not want to see fascism in Russia to put on pink triangles. Though I have always been publicly out, I had never done what I did then – talked about my family and asked to be seen as a lesbian rather than a journalist first. It seemed to work beautifully. People wrote to me and came up to me in the street. I had had 6,000 pink triangles printed up and I got rid of most of them within a few weeks. The public chamber, an extraparliamentary body formed by the Kremlin, scheduled a hearing on the legislation. I testified, as did a number of human rights activists I respected. The chair read out a draft resolution. I also received private assurances from highly placed officials present that the legislation would never make it to the parliament's floor. That was a year ago. The public chamber's resolution never materialised. In January 2013, the Duma passed the bill in first reading. The protesters who came to the parliament building that day were beaten up. There had been anti-gay violence in Russia before, most notably when a group of activists had attempted to hold a gay pride celebration in Moscow, but never like this: brutal beatings in broad daylight as the police looked on – and eventually detained the protesters, not the attackers. One of my closest friends took part in the protest at the Duma that day. The following day, he was fired from his job teaching biology at one of the city's better schools. He was eventually reinstated after a public outcry – he was arguably the city's best-known teacher, with his own podcast and television and radio series – but I knew one thing: if he had been a gay man rather than a heterosexual ally, he would never teach in the city again. Oh, and around the same time, Moscow City court banned gay pride celebrations for the next 100 years. In March, the St Petersburg legislator who had become a spokesman for the law started mentioning me and my "perverted family" in his interviews. I contacted an adoption lawyer asking whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000. The lawyer wrote back telling me to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: "The answer to your question is at the airport." In June, the "homosexual propaganda" bill became federal law. The Duma passed a ban on adoptions by same-sex couples and by single people living in countries where same-sex marriage is legal. The head of the parliamentary committee on the family pledged to create a mechanism for removing children from same-sex families. Two things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament for the first time and I realised that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle. My family is moving to New York. We have the money and documents needed to do that with relative ease – unlike thousands of other LGBT families and individuals in Russia. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/anti-gay-laws-russia

Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companiesEdward Snowden: 'Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for our interests the same way' Glenn Greenwald theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 08.19 EDT The front page of Lavabit announces to its users its decision to shut down rather than comply with ongoing US surveillance orders Photo: Lavabit A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden - Lavabit - announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users' content. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations," the company's founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in a statement to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US directive forced on his company "a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He chose the latter. CNET's Declan McCullagh smartly speculates that Lavabit was served "with [a] federal court order to intercept users' (Snowden?) passwords" to allow ongoing monitoring of emails; specifically: "the order can also be to install FedGov-created malware." After challenging the order in district court and losing - all in a secret court proceeding, naturally - Lavabit shut itself down to avoid compliance while it appeals to the Fourth Circuit. This morning, Silent Circle, a US-based secure online communication service, followed suit by shutting its own encrypted email service. Although it said it had not yet been served with any court order, the company, in a statement by its founder, internet security guru Phil Zimmerman, said: "We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now." What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this: I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on - the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests." Does that sound like a message coming from a citizen of a healthy and free country? Secret courts issuing secret rulings invariably in favor of the US government that those most affected are barred by law from discussing? Is there anyone incapable at this point of seeing what the United States has become? Here's the very sound advice issued by Lavabit's founder: This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." As security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in a great Bloomberg column last week, this is one of the key aspects of the NSA disclosures: the vast public-private surveillance partnership. That's what makes Lavabit's stance so heroic: as our reporting has demonstrated, most US-based tech and telecom companies (though not all) meekly submit to the US government's dictates and cooperate extensively and enthusiastically with the NSA to ensure access to your communications. Snowden, who told me today that he found Lavabit's stand "inspiring", added: "Ladar Levison and his team suspended the operations of their 10 year old business rather than violate the Constitutional rights of their roughly 400,000 users. The President, Congress, and the Courts have forgotten that the costs of bad policy are always borne by ordinary citizens, and it is our job to remind them that there are limits to what we will pay. "America cannot succeed as a country where individuals like Mr. Levison have to relocate their businesses abroad to be successful. Employees and leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for our interests the same way small businesses are. The defense they have offered to this point is that they were compelled by laws they do not agree with, but one day of downtime for the coalition of their services could achieve what a hundred Lavabits could not. "When Congress returns to session in September, let us take note of whether the internet industry's statements and lobbyists - which were invisible in the lead-up to the Conyers-Amash vote - emerge on the side of the Free Internet or the NSA and its Intelligence Committees in Congress." The growing (and accurate) perception that most US-based companies are not to be trusted with the privacy of electronic communications poses a real threat to those companies' financial interests. A report issued this week by the Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that the US cloud computing industry, by itself, could lose between $21 billion to $35 billion due to reporting about the industry's ties to the NSA. It also notes that other nations' officials have been issuing the same kind of warnings to their citizens about US-based companies as the one issued by Lavabit yesterday: And after the recent PRISM leaks, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich declared publicly, 'whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don't go through American servers.' Similarly, Jörg-Uwe Hahn, a German Justice Minister, called for a boycott of US companies." The US-based internet industry knows that the recent transparency brought to the NSA is a threat to their business interests. This week, several leading Silicon Valley and telecom executives met with President Obama to discuss their "surveillance partnership". But the meeting was - naturally - held in total secrecy. Why shouldn't the agreements and collaborations between these companies and the NSA for access to customer communications not be open and public? Obviously, the Obama administration, telecom giants, and the internet industry are not going to be moved by appeals to transparency, privacy and basic accountability. But perhaps they'll consider the damage being done to the industry's global reputation and business interests by constructing a ubiquitous spying system with the NSA and doing it all in secret. It's well past time to think about what all this reflects about the US. As the New York Times Editorial Page put it today, referencing a front-page report from Charlie Savage enabled by NSA documents we published: "Apparently no espionage tool that Congress gives the National Security Agency is big enough or intrusive enough to satisfy the agency's inexhaustible appetite for delving into the communications of Americans." The NYT added: Time and again, the NSA has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as guaranteed by the Constitution." I know it's much more fun and self-satisfying to talk about Vladimir Putin and depict him as this omnipotent cartoon villain. Talking about the flaws of others is always an effective tactic for avoiding our own, and as a bonus in this case, we get to and re-live Cold War glory by doing it. The best part of all is that we get to punish another country for the Supreme Sin: defying the dictates of the US leader. [Note how a country's human rights problems becomes of interest to the US political and media class only when that country defies the US: hence, all the now-forgotten focus on Ecuador's press freedom record when it granted asylum to Julian Assange and considered doing so for Edward Snowden, while the truly repressive and deeply US-supported Saudi regime barely rates a mention. Americans love to feign sudden concern over a country's human rights abuses as a tool for punishing that country for disobedience to imperial dictates and for being distracted from their own government's abuses: Russia grants asylum to Snowden --> Russia is terrible to gays! But maybe it's more constructive for US media figures and Americans generally to think about what's happening to their own country and the abuses of the own government, the one for which they bear responsibility and over which they can exercise actual influence.] Lavabit has taken an impressive and bold stand against the US government, sacrificing its self-interest for the privacy rights of its users. Those inclined to do so can return that support by helping it with lawyers' fees to fight the US government's orders, via this paypal link provided in the company's statement. One of the most remarkable, and I think enduring, aspects of the NSA stories is how much open defiance there has been of the US government. Numerous countries around the world have waved away threats, from Hong Kong and Russia to multiple Latin American nations. Populations around the world are expressing serious indignation at the NSA and at their own government to the extent they have collaborated. And now Lavabit has shut itself down rather than participate in what it calls "crimes against the American people", and in doing so, has gone to the legal limits in order to tell us all what has happened. There will undoubtedly be more acts inspired by Snowden's initial choice to unravel his own life to make the world aware of what the US government has been doing in the dark. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/lavabit-shutdown-snowden-silicon-valley

Here's Part 2: Dan Balz: Polling alters press coverage President Obama and Mitt Romney spoke to voters differently, Balz said. | AP Photo By ROGER SIMON | 8/7/13 5:04 AM EDT A few days ago, I sat down with Dan Balz and interviewed him about his new book, “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” a searing look at presidential politics. On Tuesday, I presented the first part of our conversation and this is the second: Q: The Obama campaign had so much going for it, including deep data, targeted ads, tons of opposition research, groundbreaking field work, a huge staff and a billion dollars. Did it need all that to defeat Mitt Romney? DB: They believed that they were going to be in a real struggle. They came to the conclusion that Romney was a bad fit for the moment, but they didn’t know that for sure at the beginning. But they had so much money they were going to run this kind of campaign even if their opponent was Herman Cain.Q: You reveal that the Obama campaign collected data on what individuals were watching on cable TV based on their channel clicking gathered from set-top boxes. Isn’t that pretty invasive? DB: When I learned about it, I was, “Wait, you know what I’m clicking on?” And they said, “We don’t know what Dan Balz is doing; there is a firewall that keeps individual identities private.” But it gave [the Obama campaign] an advantage. They had a better sense of the kinds of people who watched this or that, and this allowed them to advertise on many more cable shows. Q: Both Obama and Romney opted out of public financing in the general election, a system that was supposed to stop the raising and spending of obscene amounts of money. You blame this on Obama, who opted out in 2008, writing that he was “choosing political advantage over principle.” DB: Obama didn’t create the problem. Whoever has an advantage [in fundraising] has taken that advantage to destroy the public finance system. Q: Isn’t that a bad thing? DB: Bad? I don’t know the answer. On one hand, if you get millions of ordinary people to give relatively small amounts to campaigns, that is healthy. It is not [business tycoon] Sheldon Adelson giving $5 million to a super PAC. But could you run an effective and efficient campaign for half the money? Yes. You would have fewer ads and employ fewer people. David Axelrod says no campaign wins with ads that are run after Labor Day, yet the Obama campaign ran thousands of ads after Labor Day. You don’t want to take the chance. Q: To slightly alter Michelle Obama’s memorable line: “Running for president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” True or false? DB: It’s basically right. It is such a long and public process that the public does get to know the candidates and the essence of who they are. The mystery to me was Mitt Romney, why his campaign was never able to present the Romney that people who know Romney revealed: smart, successful, a man of faith, with a lot of positive attributes. For whatever reason they weren’t able to highlight that. The biggest difference was the way the two candidates spoke to voters: Romney spoke to job creators, businesses large and small. Obama spoke to people who worked for businesses. As [Romney spokesman] Kevin Madden said: “We were doing economics and he was doing love songs.” Q: You write that even after it was clear Romney was not going to win “…the media’s hunger for a compelling story down to the last day of the campaign, affected the broad sweep of the reporting and analysis.” And reporters began doing “Romney comeback” stories that had little or no basis in fact. That’s a pretty damning indictment of the press, isn’t it? DB: (laughs) I thought it was an understatement. One of the elements of current campaign coverage is that it is much more shaped by polling than ever before. Obama’s polling was very accurate. There were no peaks or valleys during the entire campaign. There was a dip for Romney after his 47 percent remarks, and after the first debate his numbers came back up. But Obama’s numbers didn’t change. Q: Will Chris Christie run for president in 2016? DB: I assume he will run in 2016. Q: There are some signs that people on both sides would like to get past the gridlock in this country. DB: Maybe that will happen over time. This is a very divided country and not a particularly happy country, and it is a country that has lost confidence in Washington. Q: Can anybody change how presidential campaigns are run? DB: It’s hard. I don’t think voters can or will be able to change how campaigns are run. The voters will have to endure them. Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/dan-balz-polling-alters-press-coverage-95240.html#ixzz2bfzMeXqs