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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
In order for a representative democracy to properly function, a simple pre-condition must be met: citizens must be allowed to see how elected officials, entrusted to govern according to our nation’s laws and ideals, are actually governing.
If elected officials abuse their powers in secret, concealing illegal actions or the violation of citizens’ rights, representative democracy breaks down.
It’s that simple.
This is why the First Amendment and press freedoms are essential to a functioning democracy, and why it is considered in the United States, in its ideal form, as the ‘Fourth Estate.’ The right to report upon those things politicians wish to hide has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned check against government abuse.
Put another way: the press has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned whistle-blowing institution.
Which is why our government’s current war against whistle-blowers is nothing short of a war against representative democracy itself – a fact that makes what has happened to Bradley Manning, and what is happening to Edward Snowden – larger than any ‘national security’ or ‘Fourth Amendment’ argument we could possibly have.
In The New York Times this morning, Ben Wizner of the ACLU explains that the Obama administration did not have to put Manning on trial. After all, the American soldier had offered guilty pleas that would have put him behind bars for decades for leaking U.S. war crimes and illegal actions – abuses Manning felt needed to be in the public domain for Americans to properly evaluate the 'War on Terror.'
However, as Wizner writes, the U.S. government insisted on a trial, hoping to charge Manning with ‘aiding the enemy’ – hoping to cast, just as it has done in its persecution of the NYT’s James Risen, whistle-blowing to the press as worse than espionage.
The government’s reasoning, as Wizner writes:
… couldn’t be clearer or more dangerous: it’s preferable for the American people to remain in the dark if that’s what’s necessary to keep the enemy in the dark. But sometimes information that might be useful to an enemy – such as evidence that the United States tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere – is also indispensable to the public to ensure democratic accountability and adherence to our nation’s ideals.
Equating whistle-blowers with traitors is not only crude, but also fundamentally antidemocratic. And until our laws fairly distinguish between leaks in the public interest and treason against the nation, we shouldn’t be surprised when our whistle-blowers seek asylum elsewhere.
The adversarial approach the United States has taken to whistle-blowers is an extension of the adversarial approach it has taken to press freedoms themselves, both of which are extensions of First and Fourth Amendments setbacks which are weakening our democracy.
We’ve seen it in the military-style crackdown on protesting. We’ve seen it in the Obama administration’s prosecuting of more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. And now, we see it in FBI and NSA surveillance of journalists’ private phone and email records – abuses that accompany the government’s violation of millions of Americans’ privacy rights.
As we learn more each day about the secret scope of NSA surveillance, the public – and Congress – are growing more indignant.
Calls for accountability are growing.
As they should, for this is how democracy functions. This is how democracy is supposed to function. And such calls for accountability would not be happening had Snowden not stepped forward and released into the public domain information that is wholly in the public interest.
To do so, Snowden had to flee this country, for he knew he would be treated, in our current environment, as an ‘enemy of the state.’
This ‘enemy’ status is due to the government’s war against whistle-blowing, which itself is a war against the democracy we all hold so dear.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
The largest mobilization of fast food workers in U.S. history, organized by Fast Food Forward, begins today in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City and Flint, Michigan.
Workers from a number of popular chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy’s, are walking out to protest unsustainable wages under the slogan, “We can’t survive on $7.25!”
As reported by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation, the strike is being backed by a number of religious groups, community organizations and unions, including Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Today’s mobilization comes under the backdrop of an infuriating budget ‘calculator’ published by McDonald’s, ostensibly meant to help employees budget wisely. What it does, in truth, is establish how it is virtually impossible to survive on a minimum wage salary provided the fast food chain. Unless, that is, one forgoes buying food or paying rent.
Today’s striking workers will be demanding that fast food companies raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, enabling hard-working employees to actually afford being able to feed their families and provide their children with health care:
Per a statement from Fast Food Forward:
In America, people who work hard should be able to afford basic necessities like groceries, rent, childcare and transportation. While fast food corporations reap the benefits of record profits, workers are barely getting by – many are forced to be on public assistance despite having a job. Raising pay for fast food workers will benefit workers and strengthen the overall economy.
Jonathan Westin, New York’s director for Fast Food Forward, credits the strikes for making the issue of minimum wage one that has become more prominent in public discourse:
“The more and more workers continue to take action and continue to publicize their fight, the more and more it starts to get at the fast food industry’s biggest asset, which is their name brand. And I think that’s what we’re beginning to see in a very real way.”
The strikes, which have kept the issue of minimum wage in the public’s eye and on the media’s radar for months, plan to continue after today’s action.
The ultimate goal: economic justice for a working class that, for too long, has been not just taken for granted, but taken taken advantage of as well.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
According to a new poll published by Pew Research, U.S. citizens are more concerned about the potential violations of their civil liberties from anti-terrorism measures (such as NSA surveillance) than the threats such measures supposedly aim to stop.
As seen in the graph below, a significantly larger percentage of Americans (47 percent) feel as though government anti-terror policies have “gone too far in restricting civil liberties” in contrast to those (37 percent) who feel such policies have not gone far enough.
As Pew’s data shows, what’s remarkable about this shift in public opinion is that it holds true across the political spectrum, as both Republicans and Democrats show greater concern about their privacy rights than about terror threats.
The effect Edward Snowden’s revelations is having on public opinion in America cannot be understated, for since the infancy of the ‘War on Terror’ and its resulting military and intelligence efforts, Americans now see government intrusion as a greater threat than terrorism itself.
In fact, Pew reports that 56 percent of Americans don’t feel that there are appropriate checks on NSA surveillance, and a whopping 70 percent think the government uses surveillance data collected on U.S. citizens for things other than investigating terrorism.
While Americans narrowly approve of anti-terrorism surveillance (50-44), the data indicates that this is due to a view that, if applied correctly and with the public’s civil liberties in mind, such surveillance is a positive and necessary thing.
However, just like the Google engineer who recently won an NSA award, and then expressed that he’d rather see the NSA “abolished than persist in its current form,” a growing number of Americans are expressing opposition to the current state of U.S. intelligence activities.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Since 2008, the Obama administration had made available the President’s original campaign promises at Change.gov, along with a splash screen directing readers to the White House website.
However, as the Sunlight Foundation discovered, the Obama administration removed access to these promises on June 8, two days after Edward Snowden’s first revelation. The likely reason? One of those promises was to protect whistleblowers.
Per the Sunlight Foundation:
While the front splash page for for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama’s performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov.
According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th – last month.
Why the change? Here’s one possibility, from the administration’s ethics agenda:
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
As emptywheel notes, Obama did extend whistleblower protections a bit last year, though he did so in secret.
However, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined, and Obama’s institution of Insider Threat, making it a crime for federal employees to not report suspicious colleagues while strongly discouraging workers from engaging in whistleblowing, hardly inspires confidence.
So is it a surprise that the Obama administration would remove access to its promise to protect whistleblowers, if that was indeed the motivation for removing access to all of Obama’s campaign promises? No.
Is it a jarring symbolic act?
Yes.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual Science of Security (SoS) Competition. The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords.
And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become:
On a personal note, I’d be remiss not to mention my conflicted feelings about winning the award given what we know about the NSA’s widespread collection of private communications and what remains unknown about oversight over the agency’s operations. Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance. And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path.
In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance. Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.
In an interview with Andy Cush at Animal, Bonneau went even farther in his critiques of the NSA:
I’d rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable…But my feeling based on what I’ve read is that I don’t want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now.
When Bonneau learned that he has won the award from the NSA, he considered turning it down. However, he ultimately decided upon accepting as a way to potentially bridge academic gaps with the NSA, as a means of opening up at least one avenue into the organization that has been mostly closed.
That said, the winner of the NSA award wants, like many privacy rights activists and citizens concerned with the government’s Fourth Amendment violations, for the NSA to be reformed by a political process (like the one which narrowly failed in the House yesterday).
Either that, or have it abolished altogether.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Speaking at the Aspen Institute, General James Mattis warned that if the current peace efforts led by John Kerry fail, Israel will have two paths: bi-nationalism or apartheid.
Mattis, the 11th commander of CENTCOM, retired on June 1 after a 45-year military career. His comments at Aspen were uncharacteristically blunt and relatively unfiltered, revealing U.S. military frustrations and perspectives rarely heard from such high-ranking officials:
I’ll tell you, the current situation is unsustainable … We’ve got to find a way to make work the two-state solution that both Democrat and Republican administrations have supported, and the chances are starting to ebb because of the settlements. For example, if I’m Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers to the east and there’s ten-thousand Arabs already there, and if we draw the border to include them, either [Israel] ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote — apartheid. That didn’t work too well the last time I saw that practiced in a country.
Mattis also expressed his frustration for the price U.S. military efforts have paid for Washington’s inability to function as an unbiased arbiter in the conflict:
So we’ve got to work on [peace talks] with a sense of urgency. I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel, and [because of this] moderate Arabs couldn’t be with us because they couldn’t publicly support those who don’t show respect for Arab Palestinians.
Mattis’s words are looking to be particularly prescient as Kerry attempts what many see as a last-ditch effort for the United States to broker a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
Why? The Associated Press reported that Palestinian leaders received, in writing, assurances that proposed peace talks would be based upon pre-1967 borders with land swaps, which is the longstanding U.S. position.
However, that same AP article reported that Western officials have denied such is the case: that ’67 lines would form the basis of negotiations on borders for a future Palestinian state.
We will soon learn whether or not the U.S. government will heed Mattis’s warning, or whether Washington will continue to waffle in sticking to its own stated policy with regard to Israel/Palestine, a waffling that has always worked against U.S.-led peace efforts.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
The Los Angeles Times editorial board has finally had enough. Enough of what, you ask?
Enough of exemplary American citizens being falsely smeared for the crime of being Muslim or the temerity to be critical of Israel. It’s had enough of so-called ‘pro-Israel’ groups trying to sabotage the professional lives and personal aspirations of upstanding Americans by slanderously tarring them with the “anti-Semite” label.
The Times has expressed this opinion beautifully in an op-ed congratulating, and defending, the first Muslim student ever to serve on the University of California Board of Regents, whose resume is impressive:
Congratulations to Sadia Saifuddin, who will be the first Muslim to serve as student representative to the University of California Board of Regents. Her resume for the post is a strong one: Since arriving at Berkeley, she has worked to increase the amount of financial aid available to students, to secure funding for the UC Berkeley Food Pantry and, as head of the student Senate’s finance committee, to allocate money to student groups.
But there’s one glitch. She is also a critic of Israel. Like many people, she opposes the occupation of the West Bank, the continued building of settlements and what she sees as the mistreatment of Palestinians. Earlier this year, she cosponsored a nonbinding resolution in the student Senate calling on the UC system to divest from companies that do business with the Israeli military.
The Times goes on to detail how Saifuddin, because of her progressive political views, has been attacked by numerous ‘pro-Israel’ groups, who attempted to reverse her appointment. Conservative activist David Horowitz wrote in an open letter, “If she were confirmed, it would set a dangerous precedent to encourage anti-Semitism on campus, which is already a big problem in the UC system.”
Here is how the Times responded:
Oh, for goodness’ sake, will this never stop? There’s no indication that Saifuddin is an anti-Semite, despite her criticism of Israel, her involvement with the Muslim Students Assn. or her condemnation of anti-Islamic “hate speech.” On the board, she says, she hopes to focus on financial aid reform and “bringing students together.”
We are finally reaching a point in which attempts by American ‘pro-Israel’ groups to slander Muslims (and Jews) who critique Israel are being called out for what they are: extremist and tiresome.
Last week, New York Jet Oday Aboushi – the first Palestinian American to be drafted in the NFL – was wrongly smeared as anti-Semitic by a host of publications (including Yahoo! Sports), which wondered aloud whether the Jets or the NFL should allow him to play. In response, Dave Zirin wrote a forceful defense of Aboushi in The Nation that went viral.
Right-leaning ‘pro-Israel’ groups have diluted and cheapened a very real prejudice that exists: anti-Semitism. The term has been so misused that all it really means at this stage, when flung by right-wingers, is this: I don’t agree with your politics.
As one who has also been smeared as anti-Semitic in print, I echo the Times‘ when it asks, “Will this never stop?”
Fortunately, growing pushback in America against such smears indicates that it may stop, or slow to a crawl, sooner rather than later.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
President Obama’s Insider Threat Program, instituted in 2011 as a response to Bradley Manning, essentially orders all federal employees to behaviorally profile their colleagues and report any ‘suspicious’ actions.
While much attention has been paid to the program’s Orwellian nature – employees who fail to report ‘suspicious’ activities of co-workers can face criminal charges – little attention has been paid to the actual techniques that underlie the program itself.
Security investigations can be launched against a federal workers if colleagues identify and report actions that seem to be less than normal. And what actions are these? McClatchy explains:
Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and,if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.”
Not surprisingly, this reflexive response in the name of ‘national security’ – while strikingly broad – is based upon techniques and methods that are unproven, techniques likely to result in privacy violations and illegal profiling while failing to identify future leakers.
Like the NSA’s overly-broad and unconstitutional (in my view) surveillance infrastructure, created in the name of national security, the only thing Insider Threat appears to have done is increase the threats of government abuse by ordering millions of federal employees to profile their co-workers and report ‘suspicious’ activities. To protect us from the ‘enemy,’ our government is becoming the enemy by focusing on breadth rather than depth.
McClatchy’s latest report seems to agree that Insider Threat is likely not to work, precisely because it is based on unfounded principles:
Even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.
“There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or psychological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on defecting terrorists.
The Obama administration has turned millions of federal workers into mandated, behavioral profiling specialists, ordering them to report colleagues whose actions raise supposed red flags.
But like the NSA’s broad and absurd list of words that trigger one to be on a watch list, Insider Threat’s list of psychological and behavioral actions federal employees are to look out for will do nothing but net more innocent citizens.
Security can no longer be a justification for these programs. Not just because they violate our rights as Americans. But also because they will not work.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.
What he received in response made his blood boil.
“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”
So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”
Seymour had decided to request his NSA file after coming across a recent post of mine instructing Americans on how to properly request such files from the FBI and NSA. A Navy vet and two-time Obama voter who supported the President’s platform of greater governmental transparency, Seymour was shocked by the letter he received.
The letter, which first acknowledges the media coverage surrounding its surveillance systems, quickly moves to justify why none of that data can be obtained by an American citizen in a standard FOIA request:
Seymour isn’t the only one who has recently had an FOIA request denied by the NSA – dozens of citizens have emailed me to say they’ve received a similar, if not identical, letter. And it’s clear from the exemption the NSA is using that every single American is having their FOIA requests similarly rejected.
Unjustly so.
It should be noted that there are legitimate exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, the first of which states that documents requested may be denied if they are “properly classified as secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”
However, the central problem is this: Seymour’s letter from the NSA points to Executive Order 13526, signed by President Obama in 2009, as justification for the NSA’s FOIA exemption.
This order signed by Obama established a uniform system for classifying national security information, and stipulates that “information shall not be considered for classification unless its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.”
This qualification appears in section 1.4 of the executive order, after which follow many categories of information which may be marked as classified. The category the NSA points to in justifying the classification of all its data is this:
(c) intelligence activities (including covert action), intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology
Meaning: the NSA is classifying every single bit of data it receives from ordinary American citizens based on the premise that it has been gathered covertly.
Meaning: the NSA’s advertised justification for not granting FOIA requests is to protect our country. However, the real justification is the NSA’s covert violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment right not to be subject to unwarranted searches and seizures (in this case of their personal, digital data).
The NSA, it seems, has classified every single piece of data on American citizens that it has seized and saved, even benign data culled from people like Seymour, who are no threat to U.S. national security.
“I believe in the concept of America,” Seymour told me. “[But] not its current execution.”
I sense the Founding Fathers would agree with him.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Today, I learned that – due to my writing for Daily Kos and Tikkun Magazine – I have been officially declared a self-hating Jew, joining the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman on a list I’m only too proud to embrace.
How did this happen?
It’s quite simple and rather mundane. See, as an American progressive, I have long held that one of the most important geopolitical issues of our time is Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories, and the U.S. government’s role in enabling this military occupation. I have long held that America’s unwillingness to seriously intervene in this asymmetric conflict, to use its inordinate leverage (namely: $3 billion in annual funding) to compel Israelis to embrace a two-state settlement is a moral and political embarrassment.
As a Jewish progressive, I have long held that this occupation and domination of another people is the single greatest moral failing of my generation. For the human rights abuses Israel’s sustained occupation has wrought – civilians being subjected to undemocratic, military rule, indefinite detentions, home demolitions, restrictions on basic freedoms, and worse – make me shudder with shame and sadness.
And for harboring such political perspectives, I have been called an anti-Semite by conservatives and progressives alike, a term that has become so diluted by misuse that all it really amounts to anymore is a glorified way of saying I disagree with you.
And now, I have joined Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman (among many others) on an ‘official’ list of self-hating Jews curated by a right-wing, extremist organization that – tragically – mirrors the views of too many middle-of-the-road Americans.
Here is part of Glenn Greenwald’s entry, earned for honest political critiques of American foreign policy in the region:
He uses classically anti-Semitic narratives regarding Jewish power and dual loyalty – while also warning of the corrosive effects of Jewish money.
And here is a section of Amy Goodman’s entry, earned for some of the smartest, in-depth reporting on Israel and Palestine:
Pro-Palestinian writer and host on Pacifica Radio and one of many leftist radical Jews who populate the airwaves on Pacifica Radio. The media watchdog group CAMERA condemned her Pacifica Radio for “repeatedly providing a forum for racists, anti-Semites and other critics of Israel.” She is also a ubiquitous speaker at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rallies.
And here is a portion of my entry, or rather snippets of my writing which earned my place on this self-hating list:
Palestinians are controlled in an apartheid state without any political rights … [Israeli leaders are still stricken by] psychological demons that stretch back to the Holocaust, demons which magnify Jewish victimhood such that brutalizing another people becomes a justifiable, even necessary position.
Now, that fact that this self-hating list exists, or that it’s run by an extremist organization, should be neither surprising nor noteworthy. What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that too many progressive Americans – and Americans in general – view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as simply a match between two peoples who hate each other, a match that they should just figure out on their own (or destroy each other trying).
How could such an asymmetrical conflict – with one of the most sophisticated armies in the world pitted against a stateless, powerless people – be viewed and dismissed by so many in America as a dumb conflict between two ideologically-bent peoples?
Lists like the one I’ve been included on and the principles that underlie it – casting Palestinians as a brutal, murderous lot – is much to blame.
In truth, both peoples are full of those who simply want to enjoy the right to watch a proper soccer match in peace while having access to a good cell plan.
But with so many self-hating Jews abounding, it’s hard to see such a reality.
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